Moving Rooms

Late last week, I got an email from the accommodation office saying that I should move to my room next year before Monday the 15^th, or else. And so, I packed my stuff over the weekend and managed to find two volunteers to help me move them. Well, they might not be totally voluntary, but let’s pretend we don’t notice that. What I failed to do was to check whether the big trolleys are available, so in the end we had to use this small-ish wheelchair type trolley and made several trips back and forth, but oh well.

Anyway, thanks Lennart and Bao for helping me carry my stuff even though you guys are either: a) tired from a volleyball game or b) sleeping. It’s much appreciated.

So here are some pictures of my new room. It’s much bigger than my previous one with a kind of wall dividing the living room and the bedroom. There’s also an en-suite shower and the kitchen is just next door. It’s on the third floor and next to a busy road but if I close the windows then I can hardly hear the people down below so that’s fine. Please excuse the mess, I haven’t had time to unpack everything yet.

My stuff in my old room

The living room

Living room from a different angle

The bedroom

The only thing I don’t like is that the room doesn’t come with its own fridge like mine last year. I know it might be a luxury but I think I was spoiled a bit by living in Trinity. Well, not having a fridge is probably a good thing as pointed out by Lennart, who hinted not so subtly about the environmental impacts of refrigerators. Okay, okay... I’ll just learn to share the fridge in the kitchen then.

On a different note, this week will be my last week for the summer project. So after this I’ll be free. What’s sweeter is that my supervisor is gone to a conference in Germany for the week so I don’t have much to do at all. Just one or two more experiments, collect my salary and that’s it.

Talking about experiments, as you might know I’m watching paint dry. And the typical duration of me watching paint dry is about four to five hours. So the other day I brought a book with me to read and this book is ‘The Subtle Knife’ which is the second in the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. Anyway, there was this post-doc who’s also working in the lab at that time (which I’ve mentioned about before here) and he saw me with the book and we started having a conversation about books. It turned out he read ‘The Subtle Knife’ in his second year undergraduate when he was taking a break from revision. I was surprised because I thought the book only came out recently. After all, I’ve only heard about it last year or so. But it turned out the book was published in 1997. Well, what do you know. Seeing me there reading must have brought him back to those times, I guess.

He recommended a book called Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. However, since I’m not particularly interested in science fiction I’m not sure if I’m gonna read it. We’ll see, I suppose, after I finish with His Dark Materials, and the Watch tetralogy, and Jasper Fforde’s latest, and others.

Yaz.