Counting Down... 5 Days

Well the send-off party has been and gone (cheers to my boy in the first picture for hosting a brilliant evening!) and now all that remains to be done before the move is another 3 days of internship and packing. Then next Monday I shall be jetting off to pastures new: luscious, unspoiled and ready for grazing.

It has occurred to me that I haven't explained why in fact I am moving to Santander at all, so I had better give a bit of background:

I'm currently an undergraduate student at the prestigous Imperial College London reading MSci Physics with a Year in Europe. As part of our course we have to spend one year (our third of four) on the EU Erasmus Exchange Program at a partner University. There we will be a normal undergraduate of the institution in question for the academic year.

Orginally I applied to the Universitat de Valencia as the city is Spain's third biggest and the college itself is quite large. However, as fate would have it, I was beaten to the limited places by some eager beavers on my course who achieved better grades than me in my first year. It was news to me that I'd even taken exams in my first year; all I remember is 36 weeks of unadulterated lash, staggering into the lecture hall occasionally for a nap and at the end a really big hall that I was sat in, perfectly silent and majorly hungover. That must have been the exam room in hindsight. Shame I didn't know at the time.

But anyway I had to take my second choice uni, Universidad de Cantabria (in Santander, the regional capital) and work at a 2:1 for that. As noted in an earlier entry, I just scraped the grades in what can be described as an 'efficient performance'. Minimum effort, maximum effect.

So here I am with 5 days till the move having to face going to an office in the City that is so well air-conditioned it would be more accurate to describe it as 'refridgerated'. During the heatwave in August I had to bring a jumper in to work with me for the office, much to the amusement of my flatmates.

Packing is going to be an interesting affair; I have only 40 kgs in two suitcases for all my worldly goods. Sorting out my clothes last night lend me to the discovery that about 60% of my apparell is sportswear, leading me to the conclusion that my university moniker of 'that Chav' is actually quite accurate.

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