Does it Offend You, Yeah?

The past week has been fairly busy so I've slacked off on the blog. Last Thursday I ended up going to a Spanish bar in Leeds with my Spanish flatmate since a friend of hers was dancing flamenco. There were so many people that I wasn't able to see much of it. It was alright though, I was able to see flamenco when I went to Spain in 2005. Then Saturday ended up being my first pub crawl.

The popular pub crawl in Leeds is the Otley Run. Technically, it's about 20 pubs and you go to each one and are basically expected to drink at each one. This pub crawl only lasted about 13 pubs though. It was "P" themed which means you dress up as anything that starts with a "P." There were priests, prisoners, perverts, etc. It was a lot of fun although it was weird to start at 4 in the afternoon.

The next day we went out to a pub for Sunday roast. Apparently, Sunday roast is like a mini Thanksgiving and it takes place every Sunday. It'll consist of a choice of meat [usually beef or lamb] with Yorkshire pudding, potatoes and vegetables. It ended up sounding a lot better than it was but I'm sure that with a home-cooked one it could be really good.

During the week I just kept busy with school work and the like. I signed up to do the HOST program which means that for a weekend in the near future, I'll be living with a family in the UK. I'm not sure where yet- I won't find out for a while. Hopefully somewhere more in the country. I here a lot of people like to go to Scotland- which would be nice but I've already been there and I'm going back next month. One of the weekends I put down was Christmas, since I won't be coming back to the States for it. It'd be neat to have a traditional British Christmas- preferably somewhere where it would snow.

On Thursday, last night, I went to the University Union and saw a band, Does it Offend You, Yeah? perform. The show was really good. The lead had a broken leg so had to sit for the show but he powered through and I feel, was even more animated than he was at Coachella. I took a video at the show and uploaded it to YouTube last night and the band actually used it in a bulletin they sent out to all their fans!

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FhKqpqwHlE4

I haven't posted any pictures to my flickr account lately since I'm only allowed so many per month. When I get more allowance, I'll upload more. Not all of my castle pictures were uploaded but you can also see them here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2003662&l=6f195&id=1066170070

and here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2003663&l=e71b2&id=1066170070

I probably won't upload all of the castle pictures to flickr since next week I'm going to Dublin so I'm sure I'll have a lot more pictures to upload. Also, I'll be back in Edinburgh for the EAP Thanksgiving they organize for us. Last night, I also booked a flight to Copenhagen for the first week of December. I have a friend studying abroad there so I'll be visiting her. I'm really excited for it- and where I'm flying into- the first Legoland is there! So I might take a day to go see that :]

Castles and things

So this past week I've been keeping pretty busy. Thankfully, my cough has gotten a lot better. On Monday, I participated in an experiment and then learned exactly what my first task will be as a research assistant. For now, I'll be pulling data for the professor I'm working for. In a few weeks when the experiment really gets going I'll be doing something slightly more complicated. The professor actually lived in Canada for 10 1/2 years but she's from Greece.

Tuesday I gave a presentation for my Imperial Germany class. It was about Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany. It actually went a lot better than expected, thankfully. I was nervous about the professor since he's pretty intimidating but he enjoyed my presentation and gave me a high grade.
My flatmate had invited me out to a pub that night since she's studying abroad [from Madrid, Spain] with Erasmus. I guess they were having a gathering at a pub on campus. So I went along to that with a few other people. When we first got in, a football match was on so the place was fairly busy and everyone was pretty animated about the game.

I ended up meeting another kid from Spain. We talked a while- he was thoroughly interested in the States. He was saying that in Spain, they pay about 400 euros per school year and that's it. Ridiculous. I met another kid from Sweden. Over there, they don't pay for school at all. I'm not sure how the system works then- if they just apply to particular schools and hope they get into their choice. But they don't pay! Also, with the Erasmus program, the kids actually get grants to study abroad. So they're essentially being paid to do it. The Swedish kid was really interested in the American elections so we're all supposed to get together to watch the post election results somewhere.

Today I went to Howard Castle. It was in Malton, which is just outside of York. It's about an hour train ride from Leeds. It was a bit of a journey getting out there but it was worth it. The castle is more of a private residence than anything but it's incredible. It sits on 10,000 acres of land. There's a masoleum [although that unfortunately wasn't open to the public], a few lakes, stables, etc. We walked around the grounds of the house and went in to view the rooms. We were allowed to take pictures, which usually doesn't happen at places like that, so I took well over 150 pictures. I'll be posting those on flickr later this week.

The rest of this week will be really busy too- tapas and flamenco, a pub crawl, Sunday roast, potentially covering a gig for the student newspaper...and then in two weeks I'll be going to Dublin, Ireland! Hopefully I'll be going down to Cork to see and kiss the Blarney stone too. A couple of my friends mentioned going to Prague for New Years as well so I might look into that. Exciting!

xx

Culture Shock

When I first told people that I was studying abroad in England, everyone commented that at least they speak English and that there wouldn't really be much of a transition. But, there's been a lot of differences, some subtle, and some not so subtle that I've become accustomed to living here...

-you get called love and/or sweetheart a lot more here, which I like, but it's not really meant to be cute, just part of their vocabulary

-the price you see is the price you pay. They have a VAT [value added tax] that's already included in the prices. So, when you see 5.99, you pay 5.99

-there's no tipping involved, unless you're at a nice restaurant perhaps. Most of the time, when you go to a pub or the like, you go up to the bar, order, and pay right then. They bring your food to you but you don't necessarily get service like you would at American restaurants. Also, water refills tend to be less common.

-to catch the bus, you often have to signal to them that you'd like them to stop at the busstop. Then, when you want to get off, you press a little buzzer. Buses aren't always on schedule either.

-there's not many, if any, vegetarian options

-you have to bag your own groceries at most places...Ikea style

-our version of Lay's potato chips = Walker's potato chips here. They have flavors like, cheese & onion, prawn cocktail [which is more of a vinegar type flavor], roast chicken...etc.

-cars have the right of way despite there being so many pedestrians. Pedestrians tend to cross whenever they feel like it, despite what the cross signals say.

-stoves are called hobs and microwaves and ovens tend to be a lot smaller versus American ones

-you generally have to call a cab in advance. It's not safe to just flag down a cab so no one does it.

-you only pay for calls and texts that you send out, not incoming ones

-chips = crisps, fries = chips, cookies = biscuits

and those are just a few of the differences. Some of them I had heard about before I came out but most of these were small bits of culture shock for me. Although I've gotten used to most of them- except the food [in terms of hardly any veggie options and the roast chicken chips]. I think next time I go to the grocery, roast chicken crisps will be on my list.

xx

FOALS

So on Thursday, I ended up going to see one of my favorite bands right now, Foals. They also played at Leeds Academy- the same place I had gone to the night before for Kaiser Chiefs. It ended up being a hassle to get to the show. I've found that while there's a lot of buses available in the UK, when it gets later in the day, or on weekends, sometimes the buses aren't exactly on schedule. All together, I ended up waiting an hour. So, I ended up getting a cab. Thankfully the cabs haven't too expensive- I usually end up having to spend 3-4 pounds. There is a late night bus that runs back to Clarence Dock but either at 11pm or 2am.

Foals were amazing though. I was pretty close to the stage, I started off on the right hand side, one person back from the barricade. However, when Foals got started, I ended up more off the side- the crowd went nuts for them.

Afterwards, I met up with a few friends to go to the afterparty. The keyboardist of the band was going to do a DJ set at Jake's Bar in Leeds. The bar was actually quite small, not what I had been anticipating. At first, it was a lot of people packed in- especially by the bar. After the keyboardist got into his DJ set though, things seemed to calm down a bit more. I ended up being able to meet the lead singer and the guitarist- both really nice guys. I talked to them for a while- mostly about Coachella and San Francisco. Hopefully if things work out, I'll be seeing them at a house party in the next couple of months.





Then on Saturday, I just met up with a few friends of mine and had Indian food for dinner. We went to this place called Balti King on campus. It was really good. I had chicken curry with white rice and a Strongbow- a type of cider. Cider is more prominent out here than in the States. It's like an apple cider but with alcohol in it. It's pretty good. They sell them in two liter bottles at Tesco. My friends got naan with their meals. I had tried naan a couple weeks before but these ones were massive. They're essentially like pita bread and you can get different flavors: plain, garlic, cheese, etc. The Indian food out here has been really good. I want to go back to Balti King soon. I've also heard of a place in the city centre- Akbar's, that apparently has really good food.

I haven't seen as much Asian food. However, there's an oriental buffet not too far from my place so I'm planning on trying it soon. I've also seen Lebanese cuisine and Pakistani cuisine nearby, so those will be places to try soon.

That was about it for Saturday though. Most of my friends have been sick lately and so we just went to a bar on campus for a little while after dinner.

On Sunday I ended up waking up with a cough. I didn't think it was a big deal but it's progressed into a full on cold now. So that hasn't been too fun as I have a lot of school work and assignments coming up. Hopefully it goes away by this weekend since I have to give a presentation on anti-Semitism in imperial Germany early on next week.

Today though, I met up with the professor that I'm going to be a research assistant for. It's all really exciting. She showed me around the lab and the equipment that I'll be working with. It's a pretty large lab although I'll be working in a small section of it. They have a special room for subjects and the EEG machine. It's exciting to finally be on the other side of research now- I'm so used to being a subject! I'm going to actually start next week or so, once I get a copy of the key to the lab. It sounds like I'll start off doing some data collection- putting data into a program and recording the data it gives back to me.

I'm really looking forward to this as classes still aren't challenging me enough. I was in my 3rd year course today and the professor was explaining a concept that I knew about but none of the other students knew...and he couldn't properly explain it himself. He finally realized it about 5 minutes later and got it right. It was frustrating to sit there and listen to it though. I had been expecting my 3rd year course to at least be like a 4th year course if not more on a graduate level. Maybe UCI is just different in that respect.

Overall though, things have been really good. I'm looking forward to doing some traveling in the hopefully near future.

xx

Midnight Juggernauts

Although I had had my first actual UK gig at the end of September, Midnight Juggernauts on October 5th was more my first in that it was a band I really wanted to see- versus getting invited to see a band play. I had gone to the Cockpit at the end of September since I made some friends that were in a band and they invited me to the show. The show was really good but the type of music wasn't exactly my taste- they were a sort of pop-punk/Warped Tour style band. Really nice guys though.

So, I saw Midnight Juggernauts at The Mission which ended up being pretty close to where I live. I had seen them before at Coachella and they were really good. They're more of an electronic/indie/alternative band, hailing from Australia. The show was really good- the crowd was pretty into them and at the end of the set- I was able to get a setlist.

I ended up making a couple friends at the gig while Erol did a dj set.

Then the headliner, Late of the Pier, took the stage. I had only heard of them but I wanted to check them out since they're gaining a lot of popularity in the UK. They looked to be a relatively young band but their stage presence was incredible. The crowd went crazy for them. I had anticipated insane crowds as I've heard that crowds in the UK are worse than those in the States, but I didn't expect anything like that. There was a double barricade that had been in place at the beginning of the show. Granted, I could tell right away that it wouldn't be very good. But when Late of the Pier came on, the barricade basically came down and so all of the security personnel ended up holding the crowd back. It ended up being 10-15 personnel holding up the barricades.

Then last Monday, there was a media social for everyone involved in the student newspaper, tv station, and radio station so I went to that with a few of my friends. It started off at a pub on campus and then progressed to another one where they had a band do a set for us. The band was called, I Call Shotgun. They were a little dancey but nothing special necessarily. It ended up being a really fun night though. Since Leeds is so student oriented, there's always something to do, and there's always a lot of gigs. I ended up going to four gigs in five days last week. But I'll write more on the others later.

Perhaps since I've been to so many, and since all my friends have been sick for a while, I woke up with a cough on Sunday which just progressed to get worse. So, I'd like to get rid of it before it gets too bad as I'm starting to have some assignments and things due soon.

xx

Classes and such

Since classes started, I've been fairly busy. I joined the Psychology Society since they put on a lot of events and they give you access to a special book sale. I also joined the student newspaper and have been attending a couple meetings for that. I'm working on the music section here. It mostly seems to be that if you want to review a CD, or cover a gig, you can and if your review is good enough, it will get printed in the paper. I'm hoping to cover a gig [Hot Chip] later this month but it all depends on if they get the tickets or not. I haven't heard anything yet though. There's another meeting this week though so we'll see if they have any more gigs for me.

I also joined the peer mentoring scheme for psychology students to get some extra support. As a study abroad student, they don't have as many services to ease us in as I feel they do for freshers. Or, the international centre was a bit slow in sending out notices as I failed to hear about my psychology introduction meeting. So I joined the mentoring scheme which is basically a mentor, or two, to help ease freshman students into college life. There's a few other international students involved too. However, I think I'm actually older than my mentors so I'm not sure how involved I'll become with the peer mentoring scheme. I think I'm actually doing a class that's at a higher level than my mentors...

I've also been busy looking for a job, preferably on campus. I've applied a few places but haven't heard much of anything. I'm going to keep trying though as I know it's the beginning of the school year and so many other students are looking for jobs as well.

I also wanted to get involved in some research while I'm here- versus being a subject- although I'd still like to do that if possible. So, I emailed a bunch of professors and grad students and had a couple meetings with professors last week. They went well and I've decided to work with a professor studying language. She's relatively new to the university as well. She had lived in Canada [either Montreal or Quebec...can't remember which one] for the last ten years. She's studying language and how the brain processes language- especially words that have more than one meaning. I'll be doing more elementary tasks, especially in the beginning, but maybe eventually I'll be able to carry out an experiment. The amount of time that I'm here limits me, so I can't necessarily learn how to carry out an fMRI but I've asked to sit in on some sessions. This way, I can sort of get a feeling for the work that goes into fMRIs. I haven't started working for her yet but that might start up in the next week or two.

I'm pretty excited about everything going on here though. Everything's been really good and everyone's been really nice. I was worried that English people might have engrained the worst stereotypes of Americans [loud, obnoxious, etc] and would think everyone was like that. But I've actually run across a lot of people that are seemingly obsessed with America. They love the TV programs, they love the ideals, they want to move there. I suppose me being from California doesn't hurt either as everyone has taken really well to that. Everytime I go somewhere that requires me to show my ID, I get a lot of comments/questions. Everyone is curious about California. My "accent" used to get a lot of comments and questions too but I think people are getting used to it now as I haven't had as many comments as I did when I first moved in. Funny enough though, I've heard from a lot of people that love the American accent.

Also, as a sidenote, if you're keeping up with my flickr- since I have a free account, I can only display 200 pictures. So, it will show the 200 most recent ones but will hide the others. I just hit the maximum the other day. They're all saved on my computer though and they're on my facebook if you're facebook friends with me. Just a side note in case you were going through all of them and wondered what had happened to them.

xx

Leeds

Thursday September 18, 2008
I had a train out of Edinburgh to Leeds at 9:30am. The trip took three hours and there was one stop in York. Once I got into the Leeds train station, there were personnel to take us to our respective residences. I'm actually living in the same building as one kid from our EAP group but otherwise, everyone is pretty spread. There's several different accomodations for freshman. Mine, Clarence Dock, is right by the Aire River. It has a shopping center right next to it with restaurants, apartments, a casino, the Royal Armouries, a Tesco Express [a small grocery store] and they're still opening shops. It's pretty nice but my residence is about two miles from the university campus. So, I had to buy a bus pass and I take the bus to campus everyday. But, we're close to the city centre that has a lot of restaurants and shops so it's nice. My residence has it's own bar as well.
I get my own room and my own bathroom and then I share a kitchen with my four flatmates. There's two girls- one from Nottingham, one from Spain, and two boys- one from London and one from Reading. Everyone is really nice though so it's been good thus far. Everyone is a freshman though apart from me and the girl from Spain so sometimes I feel a bit old but it's worked out well so far. I was the first one in the flats so I spent the first few days just settling in and getting things together that I wasn't able to bring with me.

I ended up blowing up one of my converters though so that turned into a problem since I had to buy some UK friendly appliances. It actually ended up blowing the fuses for the entire flat. Thankfully it was just me for the first few days and the site office was able to fix the problem pretty quickly once I realized it had blown the entire flat.

The first full week was "Fresher's Week" which just has a lot of events and nights out before school officially starts. The week before that is International Orientation so for the first two weeks I was just taking care of a lot of administrative type things- lots of orientations and seminars. Although we went out a lot at night since there were so many events. The pubs and clubs out here tend to have more specials during the week and so students go out all during the week since it's cheaper. They don't go out as much on Fridays and the weekends. A lot of people get "Fresher's flu" this week since a lot of people go out every night. I took a couple nights off though so I haven't gotten sick yet.

That's something else that I've had to get used to here. Going out to clubs and whatnot is more common versus house parties. Everyone seems to go out a lot more- perhaps because the drinking age is 18. House parties seem rare compared to the States though.

I started classes Sept 29th. I'm on semester system here so I only have 4-5 classes for the semester. One is a history class: Imperial Germany 1871-1918. All the others are psychology courses. Classes seem okay thus far but even the way the lecture halls are set up is different and I don't like them. The way it's set up, you would have to wait for everyone else in your row to get out before you'd be able to. It's annoying and a fire hazard. College in the UK is 3 years long versus the 4 years in the states so I'm doing two 2nd year courses, 1 3rd year course, and 1 1st year course. I'm not sure if it's still review/introduction type lectures since school only started last week...but most of the material tends to be things that I already know. I'd like more of a challenge but if this gives me more free time to travel, etc I guess it will work out alright.

Also, in the classes- it's a lot more of figuring out what to do on your own. The professor gives you a syllabus but they don't really tell you what book/chapters to read. I had a professor actually give us a list of 15-20 books and then tell us that he hoped we would read one or two of those. I need more of a structure to my courses so this will take some getting used to.

Edinburgh

On September 14th I flew out of San Francisco to Edinburgh for my EAP Orientation. I had connections in Chicago and Manchester and basically had the flights from hell. Thankfully, however, all my luggage made it with me to Edinburgh. After finally settling into a hotel not far from the city centre, I arranged to meet up with another kid who was in my orientation program- Andrew. We ended up getting lunch at a local pub and having our first proper drinks in the UK. As a side note on the food- I had kept hearing about how the food was so bad in the UK but all of the meals that I've had have been really good. Although there's some differences- the first meal in Scotland, I had a hamburger that was supposed to have bacon on it. Apparently their form of bacon is some type of turkey or ham. So that was on the hamburger. Kinda weird.
Andrew and I just ended up exploring around the city centre afterwards. The weather was actually really nice- especially since I expected it to be constant rain. The most that we got while in Scotland was light rain for a couple hours. Edinburgh was absolutely gorgeous and almost what you think of when you think of old British towns- cobblestone streets and breathtaking architecture. I wish I had had more than two days there. That night I just went back to the hotel and ended up sleeping 15.5+ hours.

Tuesday September 16, 2008
I had to go check into my hotel for the orientation and when I got there, I ended up running into Andrew and another girl from the program- Stephanie. They were nice enough to wait for me to get my things together and we all went to lunch together. Ended up going to a little Scottish pub down the street. I had always wanted to try haggis so I ordered that for lunch despite being somewhat nervous about it. By the way, for those of you that don't know...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis

And no, mine wasn't served in the intestine/stomach lining. They served it with mashed turnips and potatoes and it was actually really good. I'd liken it to a sort of spiced ground beef. Afterwards, we explored the city more and took a look at the University of Edinburgh- or at least part of the campus. The portion we were at had some galleries so we spent some time there. I wish I had pictures but no pictures were allowed. I did get to see a table that Napoleon used for dining and/or meetings which was really neat. They didn't even have it in a sort of glass case- it was just out in the open.

Later on the in the afternoon the group [9 of us total] had to meet up and we were shown our study abroad office in Edinburgh. The coordinators took us to dinner at French Bistro [after having a sort of bonding session beforehand complete with half pints] and then gave us free time for the night. Most of us ended up checking out the local pubs.

Wednesday September 17, 2008
After a meeting at the study abroad office and lunch, we went to see the Edinburgh Castle. I ended up doing a guided tour and then was free to explore on my own. There's pictures on my flickr if you haven't seen them yet:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26126374@N06/

I ended up being able to see the Crown Jewels, a war memorial that they had there, and their prisons of war exhibit- complete with some of the actual prisons used. Afterwards we went on a hike up Arthur's Seat- a volcano in Edinburgh. It was pretty muddy and rocky but the view at the end of it all is basically a panoramic view of all of Edinburgh- definitely worth the hike. Also, when we got to the top, there was a kid from Rhode Island playing the bagpipes. Apparently he is studying at the university and just had the urge that day to hike up and play. Our group got lucky as they've never had anything like that on previous hikes. Afterwards, we had a group dinner and had free time for the night. Since it was our last night in Edinburgh, we all went to The Tron- a pub right across from our hotel. The pub closed around 11pm- which was another sort of culture shock to me. I suppose the pubs close a lot earlier here, unless they turn into a club at night. Afterwards we just got ready to head to Leeds since a lot of us had trains out in the morning.