I spent my first year of university in a student house. I’m hardly the most outgoing guy now, but back then I took shyness to a fairly extreme level. Having housemates who enjoyed hosting parties and going to nightclubs and things like that (normal people, in other words) lead to a fairly alienating beginning to my degree. The first semester of my second year was to be spent abroad, and perhaps as a response to my previous accommodation arrangements I elected to stay at a dorm rather than another student house.
Compared to the titchy room I had back in Britain, which had just enough space for a bed and a desk, my Canadian room was massive. From the window you could look down and see a decent amount of the campus, and there were actual shelves where you could put actual things and not have to keep them on the floor. This was going to be fantastic, I thought. Those first few days when there was no one else on the floor except a couple of other exchange student on the other side of the building were great. So great that I completely forgot to buy any bedding for the first three weeks or so, spending a lot more time using rolled up clothing as a pillow than I probably should have.
Then the Canadian students rolled in. My floor was almost entirely first years, mostly pretty nice people (despite the following tale), and a couple of utterly useless supervisors. It had taken me rather a while to get over my jet lag, so by the time the rooms around me became occupied I was still rather out of it. Years from now I’ll still remember the first time I was woken up at two in the morning by an ear-busting sound.
Yes, the soundtrack to my Canadian exchange is a dubstep remix of The Legend of Zelda theme. Everyday was dubstep day on my floor (well, four days a week, every week including exams weeks) going from around 8-9PM to 4AM per night. The party usually centred around the room two doors down from me, but the distance didn’t really matter because you could still enjoy the music from the next building over. Do you remember in the last article I mentioned my two thousand words a day writing schedule?
Yeah.
Most nights had me working in the library until it closed at eleven, then picking up the biggest size of coffee I could (which was a bit under half a litre) and supping it as I worked on my laptop in my room with my headphones on, blasting the loudest anti-dubstep I could find, until about 2AM. At this point I would finally have worn myself out enough to drop to sleep despite the racket (albeit sleeping on my side pressing a pillow down on the other side of my head).
In the mornings I’d wake up to some new thing done to the building in the name of fun. Let me think, there was the time a group of them decided to rip off all the doors on the toilets. That was fun. There was the time they kicked a hole through my wall, but don’t worry it wasn’t personal because they kicked a hole in every wall. That was fun. Then there was the time they stole all the soap and shower curtains from the floor bathroom. I don’t know what they had against our bathroom to be honest, but in the end I had to start taking my showers in the ones a few floors down. Oh, there was the time they nicked the door handle from the front of the building, making it really difficult to get in and eventually leading to me having to use the back entrance. That one was really fun.
For the rest of my degree I went back to living in student houses.
