It's my last week in Sunderland...

So, I'm leaving Sunderland for good in a mere three days. Rising to the top of my mixture of emotions is the panic of not having packed — or even having enough suitcases, in all likelihood — at all, not even sorting my stuff.
Of course, this has been a week of more "lasts" than I can remember having since my high school graduation. I was in denial about graduation for three months before it until two days before it, when I finally read through my speech and got the panics.
I had my last day with my british biochem lab partner Freya, who's been featured on this blog before.
I turned in my last assignments.
I've been busily not buying more food, since I'll just be leaving in a few days (I use jessi's milk instead).
I returned all my library books. I really will not miss that place. I spent too much of my time cooped up trying to write lab reports on the top floor.
I keep realising that each day is my last "day of the week" in Sunderland, probably ever. I probably won't see Conor, Josie, James, Adam, Flo, Jessi, or Freya ever again after I go home.
Of course, I won't have to deal with that impossible little frenchman ever again (except for when I have to take that exam in friggin' June, not that I'm bitter). I won't have to feel like I'm wasting my time by going to lectures (I hope. I've never felt like I didn't need to go to a Whitworth lecture).
It's just as well that I'm done with my papers, though, since I had my last packet of alpine cider this morning.
A couple of funny stories about words with different meanings:
1. Cider. Cider in the UK means the alcoholic kind. It's like beer with apples, I believe. Comes in cans. Cider in the states, unless preceded by "hard", means "cloudy apple juice, I guess" or "hot, spiced apple beverage that is mostly sugar". I got some funny looks when I said that I write my best papers while drinking cider.
2. Fanny. In the states, it's sort of like saying "bum" in reference to someone's hindquarters: a fairly polite word for a culturally amusing body part. We even have fanny packs, which sit either on the bum or on the stomach.
In the UK, fanny means, ah, "ladybits", as Adam so delicately put it when we pried the definition out of him.
I probably wouldn't think this was such a funny word if I hadn't grown up with it as a quaint, funny way of saying butt.
Snrk. Yes, I am five years old.
3. The Garage. Here pronounced GARE-uhj, which still seems foreign. Although, I use and hear this one enough that it's making guh-RAHJ sound weird and foreign. In the states, a gah-RAHJ is the thing that holds your cars when you're not driving them. I think it's normally that way for GARE-uhjes here in the UK, as well.
However, there's a petrol station that I think of as "behind Clanny", although it's really more to the side. Anyway, it's the place to go for late-night food hunts that don't include hot pizza or any other kind of takeaway. Do we call it "the petrol station"? No, we do not. Someone in Clanny House, past or present, started calling it "the GARE-uhj", and the name stuck. If you say "I'm going to the GARE-uhj, does anyone need anything?" then everyone in the room will either reply that they'll come with you or thrust fivers at you with orders. I think that if I tried to call it "the petrol station", no one would know what I was talking about.
The thing that makes this really funny for me is that I still don't think of a GARE-uhj as a place to put a car, but rather as the petrol station behind clanny. Guh-RAHJes are where you keep cars.
I'd like to think that I'll be too busy packing and eating the rest of my food to post again before London or Leicester, but who am I kidding? I'll put it off until late Sunday night, and we all know it.

Pretty things in Sunderland

I needed to do this post because of this.

Image swiped from my.ilstu.edu and modified by me.

After a day of feeling like everything was going wrong and walking down the road muttering about how much I hate this place, I decided to use the pictures I took of the cemetery before I went to bedford.

Here are pictures of the cemetery up the road. It's very pretty, and makes for a nice walk.

I was on the hunt for these, but I couldn't find any from much before 1800.

Huge group plot. I think it's for people affiliated with a church, like possibly a convent or monastery. 

All the stereotypes about cemeteries are true here. Huge crooked tombstones like jagged teeth... 

And then huge empty spaces.

Lots of the stones have broken; the pieces are all kept together.

A real, live holly tree. I think I was feeling a bit festive when I took this one. The tree was huge, by the way.

The ground here is really unstable. Almost all the headstones are tilted, and most of the monuments have sunk.

The "family burial ground" thing is kind of odd to me, somehow.

There are a lot of stones for people that were lost at sea or other far-away places.  Sunderlandians got around.

Marble: pristine. Stone: so worn you can't even tell there were letters there.

There are these huge old buildings scattered throughout the cemetery, with broken windows and fences around them.

Like so. I do like the little round bit off to the side of the main building, though.

Entrance? 

Fancy.

Lost at sea.

War graves always get me. "In memory of so-and-so, who failed to return"

Also, cat.

Our flat (now consisting only of Conor, Jessi, Flo, myself, and occasionally Adam) kind of adopted the Ginger Clanny House Cat, known alternately by us as Clanny, Kitty, Look Who Followed Me Home, Can We Keep Her, *tchk tchk*, and The Cat.

She follows us from further up the block, knows which flat is ours, knows which door inside the flat is ours, and also comes to the window to be let in. 

Jessi bought some ham for Kitty's consumption (because that made more sense than cat food?), and despite the inherent dietary flaws, Kitty's not sick and she keeps coming back and eating more ham, so... 

She's got a routine. Get into our flat, eat some ham, maybe have some milk (we have some spare containers of it, I don't know whose, and they're not bad yet, but they will be, so...), curl up on the chairs, and sleep until we put her out. 

I hate putting her out. I feel so cruel. Jessi hates putting her out more, though. She seems to be afraid of cats, which quite mystifies me, and flinches away whenever Kitty moves her paws, claiming that she never knows what cats are thinking.

Well, this is true. She's terrible about figuring out what mood the cat is in. But I blame the single claw attack she's suffered (at no physical damage to her person, I might add) on her not knowing the warning signs of sudden rage and repeating her offences.

So here's some more things that I liked in Sunderland, mostly to remind myself that I ever liked it.

British houses

That random door in the cool wall

Wall

Good flatmates

Cheese and onion pasties... Mmmm.

Old churches

Walls

Walls

More walls

Even more walls

I do not tire of these pictures

But I'll throw in a picture of nutella, only 99p for the small glass.

Brick walls in various states of decay

Mosaics in entryways

Wall

That park down the road

A "stumpery"

Wall! Leading to the prettiest place I've found in sunderland.

Wall

Pretty bridge and autumn colour (in december, but still)

Pretty river

You guessed it: Wall.

Not wall. Slippery death trap, actually. But it was pretty.

Natural wall from where the river was

Little secluded area

As excited as I am to be leaving Sunderland and returning to Whitworth, I'm still going to miss this place. Of course, staying doesn't hold much of an attraction for me, since almost all my flatmates, who became my best friends here, are leaving, too.
So I'll think fond thoughts about Sunderland as I've known it, with two brits, two germans, two americans, and an australian as my companions, and be happy that I'm going back to a university where more of the faculty is sane and likeable.

Christmas; Joy and Sadness — Tuesday 13 December to Saturday 17 December

So, on Tuesday I found out that I had my history exam a month earlier than expected, and most of my day was consumed by revising (studying) for that off the back of the how-to-revise lecture (luckily, I had already procured and wrapped my secret santa present). It was a two-question essay exam, so I needed to look up some basics on three or four topics and the details on some primary sources (historical documents we've looked at in class) so that I would be prepared for anything the exam threw at me. For a study break, I made crepes in a wok that I bought against the possibility that all the good skillets would be gone. I felt pretty good about the wok: it only cost £2, doesn't burn the crepes, and only tilts a little bit when empty (unlike the other skillets that I got for £2, which tip over when empty because the pan is lighter than the handle). I accidentally stayed up late, but I managed to wake up on time to make the 10 AM exam time on Wednesday.

My professor, however, missed her metro and was 10 minutes late, which sent me into a pre-exam panic. I always have these panics, but this one was forestalled by the fact that I didn't know about it until the day before. The main topics that my brain freaks out about are:
1. Is it really today?
2. Am I in the right room?
3. Was it really scheduled for this time?
4. Oh, God, I should have checked my email before I came!
Usually, my freakouts are ended by the presence of the other students and/or the proctor of the exam being in the room at the time that I show up. This time, I was the only student in the room, and the proctor wasn't there.
PANIC!
Fortunately, she showed up and I sat the exam with no panicky blank stare moments.
After this, I prepared for Christmas night. I snuck my present downstairs, and waited around for Adam to come and take Josie and I shopping for food.
He took a while.
We finally got to Asda and had a great time navigating the awkward store set-up with crazed christmas shoppers filling the aisles.
When we got home with £70 of loot, Josie hurriedly put the 3 kg (~6 lb) pork roast with a thick layer of crackling fat into the oven, since it was going to take 3 hours to cook and it was almost 17:00. Bad Adam. Then we all kind of had to knock around for a few hours until the squash, yams/sweet potatoes, and potatoes were ready to go in, and I had to wait until 10 minutes before everything was done to heat up the quorn lamb things that I got for Felicity and myself.
Before Felicity came over, we had the gift exchange. Here's a picture of all the presents looking very nice around the £5 tree:

Josie got the redeem code for the X-Factor winner's single on iTunes from Conor, Conor got a Daft Punk CD from Flo, I got a book and a "Tea Deck" of cards with info about tea from Jessi, Adam got a bunch of CDs that Josie thought he would like as well the Coldplay album with his new favourite song on it, Jessi got a bright, fluffy scarf and irish coffee from me, and Flo got an "insult-a-day" calendar from Adam. I'd call the presents a success. I was impressed that Jessi and I managed to draw each other and then keep it a secret.
Here's the Christmas decorations that we put a ton of money into (nothing cost more than £5):

The rest of the tree. It has lights, but the batteries went out.

The tinsel garland looks cooler from this angle, trust me.

This was supposed to be another garland, but instead it's an awkward little tree that sits in the back of the kitchen.

Fairy lights around the board, and the tree.

Three things in this photo... Let it snow!, the Christmas moose that faces the window. and fairy lights held up with sticky tac. And the tail end of Merry Christmas on the other window.

One of the stars that Jessi's mom sent.

Jessi's advent calendar. The bags have dates on them and candies inside them.

The other star is in the window. We get some cool shadows from that.

That was the Joy part of the post.

Thursday, I slept in until 2 because my lectures were cancelled, then went and hung around Sunderland with Freya, who is slightly devastated by the fact that I'm leaving in a month. I'm impressed, since I'm a terrible conversationalist...
When I got back in, I knocked around the flat a little, then went to have another boring night of trying to update the blog and watching movies until the wee hours.
I got a text at 19:30 that Grandpa had passed on two hours before, and I spent the rest of the night trying to come to grips with the situation. It's really weird for me, being over here. I don't have the close connection with family that facilitates mourning, and I'm not really one to sob and scream when I'm upset. So I watched sad movies that would let me cry and wondered why I felt so disconnected. I didn't really tell anyone, unless they brought it up, since I don't know how to broach the subject. It's not much of a conversation-starter, and I'm not looking for people to tell me how sorry they are that a man they never knew isn't there anymore, even if I do appreciate the sentiment. I know that I'm sorry on behalf of others when people close to them that I never knew pass on, but I always feel awkward when that comes up. I think this is part of the disconnect.

I thought about canceling with Freya for Friday, since she wanted to hang out again and do "stuff" but decided against it. I needed to get out of the flat. I did have a good time; had some good pizza, saw some cute rabbits and a cute puppy, laughed... I felt a little like a traitor to Grandpa's memory, but I made up for it by looking up the stages of grief and analysing my feelings later that night. And don't worry, Mom and Dad, I'm not going to let this ruin the whole trip, I promise. I'm not going to just bury my feelings (NOT healthy, I know, I've tried it before), but I'm going to let myself have a good time when the opportunities present themselves and have some sad times when I need them.

Saturday, Josie moved to Leicester (pronounced "Lester"), which was like the end of freshman year at whitworth on a more permanent level. I sat around making little sad puppy noises, like the weird little alien from Star Trek (2009) makes when Scotty and Kirk beam onto the enterprise. Josie's kind of the fun one in the group, but I guess I'll be visiting her in Leicester (I cannot write that without pronouncing all the parts: Lie-sest-er) in January, maybe for new years, maybe later. But still... It's like the end of things. Also, the flat will be pretty empty during break. Conor is in Germany, Adam's going to be home for most of it, Josie's in Bedford (where James' home is), Micha's going home on Tuesday, Thomas is probably in Ireland, Florian's in Germany, and Jessi's going to be staying with her parents when they come to visit. Okay, that last part makes me happy, but everyone else being gone is kind of sad.

In other news, I didn't get dressed today. By the time I woke up, it was going to be dark in two hours anyway, and the library trip can wait for tomorrow. I did get up, eat breakfast, go outside, drink three or four cups of tea, and I'm going to eat proper dinner, but my purple plaid flannel pyjama pants and tank top are perfectly decent for knocking around the flat on a saturday.