First time in UK -- Warwick!
[Hello! WJ here again!]
The saga continues!
Part II - Warwick, Coventry!
It was a fairly easy journey - I took the tube from WY’s flat to Heathrow (by myself whilst dragging all my luggage, might I add!) and took the coach from there. It was a 2-hour coach ride to Coventry - note that the University of Warwick is NOT in fact IN the town Warwick but in Coventry!
So - the million dollar question: how’s Warwick?
To give an honest answer, I can’t really give a comparative description, having seen roughly ZERO other UK campus universities. (King’s and LSE don’t count - I walked past them barely even knowing they were unis since they just looked like any other building in the city to me… And Sarah’s uni isn’t exactly a proper campus uni either, so I don’t count that either!)
It’s like a quaint little village, except everything in it is geared towards serving the university, I suppose you could say. There are buildings for different departments - like the Maths building or the Humanities building etc in the heart of the campus, and then the accommodation blocks scattered around - some of which are like houses, some like boarding-school dorms, some like prison cells and others more like luxury apartments. There are small lakes, lots of greenery and ducks and rabbits which I literally cross paths with every day.
Exhibit A: Greenery @ Warwick
The student union building is next to our arts centre and it houses 3 banks, the post office, the stationers, insurance, hairdressers, Oxfam, and of course the bars and cafes and the places where the parties and events are held. There are cafes in practically every department building so that makes buying a bite between lectures fairly easy (although I personally don’t - I pack lunch or eat at home since that’s much cheaper!)
The arts centre has the uni bookshop and obviously, the arts stuff - the cinema, the theatres, the performance hall, the music centre etc.
I haven’t actually taken that many photos of the grounds / campus itself - rushing off to lectures tends to take priority over snapping photos of buildings you’re going to see practically every day for the next 3 years of your life.
But anyway:
The path leading to Cryfield 2, the building on the left - home sweet home?
I live in Cryfield 2 - i.e. the 2nd Cryfield block out of the three. It’s the cheapest accommodation on campus, but it’s ideally situated not TOO far from the central campus where all the department buildings are yet far enough from the student union that we’re not kept up all night by the noise coming from it - there are events (as in band performances / concerts, drinking etc) EVERY night at the union for those who live JUST for the nightlife!
Anyway, it’s been said that Cryfield was designed based on a Swedish women’s prison. Since we’re situated just adjacent to GIBBET Hill Road, I’d say that’s fairly apt. Add the fact that we used to be an execution ground or something and supposedly have our own ghost (it’s called CRYfield for a reason, y’know!), AND that Warwick is the uni with the highest suicide rate in UK AND that a 3rd year hanged himself in our block (as in not Cryfield 1 or Cryfield 3 but CRYFIELD 2) last year…
Well, judge for yourself!
The corridors of Cryfield 2!
You can just imagine those Swedish female convicts sticking their hands out of their cells from either side, can’t you? =P Apparently the corridors are so narrow because prisoners wouldn’t be able to riot or start a fight in them (too narrow to swing weapons or proceed more than two at a time)!
Makes me wonder what exactly do they think we uni students get up to / are capable of…
Room 210!!
Room 210 - sorta opposite the token communal co-ed bathroom on my floor - is supposedly the suicide victim’s room - or at least we think so, since every other room has been allocated besides this one, and apparently that’s what one of my flatmates was told by a senior who used to live in our block.
I live in Room 219, roughly 3 or 4 doors down. =P
This is my view when I lie down in my bed - WHY ARE THERE HOOKS ON MY CEILING???
…There aren’t any hooks on any of my flatmates’ ceilings…!
Anyway, it’s actually not all that bad. I like living in Cryfield, actually, despite the fact that we have about 16 people to a kitchen and maybe 30 or so to a bathroom. The bathroom contains about 4 shower units, 4 toilets and one sink and is for both sexes, so one has to be rather careful. (I shower just before I sleep, which apparently is just not done by the locals who shower in the morning, so I’m fairly safe!)
Room sweet room?
My room’s small and lacking in personality and not particularly tidy (I hate how it looks neither spartan-tidy nor messily-personalised-and-lived-in but is rather in between…) but seeing as the only time spent in there is for sleeping or using my laptop, I guess I don’t really care excessively.
The view from my window - my room looks out on Cryfield 1.
Kitchen 6 - kitchen sweet kitchen?? (L-R: Marta and Carla, the Italians on my floor)
There are 2 kitchens on my floor - one on each side of the corridor, directly opposite each other. We each basically picked a kitchen and that’s where one cooks and eats in for the rest of the year. Kitchens are enormously important in determining the dynamics and relationships with your flatmates! My kitchen is where all the people I like to hang out with eat while the other is where all those party-animal-type people eat. It’s an unspoken “them and us” situation - we’ll say hi and be nice to the people from the other kitchen and vice versa, but we tend to hang out almost exclusively with our kitchen mates!
The fridge in Kitchen 7 - “their” kitchen. (Those are fridge magnets, FYI...)
The noticeboard in Kitchen 6 - “our” kitchen!
We have noticeboards in the kitchen - we decided to put a map up on which we would stick in pins representing where each of us came from. Since they couldn’t get hold of a world map, we non-UK Cryfield 2 people drew our relevant bits of the world and stuck it on the wall roughly where our countries would be! (Yes, that’s what those random white bits on the wall are…)
Close up of the map of the UK. (Warwick's near that white pin that's sorta between the orange and the pink pins)
I love hanging out with my kitchen-flatmates, I really do! We’re of the same minds that prefer communal cooking and sitting in the kitchen laughing and chatting about the randomest things and drinking cheap stuff in the comforts of “home” as opposed to having to fuss and dress up and waste oodles of money going to some noisy crowded public place to drink!
And of course, one of the Kitchen 6 essentials - cheap VODKA!
And that concludes the domestic part of my “First time in UK” series… stay tuned!
TBC: Part III - Leamington Spa!
The saga continues!
Part II - Warwick, Coventry!
It was a fairly easy journey - I took the tube from WY’s flat to Heathrow (by myself whilst dragging all my luggage, might I add!) and took the coach from there. It was a 2-hour coach ride to Coventry - note that the University of Warwick is NOT in fact IN the town Warwick but in Coventry!
So - the million dollar question: how’s Warwick?
To give an honest answer, I can’t really give a comparative description, having seen roughly ZERO other UK campus universities. (King’s and LSE don’t count - I walked past them barely even knowing they were unis since they just looked like any other building in the city to me… And Sarah’s uni isn’t exactly a proper campus uni either, so I don’t count that either!)
It’s like a quaint little village, except everything in it is geared towards serving the university, I suppose you could say. There are buildings for different departments - like the Maths building or the Humanities building etc in the heart of the campus, and then the accommodation blocks scattered around - some of which are like houses, some like boarding-school dorms, some like prison cells and others more like luxury apartments. There are small lakes, lots of greenery and ducks and rabbits which I literally cross paths with every day.
Exhibit A: Greenery @ Warwick
The student union building is next to our arts centre and it houses 3 banks, the post office, the stationers, insurance, hairdressers, Oxfam, and of course the bars and cafes and the places where the parties and events are held. There are cafes in practically every department building so that makes buying a bite between lectures fairly easy (although I personally don’t - I pack lunch or eat at home since that’s much cheaper!)
The arts centre has the uni bookshop and obviously, the arts stuff - the cinema, the theatres, the performance hall, the music centre etc.
I haven’t actually taken that many photos of the grounds / campus itself - rushing off to lectures tends to take priority over snapping photos of buildings you’re going to see practically every day for the next 3 years of your life.
But anyway:
The path leading to Cryfield 2, the building on the left - home sweet home?
I live in Cryfield 2 - i.e. the 2nd Cryfield block out of the three. It’s the cheapest accommodation on campus, but it’s ideally situated not TOO far from the central campus where all the department buildings are yet far enough from the student union that we’re not kept up all night by the noise coming from it - there are events (as in band performances / concerts, drinking etc) EVERY night at the union for those who live JUST for the nightlife!
Anyway, it’s been said that Cryfield was designed based on a Swedish women’s prison. Since we’re situated just adjacent to GIBBET Hill Road, I’d say that’s fairly apt. Add the fact that we used to be an execution ground or something and supposedly have our own ghost (it’s called CRYfield for a reason, y’know!), AND that Warwick is the uni with the highest suicide rate in UK AND that a 3rd year hanged himself in our block (as in not Cryfield 1 or Cryfield 3 but CRYFIELD 2) last year…
Well, judge for yourself!
The corridors of Cryfield 2!
You can just imagine those Swedish female convicts sticking their hands out of their cells from either side, can’t you? =P Apparently the corridors are so narrow because prisoners wouldn’t be able to riot or start a fight in them (too narrow to swing weapons or proceed more than two at a time)!
Makes me wonder what exactly do they think we uni students get up to / are capable of…
Room 210!!
Room 210 - sorta opposite the token communal co-ed bathroom on my floor - is supposedly the suicide victim’s room - or at least we think so, since every other room has been allocated besides this one, and apparently that’s what one of my flatmates was told by a senior who used to live in our block.
I live in Room 219, roughly 3 or 4 doors down. =P
This is my view when I lie down in my bed - WHY ARE THERE HOOKS ON MY CEILING???
…There aren’t any hooks on any of my flatmates’ ceilings…!
Anyway, it’s actually not all that bad. I like living in Cryfield, actually, despite the fact that we have about 16 people to a kitchen and maybe 30 or so to a bathroom. The bathroom contains about 4 shower units, 4 toilets and one sink and is for both sexes, so one has to be rather careful. (I shower just before I sleep, which apparently is just not done by the locals who shower in the morning, so I’m fairly safe!)
Room sweet room?
My room’s small and lacking in personality and not particularly tidy (I hate how it looks neither spartan-tidy nor messily-personalised-and-lived-in but is rather in between…) but seeing as the only time spent in there is for sleeping or using my laptop, I guess I don’t really care excessively.
The view from my window - my room looks out on Cryfield 1.
Kitchen 6 - kitchen sweet kitchen?? (L-R: Marta and Carla, the Italians on my floor)
There are 2 kitchens on my floor - one on each side of the corridor, directly opposite each other. We each basically picked a kitchen and that’s where one cooks and eats in for the rest of the year. Kitchens are enormously important in determining the dynamics and relationships with your flatmates! My kitchen is where all the people I like to hang out with eat while the other is where all those party-animal-type people eat. It’s an unspoken “them and us” situation - we’ll say hi and be nice to the people from the other kitchen and vice versa, but we tend to hang out almost exclusively with our kitchen mates!
The fridge in Kitchen 7 - “their” kitchen. (Those are fridge magnets, FYI...)
The noticeboard in Kitchen 6 - “our” kitchen!
We have noticeboards in the kitchen - we decided to put a map up on which we would stick in pins representing where each of us came from. Since they couldn’t get hold of a world map, we non-UK Cryfield 2 people drew our relevant bits of the world and stuck it on the wall roughly where our countries would be! (Yes, that’s what those random white bits on the wall are…)
Close up of the map of the UK. (Warwick's near that white pin that's sorta between the orange and the pink pins)
I love hanging out with my kitchen-flatmates, I really do! We’re of the same minds that prefer communal cooking and sitting in the kitchen laughing and chatting about the randomest things and drinking cheap stuff in the comforts of “home” as opposed to having to fuss and dress up and waste oodles of money going to some noisy crowded public place to drink!
And of course, one of the Kitchen 6 essentials - cheap VODKA!
And that concludes the domestic part of my “First time in UK” series… stay tuned!
TBC: Part III - Leamington Spa!