Success, Views on the World, and I Don't Like Thursday — Tuesday 4 October to Thursday 6 October

Tuesday saw an interesting development in my viewing of the world, yet again. Up to this point, I was under the impression that Americans were the only people group that exhibited the "ugly American syndrome", but, in retrospect, I think we may have inherited it from the British. When I thought about it a little, I remembered that the British colonised, and made multiple attempts to civilise the savage, heathen corners of the earth. Remember the British Empire? Yeah. My new acquaintance had this to say about the rest of the world: "Yeah, France is nice except that it's full of French people. Germany would be okay too, but there's so many Germans... And I bet America is quite nice, but you'd have to put up with all the Americans, begging your pardon. Yep, this is the best place in the world with the best people in the world." He also recommended Idiot Abroad, a TV show about a british guy that gets taken to various countries around the world. Apparently, the star of the show shares the sentiments of my history class companions.
History class also brought me into contact with the Veronica White of Sunderland. Apparently there are two of her, since I hear there's an art major like her as well. She's the sort of person who, once she starts talking, doesn't know how to shut up. Not that I claim to be much better, but in class I do tend to keep quiet. Not so for the Veronicas of the world. I believe that the original Veronica at Whitworth was unaware that she was doing anything wrong or impolite, and I think that it's the case with these two as well. Unfortunately for my conscience, I'm not a nice enough person to befriend them and do them the kindness of helping them out with their social skills. Quite frankly, I can't stand people like that. This is probably indicative of some awful traits that can be found in me, but some people get under my skin.

Wednesday was a successful day. I successfully contributed to the discussion in history seminar, which may well have prevented me from embarrassing myself by being asked what book I read (because I didn't read). Success!
After class I sat down in the library cafe to determine the plot of The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope's mock-epic monster. I was determined to sit there and write down every plot point until I made sense of the whole thing. Unfortunately, the library had a fire alarm, so I picked a new location (City Space, the building which houses the cafeteria and the gymnasium) to occupy until I defeated Pope.
Success came, but not without much grumbling and several notes in my plot outline regarding the pointlessness of the whole thing. I believe that this may have been Pope's point in writing it, actually, since he was writing in an epic fashion about a stupid trivial thing that was treated as something incredibly serious. I don't dislike him any less, and I don't think that he was really all that great, but he wasn't too bad. It was still a bit of a crabbed number, but it was less unmanageable when I worked at it.
I also succeeded at biochemistry calculations while ensconced in City Space.
After my wild academic successes, I decided not to take the metro back, since I would have to wait longer than it would take me to walk. I ended up taking a back way, which is regrettably not faster than the normal way. There's a little street that curves around behind the Royal Hospital (across the street from Clanny), and it's probably one of the most british places in Sunderland. There's a post office, and several little tea rooms, bakeries, and grocery stores, as well as no fewer than four fruit and veg stores and two pharmacies. I'll have pictures tomorrow, since I plan on mailing the postcards I've done so far.
I decided, as I was walking, that I want to move Whitworth to Sunderland. I want my professors and my three-minute walk to class and my friends and Whitworth's lack of administrative nightmares, but I really love this place. I'm not sure that my Whitworth friends and Sunderland friends would mesh very well, though.
I watched How to Train Your Dragon, which has been highly recommended to me. It was pretty good, although the vikings are scottish and Gerard Butler. Hmm. The story is mostly cute, with some impressive cultural messages and some rather serious plot twists. The soundtrack is good, and I discovered that it was composed by John Powell, who did the Bourne trilogy and has worked extensively with Hans Zimmer, who seems to be the John Williams of the last decade or so. The dragon is adorable. D'awwww... The most scottish viking, voiced by Craig Ferguson of late night talk show fame, has a great line about trolls: "They EXIST! They steal your socks! Only the left ones, though..." I maintain that the trolls work with the car key gnomes, and that they've been hanging about the Clanny laundry room, since I just lost a sock.

Thursday has been a bit of a trial. I don't like thursdays, since I have class 9-5 with two 1-hour breaks, and I have to deal with the impossible little french biochemist who can't explain things very well in english.
First, I found out that Steve Jobs had died about ten minutes before I ended up having to leave for the bus. I think that Joy of Tech has one of the best memorials. Gizmodo has published several pieces as well.
I also received some unfortunate news about my grandpa's health.
Then, I forgot my wallet and ended up missing the bus and walking to class in the cold wind (although I walked so fast to keep from being late that I eventually took off my coat). I just made it on time to biochem.
We had a new prof, who is easier to understand because she's british, but she talks like the class is comprised of first graders. Also, the subject of the two-hour session was quality control and SOPs, followed by a one-hour session that was on calculations instead of spectrophotometry.
Bleh. What it all comes down to, to borrow her favourite expression, is that I signed up to learn about biochemistry, not about being a biochemist.
Lab was okay, although the impossible frenchman was back. We were doing a protein assay, and I was excited to recognise several terms and concepts from my internship at PNNL. The Bradford reagent, for the Coomassie protein assay, was as brown as ever, and it turned a familiar blue in the presence of protein. We used BSA standards, and made curves. It was all so familiar... My group and I forgot that we were diluting our standard by another 10x, so we had a failure of a standard curve. Sad day. Luckily, we did one run with the 100x diluted standards, and the results were much less awful.
When I got home, I discovered the ginger Clanny House cat outside the flat drinking milk. He's so friendly, which is good because I needed a kitty snuggle. He's got this incredible long fur, and I suspect that someone brushes it. In any case, he submitted pretty readily to snuggles as long as I didn't take too long.
It was a pretty exhausting day. As soon as I got inside, I went to bed and slept for about three hours before venturing downstairs to eat dinner at around 8 (20:00). I ended up staying in the kitchen and watching a few episodes of Downton Abbey, a british TV show that Conor introduced to Josie, Jessi, and me (Flo and Micha are too busy, Thomas is still gone, and Adam already knew about it).
Now it's time for me to go to bed again. I have a lot of sleeping planned for tomorrow morning, in the absence of any classes. Also, I think my typing might keep Jessi up. Sorry, roommate!

Class, Naps, and Paranoia — Tuesday 27 September

Today was another successful crepe tuesday. I figured out that mixing olive oil into the batter helps make them better.
I went to talk to IT before my noon class (the only one for tuesdays) and was told that my issues with receiving emails were pretty much a mystery. Sigh. I was more successful at the payments desk, where I picked up my stipend cheque to be cashed at one Barclays Bank. Then I went to class, and took some notes before class started. I'll probably sound pretentious. Don't say I didn't warn you.
HIS114, which turned into my first module at the University of Sunderland: So far, really warm and probably full of freshmen. Smelly ones. Although, that might just be the room. 
All the british students are up in arms about the heat. It's supposed to get up to 25 ºC (which is around 77 ºF). That's a rather warm room temperature. 
I had a strange conversation about study abroad, modules, and the weather with an irate southerner (I suspect London, but I'm not sure). He insisted on calling me "Raeanna". 
The classroom was really warm, and no one on the windows would open one. Regarding the outside temperature, I heard someone with a british accent trying to explain the term "Indian Summer" to a german international, so I guess it's one of those terms that forgoes rational cultural identification.
I need to come up with better reasons for going on this trip. "Because I've always wanted to see England" doesn't sound that great, and "I've always wanted to study abroad, and I don't speak any other language fluently" sounds worse. Any thoughts, please let me know.
I was pleased when I didn't end up in the 09:00 seminar group, but then I realised that I wasn't registered for the class and so hadn't been placed in a group. Bummer. I ended up in the 10:00 group.
The first lecture was an overview, and I didn't know most of it. I did know that the world wars aren't in the early modern period, which stretches from approximately 1500 (1453 and the fall of Constantinople and 1492 and Columbus sailing the ocean blue are two academic contenders in the great debate) to 1750 (I don't know why). That made me feel better, because I'm slightly less unknowledgeable than the person behind me. It looks like the class will be over the social events of the period and how they are intertwined with the political and religious events of the period. I'm pretty satisfied with this, since I know a little bit about the religious events as taught in Core 150 (who knew it would be so useful?) and I have a vague impression of English history for that period.
After class, I hunted for Barclays. I was not very successful. I got directions, all conflicting, from three different people. The last one finally landed me at the "fruit and veg stand" across from the bank, but only after I walked all the way up and down three streets and ended up covering the same ground two or three times.
I bought some strawberries, peaches, and pears with some of my £520 in cash that I need to hide around my room in £38 aliquots. On the first day of orientation, Emma told us about a kid who lost £6,000 that he was carrying around in a brown envelope. Stay with me, it's related. When I got my cash, they gave it to me in a brown envelope. I went home pretty quickly, with a tight grip on my bag.
I foolishly didn't buy a pair of slippers at a random shoe store, so I was incredibly footsore with very little to show for it by the time I got home. I heated up a cheese and onion pasty (remind me to look up and test a recipe before I head home), then put on Pride and Prejudice. I updated yesterday's blog, then fell asleep for about five hours, I would say.
When I went downstairs around 20:30, everyone was just getting ready to watch Sherlock Holmes (with Robert Downey, Jr.), so I had a snack and hung around. "Everyone" here means Jessi, Conor, Josie, James, and Adam, since Micha doesn't hang out with us much and Flo was on a date (tikka chicken chom chom). We had a fun time switching around the seating arrangements every time someone got up, too. Adam's computer doesn't have a very wide angle of viewing, so the people on one end of the "couch" got the slightly inverted colour scheme.
After the movie, I set about arranging a skype date with my family for tomorrow. Now it's time to sleep, which will be aided by some mint tea.