Cambridge, violence, and London!

Went to Cambridge last weekend to celebrate Luke's birthday. A few slight hiccups, none of which were exactly expected, but overall pretty awesome. London this weekend, and the Cambridge are coming to visit, should probably tell them about Mexican Night 2.0 sometime soon.

In other news, violence in Oxford has risen steadily over the past week. One student was assaulted, one man was stabbed outside a restaurant near city centre, and another man's body was found in the Thames about a block down from our house. Makes me feel all warm and safe inside...

Tutorials are going alright. I started out with papers that definitely weren't my best, but it's totally okay because this means I can slowly "improve" over the course of the class, landing a good grade at the end. Uhmmm....that's about all I have right now. I think I've given up on visiting Morocco, but we're definitely taking some other weekend trip, and maybe two. Poland and Italy are high on the list.

This week's post: A Rant on English weather.

I have yet to experience a thunderstorm in England. There is no thunder, and there is no lightning. It's horribly boring and all I've gotten is a sad mix of dreary clouds, cold sun and windy snow. All the fun weather was left behind, though the awesome snowstorms that shut down the entire country did provide me some entertainment.

Get to see MacBeth tonight. It would definitely be cooler if I didn't have a paper due at noon tomorrow, which I naturally haven't started, and we won't be back until midnightish at best. Plus I'm tired so there'll probably be some dozing during the play. Maybe I'll get it on the bus ride into London instead. Should have a chance for some good London Eye and Parliament pictures.

It starts getting light at about 4 am now, and won't be dark until 9 pm. This cuts deeply into my sleeping time. I need more darkness. thankfully even when it is light the sun is almost never out, so I can just pretend and sleep on anyway.

Also, May Day was a couple of days ago. Some people jumped off bridges, some of us just stayed up all night to watch the singing and then go pass out for a few hours. I'll just blame my fatigue on that...

So, it's been a few more months, and I still fail at blogging. Real surprise.

Aaanyway, my new term resolution is a once a week blog. Maybe. We'll see.

So I spent the last month or so at home and in Spain. Home was great, I needed a break, and I got to see a lot of people that I'd been missing, as well as get my fill of super smash brothers. Spain was pretty good too, especially Granada and Seville, but Madrid was kind of ruined by the "OH NOES HOW WILL WE GET BACK" complex that hit us about halfway through. If you hadn't heard, a big ol' volcano went off in Ireland, and is still spewing some ash, which absolutely shut down the air travel in northern Europe. The ryanair flight that we were planning on taking back was similarly shut down. With great luck and ingenuity we managed to make it back, though. We caught a bus from Madrid to Paris (17 hours+80 euros) and a bus from Paris to London(9 hours+50 euros) and even got back in time for our first lectures(6 hours of sleeping in my bed, I didn't go). Still waiting on my refund from Ryanair, it'll help lessen the impact of that bus ride, but it's still annoyingly expensive.

Either way, we're back safe and sound, and the rest of the stragglers are slowly trickling in, though my house is still missing a third of its residents. My major and minor tutorials both seem like they'll be interesting while not being toooo much work, so I think I'm looking forward to the rest of this term. I'm certainly looking forward to the traveling I want to do during it, but I still have yet to find someone to go to Morocco with me.

My bad...

Alright, so I've really failed at blogging for a long time now. I promise to start again! Or at least try. I can share all my adventures from the trip as soon as I find my camera. I have all the pictures on my computer, but didn't upload the videos yet, and the videos are what will tell me specifically what I was thinking about what I was doing at the time. I managed to lose both my keys and the camera somewhere in this house within two days of getting back...

Anyway, for now I've just made it back to Oxford and we're getting to know all the new people. They're all from Mercer except for one, so they mostly know each other already, which is good, because all of the Oxfordians already know each other. Makes it a little less awkward than them jumping straight into a group where they know noone. Everyone's pretty cool! We've shown them around town, where all the best pubs are and where they need to shop, as well as where they need to eat (Noodle Nation & The Mission) and what days the pubs have their specials (Mmmm...Curry...). We'll see how everyone does when the tutorials start, but for now it seems like everything's going to work out fine.

It's really nice to be back after a month of traveling, and I'm not sure I can do another trip like that without a very long time to recharge. I'm still planning on traveling some in the next break, but more like one and a half to two weeks, not a month. We saw so many awesome places (Madrid & Alcala de Heneres in Spain, Copenhagen in Denmark, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Munich in Germany, Prague in the Czech Republic and Paris, La Rochelle and Marseilles in France). It was easier in the places where we spoke the language, or in Prague and Amsterdam where tons of people spoke English anyway. Communicating in France and Germany was difficult at times, though, but thankfully we never really needed anything aside from a menu item we could point to or some kind of train or bus ticket that went to a city we just had to figure out how to pronounce. Apparently it's impossible to get Marseilles(Mar-sigh) from Marseilles(Mar-say). Only had a few traveling difficulties, like being stuck in La Rochelle for an extra three or four days and nearly missing our flight back to London because we thought it was the next day, and the Eurail pass was definitely and completely worth it. We saved a lot of money going that route.

Either way, it was fun and I'm really glad I did it. I'll start sharing more detailed accounts of what happened to us and what we did in all the countries we visited as soon as I locate my camera. If I never locate it, I'll just be sad, and will give a foggy recollection based on pictures!

I'm tired of wet underwear

I meant to post this last night, so the timeline will be a bit off, but I can't be bothered with that right now.

I've officially joined the kayaking club, and while I absolutely hate it, I love it, too. There's something about being on the water and zipping around on a river that's really awesome. There's also something about being in a tiny boat that will tip if you lean ever so slightly in the wrong direction that isn't so awesome. I have yet to kayak without flipping...but I've never flipped more than once in the same session...sooo...we'll call it even.

We had a session on Saturday that was in a nice warm pool. This is where we did the majority of our capsizing training, so I spent a majority of my time on the water, under the water. My best piece of advice to anyone who wants to start kayaking is to take your instincts and intuition and throw them out. Nearly everything you need to do in a kayak, especially while you're under the water, goes completely against what your body is telling you to do. So to survive on the water, you have to let go of all those animal instincts that helped us to evolve into the intelligent, lazy people that we are today.

Back to my main point, though. Noone likes walking around in wet underwear. I did it two days in a row. The first day, I went out early, before heading to the pool, to try and find some swimming trunks. One of the main stores didn't sell them at all, and the other advised me to "go check the sales area by the ladies' fitting rooms," as they were now out of season and everything out of season is hung on a rack with a bunch of women's clothing. Needless to say, I gave up and left. So I show up at the pool in athletic shorts, which isn't too bad, except for that I didn't pack any other boxers, assuming that I'd have had swimming trunks on, instead of underwear, when I took the dive. Wrong.

It wasn't enough that I was going to have to walk back in the biting cold, from a part of town that I wasn't yet familiar with, with a backpack full of wet clothes. I now had to take that walk with a squishy, clingy, really cold fabric between my legs the entire way. Now I realize that I could have tried to go commando and just avoid the complications of wet underwear, and normally i would have, but it seemed somehow wrong to go commando in England while I wasn't yet familiar with the country. It'll take more than a month of wining and dining before I'll let England get that far.

This brings me to day two, Sunday. We went out on the Thames again, and did some slightly more advanced stuff. In theory, learning all this slightly more advanced stuff is fine. It's only when they ask you to paddle as fast as you can, then turn as hard as you can without turning over that it gets rough. I turned over.

They taught us how to stay upright a little better, and how to stay upright while you were taking a hard turn. The only problem was, when I focused on learning how to make the kind of hard turn they were trying to teach me, I completely forgot the whole "staying upright" part of it. The river was really, really cold, but as time went on, and more and more beginners also took the plunge, I got over it. I met a couple of other Americans in the club, as well, but it seems like everyone from the states that's over here is doing graduate work. I also met a couple of doctors who were in the club, today, so at least I know that when I'm out in South Wales a couple of weeks from now, I'll have someone who knows how to save me should I come perilously close to death. And if the one does manage to save me, the other has experience in plastic surgery, so he'll be able to put humpty dumpty together again if anything horribly traumatic were to happen to my face. I need my face.

I'm kind of rambling now, and it's nearly 3 am, so rightly so. I kind of forget, from time to time, that I'm really three thousand miles away from home. It's both good and bad, I guess. Let me first reassure my parents and say that I still miss you, no worries there. As far as actually being in England goes, though, I no longer think of it as "being in England." It's more just like, "being," now.

Procrastination

So...I have a paper due tomorrow. And then I have a paper due the next day. I haven't yet started to write either of them. This, of course, doesn't mean I'm not ready to write them, though I'm not really ready to do that, either. I see two very long nights ahead of me...

That said, I'm naturally procrastinating so I still don't have to start writing.

I MISS CHIPOTLE! We found a replacement, it's called the mission, and it's actually pretty good. Only problem is they're not very good. Over here, rather than Mexicans manning the Chipotle as one would expect from the Mexican restaurant, the Brits have a random assortment of foreigners who are quite hard to understand. I still have yet to figure out what accent they are speaking with, but they don't even have the decency to be Spanish while preparing my "Mexican" food.

As for the food itself, it's alright. The chicken is weird and pulled, rather than diced, but is still tasty overall. They also have a sauce called "Habenaro Salsa." I'm not one to settle for anything less than the spiciest sauce on my food, so of course I decided to try it the first time we visited The Mission about two weeks ago. I didn't buy a bottle of water to prepare myself for this sauce they had labeled "Extra Hot," so I was fully unprepared for the utter misery I was about to put myself through. (They had no tap water available, and I wasn't about to pay for water, but my principles really didn't do me any favours this time). About four bites in I had to stop and rest and try to deal with the fire that was in my mouth. By the time I was halfway done I'd switched to a different strategy of trying to eat it as quickly as possible. That didn't last very long. Three quarters through my eyes were watering, my nose was running, and I was about as close to hyperventilating as I've ever been in my life because most of my energy was going towards breathing quickly enough to keep my mouth cool.

Obviously, after an experience like this, I'd learn my lesson. Not quite.

Today, for lunch, we stopped by the mission again. This time, in a fit of cunning, I insisted that we get them for take away, and then head back to our houses to eat. This way I would have access to water because, once again, I could not settle for anything less than the spiciest on my burrito. Quite proud of myself, when we returned I prepared myself a glass of water and set to work on my food. Two bites in and I had to stop and take multiple gulps. About an inch down the burrito and I was nearly finished with my first glass. All in all, I finished four+ pint sized glasses of water with my burrito, and my mouth was still burning.

The Mission: 2 Kyle: 0

So. Looks like it's going to kind of just be a marathon to the end of the trimester here. I have a paper due thursday, one due Tuesday, and then another due next week sometime(probably). ~15, 10, and hopefully less pages on the last one, respectively. Aside from that craziness, everything's kind of calmed down here now that everyone's settling into a pseudo-work theme. That said, I do need to start working again. Not having your reading done for the 15 pages due in two days that you also haven't begun to write is not generally a good idea.

Before i go, though, I want to point out that I refuse to use the bus while in Oxford. this means that some days I will be walking upwards of five miles, including the return trip, to my tutors. Lots of exercise here! I can't really see myself returning to driving to class once I get back...