By the way… I got an email from a very sweet girl called Ashley, who is starting an organisation called ‘Teddy Readers’, which donates books and teddy bears to less fortunate children. If you would like to send any donation at all, please email ectorbabii@yahoo.com if you live in the US. If you live in the UK, I’m going to try and take some with me to post when I go to New York next week, so if you’d like to post a few things to me, email me :)

Cambridge was AMAZING. I hardly wanted to come home lol. My room was quite good, pretty near everything important. Each room has at least one piece of antique furniture, plus mine had a sink, a window seat, a desk, 2 chairs, and some other random things. Fun. The students there finished for Christmas last week (they get 6 weeks off!!) but some were paid to stay behind and look after us interviewees, which was really nice. They invited us to a ‘Coffee Party’ in one their rooms, and the girl who organised it had built a robot, which was cool. Apparently everyone’s great there, you can leave your room open, never mind unlocked, without having to worry. Which may explain why the room I had, which I think belonged to a Chinese student, had a lot of things left in it like sardines and Marmite, which she had decided not to take home for the holidays (I wonder why…) :S
The city is beautiful, and so is the college I applied to. It’s huge, and has amazing gardens. My interviewers were all really nice as well, they made the interviews fun even, and although the Linguistics one was hard (and I did pretty crappily), I learned some interesting things. The written exam was also fine, although they gave us plain paper to do it on…I’ve never written an essay on plain paper before lol.
The bad points? Well, there are some of course…
1. Tom was sick before we even got onto the motorway – and partly on my new suede jacket. Ick. The main thing was that he felt better afterwards though. Oh, and that my jacket wasn’t wrecked and I could wear it for my interview :P
2. The food wasn’t great, the ‘buttery’ is only open at meal times, and there is only a choice of 3 meals (although they are different every day). I’m used to a ‘refectory’ open about 8am-4pm, serving all sorts of hot and cold food.
3. I had to carry my bags down the second longest corridor in Europe, in boots. That took me at least 10 mins lol. Especially as about every 20 steps there is a really heavy door to push/pull open. But, I had people to help me the rest of the time :love:
The interviews went quite well I think, they weren’t amazingly brilliant but I don’t really regret anything. I wasn’t really nervous, the thing that worried me most was finding my way around, but there were ‘Sheepdogs’ (first and second year students) who took us to (and even from) interviews, so that was fine. I think I’m going to hear in January whether I got in; I’m guessing that there are about 20 applicants and about 8 places, so fingers crossed. I would LOVE to go to uni there. It’s not at all how I expected, everyone’s so lovely and down to earth. And the library is fantastic :)
I got home about 9:30pm yesterday, but I’d been awake since 7am (with hardly any sleep), and I’d walked round Cambridge and the college several times, plus had 3 interviews and a written exam spread out throughout the day so you can guess I was exhausted after a 3 hour car journey. Unfortunately I was in at 9am this morning, but after I’d dragged myself out of bed, it was okay. I didn’t really do much today except write an essay and finish my IT assignment. I kept getting stopped: by my English teacher, the careers tutor, my tutor, and loads of my friends who all wanted to know how I’d got on (or didn’t, and I bored them anyway :P). My tutor started talking to me about how I was doing 4 A levels and had full attendance and top effort grades and stuff like that and didn’t I expect anything for it? I was like, No not really! We did get WHSmith vouchers last year, but I seem to gain those faster than I can spend them, I always have at least £30’s worth lol, from various different things. So anyway, he said that I don’t have to go to Tutorial on Tuesdays now, just Mondays which is great, because he mainly repeats things over and over for the slow people in my class, or the ones who just can’t be bothered, and I just have to sit there for 2 and a half hours a week doing nothing. And there’s nothing I hate more than doing nothing, especially as I’m always rushed off my feet and could be doing a million things I’m behind with. So now I only have to go for an hour and a half, yay! :) I’m happy lol.