These are hectic times. And I am not even talking about lectures, studies and assignments. I am talking about house-shifting, fire alarms (hope you aren't tired of reading about them, because I'm not tired of writing about them) and lifts that don't work.

On Saturday, I finally moved to my official University Accommodation. It is in a street called Ratcliffe Terrace. For two months before this, I was staying at serviced apartments in Grove Street, provided by the university, because the accommodation that had been allocated to me was still under construction. Yes, such things happen. After several postponements, the date of the shifting was finally fixed, and everybody who had been allocated Ratcliffe Terrace moved in. As university accommodations in Edinburgh go, it is a very nice place.

It is work in progress. Outside the building, they still have temporary fencing along the road. There are notices on the walls announcing that it is a construction site, and one should not enter without proper protective equipment. I don't remember them handing out helmets when we moved in (which would have been daft anyway), so I am assuming the notice is now defunct. The lift has yet to see the light of day. We were told that it should have done that today, but then we were told lots of things. The backyard is beautifully landscaped with heaps of soil, spare bricks and artfully scattered blocks of concrete, and a few cranes (not of the avian variety).

And I am in a flat with five other people, and we make an interesting multi-national, multi-ethnic mix: India, Indonesia, Italy, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, and Poland. We have rooms of our own, with a common kitchen and dining area. I have a nice little room with a window facing east, which means that I have a beautiful view of Arthur's Seat and the Salisbury Crags. I woke up to a beautiful cloudy and pink sunrise today, which really made my day.

Everything went smoothly until I sat down for dinner in the evening when the fire alarm went off. I am an absolute pro now, as you might have gathered from my previous fire-alarm posts. I leapt up, gathered my keys, wallet and phone, closed all doors and ran down the stairs. Slowly everybody gathered there, and somebody made the call to the fire brigade. The building has sophisticated, state of the art fire-alarm technology. At the ground floor, near the main door, there is a big box with an LCD panel, which was saying that there was a fire in the kitchen of one of the flats on the second floor.

It is astonishing how many jokes you can make in such situations. All I had on was a T-shirt and pyjamas, and in the chill evening air in the street, when someone asks you why you didn't get your coat, you say you were expecting to be warmed by the fire. The fire brigade arrived surprisingly quickly, and the firemen found that there was no fire. There's no smoke without a fire, but apparently, there are lots of alarms without a fire. Now, the alarm was ringing all this while, and the firemen couldn't turn it off because the system requires a password to be entered to do this which they didn't know. So the university security people had to be located and the firemen asked us all to return to our flats and enjoy the music. So I went up and sat down to finish my dinner trying to figure out the frequency of the wailing alarm. When I got down to the dessert, the alarm suddenly stopped, and everything was back to normal.

I'm loving my new home! Ten more months here... woohooo!