castle food

I’m very lucky to have spent 2 years at university living in a beautiful castle:

It’s an extremely cool place that I’ll never forget. One of the nice things is that it’s catered, so in the third year we can concentrate on study rather than cooking and shopping (though we live out in the 2nd year and do all our own food then).

That said, every silver lining has a cloud, and here it’s the food. As you can imagine the rent to live in a castle is ridiculous (though not seriously worse than any other college) even though the university owns it. Unfortunately most of that rent goes into repairs and making sure the castle doesn’t fall into the moat, and as a result some budgets get cut to compensate. One of those budgets is the food budget.

The other day I arrived a bit late and all the rice was gone. We practically live off rice here, so that was a bit of a disaster. Here’s what I got for dinner:

mmm, stew
24 hours later I came down with food poisoning and was violently sick. Co-incidence? I think not