20th September 10:49am

I thought it was time for another entry. I've only been here a week and a few days but already it seems like months and I can hardly remember everything to write down.

Over the weekend Leeds and the uni exploded with British students arriving with their parents. Now the uni and all the surrounding shops are crowded every day. In a week the international students all bonded in our groups and now feel a little invaded.

But all the British students I have met so far have been great. I have been asked about three or four times about Steve Irwin and about kangaroos and other 'weird' animals. The other day I was at the house of some British people I've met and its one of those houses in the rows and redbrick. The house is weird and quiant! Door frames slope so the doors don't fit in them, I think even the floor slopes a little, there are doors to nothing and rooms that go nowhere. I love it!

I have still to meet all my flat mates - I think they are all international students as well because I've heard a lot of different languages being spoken around the place. As far as I can tell there is guy from Brazil, a girl from Italy, a girl from and Asian country, and another guy but I don't know where he is from yet.

Sharing a bathroom between five is a minor challenge - each morning I stick my head into the corridor about 3 times until I find its free and can go have a shower. And i only just got my room organised today until now I hadn't even unpacked entirely. I seem to be out all day most days, and often out late each night so I when I get home its all about sleeping. Today is the first completely free day I have had. I'll have to do some washing today since I've run out of clean clothes.

On sunday there was a trip organised to Scarborough on the coast for all the international students. It was even the perfect weather for a trip to the seaside! Not warm enough to swim of course, and there was fog all day, but the sun did shine in patches and it was warm with a cool breeze. Everything I thought an English seaside would be like.

We visited Scarborough castle. The headland it is on has been inhabited for about 3000 yrs, and the castle was built in the 12th century. Not much of the castle left due to civil war and shelling in 1914, but it was my first ruins I've seen of anything close to this old!! It was really beautiful to see and gave great views over Scarborough as well.

One well we came across we decided to drop a penny into to see how deep it was because you couldn't see the bottom. The penny took 6 seconds to reach the bottom!! (If any one is good at maths please do the calculations of speed of a penny and time it took to give me the distance!!)

It was sad to see in some places though that many people don't care at all about preserving these sites - there was rubbish in many places. It wasn't just careless littering either as in one place there was a cage over a a shallow well, but people had still gone to the trouble of squashing their plastic bottles through the openings to drop it down.

After the castle, we walked along the beach, everyone else had fish and chips for lunch but I had a pasty thing since I don't like fish (almost wish I did because fish and chips is the thing to eat in British seaside towns!) and then went to a sea life park. Pretty 'touristy' but they had some cool animals like jelly fish that looked surreal floating in the blue light, giant crabs that walked like spiders, sea turtles and a seal hospital. Got slightly lost finding our way back to bus but it was a nice day for a walk.

Since then it almost feels like I've been endlessly queing for things... food, my student card, getting into lecture theatres with weird doors, buses.... but I'm still having so much fun and my sleep routine seems to have settled down into a normal pattern.

Anyway, here are some photos from Scarborough:

The lighting wasn't the best and it was much prettier in real life but this is the first thing I saw on arriving in Scarborough.

This is a view over Scarborough from the Keep at Scarborough Castle.

My French friends

Bjorn (Holland) and CJ (Canada) in the Keep.

Another view from the Keep

And another one...(That's Sara from Morocco/France)