The beauties of leaving UEA for the summer

Remember these as you’re crying with loneliness in your room over summer


Going home for the summer might leave a slight pain in your heart when you pack your bags and leave the fine city of Norwich and your uni friends behind. It may also leave you wretching when you finally have to clean that disgusting kitchen.

At uni, it’s acceptable to leave plates, glasses, pans and bowls all over the kitchen surfaces for weeks at an end. The smell will become unbearable and the flies move in as your new housemates. At home, you have a meal and wash up – or leave your parents to do it for you – straight away.

It was only when you return home that you realise how nice a place the kitchen can be. You know times are bad when you have gloopy liquid pouring out of an already decomposing bin bag.

What’s even worse than uni kitchens though, are the showers.

If you shared a bathroom in halls, and it would be normal for you to climb into the shower and find yourself ankle deep in the cold water that still hadn’t gone down the from the person before you.

And then you’d turn the shower on. There are two functions on uni showers: Scolding hot or freezing cold, leaving you with the options of developing pneumonia or third degree burns.

The options are endless

Of course the state of the kitchen and the showers causes endless arguments among housemates, ones you will no doubt miss over the summer. But this is nothing compared to your battles over the heating.

If your flat was like mine, someone would always turn it on when everyone else wanted it off. Struggling to revise, you will find yourself thwarted by whoever turned the heating off, leaving you sitting indoors wrapped in woolly hats, coats, blankets and anything you could we could find to keep warm.

Smiling because she’s frozen, not because she’s happy

As well as aspects of student housing you won’t miss, there are also parts of campus life you shouldn’t long for either.

The UEA library is akin to hell. You will not miss spending half an hour walking up and down every staircase and across every room desperately trying to find a free computer. You will not miss finally finding a computer only to hear the person next to you having a very loud and annoying phone conversation, and you will not miss paying for printing credits.

I for one certainly won’t miss the 27 hours I spent in the library over three days, desperately trying to get my coursework done.

Such fear

Who on earth will be setting you deadlines over the summer? Like an LCR creeper, deadlines sneak up on you. One moment you’ve got weeks to finish your coursework and the next thing you know, you realise it’s due tomorrow but all you have is a scantily-clad plan.

Doing an English Literature degree, I won’t be crying over my freedom from reading deadlines. Trying to finish a 400 page novel in one night strains your eyes so much that it makes you go temporarily blind. Fellow humanities students, you should be glad to regain your vision this summer.

Gotta love Jane Austen 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Let’s not pretend anybody is going to miss the buses over the summer period, either.

The number 25 and 26 buses, with their cantankerous drivers who watch you run to the stop and then pull away at the last minute are like gold dust to catch.

The drivers huff and puff when you don’t have any smaller change, and one girl was even told that it was people like her who waste drivers’ time when she only had a note to pay with.

The drivers stop half way through journeys to swap over, delaying your already delayed journey even further. You’ll be loving the free taxi service from your friends when you get home.

Bus woes

Last but not least, something you should be very glad to get away from will be the foxes. How scary are foxes? Before I came to UEA I had never seen them before, and now every night I live in fear of them.

A few months ago, I was walking home late from the library. I heard a screech near my house then saw a fox running towards me. I was sure it was going to eat me. It didn’t. It got scared and ran off, but even so, I certainly will not be missing those.

I prefer these running towards me

Although there is quite a lot of UEA you should be glad to get away from this summer, there is far more that you’re probably sad to leave behind. The dirty kitchens and cold houses aren’t enough to scare off us off. By September you know you’ll be desperate to get back there again.