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