Surrealism in daily life

And so... it’s the end of week blog, and what a week it’s been. Life for an architecture student is so hectic- with one look at my timetable you could easily write it off as being ‘lightweight’ with rarely more than a couple of hours of work a day. The sickening truth is that the amount of work expected of you in order to follow up the lecture is horrific. History of Architecture happens to be one of my most time consuming lessons, since we all have a list of buildings briefly covered during the lecture which we are supposed to draw and analyse in detail and for me, I have to really concentrate on getting the drawing absolutely spot-on since I like to be a perfectionist. So in the end I usually end up spending about an hour on one building in one session, standing up and thinking: ‘where has the time gone?’

Saying all that, though, I do manage to enjoy myself a little, on occasion. For instance, this evening it was the rowing club’s social dinner at the ‘all you can eat Chinese buffet,’ which I absolutely loved. I know that in clubs I’m not the best at socialising, but when eating it’s just so much more relaxed. Within no time we were all chatting, scooping great ladlefuls of sweet and sour chicken onto the never-ending plates. I half expected all the macho guys to pronounce in fake embarrassment: ‘Oh goodness, that’s my calorie intake exceeded for the day... I’ve got abs to build tomorrow! But sure, guys, go ahead [mumbling] eat up, pigs.’ Alas, everyone kept eating and eating, chatting and laughing and the atmosphere was fantastic.

I couldn’t believe my luck at the buffet either, for a poor student who’s seen nothing but Tesco’s value chicken breasts in a boring tomato sauce and pasta for the last month or so it was like heaven. Literally, whereas at any other Chinese, duck would be the most expensive thing, here you could take as much as you wanted, with all the trimmings- pancakes, plum sauce, cucumber... it was amazing. I filled a good plateful with only duck, wondering briefly if I would get sick of it instantly... I didn’t, it was the best thing I’ve eaten since I arrived.

Today’s lectures were slightly surreal, not only because I’d gotten to bed finally at 4 in the morning and still felt drunk, which for an eleven ‘o’ clock lecture, is a bad combination. Nicky, the art teacher put up a fascinating, but unfortunately incorrect and utterly unrelated video on the screen. It said, ‘As we move away from earth, at this speed, every ten seconds we will be able to see a square of land that increases in size by factor 10.’ And the camera was panned towards the earth, and even through my hung-over mist I could still tell that this narrator was completely barking... I did physics, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what would happen. If anyone would care to correct me or criticise me on this, you’re welcome to!

To cut a long story short however, I learnt little, if nothing in that lecture. Most of it was things like... ‘This is the symbol for a door on a plan... [Sound of my head hitting the floor]’ and we were actually explained to about how a scale works! Oh dear, oh dear...

After that fascinating lecture I hurried home to try and do some research on the Schroder house... and you know how it is, if you’re tired especially, you just end up procrastinating... doing anything but actually doing the work. In the end I just made a plan of all the things I had to find out and promised myself I would try again with more sleep.

So that’s been my day really, a little bit surreal, but overall... as Borat would say, it was ‘Great success!’