I ended up moving in with three other guys, they were all in the same position as me and in that respect we had solidarity with each other. Fortunately one of the people I actually knew already from my local area and that was the biggest shock of the whole day that he happened to be in the same position. He didn't go to the same school as me so I guess if there was one stroke of luck it was that. So that put me and him, we had stuff we could talk about from back home so that was great. The people I ended up living with I guess a little bit through having time to get to know them but also through, I guess, a lot of luck, worked out.
We got along it turned out, we had similar interests, we enjoyed going out, we didn't enjoy being silly or doing drugs or anything like that so we ended up making the best of it. We were included by the university but people sort of looked down on us a little bit because we were called off campus and everyone else had a hall and a hall had traditions and they were affiliated with the hall, the hall arranged events for them.
We had a rep as it were but she was busy with her studies and she was probably doing it more because she knew what we were going through whereas the Hall reps seemed very keen, they'd volunteered for it, they wanted to be the person who got the Fresher's involved in all the activities, so we were sort of living off the campus. We had to sort of traipse up to campus when it was time for nights out and we were, if we were even remembered to be told about these events because we weren't in a Hall and it wasn't advertised around, we didn't have corridors to look for events.
So we had to make a lot more effort than everyone else but we did make the effort because we wanted to be sociable but it was hard to just walk up to random groups because when you went to, say, a club, people tend to arrive by Hall and they'd be singing a Hall anthem or something and there was like eight of us or something which I'd made friends in that day. When we first had to meet and you know we didn't have an anthem we sort of felt almost a bit like I guess foreign students feel. We were sort of a bit, not excluded because we were there, but it wasn't the same atmosphere of here's another five hundred people we can just say 'Hey we're in the same Hall what's your name, where d'you come from?'
We just felt a bit like when we said off campus we were looked at a little bit like lepers so that was hard but we had sort of the benefit of not having fire drills, we didn't have people waking us up at six in the morning, five in the morning you know making a ton of noise, we didn't have to share a shower, we had a house which was a first time for all of us. So on the positive side you know people wanted to come and see us, the friends we did make because we could have house parties, barbeques and things like that. So we tried to make the most of it in that respect, we tried to almost be like a bit more above our years and act the adults so that people could enjoy the house we had but we all probably deep down knew we would rather have been in Halls.
