I have just moved from Norfolk Terrace, an around-40-year-old building, to the university village, a group of residences for the undergradute and post-graduate students of the UEA.

The university village is 10 to 15 minutes walk from the main campus. The university village may look like a holiday camp in Hong Kong and all houses there are 3 stories high.

My room is single ensuite with a bathroom with toilet in my own room. Looking outright from my window is a tree and beyond a grassland.

Why I needed to change the room? I was told by the accomodation office that my accomodation application was received after the 1 September deadline. But the truth is that I sent over my online accomodation and accepted the unconditional offer of the study in the UEA early back to February and May. The reason that the accomodation office treated my application as overdue was that they needed the confirmation from the law school or faculty that I had a seat in the study. Well, for some reasons, such confirmation was sent after the accomodation application deadline. The result was… I was sent to the “refugee camp” (all students who arrived late would be sent to there) - the Norfolk Terrance which was in need of and being planned for refurbishment.

I then wrote to the head of the law school for help. He initially was reluctant to help as he said he had no influence to the accomodation office. But I continued to plead for help, telling him the entire matter was very unfair to me and how the room was unpleasant and damaging to my campus life. (In one day alone, I killed one cockroach and 5 spiders (Note) in my room. The room had a bad smell and was too dark.) He finally talked to the head of the accomodation office and then I was treated as a VIP in the accomodation office.

While I was working on the law department for help, I also went to see the welfare officer of the student union for help. (The student union is not the ordinary student association like in Hong Kong. It seems to have certain powers in the university when I note that there are quite a number of full time staff in the union to help and advise the students and the union also runs bookshops and some other facilities in the campus.)

In fact, I had also made an appoitment and was prepared to see the officer of the dean of students office when I was notified by the accomodation office that I have been allocated to a new room in the university village.

It is fortunate that some people in the UEA were willing to help me in this matter. However, it is also true that if we need to assert our rights, we need to do whatever we can to voice out our discontent and our justifications. On the same floor of my first room in Norfolk Terrance, a Japanese girl also has requested the accomodation office for a change of room but until now she has not yet been able to move to a new room. However, she has not done anything else apart from submitting a form of request of room change to the accomodation office.

When I saw the head of the accomodation office, I also asked for a waiver for the handling charge for room change which was 20 Sterling pounds. Initially he hesitated that his accomodation office was not at fault in the matter and the room needed cleaning when the room was changed. I stated I was even an innocent victim in the whole matter. I had already suffered in this matter and it was unfair to me that I needed to pay for something which was not at all my fault. In the end, he let me waive for the charge.

Note: The spiders are called Daddy Long Legs. They have very long and slender legs. They look like a bit like mosquitoes for their long and slender but their size make them look like spiders. They will not bite people but will fly around in your room, climbing into your food (One loaf of my bread was thrown away just because it has climbed to it). They are very stupid and you can always catch them. The Norfolk Terrance was next to a grassland. Therefore, plenty of Daddy Long Legs would fly into my room when I lived there, especially at night.

Great Yarmouth is about half hour away from Norwich city centre by bus.

There are many amusement parks along the coast.

There is a beach there.

The city centre of Norwich is about 20 minutes away from my school by bus. There are plenty of shops there.

There is also a castle in the town centre. Open markets were also open when I arrived there.

My univeristy is called the Unversity of East Anglia (UEA). It is a campus university located in Norwich, Norfolk, England, founded as part of the British government’s New Universities programme in the 1960s.

The UEA has a motto - “Do different”. It is indeed very different.

The site of the campus today was once the Earlham municipal golf course. Denys Lasdun (who designed the Royal National Theatre in London) designed the university’s core buildings including the central square (see pictures above), the foot bridges (see pictures below) and the “ziggurats” of Norfolk and Suffolk Terrace (as mentioned below). His plan was that no building on campus should be more than five minutes’ walk away from any other.

The main campus of the UEA is very compact and all buildings (except the law school in the Earlham Hall) are centralized in one area. The wide use of the foot bridges to connect different buildings and at the same time allowing the vehicles to run underneath, is a charateristic of its architectural design.

Inside the campus, there are a number of hall residences for students and most of them are surrounded by grasslands. My first hall residence is called Norfolk Terrace (see the picture in the middle of above). Together with Suffolk Terrace (another hall residence adjacent to it), they are well known for their “Ziggurats” (having the form of a terraced pyramid) architectural design.

Outside Norfolk Terrace, there is a grassland and a huge broad.The broad is a man-made lake dug out in the 1970’s. It consists of 18 acres of freshwater. You can catch fishes there with a permit. Depths of water vary from a couple of feet to about 25 feet.

If you want some fun in the evening, you can go to the grassland to watch the rabbits which like to leave their hidden homes at night time. 

Adjacent to the campus is a huge grasslands of 8 hectares - the Earlham Park Woods. It is a Local Nature Reserve owned by Norwich City Council (Local Nature Reserves are places with wildlife or geological features that are of special interest locally and are almost always owned by local authorities). The park is huge in area but there are scarcely any person around except for the area near the entrance. One time I ran around the park but most of the time I could not find any person within my sight. That was the only and would be the last time I went around the whole park.

I have seen squirrels in the park. One of my classmates told me he has seen a fox in the park too one late afternoon (later I did find a fox in around my hall residence). In fact there are many animals living in the park.

As the park is very close to the campus, I initially had mistaken it for part of the campus. The park has a particularly close connection to me because the UEA law school is situated inside the park and it is also the running field for me (it is only two minutes’ walk from my second hall residence (University Village) which I later moved to).

My law school is situated in the Earlham Hall in the Earlham Park. If you walk from the main campus and want a short route, you will go through a path (as shown in the pictures above).

You will not believe it -  the Earlham Hall is such an old and shabby house. It looks like it may tumble any moment. There are even holes at some parts of the roof. Nevertheless, the Earlham Hall has a position in the history of the UEA: it was the home of the administrative offices of the UEA during the earlier days of establishment of the UEA until 1975.

Unlike other academic departments which are all situated in well-maintained buildings and in the main campus, the law school is set far apart from the main campus and housed in the old Earlham Hall in poor conditions. I have no idea why the law school is treated in such a “preferential” way. However, the law school may feel proud in this: the Earlham Hall is a house of historical interest. It dates from 1642 and was the home of the Gurney family from 1786 to 1912. Elizabeth Fry, a member of the Gurney family and the famous British prison reformer in early nineteenth century, had been living there).

On the way I went to the law school for the first time, I asked a lady in the main campus where it was situated. She asked me, “Do you really need to go there? It is a bit far away.” I replied, “Yes, I have to go there because I need to complete the registration there.” I suddenly became worried whether I could reach the house in time. ”How long will it take to go there?” I asked. “Ten minutes”. Okay, it was only ten minutes walk. It was not THAT far.