Regarding flats and flatmates

Well, first, let me start off by saying that I live on Drunk Row. In either direction on our road, there are bars and clubs crowding the streets, including one located in a re-vamped church building (which, I've found, is a very common cure for the hundreds of old churches that aren't necessarily used as places of worship anymore). This simply means that sometimes it's hard to get to sleep at night, and in the morning we can see some interesting characters (like the one man sitting on the sidewalk one morning for a half hour and leaning to the side at about a 45-degree angle). It also means we've always got places to escape to when our flat just gets to be too oppressive at night.

Our walls are white, our doors and carpets blue, and our furniture is a decent sort of wood. It's a nice-enough looking place, with okay furniture. We have two toilets for five girls, one in a small room with just a toilet and a sink, and the other in a larger one with a shower. Our kitchen has a sitting area, a TV (thanks to Kate), and a decent amount of space for cooking - and the fridge is the biggest I've ever seen, it's taller even than Monique.

The floors in the hall creak, no matter how softly you step. The stove's grill compartment (there's a top drawer with a grill and a bottom for the oven) doesn't have a handle to pull out the grill tray, so we have to use a spoon. The shower is scorching in the morning, but ice-cold in the afternoon, no matter how short our showers are. The knob for the shower sticks, so even if you do manage a hot shower, when you try to turn it off you are stuck in a freezing waterfall while you struggle to push the knob down that extra inch that will shut the water off entirely. The girls, though, are great.

From my program, there are Christine and I. Christine is from Florida. She's a nice girl who tends to keep to herself and likes to hang out with a few of the Americans from downstairs, but will join the rest of us for tea and Hollyoaks most nights, as well as a drink or two if we have them.

Anna is from nearby, here in Scotland. She spent a gap year in India teaching children. She is dead set on going to the Freshers' Ball tomorrow: to go, you had to pay thirty pounds at the beginning of the week for a Freshers' Pass, which got you in free to the events that had entrance fees (we never went to any that we had to pay for anyway). None of the rest of us bought Freshers' Passes, so she might end up going with girls from the next flat over.

Eve is also Scottish, but she's from the Borders, so she's got a mixture of an English and Scottish accent. She's studying psychology, and is not happy that she has to take chemistry in order to finish her degree. She has a boyfriend living in Edinburgh who is my age. He doesn't go to the uni, but goes to a smaller college in the city. They've been dating two and a half years, and he seems like a really nice guy - he's taken a true interest in getting to know her new friends.

Kate is from Manchester. She is the reason we have a TV, and she is also most of the reason I have started saying "well" and "dead" in the place of "very" or "really" (Example: "Hollyoaks is well good!"). The boys next door have taken to calling her "Bob" for no other reason than that they thought she should have a nickname. This drives Kate crazy. And oh, she's an art history major.

This all makes for a very interesting flat, and great times all around. We all have our respective interests, but it seems as though we gel really well. They are part of what will make my semester here amazing.