Sunday, 22 September 2013

Another Adventure in Manchester

Hello!

I believe my last blog post was a while ago...The past week or so has been kind of hectic (or maybe I'm just using this as an excuse to defend my non-bloggatry). (?)

To be honest, everything feels a bit jumbled up and hectic because of the fact I'm leaving for France in a few days (and I'm not reaaallllly prepared! Shh...don't tell Southampton University that).

I am arriving into Paris Gare du Nord at 20:50 on Wednesday evening and then I will make my way to my small village outside of Paris where my appartment is. This is all that is fixed so far: everything else like finding a fridge and opening a bank account is not.

But anyway, my last week in the UK has been fun. This weekend I took a much-needed trip down to Southampton for a few days to rest & recuperate chez Gordon Avenue. I say Rest & Recuperate because this week...something very abnormal happened to me and I had to go to hospital (which never ever happens to me...I am so bad at going to hospital it's been 2 years in Southampton and still I am not registered with a GP yet).

So OK, I will start from the beginning. The other day I walking back home down our road (our neighbourhood at home) and there was loads of rain/wind/generally crap weather and in a particularly horrible gust of wind a small piece of something flew into my eyeball. It really hurt and I couldn't get it out. In short, it felt as though a small tiny beast had lodged under my eyelid and was trying to set up camp.

But I couldn't find it and tried for ages to get it out but in the end I just assumed that it was nothing more than a scratch the pain I was experiencing was a result of a bruised eyeball. My mum said to go to the eye hospital (not like she knows anything specific about eyes anyway) and fortunately there is an eye hospital specifically dedicated to eyes in Manchester. Unfortunately, it closes at 8pm. So I had to go the following morning instead (AT THE CRACK OF DAWN!!!!) to escape the hospital queues. That night's sleep was NOT the best I've experienced. Every 30 minutes when I began to start sleeping deeply (when your eyes start moving rapidly) I woke up because it was agonizingly painful.

So the following morning, I went straight to the eye hospital and I could barely open my injured eye (well, I usually have trouble opening my eyes anyway AT THE CRACK OF DAWN ha ha). But I only had to wait a little while until the eye nurse saw me and kindly checked my poor little eye and discovered a PIECE OF BARK! It was eurghhh....bleurghh...

It was more that I couldn't believe a piece of bark that big had been lodged in my eye all night without me even realising. Well when I say big, I don't mean plank-of-wood type size, I mean big for my eyeball. She gave me medicated eyedrops, which even I understand means “eyedrops that work” as opposed to Ibruprofen which rarely works. So the pain went away within a few days, but my left eye resembles this:



So I guess I might be “a la mode”, considering vampires have made a massive comeback these past few years. And it has turned a few heads, raised a few questions – to which I haven't yet thought of a more creative response than the truth.

But I suppose from afar it simply looks like I've smoked a little too much weed.

Anyhow, I have been back in our old house at Gordon Avenue, spending some quality time with old housemates and friends, doing the park run at Southampton Common (and not blacking out, contrary to what I expected), doing a Sainsburys' shop one last time, getting locked out of the house (for the first time) and just generally being a student in a shared house (something I won't have at all next year considering I am living alone).

Sunny Southampton! (Compared to freezing Manchester..)


The park.


We had a game of mini-golf in town one fine afternoon.


...culminating in some over-enthusiastic golf-club-swinging...


Our student house has been renovated over the summer and I just can't believe I am missing out on this shower next year...



And yes, I did feel very nostalgic (I couldn't quite bring myself to go to my beloved Avenue Campus for fear that it would bring back too many joyous memories) and I did feel very sad not to be joining my housemates in one more year of wonderful student antics. But I also feel excited (and intermittently apprehensive) about the upcoming “First Week In France”. My main fear is probably organizing life. Ie. Acquiring furniture, doing official things like registering with all the various bureaus and social security blah blah blahs.


But that is all. I will have to update my blog the week after I arrive in France. With photos of fridges...and mattresses...

No comments:

Post a Comment