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.
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