That's my first week of classes finished and to the surprise of no one, I found myself throughout it quite thoroughly conflicted by my dueling instincts of intense academic curiosity and an overwhelming predilection for procrastination and self-indulgent time management.  Even now I am writing this as an excuse not to perform household tasks that need seeing to, read endless pages of dense technical writing on human cognition, or go grocery shopping.

My groceries have been rather a sad scene.  I'm on a rather strict weekly budget (one which will certainly not accommodate my newfound appreciation for chocolate hobnobs), and my food has been rather basic to start.  Every time I conjure up some more complicated dish, I'm impeded by my scanty tool collection and unstocked cupboards.  There simply hasn't been time to accrue the sort of thing that most people have in their kitchen, the little things - baking soda, chocolate powder, red pepper, a whisk, a potato masher.  Each week I pick up something new to flesh out our sad, spacious cabinets.  One of my flatmates purchased some small plastic wine glasses - 8 for a pound - for some offensively acidic novelty fruit wines that she had picked up, with the very exciting result that we now have more than mugs and coffee pots to drink out of.  However, when I contemplated picking up some gin or whisky, I found the idea of drinking cocktails out of such receptacles on a regular basis a bit too pathetic to bear.  My alternative, three tumblers for a pound at Poundland, wasn't precisely a classier option, but I derive some satisfaction from drinking out of an actual glass.  It's a small creature comfort, like silverware that has decent heft to it.

Poundland has turned out to be overflowing with curiosities, as good dollar stores are wont to do.  It has all of the usual suspects, as well as a surprising amount of food - I don't trust poundstore eggs and milk, and I don't suppose I ever will.  The seasonal section included 'celebrity masks,' with one's options being either Justin Bieber or... some blonde fellow with a handlebar mustache that I don't believe I've ever seen before.  It's true that my curiosity is piqued when I spot foods that I have heard mention of in British media, no matter how uninspiring they probably are to eat.  I'm tempted to explore things like jaffa cakes, hobnobs, whatsits, angel delight, bovril, minstrels, etc., but I must keep in mind that neither myself nor Sainsburys are going anywhere fast.  I'm sure plenty of it will be utterly disgusting, but I won't know until I try, now will I?  Well, custard in a can pretty much speaks for itself, and I'm pretty dubious of the merits of beef tea, and I have it on good authority that Irn Bru is nigh undrinkable, but what is travel without a sense of inadvisable adventure?

I'll be honest, I'm starting to run out of small talk.  This week is about throwing ourselves together until something sticks, and I'm being better about it than I might normally be, but even so - it's not my scene. Yesterday morning and today, a societies fair was held at Pleasance for all of the societies (student groups and clubs, essentially) to showcase their wares and advertise to new members.  The place was packed, but it was pretty amusing all the same.  A lot of countries and ethnicities have their own student groups (there is a North American club, which I have every intention of avoiding like the plague), but most of them are a little less straightforward.  For example, the History Society has both a netball team and a football team.  A lot of them have pub quiz teams.  Okay, most of it revolves around drinking.

Nicole asked me about pub quizzes, but there's not much to explain.  On designated nights, some pubs hold quizzes.  Sometimes they are themed (films, sports, etc.), but most of them have different rounds on different topics.  People go to the pub, declare their table a team, and try to beat the other patrons of the pub at trivia.  Prizes optional.  It appears to be quite a popular thing around here, second only to pub crawls.  I've never quite understood the appeal of these.  I can think of a few motivations - you're so drunk that you keep getting kicked out of pubs, there are some pubs that are open later that you head to later in the evening, there are different events (like parties or pub quizzes) that you want to go to at different pubs, etc. - but none of these seem to justify the prevalence of this activity.  The method of most of the societies appears to be, "Let's get together because we have a mutual interest in ___ - okay, now let's go drinking together." The Classics Society even throws toga parties.  Perhaps slightly inadvisable in this region's climate, but go for it. I'm told by people who study such things that the only women in Ancient Rome who wore full togas were prostitutes.  Observation from Wednesday night suggests that little has changed.  It's not a complaint, simply an observation.

However, it does mean that the social scene is essentially the drinking scene, and drinking in pubs is awfy expensive.  Probably not any more than in any other large city, but I certainly can't afford to do it four nights a week on any kind of regular basis.  I can get a bit neurotic about money, but I'm trying to cut myself some slack in this first week.  Just last night, for example, I had the most fun I've had on any night out here so far going on a pub crawl with the Linguistics Society.  Finally, people with whom I have more in common than simply being in the same place at the same time, people who can argue language politics and policy and geek out about dialectology after five pints.  We spanned a good range of levels - second years to postgrads - and we bonded over the difficulty of course choice, the stupid questions we get asked about our home countries, and the frustration we feel around people who are nearly apologetic about their desire to learn.  (Unless you're studying for a trade, accounting or some such thing, you had better be damn enthusiastic to be spending this kind of money on your education.  Who goes, "Oh yeah, I'll spend tens of thousands of dollars on getting a degree in psychology/sociology/whatever, but I don't really give a shit"?  Madness.)  Best of all, we had a wug.  Rather, we had a foam costume of a wug that we all wore at one point in the night, in which it was ruddy impossible to see forwards.  Something of a challenge when all of the people wearing it are a: pissed and b: wandering the town at night, searching out the next venue.    If you don't know what a wug is, you wouldn't have found last night half as entertaining as I did.  It's a linguistics thing.  Don't worry, you're not alone.  Also occurring last night was a photographic treasure hunt - groups of students had lists of things to find, and needed to take pictures of themselves with the listed objects - and evidently one of the items was "an animal," because we were approached several times by people asking, "Is that an animal?  A bird or a dolphin of some kind? ... Can you take a picture of us with it?"  And because we were drunk linguists, we insisted on performing the elicitation test on every single person who asked us.  Pissed academics are my favorite.

Today saw me once again waking up later than intended, but it's only half past 2 now, and I've certainly made the day count so far.  I have utterly dispelled any vague initial worries of mine about the effects of a country famous for drinking and fried dough/ meat products on my general health.  I left the house at a quarter to 12 and returned just moments ago, and in that time roamed at least 4 miles of the city.  This is hardly record breaking, and I did spend the time between 12 and 1 receiving a tour of the Bedlam Theatre, but its certainly more footwork than I'm accustomed to in the afternoon.  Perhaps things will change when classes begin and there is less time to spare, but in the mean time, I'm rather enjoying all the wandering - and learning the lay of the place much faster than I ever expected. 

 As usual, there are events all over the place, but I've spent my time walking with one of my flatmates, a theater electrician and light/sound technician, around to various theatres so that she can inquire about job opportunities.  It's a good method for pressing myself to keep an eye on my surroundings.  I have no maps or smart devices to speak of, which means I have nothing to pull out if I wander astray, but which hopefully also makes me look slightly less like one of the hundreds of tourists crawling all over the place. 

-Time Break

This is starting to become a habit - my blog writing was broken off by a proposal to do something else, and go do we did.  This week has been a very vivid reminder of how rubbish I am at names.  Nevertheless, I met a great many more of the people that live in my building (mostly foreign third years like myself, but some freshers), attended a meet and great for the History Society, went to my first pub quiz, and generally tromped through the night with a collective of affable American, English, Dutch, German, New Zealandish, and... whatever Andrews was, people.  I still haven't bought a blanket.  These things come with time.

I love to Travel, I love the Challenge, I love Change

Well, the eagle has landed and all that.  It has been a very busy couple of days, and while I could recount for you every last bleeding detail, I'll spare us all the drudgery of such a thing.  It is my instinct to go through things chronologically, but doing so would soon create such a backlog of things I hadn't mentioned yet that I'd be paralyzed, unable to move forward until I had covered every inch of the past.  Nonsense.  I've been assured that would do far better to be brief than to go dark entirely, only to resurface every month or two with a saga in hand.

I'm currently in my flat, on the top floor of a building about a 15-minute walk from the main campus.  I'm eating jam on toast, drinking tea out of a turkish coffee pot, for lack of a better vessel, and watching the new episode of The Thick of It (expect a tirade on this subject in the near future), which in the typical fashion of British television, is just nearly too awkward to watch.  It is 1:30 am now, and there's much to do tomorrow, like buy a blanket for starters.  The University is putting on a hell of a lot of events, frankly more than I could possibly work up the energy to attend, but I shall endeavor to socialize.  I spent today meeting two of my flatmates (young ladies from Virginia and Oregon, respectively), doing a paltry grocery shop at Scotmid, and just generally getting lost in the city to learn my way around - and in doing so, tripping over a number of landmarks, including the National Library,  Deacon Brodie's Tavern, and the Surgeons' Halls Museum.  All places that will have to wait for another day.

Buying an alarm clock.  Another chore for tomorrow.

The Worst is Yet to Come

Here, then, is to follow a patchy account of my travels and travails at home (?) and abroad, written at the request of Hampshire College’s GEO and the behest of a family that refuses to believe that I am alive and well unless I contact them on a regular basis to assure them of that fact.

This post is being written the day after the blue moon, and as my life consistently reads like a cheap paperback novel, written by someone doing their ample best to mimic the lessons of Hawthorne and Hemingway thrashed into them in primary school and utterly devoid of subtly, this would be a fitting date to reflect the rarity with which my posts will likely be made.  The fact that I intended to write this yesterday and didn’t get around it until the day after a blue moon should really only hammer home further the extent of my flakiness.

             This blog will, by necessity, be available to a rather wide audience.  It is for the benefit of Hampshire students considering the program that I am currently undertaking, academic advisors curious about my progress, and a diverse jumble of family and friends keen for updates on my welfare – as well as anyone else who happens to stumble upon it.  I could, therefore, dedicate great energy to making my notes relevant and appropriate for anyone likely to read them.  But honestly, I couldn’t possibly be bothered.  Instead, I intend to write whatever comes to mind and makes its way to paper, based on no criteria other than my personal interest in mentioning it.  Therefore, readers should be braced for content of a potentially tedious or offensive nature.  If this is going to distress you in some fashion, then, in the frank words of the late Hector Kipling, “You shouldn’t have fucking come anyway.”