Reflections -- 22 February 2012 (slash 25 July 2012)

I wrote this a few months ago (in february, in fact, and it is now july) and then forgot about it. I just got turned into an "ISEP Ambassador" (in something of a fit of irony, given the issues a bunch of us had with ISEP) which reminded me of this, and I also have to resit an exam which is making me think about having studied abroad again. So here's my reflections from just a month after having studied abroad.


Tomorrow, I'll have been back for a whole month. It's kind of crazy.
I'm already so absorbed by school that I have a hard time sitting down and thinking about England. Fortunately, I have a lot of homework to avoid, so it happens more than it should. Right now, for instance, I should be thinking about inorganic chemistry.
So.
I was pretty close on my "what I won't miss, what I will miss" predictions. I really miss the people; I get excited when I hear australian accents before remembering that Josie is in Leicester, and it's weird being on facebook and seeing people from Sunderland friend people that I don't know and go places I'll probably never be.
And, yeah, I miss the easy Sunderland workload (but not the work itself) and cheese and onion pasties. I miss being somewhere where people know what a pasty is... and how to pronounce it. It is fun to explain the "putting stuff in pastry" phenomenon, though. Also, the "irish" pub that moved in across from Whitworth is reported to sell at least meat pasties, so I'll be checking that out sometime.
I don't miss the exchange rate at all, but I'm still confused when I cross the road. I have to think about where I would be sitting if I was driving, and where the center line would be, and therefore where a car will come from when it hits me. Ah, it'll be from behind. Better get on the grass, just in case they aren't paying attention. Note: this is only on campus. I'm very careful when I cross the street from my house to the Whitworth side.
I'm doing pretty good on the "not talking about England ad nauseum" thing, except when I get together with other long term study abroad-ers, and then none of us want to shut up. I found one girl who went to australia and knows the university that Josie and James went to, which was amazingly exciting, although it would have been cooler had she gone to their uni. I also met a girl who went to Northern Ireland (and who confirmed my suspicion that the northern accent is much easier to understand than the republic's), and who shared my frustrations over "I'm from Washington. No, not DC. Yes, there is a state called Washington. Where is it? Um, it's by California." conversations as well as my longing for pasties.
I've stopped saying "uni" so naturally and dropped back into "college", even though I use uni as a texting abbreviation.
I do miss being able to say "chips" and have people think "delicious, deep fried, soft, thick potatoes" instead of "crispy potato slices".
On the other hand, I've settled back into Whitworth pretty well. I've made new friends, even.
I blame my newfound gregariousness on having been somewhere where no one knew me. For the first time ever, there was no familiar face, no one I knew from church or liberty or whitworth, and I think I branched out without knowing it. If I wanted a familiar face, I had to get to know people. So I did. It helped that everyone else was dealing with the same sort of thing, and so were more willing to share my effort, but I could have made no friends. I know people who did just that, and I'm ridiculously proud to say that I'm a successful human being now. Last year, in Duvall, I did not make a single friend in my dorm.
This year, in England, I made several.
Of course, it's still hard for me to just strike up a conversation with someone, but I've definitely made strides in the "being able to function in the real world" department.

Jessi Insulting People (at a football match and the Durham Lumiere Festival) — Saturday 19 November

The title was inspired by this video:

I started off my day by printing the e-ticket for the football match, which I got in october. After something of a debacle with the people handing out the real tickets, due to our large and unwieldy group of nine (it took about three counts for them to get all of us), we got our real tickets and split up into normally sized groups. I stuck with Jessi, since I know her, and she stuck with Felicity, who tends to act like she knows what she's doing. It was her idea to storm the castle, by the way. I made a new friend in Lauren from australia, who stuck with us for the rest of the day.
We took the bus to the Stadium of Light, the brand new pretty football stadium that sunderland just built. We all got excited and Jessi took a lot of pictures. I took one, too.

Outside the stadium.

 When we couldn't find the turnstiles listed on our tickets, Jessi performed her first insult of the day by accident. She has this habit, which is starting to get on my nerves (1. w-curve. I should be getting fed up with everything pretty soon, not just the university itself. 2. We are not the most compatible of people. It could be way worse, but it could definitely be better. I refer you to the end of the edinburgh post. This is not a repeat of the rant.) of saying "for God's sakes!" in this really angry tone when she's confused, frustrated, or just angry, and even when she's in a good mood. In any case, the numbering system for the turnstiles is pretty weird. She vocalised this by asking if they couldn't count here, "for God's sakes!" when we were standing right behind a stadium worker.
Oops. He laughed it off, but it wasn't the best foot to start off on.
Getting in was exciting, followed by being disappointing. We were over an hour early, due to intelligence that the stadium would be bedlam, but no one was there. Our search for food led us to "food kiosks" that sold no chips (in the french fry sense of the word) at all. We reflected that perhaps we ought to have gotten food beforehand. I would just like to say that gesa stadium's concessions are way better than the stadium of light's. I suspect that it's becuase of the fact that SoL is still recovering from being hideously expensive, but I feel that chips would be a good start.
We waited forever for the match to start, and I forget how we amused ourselves. Our seats were up in nowhere, but we still had a pretty good view of the field.
As a group, which included Flo and Lisa and a few other germans as well as some people that some people know, you know, we lost interest pretty quickly. Flo and Jürgen, who sat on opposite ends of the "lauren felicity jessi me" group, kept yelling over us in german. Jessi later explained that they'd been commenting on how much better they were at football than the teams. Unsurprising, somehow. Felicity instituted a pretend drinking game to keep herself busy: drink every time people clap when we don't know why, every time someone falls, and twice when random people come onto the field. She lost count pretty quickly.

Way up in nowhere seats.

Mascots. I think they're the black cats or something.

Players coming out onto the field

The asian (not sure whether japanese or korean) who kept being in the way.

Getting ready to kick off...

And kicked off.

 As halftime approached, we made plans to outside to the food vendors we saw, eat, and come back in. We made extra sure we had our tickets, and asked a stadium worker if we could go outside and come back in.
No.
Okay... we tried another guy.
No.
Hmm. We tried the guy at the door.
No.
Jessi tried another tactic: reasoning. She's not very good at accepting defeat. Unfortunately, she started off on a very, very bad foot. It was more of an elbow as far as feet go. She asked if we couldn't go outside, say to get food or something, and then come back in? I mean, what if someone forgot something in their car?
If I learned one thing from concessions work, it's that herds of children with change are the worst. But I also learned that most of a stadium's income is concessions. Gesa stadium doesn't allow outside food for this reason. I'm actually not sure if you're allowed to go out and come back in, now that I think about it.
We knew, as soon as she mentioned food, that the answer would be no, even if it could have been yes. Which it couldn't have been; they use a turnstile that scans ticket barcodes, so they can't really just flip a switch, I'm thinking.
We returned to the game rather peevishly. Something exciting happened while we were in the entryway to our seating area, but the score was still 0-0 when we got in. When the game went into overtime, we all decided to head out, even if there was no way we'd beat any crowds at all.

Crowds.

More crowds.

We actually ended up walking all the way back to clanny, hungry and cold, but happily planning dinner and Durham, which would involve being all bundled up in winter clothes and real gloves and scarves and hats and warm socks. Oh, yeah. It was going to be friggin' sweet. And warm.

Durham's Lumiere festival (click here for much better pictures) was awesome. The group ended up being Lauren, Felicity, Adam, Jessi, and me. We took a cab, deciding against a return booking because we weren't sure when we'd want to head back (depending on how awesome or terrible it was), but we were pretty confident about our ability to not spend too much money on fare.
When we got there, we decided that maybe we should have, you know, looked more closely at the website before getting there. We had no idea where to go or what there was to see; we'd kind of expected to just follow people around until we saw all the cool stuff.

Following people. Lots of them.

Giant blue glowing thing!

That statue is there all the time. It was there when Jessi and I went to Durham, at least.

Snowglobe!

We had acquired a pamphlet with a map of all the cool stuff, and were headed for the rainbow bridge and lit-up cathedral when we were informed repeatedly that we couldn't go the way we were heading; we would need to turn around and go over the bridge from hell, which we had already crossed and deemed not fun. I say repeatedly because we stopped where we were standing when he first said that we couldn't go, which was just past where he was standing, and tried to deliberate. Taking our complete and total lack of motion for insurrection, he told us that we couldn't go that way for our safety five or six times in about a minute. And he wasn't just talking to the people behind us, he was looking straight at us. As a rule, I felt bad for the event security/police (not sure if one, other, or both), who had to stand there all night and repeat themselves to over-excited and occasionally belligerent crowds over and over and over, but this guy was less than informative. Okay, first in our minds was the huge, mob-like crowd on that bridge. That was not fun, and I, at least, got a lot of elbows to the shoulder. So, we looped around. Upon reaching the entrance of the rainbow bridge, which had acquired something of a mythical status in our minds (this thing was turning into the friggin' bifröst), we were informed by a portly security/police man that the whole thing was one-way.
Oh. That would have been good to know. Jessi performed her third insult of the day by saying "Are you f***ing kidding me?" loudly and angrily as soon as he said that we couldn't go across (in her defence, we had been walking for a while). He replied that he was not "f***ing kidding" (which made me feel kind of bad for him; poor guy had probably been dealing with this sort of thing for two days already), which did not bode well for our trip across. Way to endear yourself to the security guard so that he doesn't think that we're going to sneak around him.
The entrance to the bifröst was guarded by two security/police men; one of them was the portly one that Jessi insulted. The skinny one kept vanishing. It is perhaps for this reason that we decided that we could sneak past him, no problem; we also saw several people doing the same thing. We stood in a little huddle for a few minutes, waiting for the right time. Finally, Jessi made her move. He saw her, and made a little "Oi!" noise, but she was actually running by this point, and he probably decided that one person was better than leaving the entrance and having all of us get across. We all got across anyway, as soon as his back was turned all the way. My camera didn't really capture all the awesome, but it was awesome.

This was the brochure picture. It didn't quite look like this, but it was still awesome. 

So pretty...

So close...

Even closer!

On the bridge! We win!

The awesome was increased by Felicity's immense sense of self-satisfaction at our successful rebellion; this was increased every time she noticed that we were going against the crowd.
We saw a bunch of human figures (made out of some kind of white stuff) suspended above the street, and took pictures of them in between being kept out of various attractions, like the "ring of FIRE! thing that we glimpsed (jessi made it past one guard but was repulsed by a second while the rest of us were stopped by the first), and the lit-up cathedral.

First

This guy was sitting down.

I think this one was floating down on his back.

Lady.

Sitting on top of a building

Flying

Zooming down the street, if he'd been moving.

We also saw this lovely addition to the festival.

This one was my favourite.

The cathedral was really, really cool. Unfortunately, my camera didn't take any good pictures (the earlier link for much better pictures has some really nice ones).

I cranked the light fill all the way up. The cathedral is not usually red.

Jessi got in her fourth insult by saying that the guy in the white hat was ruining her picture, but he heard and turned around. It's kind of true; the white really stands out in the picture.
After the show, we decided not to go through the cathedral because of the really impressive queue. We ended up going back around through the cathedral yard to stand in line because the rings of fire were that way.
There was a cool display, which Jessi declared to be "just like Harry Potter!" and it was pretty magical. They had suspended candles that were in white shirts all through the nave, and there was a guy making eerie, monk-y music all by himself with a lot of microphones and a guitar.

The pictures make them look even more mysterious and floaty.

It was really cool sitting in the middle of this. Even with hundreds of people crowding around, it was oddly peaceful and quiet.

From below

I don't know why they used shirts.

One man monk choir

After taking a while to sit, rest our feet, take pictures, and admire the lights, we set out for the rings of fire.
We found them.

We hadn't seen this before. It was in the courtyard of the cathedral.

A fire fountain?

Fire! It was everywhere.

We decided to look for what appeared to be a lit-up dance floor, but ended up going to a completely different display. On the way, we saw this:

We felt that this should stay up all the time.

The display where we ended was cool too, and there's a picture on someone else's camera of me looking incorporeal. Mine was out of memory.
After this, we were hungry, so we looked for a pub with little luck. We saw this on the way, and figured that we should have seen this one before the everything will be alright one.

"the future will be confusing"
This was accompanied by a mixed-up alphabet. We don't know why.

We also saw this pretty waterfall thing on the way to food:

I've heard it described as the waterfall fountain. It's off a bridge, I think.

The one we did find with seats available only had toasties (like grilled sandwiches, I think), and they didn't have those, either. We moved on to a takeaway pizza place, where we all got the same pizza (margarita, or cheese) by accident. After this, we decided to look for a van cab (since they're the only ones that will seat five). Jessi wanted to call the one we took to get to Durham, but we figured we could find one that was only a few pounds more expensive. We ended up paying a lot more than we should haveThis was a cause of bitterness that I will gloss over, because the night was really awesome and we really did have a lot of fun.
After all, we crossed the bifröst! Without permission! And we stormed a castle yesterday. We're unstoppable.

Macaroni and Rage — Tuesday 25 October to Thursday 27 October

Monday night/Tuesday morning was consumed by unexpected insomnia due to very unexpected sinus congestion (I couldn't breathe through my nose at all, and I hate falling asleep with my mouth open, so I lay there and tried to breathe through my nose for a few seconds before gasping and freaking Jessi out. This went on for at least half an hour before exhaustion finally set in.) Another potential cause of my insomnia was the fact that I had tea with sugar about an hour before trying to settle down for the night. This would not normally cause a big problem, but I usually have honey. Sugar seems to affect me quite differently from honey. Happily, I didn't have class until noon.
Class was fine. I got a dirty look from Josh the hairy, irritable southerner for working on my presentation more than three days before it was due, but I may have earned that. Worse things could have happened.
I made crepes in the evening, seeing as I had slept in so as to stay awake in class. It's a pretty good time to make crepes, since people are around and can help me dispose of them. Unfortunately, Jessi always tries to eat all of them. She suspects me of putting some kind of addictive substance in them.
We went to Asda, and while I found macaroni noodles sort of, we won't be doing American night for a while because people are busy or unable to make things in the time they have. And then we're all going to Edinburgh this weekend. With luck, next week. I bought coloured medium cheddar cheese just for this, so hopefully it lasts. I'll check the expiration date and freeze it before then if I have to.
Regarding macaroni:
Aldi and and Tesco don't have it. I suspect it's something of an american pasta. This is what I was looking for:

This is what I found (minus the "cheese").

So this is what I got.

Same basic principle (small tubular noodles with a bend or five). 

Before bed, we played a few rounds of hearts that ended up taking longer than I expected. However, I made a valiant attempt to do more of my biochemistry when I realised that I would have to do the whole report, with four graphs and several calculations, in one day.
It was all pointless. I couldn't figure out the equations we got. I eventually went to bed well after midnight.

Then there was a freaking fire drill that woke me an hour before I would have had to get up. They even timed us as we staggered out of the flat. Snarl. Cold and irate, we were allowed back in at 07:35. I turned on the heater to warm up the room a bit before I had to get up in about half an hour and learned a valuable lesson: the heater keeps Jessi up. She flops around, makes grumpy noises, and gets up to turn it down. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an "off" switch, so she tried to turn it down three times in the half hour before my alarm went off again. I was kind of too sleepy to move, but I did feel hideously guilty. I also felt that saying something would give her rage an outlet in me, so I stayed out of the way. I realised that night that she had experienced a sneaky hate spiral, and shared the hyperbole and a half post with her. Her laughter was very gratifying. The history seminar was fine; I took notes on the order of the presentation and suchlike. Then I retired to the library to try and puzzle out the calculations that were driving me insane last night. They didn't get much better.

I've almost attained A Beautiful Mind status scribbling capabilities.  Only a few steps left to full-blown schizophrenia.

There was this equation that I needed to get from the data collected to the manner of analysing it, and it had some random centimeter. I'm normally quite good at going from equation to equation, once I get warmed up and set on the right path, but this had me scribbling random exclamations and drawing arrows, crossing them out, and redrawing them. At one point, I crossed out my query of "enzyme?" before turning around and writing "enzyme yes" above that. I was going insane. I had reached that weird conjunction of rage and confusion that leads to madness.
The situation improved somewhat after I decided to just forget that the stupid random centimeter was there, since it goes away in its usual equation without affecting the answer. I hope it won't cause me to fail miserably...
Things got better after coffee, since my mood was vastly improved after an hour of drinking a white chocolate blended mocha from starbucks (it was worth the money) and thinking about something other than biochemistry (I outlined my presentation). They didn't get better after lunch, which was a fifteen minute break for a cold cheese and onion pasty and a juice box of ribena (long i and e, rye-been-a), because I switched to the uni computers to edit the graphs so I could print a nice, not-demented report. It proved easier than I was expecting, although trendlines remain the bane of my excel existence.
My calculations are ALL WRONG. Well, it's more like my data are ALL WRONG, which is true enough (*guilty cough*). I ended up attaching the full graph at the end while putting in an edited graph that makes any sense at all in the body of the report.
Finally, I finished it at 19:15, after 7 hours of work. I think it's actually my best report yet, thanks to my extensive explanations. My plans of going to Aldi for two flapjacks and an energy drink were scrapped because it was too dark to walk alone, and Aldi closes at 20:00 anyway.
I didn't get to do laundry, either, because I was too tired when I got back home ten hours after I left that morning. I need to to that Thursday evening or Friday morning, or I'll have to get new clothes in Edinburgh. While it's not an unappealing thought, I don't really have the money for that.

Thursday started off with a trip to aldi to get flapjacks and an energy drink. The weather today is nice walking weather: cool and cloudy, without noticeable rain while I've been outside.
The biochemistry lecture was much better, since the professor is an immunologist and also assumed we knew how to tie our shoes.
I printed my edinburgh ticket during the break and holed up in the library's very purple study room.

So much purple!

The second part of the lecture felt a bit long, but that might just be because I suddenly had a spurt of creative energy that could not be acted upon. Hence this blog as soon as I got out of class. I was going to eat my second flapjack, but I happened to look for the nutrition information. One of these delicious little bars has "457 kcal" (so 457 calories as reported by US companies. In fact, the calorie is such a tiny measure that kilocalories was quickly adopted as the standard for food, but the k in front turns people off of perfectly healthy food, so the FDA allows companies to report nutritional information in the form of "cal" instead of "kcal").

I decided to maybe save the flapjack for later and also look up less excessive recipes. 

Lab was irritating.

You recall that lab report that took me 7 hours and considerable frustration on wednesday?

It's due next week, and this week was spent in learning how to do the graphs for the report.

Yep. So I spent two and a half hours in lab rehashing the stuff that I'd already taught myself to do. I'm really, really good at Michaelis-Menten and Lineweaver-Burk plots now, though. Also, I was doing them right. Bam. No centimeter was ever mentioned by the lab instructor.

My frustration at rehashing was not helped by the fact that the lab instructor was the lady who talks to us like we're kindergarteners. Granted, she's better at explaining things than the impossible little frenchman, but she pauses in weird places. Her emphasis habits really grate on the nerves after about ten minutes of uninterrupted talking, and she lectured for forty minutes. She says Lineweaver (which I heard at least once as "linweaver" and therefore adopted that pronunciation) as "linear-weaver" and it drove me insane. My tic started acting up, which usually leads to RAGE. I powered through on the fact that I saved all my work to a USB stick and can refine my report based on the new instructions we got.

Things got better when I got home and had, like, five pieces of toast to try and use up my bread before we leave for the weekend. I did my laundry, and then got sucked into "a quick game of hearts." 

Five hours later, we finally finished the sixth or seventh game.

I shot the moon. Twice. This has never happened to me before, and I've only seen it done twice. It's a caveat of hearts — if one person gets all 26 points (13 hearts plus the queen of spades), then they get 0 points for the round while everyone else gets 26 points each. It's hard to do, because you need really bad cards that don't give you away right at the beginning. Both times I've done it were unintentional.

I felt like a champion... until everyone ganged up on me the next round and I ended up with 25 points while everyone else except one person got 0. Ouch.

I'll be in Edinburgh until monday afternoon, so I won't be responding to any texts, emails, or comments. I could take my computer, but I doubt that I'll have internet and it's not worth the risk of having my computer nicked from the hostel room, because I'm not carrying this thing all over edinburgh for three days. No. I will take my camera, extra batteries, and a notebook so that I can make good blog posts when I get back.

Durham — Saturday 15 October

Today, Jessi and I went with the Students' Union "Connect" group to Durham, which has a castle and a cathedral. I got a window seat, but the bus pictures are quite blurry.

The latter half-ish of a cool looking house.

The blurry countryside is less interesting than the seat cushion pattern reflected in the window. All coaches here are like this.

Tower!

To get to the cathedral, we walked along a river that had some cool terracing.

It looks so... epic. Also, that's a CASTLE to the left. A CASTLE. For reals.

Duck!

The river also had mallards. The water was gross, but they are cute.

More towers.

Towers...

A cool little lodge place that rented canoes, I think.

That was literally right on the water.

The weird tall thing. I never found any inscriptions or anything on it to tell me what it was.

A different tower!

Cathedral. It's a monster.

I think that tower had bells.

Spires...

This is right across from the Cathedral. People live right next to it.
I was impressed.

Imposing camera angle!

I think that Jesus is in that garden, but it could be a saint. It's the brown thing. The face starts at the curved parts at the top of the fence.

It's so... spiky.

Castle.

It just kept going. The place is huge, as I hope my pictures convey.

I'm not sure about the light in the middle there.

It looked cooler in real life. The cross was the point of the picture.

Tower. It was legit.

Accidental silhouette. 

The gravestones were all in latin.

Some of them were statues lying down.

A new angle on the tower.

It looks a lot like somewhere to live.

Monster tower, up close this time.

I think it's a war memorial.

Detailing on the cross.

Since 1093.
My basic reaction was shock and awe.
1093!

This was a sanctuary knocker, explained in the next picture.

Below that, it said that the knocker was actually a replica.

Cool old courtyard.

This was blocking me from the courtyard.

It had a cool wall!

Looking out over Durham.

And there was a train,

 After the cathedral, Jessi and I (mostly I, actually) wanted to see the castle. It was sort of closed- I think there is a school in it. Durham University, maybe.
I was jealous.

At the castle. My camera was threatening to die at this point, so I was sparing with pictures.

Seriously tall wall.

After the castle, we went to the green part of the map to look for the botanical gardens. On the way there, we walked past at least four colleges. Or universities. I'm still not sure if there's a difference.
Then the botanical  garden was £4, so we decided not to go. It probably wasn't that cool anyway.
I did see this:

It reminded me of southwest Oregon.

 We managed not to get lost — I'm better at directions than I ever thought I could be — and ambled around the city centre for about four hours because the bus didn't come back until 5 pm.
I had an interesting experience, though.
Up until my conversion to vegetarianism at the beginning of my freshman year of college, I would classify myself as an adventurous eater. There are not a lot of foods that taste like nothing I've ever eaten before. Sure, I discovered cheese and onion pasties (which are delicious), but I've had cheese, onions, and puff pastry before, so the combination was hardly unheard of. Blackcurrant lozenges and pastilles taste like fruit in general. I think all cough drops taste about the same, just with varying degrees of medicine and menthol.
Blackcurrant juice tastes like nothing I've ever tasted before. I literally cannot describe it in terms of food I've come into contact with in the past. There is a hint of orange-ish flavour, but I think that's because Ribena, the particular brand of juice that I bought, puts vitamin c and citric acid in the juice.
It's so delicious. And it's easily found, if a bit expensive, in Greggs, Wilkinson, and Peter's Bakeries (which have oddly spicy cheese and onion pasties). I also found a weird concentrated form (not ribena) at Aldi. It's like concentrated juice in the US, but it's room temperature and in a bottle that (I think) you dilute bit by bit. In any case, I'll miss it when I go back to the US.

A saint, possibly Bede, at another church in Durham.

Statue in the city centre.

Another tower.

Imposing wall. That may have been a castle, but I'm not sure.

Not the Durham Cathedral. 

Classic red telephone boxes.

I couldn't resist. It smelled bad in there, but I needed the picture.

So, that's Durham.