College life

It seems like only yesterday when I was a college student, I can't believe I've been working for half a year already! Time is going so fast, it's unbelievable. One good thing about not being in college anymore, is I get to mock all those poor students cramming on the train before their exam! No more studying for meeee! No matter how much fun college is, the exam period sucks. You have these gigantic course books to study in just a short period of time, and sometimes I even had exams for more than one subject a day, which meant total madness the day before to try and cram it all in again once more before the exam.

It was a hectic time, but some students really went crazy. They take relatine pills (how crazy is that) and drink red bull by the gallons, and stay up all night to study. I never did anything crazy like that. Even if I only had only a day or four to study for an exam, I managed it without putting crap in my body or by turning myself into a zombie. I mean, if you stay up all night, how can you properly perform on the exam itself, you'll be half dead from exhaustion.
I was the kind of person who studied everything by heart, and I was pretty good at it, and pretty fast too. So that was really handy to get things done in time and not need to pull all-nighters. But after the exams, how great was the feeling that it was finally over and you had passed it, makes you feel so proud of yourself.

Russian really was crazy difficult to study, especially when it was for an oral exam. Totally mental. We had two hundred pages, in a small font, barely any illustrations, and the oral exam was four questions. FOUR question for TWO HUNDRED pages. I can tell you, when you receive that paper with those question you're inwardly freaking out, thinking 'Oh my god I don't know the answer to any of them!!!!!' while the professor sits in front of you, waiting for you to answer. You try the fill the awkward silence with umms and let me think's, while your mind is racing over your course notes trying to find something, at least something to say! I always had something to say, but wow thank god the professor was very helpful in giving hints. Because Russia has a hell of a lot of history, and try and remember all those names, they are all called Vladimir, Boris, Aleksei or Aleksander, and they all have a father's name and of course a last name. A father's name is the name of the father plus ovitsj (if you're a guy) or ovna (for a girl). So Putin for example is called Vladimir Vladimirovitsj Putin. So try and remember that for about one hundred different Russian tsars, presidents, scientists. Not easy! But I enjoyed studying the language, it's a shame I can't use it at my current job, but it was really hard to find a job involving Russian.

If you've had the college experience, living in your own little place, you'll fondly (or with disgust) remember such scenario's:

Ah yes, the college rooms, in Belgium called 'kot', which appropriately translates itself into 'shack'. I changed to three different ones in the course of my four year studies. The first one had a nice big shared bathroom, but gas heating (which I find dangerous, a cousin died that way). The kitchen was alright, and the building did not have that many students. The room, however, made you feel like this:

It was soooo small, I barely had any room for furniture, and to make it even worse, the window could not open. There was only this tiny raster, which really didn't help when it's nearly thirty degrees outside and you're supposed to be studying. I had to study in my underwear so I wouldn't die of the heat.

My second place was in a big building with lots of student rooms. It has it's own tiny bathroom, the shower was in the hall (but right next to my room, so I could quickly sneak back in my towel). But the room still was pretty small, and because of the dozens of other students in the building, I was often disturbed by music, drunken homecomings, creaky bed + awkward moaning sounds.. things like that. One morning I opened the door and found someone had thrown chocolate milk at my door. It had dried.

My last place was the biggest, and right across the street from college, so very handy! The room itself was fairly big (as college rooms go) but the bathroom was disgusting and so was the kitchen. The bathroom was for the 9 people in the building, it had a shower and a toilet, facing each other, about two feet distance from each other. The shower had barely worked, I once got scorched turning the tap on, the water was running horizontally and i was hit on the boob by a ray of boiling water! Not fun people.
Also the cleaning lady (who came almost never) did not clean the shower; and nobody seemed to bother to clean out the bin next to the toilet. One time a tampon fell out. There was also someone with serious hairloss apparantly, as the shower tended to be covered in it. Lovely eh. I got some of those shoes that kids wear in the sea, to protect my feet from the grossness. When it gets to the point you have to wear shoes in the shower, it really is baaad.
The kitchen wasn't any better. People refused to close the binbags and get a new one if it was full. Eventually there was this big tower of garbage , and then I had to get a new one and lift off the tower into the new one so I could close it. It one point I got so pissed off I left a passive aggressive note.

The fridge, well lets just say it wasn't very clean. People tended to forget to throw things away, and by the end of the year there was this yellow fluid on the bottom yuk. (Around May the owner has this big clean-up, so the place would be presentable for new students checking things out hah!) My gran gave me her old little fridge eventually, so at least I'd have germ-free food. Sigh! And it was crazy how much people charged you for those places. I did enjoy the time there, but wow, I could never go back to living in such a dump. But I get a good laugh thinking back. I have some good memories in those rooms.

Those were the days!