Course: Basic English Writing

    Instructor: Hu Chunmei

    Name: Lee Yuxiang(李宇翔 0801010609)

    Class: Six

    Time: 2010-3-10

    Problems with My Dormitory

    When I was young I always dreamed about living in a dormitory. Now the dream come true but I find it’s really not the wonderful fantasy in my naïve mind. Living in a dormitory always involves a lot of problems. One has to endure the narrow space of the room, the noises of roommates and neighbors, the inconvenient facilities which all makes living in a dormitory uncomfortable and sometimes quite unbearable.

    First problem is the narrowness. The room is only about 25 square meters but it has to be shared by six girls. The largest area owned by each is one’s bed and that’s why everyone makes the bed

    major site of activities in the dorm: reading, doing homework and using the laptop, ect. The narrowness is especially true in the toilet. When the time comes to seven o’clock in the morning, all

    six bounce up from the beds and hurry into the toilet. Then there’s often quite a mess. In the area of

    less than1.5 square meters, you can’t swerve with your washbasin and towel in your hands in front of the tap because one of your roommates is brushing her teeth on the right side and another is having a wee-wee on the left side. Wherever you go, there’s always someone in your way.

    But generally the narrowness is within one’s tolerance: there’s library and classrooms for you to

    read and write, there’s computer rooms for you to surf the Internet and there’s a bigger washroom on

    every floor. But no one can always live in the library or classroom or computer room. Then the problem of the noise bumps out: when you have an important lecture the next morning and need to sleep a little bit earlier, you just can’t make all your roommates to keep quiet and you can’t blame on

    them. When the lights go out and you’re at the brim of drifting into dreams, suddenly there comes a shrieking noise of a chair’s foot grating against the floor above your head and you are awake again, angrily. Or you’re trying hard to focus on an assignment in a tiresome summer afternoon but one of your neighbors is rehearsing her speech or talking on the phone loudly in the corridor outside. Plus that the wooden door is anything but sound-insulating. All these are quite common and all you can do is to endure.

     1 / 2

    Finally, the problem of facility is the most annoying among all: When one of the room’s light

    stops work, no matter after how many times of repairing, it would just be the same within six hours after the electrician leaves. Often in winter, the coldness in the dormitory makes you never dare to take off your coat when the heater is like dead, which happens frequently. Sometimes you have to stamp your feet to warm the frozen numb toes. The more unbearable thing is the scorch in the summer without an electric fan. Really, I never knew hotness is such an uncomfortable thing in my life until I experienced it the last summer! In the midnight of July, wherever you toss on your bed there is the sticky warmth torturing both your skin and soul, and you can’t sleep until about three

    o’clock and you just wear a pair of panda eyes the next day attending the final exam on Intensive Reading.

    All in all, maybe one day when I can afford an apartment of my own, all these problems would disappear.

     Mar. 10

    Dear Ms. Wang,

    I’m really sorry that I have to be absent on tomorrow morning’s lecture because I have to go to

    the Old Campus to report the loss of my ID card. It pains me to miss the lecture because I know it’s

    very important. I will borrow other students’ notes to make up.

     L

     2 / 2