Fresher's week

This week is Fresher's week, most people don't have classes so it's just a huge mass of activities for new grad and undergrad students. I'm using Google Calendar to try to keep it all straight, it's a huge mess between events at Churchill College and Gates events. The Gates group got together Friday and Saturday nights for a pub night and then a dance party, both were a lot of fun but I'm getting behind on sleep.

Churchill has an event in the MCR every night this week. The MCR (Middle Common Room) is a kind of pub/rec room/lounge in the middle of the college that only grad students can hang out in, there is a student run bar with really cheap drinks and people seem to hang out there every night before or after whatever else they're up to. Sunday was a "hostel crawl" around the college for new MCR members with different drinking games at each different house where people live on the college, for example, we're also having pizza night, trivia night, curry night, pub crawl, karaoke night, and then a formal dinner and disco party on Friday. Incredibly, for being 70% engineers it is a really social place and the MCR is packed every night for each event. I'm really enjoying Churchill, I had no idea how to pick a college or how important it was but it's a really fun place.

Add to that two brutal days of health and safety training for new students this week. This country seems to love trainings. I'm also trying to get up and going in my department, which is tough with all this other stuff going on. More on that later I guess.