A Change of scenery: Leeds

Dear diary,

This will be my last entry for quite some time as very soon I will be jetting off to awesome all over Europe. I feel like I haven't been anywhere in about 2 weeks. This is largely because I haven't. Despite this, this last week or so in Leeds has been very eventful. Wednesday the 10th Yazmin, Katie, Sarah and Emily had Mitch, Chris and I over and we made our own pizza's. Mitch even made our dough, however this failed pretty hard. It was a good effort but let's be honest, it needed to rise some more or at least be left in the oven a bit longer, neither of which we did. Still tasted awesome though and would definitely do it again. We had a million toppings to put on and was good to hang out with the girls as I hadn’t really had much of a chance to up until this point.

Thursday the 11^th. Man what a day. I have no idea what happened during daylight....actually pretty sure I missed a lecture for some reason. Something to do with a confusing timetable, but at night Julia and I set off for Manchester to see Karnivool. For those that didn’t know Karnivool are one of my favourite bands at the moment and are from (Perth) Australia, which made it even better that I could see them over here. They played for about 100 people in this tiny venue called the Roadhouse but that didn’t matter, we as the crowd loved them and cheered them and in return they played an awesome show for us. This wasn’t all though, since it was such a small show, they came out afterwards and said hi and hung out with us fans. I felt like such a fanboy but I didn’t care. I got all the autographs and a few photos, but more importantly got to speak to them. They are great guys and it was so good to be able to talk them about touring and stuff like that. Below is a photo of me with lead singer Ian Kenny.

As you can imagine I slept in pretty late on Friday considering I got home about 3am. I also misread my timetable and thought my class was at 1 when in fact it was at 12, which meant i missed it...again. Friday night we all went to Anastasia’ place for drinks and then go in to Fruity – the night club event that is on every Friday night at the Union. I was still pretty tired and still recovering from a cold so I decided I would just go to Ana’s and go home. Well, Emma had different ideas didn’t she? She pretty much coerced me into agreeing to come, against my better judgement. The only downside was that we didn’t pre purchase our tickets. So Josh and I waited in the massive line for about 15 mins and it didn’t move. We left. So at the end of the night I didn’t get an good night’s sleep, nor did i get to Fruity, both things I wanted to do.

Saturday night Amber and I decided it was time we found a new pub. We always go to the Eldon and we needed to explore the city a bit more. Everyone came to my place first and about 9 we headed out and went to The Hyde Park. Not the direction we first planned to as we wanted to go to Headingley, but since that’s the opposite direction to where everyone lived and no one was that keen for a real late night we found one a bit closer. We had actually been there before but was still a good change of scenery.

Sunday Chris, Anastasia, Julia and I went hiking in the Yorkshire Dales. Chris found this place called Bolton Abbey. It was a 13 kilometre hike and the destination was a place at the top of a hill called Simon’s Seat, pretty much a big load of rocks overlooking the countryside. It was really quite beautiful. The trail starts near the ruins of an old church, or at least half of it is in ruins, the other half had been restored and they actually have services inside. The path took us past a small waterfall where we stopped and took some photos. I got my photographer on and busted out the tripod and got some pretty sweet flowing water shots, not to mention it helped with the group shot. Right near the waterfall, on the path leading to it we saw so many frogs, and all I will say is we could definitely tell it was mating season. It was actually quite funny, the path was on the side of a little hill and they would jump together and tumble down the side of the hill. We trudged on and eventually came to the top of the mountain and the view was incredible. You could see a cute little village over the side with lots of farms, and the stone walls that form the perimeter of the yards made for a very picturesque view. We ate lunch at the top and cracked champagne to celebrate our success...I imagine that’s what Sir Edmund Hilary did all those years ago. The walk down was much easier, however not as much as you would think, walking down steep inclines gives your legs a really good workout. We caught the bus, then the train back to Leeds and since we hadn’t walked far enough i walked the half an hour trip back home.

Tuesday night was a night of genius. We had really wanted to play Risk for quite some time now, but we didn’t have a board, nor did we feel like paying for one as we are all poor students. What we did have though, was a massive map of England. Mitch went to the effort of drawing outlines around all the counties (territories), and then made continents out of those. Greater London and Isle of Man were their own continents. Playing this game was myself, Julia, Team Ana/Amber, Kayt, Chris, Mitch and Derrick. We played with M&M’s for armies, regular ones worth 1, peanut ones worth 5. With 7 people and a huge arse map, the game did go on for a very long time. Chris will argue that he won, but I say Risk was the real winner in the end.

March 17 – St Patrick’s Day. For me, St Patrick’s Day was quite dull. However, St Patrick’s Night was one to be remembered. After uni I walked down to Primark – student’s heaven – and purchased myself a white t-shirt and some permanent markers. I then proceeded to make my own t-shirt using a four leaf clover stencil I printed out. The night began at Amber’s in Henry Price where we played Kings – an increasingly regular occurrence at our events. It took about 20 minutes for the rest of my costume to be stolen. This picture is only one of my costume in it's completion. My green sunnies were being passed around and Kayt took my green scarf. It was fun though, I don’t mind sharing my awesomeness. The party then moved on the Faversham, or so we wanted. Upon leaving HP we already lost Josh and Mitch’s 2 British friends. We decided not to go in to the Fav because there was a massive line – a memo that Amber and Julia didn’t receive, thus decreasing the size of the group. The rest of us moved on to Old Bar in the Union. At some point at the Old Bar we lost Evan, he just disappeared. He said he doesn’t even know where he went, he just remembers being at the bar and then waking up at St Marks. We got kicked out at 1am for closing and by this stage all that was left were Myself, Mitch, Chris, Yazmin, Emily, Katie and Kayt. We took the party back to the girls’ place, lost Chris on the way, chatted for a bit there then went home about 2:30: a great night was had by all.

It’s now Thursday night, nothing exciting happened today and nothing is exciting is expected to happen tomorrow. My Micro lecture is cancelled so I will probably spend the day getting ready for Spring break, leaving on Saturday. A month of travelling.