Two Weeks Full of Sunshine

Posted by Ksenia

Straight after our arrival back to the UK we had to get out our books and go back to study as soon as possible - which was quite a shame taking into the account the gorgeous weather in Brighton (after Moscow it was such a pleasure to go out and just enjoy the sun, flowers and spring smells).

The reason to work hard was simple - all of us had mocks in the first two weeks of the term.  But even though the piles of papers to read and things to learn was still huge on Sunday (my first mock was on the next day) I still could not ignore the Russian Easter.  Personally I am not particularly religious but I just love this celebration.

We got together with several other girls and started to prepare a variation of the traditional Easter meal.  As we did not have almost any of the ingredients we had to use all of our imagination to do it.  The easiest thing to do was to cook the eggs and to color them.  Then we wanted to buy something similar to Kulich which is a kind of Easter bread but we could not find anything so we just bought pancakes and put some sweetened condensed milk on it (“sguschyonka” - essentially cow's milk from which water has been removed and to which sugar has been added, but believe me it tastes much better then it sounds!  You can find it in Europe but the best one is definitely made in Russia - a can of it was brought by one of my friends from home) forming some kind of sweet sandwich and then decorated it with multicolored icing.  You can see the result on one of the pictures!

 

The next three days seemed just like a very long one - write one mock, come back home, find the notes and read, read and read again until you just cannot keep your eyes open.  But then on Wednesday, after the last test was finished I felt a great relief and was very happy that everything was over already (some poor people still had mocks on Thursday and Friday).  And that was also a very good reason not to do any work for the rest of the week - I was comforting myself with a thought that I really should get some rest before starting studying again.  But the real reason was a bit different - the weather was still fantastic and I much more preferred to spend the time outdoors.

On Saturday there was a big event - Bellerbys Football Cup.  We met up with friends next to the college and then went to the Preston Park all together (mainly because the majority of us could not remember the way even though we all have been there several times).

Some of the teams were already there doing some sort of exercises.  We were the first supporters to arrive but very soon the space around the football field was full of Bellerbys students. The cup started at one and when we left around five o’clock it was still not finished.  11 teams took part in the competition (even though every game only lasted 15 minutes the choice of the winner was a very long process as everybody took this Football Cup very seriously) and in almost all of them we had our friends playing.  So me and other girls who came to watch the Cup had a big job to do – we were shouting, singing, jumping around trying to support our favorite teams as best as we can.

 

In the breaks between games we were taking lots of useless pictures of ourselves lying on the grass in all the possible positions, eating ice-cream and chatting.  For the whole day it was very sunny and warm but in the afternoon it became a bit chilly due to the cool wind so we decided to leave earlier.  But it was still a pleasure for us to know that a team Ragazzi won and we all went out that evening to celebrate the victory (I think you can guess that we would do this irrespectively of who wins and who loses – all the teams played fantastically and we were very proud of our boys and had a great time – isn’t a good enough reason to celebrate?)

 

The next day was full of sunshine as well though I wasn’t particularly happy about it when I looked in the mirror first thing in the morning.  It may sound very improbable but I got sun-burns on my skin.  That reminded me once again of how special is the place where I live – in the middle of the spring the sun is strong enough to make your face totally red!  But despite this fact I went to the seafront as soon as possible – I just could not resist the Brighton beach in such a gorgeous day.  And even though my face was even redder when I came back I did not regret any single minute spent in the sunshine – I was filled with energy, enthusiasm and infinite love for Brighton.