our dearest flat 31...

My sincerest apologies for this incredible delay... It's been more than a week and some quite shocking things have happened in the meantime. As most of you will know and the pictures are a subtle hint of the occurrence, we had a little fire at our flat. This is how it goes...

Daniel was the only one in our flat last Tuesday afternoon - the rest of us were on campus very eagerly attending lectures. Daniel, being hungry again, decided to make toast. He left the toaster for 2 minutes and when he came back there were kinda flams coming out of the toaster! He tried the fire blanket and the fire extinguisher, but without much result. By then the room was filled with smoke so luckily Daniel got out as soon as possible after opening the kitchen windows.
When I returned from classes I saw all the people standing out while the fire alarm was going off, again! I just thought some stupid student set the alarm off by smoking (which happened like 7 times before!), but when I saw Daniel and he told me, it took a second to get it. Our kitchen was on fire! At first, honestly, I didn't really realise which consequences this would have. Daniel then told me he inhaled some smoke so we agreed he had to go to the ambulance. They checked him and eventually advised him to go to the hospital, just to make sure everything was ok. I decided to stay there and see what happened with our flat and wait for the other flatmates who were already informed. Emilie and Heleen arrived and after some time, the other students could go back to their rooms and we had to go to the reception for further information. They there told us we couldn't go back to the flat that night, so they gave us keys for another flat and asked us to take the most important stuff with us to pass the night and the next day. We went to flat 31 and went in to the kitchen... Needless to say, we were quite shocked. We didn't expect it to look like that (check the pictures): a part completely burned, ashes everywhere, horrible smell and a lot of things ruined. Luckily, our rooms were as we left them. Not even the smell got through, thanks to the annoyingly heavy doors in the flat. We took our stuff and curiously we went to our new flat 35. Unfortunately it was quite disappointing. The combination of a fourth floor flat with 2 new flatmates, small rooms with small windows, no food what so ever and the realisation that we would never be able to go back to our home, made this one of the first bad nights here in Aber. And without feeling ashamed, I must see tears was flowing. You'll never know what it feels like until you have a fire yourself. The worst part was that we were so used to this old flat, it was our flat, our home. And we had to leave it.

The next morning we went to the reception. They send us to campus. After a bit of moaning and nagging, the lady gave us a new flat. Flat 27, fourth floor at a different side of Alex Hall with one flatmate, a nice Spanish girl we already met. So we accepted this offer. We had to move all of our stuff before 5 pm though and it was 10.30 am at the time. We rushed home and started moving all of our stuff. So just to make sure you get this right: most of our stuff was at flat 31, second floor, building A; some stuff at flat 35, fourth floor, building A; new flat: flat 27, fourth floor, building B. Yes, as you can imagine, it was hell! I swear I went up and down the stairs 13 times. And I had to move as fast as possible since I wanted to make my first seminar of Classical Hollywood Cinema at 2 pm all the way up at Llanbadarn. My room was pure chaos. I hated it. Plus I missed 2 screenings and 1 lecture. When I came home I organised my room and got some more stuff from our burned kitchen, whatever we could still use. Of course we had to wash all the dishes and ... just everything! I was happy Friday passed.

Since then, we settled in some more. You could say that I'm used to my new flat now - except those 4 floors of steps, hope I'll get used to them soon. My room here is actually bigger than my other room, and I have a big bed now, bloody brilliant!

That's my most important news. We had some good parties this week, as always, with more and more new people. I will post some pictures later. And I couldn't stand certain temptations in the amazingly nice shops here.

Anyway, gotta go cook now, my turn tonight. We're having steak!
I'll talk to you soon, pictures are coming!

Big kiss and thanks for the reactions (Tine, I'll come and visit you and Francis as soon as I am back in Belgium, I'm curious :)!)

Camil - formerly known as Camille