My SEP Adventure: Settling down 🇬🇧

Back to London, I still cannot believe that time has passed so fast. Unknowingly, 1 month has flew by with the blink of an eye. That I have covered 5 countries, 16 towns/cities with Xinyi! Now that 19 countries, 60 cities in 6 month doesn’t seem so hard anymore hahaha (as inspired by one of the girls who gave the FOE SEP talk last year). I will post a separate post about travel tips and I hope I can sticky it so it can benefit students who want to travel around smart!

Yep, so it seems that we have come down to the very last part before school starts. Settling in to the new accommodation, culture and environment. I would say that putting up with friends is a bold decision and most students only arrive on the day where they can move into hall! I put up in Ryan’s room at Queen’s Gate and I am very thankful that he helped to make all the additional arrangement for me! While staying in the accomodation, I could walk to Imperial within 5 minutes and settle my stuffs and walk 15 minutes for my free haircut! Speaking of the haircut, it is so awesome because it is free and your hairstyle will turn out fine! The only downside to it is that you are volunteered as a model for the trainees to practice and they will take a little longer to cut(got mine done in about 2 hours). Staying in a cosy apartment here at Queen’s Gate is welcomed but somehow I still felt unsettled? Cause I know that it is not permanent. A little thank you to Rachel, Bejamin and the others for talking to me from time to time, keeping me kind of company and not missing home so much. I was very happy to share my travelling experiences with others and it makes me want to travel even more:)

Other than that, I was actually quite looking forward to moving in to hostel and settling down! So on moving day, even though I was lugging 40kg of luggage up and down flights of stairs, i felt really excited to see my new place!

Reaching Woodward, I was welcomed by the team of seniors and wardens and the check in process was really smooth since most of the people only check in on the Saturday(I checked in on Thursday). And so the verdict of the room… ITS FANTASTIC HAHAHA! The room may seem smaller than my room in SG and similar (or smaller) in size to NUS ones, but its really cozy and the toilet is freaking atas hahaha! It is really comfortable to own my own toilet:) And after staying in so many accomodations in London and Europe, I think the Woodward room is amazing, given the cheap weekly rent too! 😁

Spent the next 2 days(most shag) unpacking, decorating the room and buyimg groceries. Now my room feels really cosy and settled hahaha! Would invite people to come over if they want to sleepover😁

Imperial halls seems to have a lot of hall budget and they do spend alot on events(pizza events, boat parties, mingle) . I went to some of these events for the experience and I would say that they are not my kind of thing! While the idea of getting to know people and the ‘try once while young’ kind of mentality is there, but such parties usually involve meaningless conversations that last less than 10 sentences and are superficial in level. Oh well, will try and avoid these events!

And it is a twist of fate to have met this German with Vietnamese family background! Was just walking along from tube and I saw this guy taking photo of the building while he’s still struggling with his bags. I thought that “hey this must have been a student of woodward” and I went to talk to him! He is also an exchange student and he will be reading Chemistry in Imperial for a year! We also realise out we were event in the same block and And he has a girlfriend in Bavaria as well. Its really comforting that he does feel comfortable hanging out with me and we did plenty of things together:)