Edinburgh Exchanges

Another month of Canadian living has gone by which means I am a quarter of the way through international exchange.  In some walks of life everything out here still seems very new and confusing but others are routine and provide a massive sense of normality.  

Right now I’m sat at my desk thoroughly unimpressed by the excess of rain which seems to have settled in for the weekend.  Whilst this makes the great outdoors rather unappealing it does mean my first rugby game in six months will hopefully be slightly less painful as there will be plenty of mud to cushion me every time I end up on the floor.  I’m really enjoying rugby at the moment, the junior varsity team don’t take things too seriously which is nice and all the girls are really easy to get along with.  My only issue with it is the cost which, until yesterday, I was blissfully unaware of.  It seems I now owe the club $300 (about £150) and as I seem to be spending rather frightening amounts of money at the moment that doesn’t help!

Last weekend I dented the bank balance by heading to a gig downtown.  Matt Mays & El Torpedo are a Canadian rock band who before Saturday I had never heard of.  By recommendation of my housemate I joined her at the gig and it was well worth it!  Through sheer luck we ended up right at the front and I attempted to jump around at all the right moments and give the impression I had a vague idea what some of the words were.  It seems I was convincing enough and halfway through the gig the guitarist offered me his water for my efforts.  The award for the first crowd surfer to make it on to the state went to a Celtic fan which amused me greatly!  Honestly, given the choice I would have probably swapped the gig for seeing Feeder at the Barrowlands (Glasgow) last Friday but with the Atlantic Ocean being in the way I think I managed to find a pretty good second best! 

This week started horribly with two lab exams, an assessed tutorial and a mid term exam worth more than the final but I made it through without too many disasters and have spent the latter part of the week thinking about Halloween costumes…. with little success.  It seems that the 31^st October seems to apply to about a two week period of partying and an excuse to be in fancy dress.  I’m pretty determined to stick to it being a one night thing.  Last night there was an outdoors clubs social with lots of food and entertaining banter.  Randomly, I also ended up playing in a string trio trying to recreate various Halloween ‘classics’ although I think its fair to say most of them were unrecognisable due to a combination of our playing skills and the arrangements. 

Plans for the rest of the day include laundry (I have run out of socks), costume design, journal reading, and wishing the ex-flatmate of the burgh a very happy birthday!!!  It’s at times like this when being closer to home would have its advantages but this year is flying and I’m sure I’ll be back before I know it!

After trudging stoically through the driving wind and relentlessly torrential and freezing rain for two and a half miles, I was at somewhat of a low point. My brother was arriving the next day, and I didn’t yet have anywhere for him to sleep – and I didn’t think he’d appreciate being given the floor after a transatlantic flight. So onwards I stumbled, dashing manically across roads (don’t get me started on the American style of driving, or the serious lack of pedestrian provision), only the vaguest idea of where the Target shop was, until I found myself in one of the many outdoor malls that dot the suburban American landscape. Despite desperately needing a blast furnace and a cup of hot chocolate, I managed to grab the double air mattress and begin the long trudge back. Except this time it was uphill, and somehow the rain had managed to get even heavier. I crossed the road and got a bus.

I’m used to buses in Manchester and Edinburgh, where the numbers of crazy/drunk people are balanced out by non-crazy/drunk students, professionals and old people. In Philly, there is no balance. It seems that the only people who take buses are those who don’t have cars – the lowest of the low. And so I’m a bit of an oddity in that I’m not shouting at people, toting an indeterminate number of children, smelly, or threatening-looking. People give me odd looks as they stumble to their seats, and I generally just give them an embarrassed smile back. To talk in an English accent seems to be an invitation for total strangers to ask you all sorts of questions, not all of them relevant or polite, and I’ve deliberately begun to make the short phrases ‘thank you’, ‘sorry’, ‘excuse me’ etc sound American.

I love public transport and I’ve been using it my entire life. But there’s something about it here that’s a little more rickety, a little more old-school, a little more dangerous. If you catch the right (or the wrong, depending on your view) train, the seats and the décor can transport you back to those scenes in films from the sixties and seventies. The train stations might seem to be vast, cavernous, modern places complete with juice bars and manicurists, but then you’ll step into a room lined with old wooden benches or into an art-deco hall. Or, when catching the shuttle in the dark, you’ll notice that none of the stations are lit, and that you have to decipher the ‘Hud’ the driver barks to mean ‘Haverford’. The conductors might open the doors for you, but they also try to overcharge you on tickets (and the ridiculous pricing system prevents you from realising for months). The bus roofs leak, you can’t walk between carriages on the trains, and everyone looks and sounds defensive – and, most strangely of all, there’s no friendly banter about the weather.

I have a jam-packed two weeks ahead of me, with my brother arriving, and then two friends from home arriving on the day he leaves. And I seem to have a thousand and one essays all due in at the same time. Wish me luck!

The last week has flown by and lots of lovely things have happened! The most exciting was, of course, my boyfriend's visit at the weekend but before that was the excitement of High School Musical 3! Now I am not your average HSM fan, in fact I haven't even seen the first two, never mind going hysterical with joy at the mere mention of Zac Effron, but quite a few of the British Erasmus students are cut from that mould and the excitement was infectious. We had tried to buy tickets a couple of weeks ago but were sternly told by the woman at the ticket desk that she couldn't sell us tickets because they only find out what films are playing at the start of each week. We pointed out the enormous poster behind her advertising the release date of the film and the showing times. She merely glared at us until we left. Nevertheless, we managed to get tickets on the day it was released and sat in a cinema filled entirely with British and American people in their twenties and watched the magic unfold. It was in French, obviously, but as with the last film I saw in French, the plot wasn't hard to follow and I had a whale of a time. I think I am now ready to join the hoards of obsessed 12 year olds who spend their weekends hunting down Zac Effron pencil cases at the disney store. How embarassing!

Once the excitement of the film had worn off I had something even better to look forward to in Michael's visit from Edinburgh. He came bearing Galaxy and Cadbury's chocolate buttons too, which made it even better! We spent Saturday in Paris where we caught a 'bateau-bus' along the Seine; it stopped at all the tourist spots and worked on a 'hop-on, hop-off' basis which was great. We didn't have a lot of time and, as always, Paris was very crowded and it took a long time to get things done, so we didn't see as much of the city as I would have liked. We got off at the Louvre to sightsee and have some lunch. The buildings and gardens are gorgeous and it was lovely and sunny, although a bit cold, so we sat outside and had our overpriced baguettes and felt very toursisty. We didn't go through any of the galleries, mainly because it was so busy, but I'd really like to another time. Instead we peeked down the tops of the pyramids and wandered around the sqaure and took lots of pictures, then hopped back on the boat and headed for the Eiffel Tower. I will say at this point, that I have a love-hate relationship with this particular landmark. Part of me thinks it is a monstrous eyesore that resembles scaffolding and looks like it hasn't finished being built, but despite myself I also quite like it and get quite excited and develop a tendency to squeal and point whenever I see it. At the moment, it is decorated with a circle of yellow stars and at night the tower itself is lit up in blue so that it looks like the European flag. Once again, I loved and hated it. After all, the tower itself is so ridiculously pointless anyway, why not adorn it with something even more frivolous? Anyway, I had never been up the tower before and was keen to do so, so we stood in queue after queue, paid our 11€ and queued a bit more until we got to the lift. The view from the top was amazing, but the crowding, shoving, swearing and mild panic of the other tourists did not make for a pleasant experience. The Eiffel Tower has apparently been voted the world's most overrated tourist attraction and I can see why! We decided to walk down from the second floor to avoid the crush of the lifts. If you ever do go to the tower, I would definitely advise walking - you can really see the engineering of the thing and it is actually quite beautiful, if in a decidedly industrial kind of way.

The visit to the tower had taken over three hours, so we didn't have time to do much more before our train back to Dijon. We had just missed a boat, so we walked along the side of the river to try to get to the next stop before the boat got there. It was a lovely, relaxing end to the trip, although we did have a bit of an audience from the side of the road as we tried to cut across a dual carriageway to get to the riverbank.

We didn't get up to much on Sunday because, as seems to be the case everywhere in Europe, Sunday is a bit of a non-entity in Dijon. Not much is open and there's not much to do. I wanted Michael to see a bit of where I'm living though, so we went for a wander about the town and found a café that was open for some lunch. His visit flew by far too quickly and it seemed like he'd only been here a few minutes when I had to stand in puddles of tears at the departure gate at Charles de Gaulle and wave goodbye on Monday morning. I don't think I'd realised how hard it was going to be to say goodbye to him a second time. I then spent a thoroughly miserable day trying to get myself back to Dijon. It seems ridiculous to me that it's quicker to get from Paris to Edinburgh than from Paris to Dijon, but Michael beat me home by a couple of hours!

Thankfully, there are lots of things planned for this week to keep my mind off being sad; it's halloween on Friday and some friends are having a house party and my best friend is coming to visit from Vienna for five days as well, so life is good!

Ok I'm on a break now between two classes, I've got 35 minutes so that's not really enough time to do any work, right? So here I am blogging.

First things first, today it's been raining (weird...) so I'm wearing my Edinburgh hoody. So. I'm sitting in the labs working away, and then another guy comes in wearing another Edinburgh hoody! To cut a long story short, he's one of the Barcelona Erasmus students who went to Edinburgh last year. That was cool, he says Edinburgh is now like his second home! We talked about things like... Mondays at the Crags, Wednesdays at Cav, Fridays at Why Not? and all that sorta good stuff. Yay. Edinburgh. It is ace.

Anyway that might not be particularly relevant to anything. Earlier today I had my first Parcial exam for Analysis and Design of Algorithms. It was two and a half hours long... what a beast! Longer than many final exams in Edinburgh. Luckily I think it went quite well, I managed to answer all of the questions using my most fluent Catalan (at one point I forgot the word and just wrote ???"Binary Search"???Búsqueda dicotómica??? en Castellá) and I even managed to write the algorithms and analyse their costs. Certainly feeling more confident about it than the stupid Operating Systems exam last week.

A general overview of the week! Well right now is basically mid-term exam time so I have been trying to do revision. The workload is still pretty heavy, my workload is like a queue data structure in which the rate of pushing exceeds the rate of popping! Went out last Friday for eating, drinking and dancing, which was good. Then on Saturday night I went to Razzmatazz, one of the best known clubs in Barcelona, to see the Canadian band, Dragonette. Sadly, due to "technical issues" with Razzmatazz, they couldn't play, but I still had a good night and I spoke much more Catalan than I had in the whole rest of the time I'd been here (due to the fact that it was just me and one other guy and it was like... let's just speak Catalan and see how it goes). Razzmatazz itself wasn't exactly what I expected. It was really big, but there were loads of people and LOADS of guiris (tourists). In the "Pop Bar" it was basically all music which I know from British adverts. Razzmatazz? I don't think I would totally recommend it, although the Killers are supposedly performing there in March and I'd love to go to that.

I keep learning things about "real" Catalan which contradict what my teacher says... like she says a certain word doesn't exist in Catalan, but EVERYONE says it. She says you don't "fer" a coffee, you "prendre" a coffee... but EVERYONE says "fer". The Catalan courses are sooo worth it though, when I speak to people who are finding their classes hard to understand in Catalan, it's just like... thank goodness I don't really have that problem.

Now I'm kinda at the stage where I see people who I got to know at the start, and it's like "Heeeeeeeeeyyyy old friend, haven't seen you in ages!" So it's more like catching up with people and getting to know people better, rather than meeting people for the first time and asking all of the necessary introductory questions.

What else?? I've bought some cool new clothes, I've got some new albums to listen to (Spanish music, of course) and things are good! Now, I better make a start to these two assignments I need to do for Monday. Oh also this weekend is Halloween (here they pronounce it like "ch"(as in loch)-al-oween, it's funny) so I need to sort out what I am going to wear!

So after a week away from Helsinki, I finally returned back to my now oh so colourful room at around half past midnight last night. The journey back was fine, although when booking my 11.15pm arrival in Helsinki I failed to remember that the lifts in my building are turned off at 10pm until 6am (apparently to 'stop residents from socialising too late'- thats actually what it says in our accommodation guide) and that I live on the 5th floor. Now, in Edinburgh this wouldn't have bothered me, having been a top floor resident for both years quite happily dragging my 20kg bag up stairs without a lift. However, now I have one this feels like the most ridiculous thing in the world and I vowed next time I would return at a sociable hour. The irony is, I normally never actually use the damn lift.

Anyway, my week of adventure started last saturday- again at the unearthly hour of 4.30am, again minus the lift- where I set off to Helsinki airport to head to Vienna via Copenhagen to visit my best friend from home who is studying there this year. It was a great few days and I really saw what I lack in Helsinki- I don't love this city like I do Edinburgh, I just live here. Whereas Laura really loves Vienna, but hates Cambridge where she is normally at university. It feels like we have swapped university places- I live on a grey unfriendly corridor and she now lives in a beautiful friendly flat. Thus, Vienna was good. We met up with two of my friends from Helsinki which was cool- one of them lives in Vienna normally, and the other is Australian and took the chance to go to Austria, as well as Bratislava, Budapest and Stockholm along the way. It was very odd to see them in a non Helsinki context, but great all the same.

I then flew back from there with the beauty commonly known as Ryan Air to home, and spent the week back in Derbyshire with my family. It was the longest I've been back there since April and god, it felt like forever. My little brother was enthusiastically planning day trips out to everywhere under the sun including a twelve hour stint in the rain at Alton Towers. Which sadly didn't happen due to the said rain.

Now I'm back. I have an essay due in tomorrow for my religion class which I haven't started so we're pretty much back into normal life. On my last one I got 18/20, which equates to 4.5/5 ETCs which makes over 70% in the UK system. So I was really happy as thats the highest grade I've ever got for an essay I think. But then I keep telling myself that the work here is easier- I know it is- theres no way I would have got a mid 70% for that essay at home, in the 60s tops but nothing higher than that. So I don't want to get too exicted about my grades here as the standard of work is lower here. Sadly.

Today I start some new classes which will be fun. The timetable has totally changed after the holiday as loads of courses have ended. Its really odd how that happens, I don't get how you can have a 10 credit course which only runs for half a semester. Although I keep forgetting that had I been in Edinburgh I would be into exams now- I've now been in Helsinki for 10 weeks, which is pratically exam season in Scotland. Here, I am only half way through the teaching with another 7 weeks of teaching to go. However the good part is that I don't have exams, so once the 17 weeks are up, I am done as I have finished everything required during that time. Although I suppose, even with exams, the Edinburgh term is only 13 weeks long so I am still putting in more hours at university.

I'm not sure what the plan is for this evening. I think I was the last person to come back from being away so we should all be here now. We'll probably end up either drinking or watching a film as they seem to be the favourite activities here. I really need to write my essay though!! Its the story of my life.

I looked online for the sunrise and sunset levels in Helsinki. At its worst, the sun will rise at about 9.45am and set before 3pm. That gives me 5 hours of sunlight per day and apparently its not really even light as its so cloudy and miserable all the time. I am totally looking forward to that! Its got a tad colder whilst I've been away, it was 7'c last night whereas the other week it was around 10'c so I don't think we're too far away to hitting the sub zero temperatures now. The first snow comes at some point in November, so we're only a couple of weeks away from that too. I can't wait for it to snow, it will be so beautiful. My Australian friend has never seen snow, so thats the main reason I can't wait as however excited the rest of us are, he will make us look normal in comparison!

Well I’m at home again, it’s strange to be in a place where people speak English to you all of the time; it’s confusing. I’m writing even later than usual but with all of the travelling this weekend (Villeneuve d’Asq – Lille- Ebbsfleet- Essex- Stanstead- Edinburgh) I’m letting myself off, plus its half term. I deserve a rest…

Anyway last week was yet again hectic, I don’t know where the time went and yet sometimes it felt like it was dragging because of lack of lab related work.

Last weekend was a relaxed affair, very Anglophone centred; but wine as enjoyed and fun was had and girly shopping ensued resulting in the realisation that it’s just impossible to shop for party dresses in France. I suppose it’s the wrong time of year for it… That wasn’t really the point, we had fun and raided Auchan afterwards, shopping in a three is difficult, especially when it’s treated like a national sport; I don’t think there’s a team event!
We went to Wazemmes market on Saturday, not a good place to drag a vegetarian around but Sarah wanted to find some things to take home- we were unsuccessful and ended up in our usual café sitting outside (in the sun), why can’t we do that at home? I can’t imagine any café having seats outside in mid-October, it’s just not done!

We’re all noticing changes in our language… now not only can we not talk perfect French but our English is suffering too, for example Andrew keeps saying starting product and not starting material because in French the word is ‘produit du depart.’ I also seem to use the verb ‘to get’ less because there is no French translation- I’m pleased about this one, personally I can’t stand the word, it’s so… vulgar, no word should have that many meanings…
Labs were odd this week, they started off well because I had things to do but because half term was approaching there was no point starting anything new so I ended up writing things up (or attempting to); not a bad thing, but a boring thing. Saying that I wasn’t in labs all that often anyway, my timetable is filling up rapidly with courses so Tuesday and Thursday I was in lectures- I am appalled with the way French students talk incessantly throughout a lecture, and not even in whispers, there is a constant babble and the lecturer will just carry on pretty much ignoring everyone and speaking at just above the usual conversational level. This is bad enough for people who don’t have to concentrate on understanding the language but for me it’s a nightmare- I can only just pick out the lecturers voice, if everyone was quiet I’m sure I’d get more out of it.

I’m glad at least that the material is easy, I’m doing 1st year courses, apparently equivalent to our 3rd year but we’re covering topics that we did in 1st and 2nd year. This is a good thing because I’m there to learn French, not Chemistry. Japanese is the real test though, no one knows I’m English so I have to try to catch every single word and he speaks so fast. If I wasn’t so absorbed in learning Japanese I might have given up by now but the language fascinates me, it’s so different to English, and I managed to learn most of the Hiragana- although the prof. taught us even more!

The main focal point for this week was Rachel’s 21st; somehow I managed to get way over excited and orchestrated the buying of decorations and silly presents. Sarah and I attacked Rachel’s room with streamers, balloons, banners and coloured paper cut-outs of stars and 21’s… Sarah spend large portion of Thursday afternoon cutting things out… We had an Anglophone shopping trip on Wednesday which entailed 5 of us trudging around Auchan at one time- it needed to be organised like a military operation with contingency plans for when we got split up and a good idea of what we needed- sweets and wine mainly…

The party was great fun and I think Rachel had a good time, her room was full of all of the Erasmus students speaking whole mix of languages mainly French- it’s hard to remember who prefers speaking which language because some people really are not confident with their French. The party wound down at twelve since it was a Thursday and we all have labs to go to (well Rachel, Andrew and I) but we were still up until two AM talking to some random French guys who live in the same block. I was shattered come Friday but it was worth it.
It’s half term now and I don’t know if I’ll write next week since I’m in Edinburgh for the week visiting y boyfriend and besides we all know what Edinburgh is like- mainly wet and cold (same as Lille then.)

Lydie has a lot planned for my return, lots of tests and things being sent to places for testing and it all sounds a bit too real… I’m not good enough to be doing real chemistry…

Until Next Time…

This past week has gone amazingly fast and once again it's sunday. Normally, sunday is my absolute favourite day of the week, however that was when sundays didn't mean having to plan ahead so that my head didn't explode for lack of caffeine (every shop is closed) or not being able to distract myself from studying by buying pretty things - which is probably a good thing for both my bank balance and my luggage allowance. Sundays don't seem to really exist here - they're not even mentioned on shop opening-hours signs, as though to even mention the possibility of accesorize or h&m being open on a sunday would be too much for this traditional country to cope with. I do love the real slow pace of sundays here - it feels like stepping back in time, well before my time - the only reason people are out are for long sunday walks or sitting in a cafe all day reading the newspaper; for students it means trying to catch up on whatever work had been set aside for parties the previous week.

Since returning home from Salzburg last weekend I've been trying to get as far ahead on work as possible before running off to France for five days this friday. (so excited!) A plan which didn't go quite to plan on thursday. A lot of my friends and I had decided to help out at our international fayre here by being ambassadors for our own universities. The actual international day was really strange, each country was given a half hour slot when we had to be there, available to answer questions about our countries and universities. The british stall had slightly more success than my friends' dutch one but the questions were all rather... well stupid... to be honest "what universities are there in the uk?" to which you can only really answer "a lot." A lot of the students just wanted to know what grades they needed to get in order to go abroad, which we obviously couldn't answer. It was a very strange half hour and despite Sarah and my efforts to persuade everyone that Scotland was much better than England to study in, not one person expressed any interest in going there. We were rewarded greatly for our efforts though with an invitation to a reception at town hall with the mayor of Vienna and some free drinks vouchers for the international party that night.

A few of us decided to head to the international party fairly early to collect our free drinks and decide whether it was worth missing out on Charlie P's 11th Birthday celebrations. When we arrived we were delighted to discover something vaguely resembling a ceilidh - a band was playing folk music from lots of different countries; Austria, France, England, Ireland and Scotland and there were dances to go with it. After our free drinks we enthusiastically joined in, enjoying the confusion that came with not one person in the room knowing any of the dances - even the scottish ceilidh dance was a really obscure one I've never learned. After the band had finished, we decided to join the rest of our friends at Charlie P's where a growing rapport with the barmen means that we're able to beat the crowd at the bar by ducking under the staircase and ordering our drinks from that awkward position. After too much wine, tequila and shots (the name of which I don't think I'm allowed to repeat here but which I'm pretty sure was made up by the barman to wind us up!) I went home, ate a lot of crisps and chatted on skype - something I'm not sure my friend appreciated since I don't think our conversation made much sense (well my side of it anyway.

I should mention at this point that a slight bout of homesickness (nothing as severe as the first week here) made me head to the british supermarket in Vienna the day before, which Sarah had recently discovered stocks irn-bru. Having stocked up on salt and vinegar crisps, irn bru, sliced white bread and spaghetti hoops - my homesickness and my hangover were quickly cured - though not in time to make my 9 o'clock lecture on friday morning - oops!

This week we've also been planning our trip to Prague in November, which is set to be both incredibly cheap and so much fun! Having asked a czech neighbour, Ellis has discovered the cheapest way of getting to and from Prague. (a 10 euro bus journey there and an 11 euro train journey back!) I feel so lucky to have discovered such a great group of friends here, before arriving I had prepared myself for the possibility that I wouldn't have the same type of group of really close friends as I do at home - the ones you can go shopping with, sit in and watch films with or just drink tea with. I thought I would have to adjust to having lots of acquaintances rather than any close friends but it's not worked out like that at all and I'm so happy about that!

This week I will be working as hard as possible to make up for travelling to France on friday but I am so excited and so happy about seeing my best-friend again!

Another week has passed, and whilst my parents on holiday half way around the world continue to make a big deal of how lovely and sunny it is with them, icy puddles have started appearing most mornings in Oslo. Luckily, I am a huge fan of cold weather, and whilst I would be among the first to admit that Helly Hansen did horrible things to any notions of fashion in the 1990s, they make really good thermal long johns that I just know I will need to start wearing soon. What a sexy image to begin this blog post with.

My flat still isn’t the easiest place to live: there are no real huge problems, but I came along later than the others and as such am not a part of the group, and it can be difficult living in such anti-social surroundings when I know that all my friends in another student village are having a rare old time as neighbours. I have heard really good things about this other student village, Sogn, where the parties are plentiful (not to mention actual living Norwegian people inhabiting the area, which is an extreme rarity in my village) and the people are lovely (they wash each others’ socks, for crying out loud). My friend C, also from Edinburgh, just transferred there and is much happier and loving it there, and I am ever so slightly envious: it will be an amazing opportunity for her to meet new people, and as she has ended up living among Norwegians it figures that her language skills will come on leaps and bounds, whilst my once articulate skills in English suffer at the hands of my international neighbours. I am pondering over an application to move; perhaps by next week I will have decided one way or another.

Despite this, socially things are great here, but it is beginning to dawn on me that many of the lovely people I consider my better friends here will be heading back home soon due to their exchange only lasting one semester, some going as far as Australia or America. It seems a shame that they will miss winter in Norway, which is a completely alien concept for many of them, but whilst it will be sad to see them go there will also be new arrivals come January, and all the international student events (tours and free admission into Oslo’s attractions and free food for ‘new’ student) will be offered all over again, giving me a low budget tourist approach to the city that I never took advantage of first time around. A (feeble) light at the end of the tunnel/beginning of next semester?

At the moment my University deadlines are all over the place, in the sense that there are many of them and I am horribly disorganized. I have submitted one essay for first draft correction, and am currently working on the next, which is far more tedious to write: the first essay was a subject of our choice, and I was able to write about one of the most intriguing Norwegian films that I have ever seen. However, the second essay for my literature subject concerns an age-old Danish play (Oh, I really do hate reading Danish) and I am barely managing to force myself through it. I cannot wait to finally submit it and get it out of my hair. I have never written such long essays in my second language before (one aspect which I would say we arrived here ill-prepared for, despite loving the department back home and being entirely reticent to criticize!) and it has acted as a steep (but positive) learning curve.

This afternoon I am heading out to one of the numerous cafes on campus (have I mentioned the fantastic nature of all the cafes and canteens on campus here??) to meet with some friends, and this evening our charming German friend S is making us dinner which he described to me as a “big roast animal.” Whilst many would shudder at the thought, I can’t wait: meat is a rare treat in these parts, whatever it happens to come from.

Welcome, once again, to Barcelona!

So, what have I been up to over the last week or so? Uni work is still time and effort-consuming, which is unfortunate because I have realised that I could quite happily get by in this city without studying or working. Yes, the finances would be a bit of a problem once the Erasmus grant ran out, but I am Scottish and I'm a student – I know how to be thrifty!

I was working on this annoying assignment thing for Concurrent and Distributed Programming... and I just could not get the stupid program to work. I went and asked the lecturer for help twice, but none of the advice I was given was of any use at all. So anyway I wasted lots of time on that assignment which I should really have been spending revising for my mid-term “control” for Operating Systems. For operating systems, we have three “controls” - they're optional (yes, optional) mid-term exams which, if you do well enough in (on average), allow you to skip the final exam.

Operating Systems is probably the hardest course, and it's taught in Catalan, so probably I couldn't, realistically, have done quite that well this early on. To cut a long story short, it didn't go that well (I don't think, haven't got it back yet), but I know I will be capable of doing the stuff once I actually get round to learning it properly. On a happier note, my Mum and Dad were visiting this week, from Friday night until Wednesday afternoon. The exam was on Tuesday at 8am, but we were out at a restaurant until like midnight the night before. Meh...

So anyway, with my parents here we discovered some fantastic restaurants in Barcelona... (write them down, they're all really great): Marmalade in El Raval, La Rosa Negra on Via Laietana, La Luna off Plaça de Santa María, and Telirium in Les Corts. Mum and Dad arrived on Friday night and we went out to eat and drink; the food, sangria and company were all top notch! ;-) Somehow seeing your parents after seven or eight weeks seems like more of a big deal when you're abroad!

On Saturday we took the Renfe to Girona, a city just over an hour inland from Barcelona. What a bonny place. The shops, cafes and buildings were all really lovely and very clean, although unfortunately it rained buckets in the afternoon and (typical tourists) mum and dad had to buy emergency ponchos. Here's a picture of us in Els Banys Àrabs de Girona, which were built in 1194 (so, a fair while ago). Even if it's raining, definitely take a day-trip to Girona.

On Sunday, the sun decided to come back. I worked in the morning, then in the afternoon we went for lunch at Buenas Migas down at Barceloneta (goood flapjacks btw!) and had a look at the goings on around the beach and Port Vell. Probably the best thing about Sunday – MAMMA MIA! We went to see the musical (in Spanish, claro) at Barcelona Teatre Musical in the evening. It was so good! Really well done, good performers and stuff. I really liked the fact that it was in Spanish, I did learn stuff, believe it or not. 4 days on, I still occasionally have “por eso... gracias por dejarme cantar canciones!” popping into my head. (Thank You For The Music).
Here's a tune, it's called “Dame Dame Dame”, Guess...:

What else? Umm... more assignments, mid-term exams are coming soon in some subjects. My Catalan really has improved heaps though, I honestly understand lectures in Catalan just fine, as long as the lecturer speaks clearly enough (which they do). And my new Catalan class is good, a few of us from Orientation Week have been reunited, and it's not too stressful.

Oh, I forgot to write about last Thursday. It was a party with RESA – the company which runs my Residencia and a few other Residencias in Barcelona. They hired out a club and gave us alcohol etc, so it was good! The staff in the club would be the definition of the word “gilipollas” though. And that's not a good thing. Guess how much it was for a drink? 9€. Yeah, really. I wouldn't be in a hurry to go back to Nick Havanna (near Diagonal station).

Here's a photo I took. Who's more photogenic, the girls or the boys???

Right, I need to go and do the dishes so I can cook since I don't have any parents here to feed me!

….. It’s been a good night.  On Friday night there was a large Edinburgh contingency and a number of other UBC students heading downtown in a limo in celebration of a 21^st birthday.  I was one of them.  The limo ride was; an experience, I can’t say I managed the getting in and out of it with particular elegance but it was totally worth it!  We were also treated to VIP seating, queue jump, free club entry and free Cosmopolitans. Once inside “Plaza” and having returned to mere-mortal status extortionate drink prices lead to the accidental failure to return the tequila shot glasses and salt.  I’m not quite sure where the logic was in that one – a desperate attempt to get better value for money maybe??  Lots of dancing and a few more beverages later I found myself running for the last bus in order to get a brief two hour kip before my alarm clock went off.

4.30Am. Needless to say it wasn’t my finest hour.  Once my backpack and I were safely installed in the car I promptly went back to sleep and awoke 3 hours later to find myself well and truly out of the city high in the mountains.  Honestly, I can’t tell you exactly where I was other than north and east of Vancouver.  I’m having issues differentiating mountain ranges: last week I think I claimed to be heading to the Rocky Mountains but I don’t think that was entirely true.  The Pacific Coast Mountains may be a more accurate description.  Either way; there were mountains and they had snow on!

The objective of the weekend was to carry out essential maintenance on the Brian Waddington Memorial Hut and the trail leading to it.  The hut is one of four run by the Varsity Outdoors Club of UBC.  Saturday’s job was to clear the paths of Alder trees so I pretended to be a lumberjack all day with secateurs and a saw.  Towards the end of the day we hiked up to the hut to find snow on the ground and a partially frozen lake which provided much entertainment for the rest of the daylight hours.  Once it was dark food became the priority and meals were cooked; tortellini was on the menu and one VOC-ers created a Cheesecake (I have no idea how!)  Fed and watered we settled down round the songbook to perform a few of the classics courtesy of The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel.

After a much needed early night, Sunday was another day on manual labour, this time I was mining.  Or rather; widening and flattening paths and trails to make the hut more accessible with the help of a beasty mattock.  Once we got back to the cars in the late afternoon I was shattered and slept most of the journey back.  There was a brief stop in Whistler for dinner followed by more sleeping ‘til we got back to campus at about 10.30pm….

…..At which point I sat down to finish writing the essay that was due in on Monday.  Staying awake and typing words in a coherent order didn’t seem to be working well for me so I caught up on more sleep and spent much of my Monday morning typing away. 

My realisation over the last few days: the work is never ending.  From what I can see I don’t have a break from deadlines and exams until Christmas which is rather a bleak outlook.  Thankfully Christmas just got way more exciting than trees and tinsel. Two of my best friends from Edinburgh will be heading to my side of the world so it’ll be more a case of snow and snowboarding as well as the usual festivities.  Definitely something to look forward to!

I’m sure the time between now and then will fly by; my weeks are kept continually busy by choir, rugby and that university malarkey.  Plus keeping up with the lives and loves of people on both sides of the Atlantic prevents me from twiddling my thumbs, which I think, while living in Vancouver, would be impossible. 

The half term holiday was a welcome break from Haverford’s student-imposed work-hard-play-hard ethos. I spent three days in and around Philly, then travelled to Washington, D.C to visit friends (Rachel and Clair) from Haverford, and then caught a bus to New York to visit a couple of friends and my cousin.

DC is a great city because even though you’ve seen it a million times on TV or in films, walking down a road and seeing the White House a mere forty feet away is pretty exciting (maybe just for politics junkies, come to think of it). The journey there, however, was hell. A quick word of advice: never take Greyhound buses – they overbook, they make promises they can’t keep, and they keep you waiting in grim bus stations filled with people straight out of a Jerry Springer show. But $76 out of pocket (after the bus was delayed by 3 ½ hours I gave in and took an Amtrak train), I arrived in D.C and immediately felt as though I was in an episode of the West Wing.

The White House (as if you needed telling).

Rachel’s dad is an economist at the Federal Reserve, and he took Rachel, Clair and I to lunch there. It was all very exciting – we had to be background checked before we were allowed in, which wouldn’t have been a problem except I gave the security officials my British passport number in order to gain clearance, but it doesn’t have a visa in it as I’m here on my American passport. I spent the night in fear of immigration officials, a fear which (thank God) never materialised.

Lunch at the Fed was lots of fun. I’m a big geek, so to see the meeting rooms where Ben Bernanke (the Fed’s Chairman) makes all the big decisions was really quite exciting. Afterwards we went walking around the Georgetown area, a very pretty and incredibly wealthy district packed with designer boutiques and women toting tiny dogs.

Having learned my lesson about Greyhound buses, I took a Bolt Bus (direct, cheap and with free wireless) up to NYC, and arrived deep in TriBeCa four and a half hours later. I met up with my friend Ben and his friends, and chatted and drank the evening away in a bar in Brooklyn’s chichi Park Slope neighbourhood. The next day I schlepped over to my cousin’s apartment in midtown Manhattan, and then spent an interesting afternoon in Chinatown whilst my friend Laura practiced her Chinese.

Chinatown, New York - A shop that only sells one type of grapes.

On Saturday, my cousin and I queued for cheap tickets to see Avenue Q. If you haven’t heard of it, imagine a dirty version of Sesame Street with songs called things like ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’. After that, my cousin had been given free VIP passes to watch a band called The Secret Machines, which was exciting as we got to watch from a balcony, above the madding crowd.

I was really ready to return to Haverford by Sunday. I didn’t think that I would miss it whilst I was away, but found I was homesick on Saturday night not just for home, but for Haverford too.

The hefty workload returned first thing Monday. But on Tuesday I went with the two other members of my English class and our professor to watch Tom Stoppard’s Rock N Roll, formerly of Broadway, at the Wilma Theatre in Philly, all paid for by the college.

It’s been a ridiculously exciting week, and I’m looking forward to a rest. However, it’s Hallowe’en this weekend, so I don’t think that's going to be possible.

Don’t let the ghouls get you.

I have now been in Dijon for exactly one month and it feels like so much longer! I'm feeling more and more at home here and am managing to find my way around the Droit-Lettres building about 80% of the time! This is impressive as it has three different entrances, innumerable staircases and an extremely strange door numbering system.

This week I was determined to start getting organised and I wrote a list of boring admin I had to do by Friday. I know I should really have sorted myself out with a bank account and handed in registration forms for classes long before now, but, as I'm sure I have mentioned at least once before, I am extremely disorganised! The reason I haven't opened a bank account is actually becuase, when I got to Dijon, I was planning only to stay here until after the exams in January and then move on to a town near Marseille to do a teaching assistantship. I didn't want to be living in Miramas with a bank account whose home branch was in Dijon - it just seemed a bit silly, and with what I knew of French beaurocracy, I thought it would be impos However, in the last few weeks, a combination of a lack of contact from my host school in Miramas and the fact that Dijon is starting to feel a little bit more like home made me decide to withdraw from the assistantship programme and ask if I could stay in Dijon until the end of the academic year in May. This turned out to be surprisingly easy, although I still don't have confirmation that I can stay in my room in halls after January, which is a bit worrying. Anyway, yesterday I finally dragged myself down to the nearest bank and asked the teller for a bank account, please. This, too, was much easier than I expected it to be, and involved less paperwork too. I didn't even have to give them a passport picture! Just my passport, student card and proof of address - no problem! I have to admit that banking vocab is not my strong point and I'm not entirely sure of all the details of my new bank account - I know that I signed an innordinate number of forms and that I get free online banking and a free atm card, which you usually have to pay a few Euros rental fee a year to have. What did get me excited though, was the free pen and keyring - woohoo! I had decided to bank with BNP, partly because they have a branch right next to the campus, but mainly for the name, which is still providing endless amusement for me. I especially love the keyring, which says 'la vie est belle avec le BNP'. Tee hee!

Apart from lots of admin, I decided to be a bit more proactive in meeting French people this week as I'm finding my conversational French doesn't hold up very well under pressure because I never get any practice. All of my friends are English speaking and the only time I really speak French is to ask for things in shops or in an academic sense in classes. With this in mind I went along to Catholic students' chaplaincy on campus last Thursday. They hold a student mass and then everyone goes to the chaplaincy to have dinner together - the students take it in turns to cook each week. There were a few English speakers there but we didn't sit together, so I got lots of opportunity to practice my awkward dinner conversation. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming to the foreign students and I had a really good time. The evning did bring up a question which I hadn't had too much need to think about before: how do bisous work? Everyone knows about the French cheek-kiss and how, in different parts of the country different nubmers of kisses are required, but I wasn't too sure how it worked here. And who is it acceptable to kiss? After how long of knowing someone? How many kisses? It was a bit alarming! It turns out that in Dijon, you give one kiss on each cheek. Men do kiss each other, but they tend not to touch their cheeks together, they just air kiss. You do not kiss the priest, as my friend found out with just a touch of embarassment! It also seems that to forget to kiss someone can be a bit embarassing too - one girl came in when we were all standing in a circle chatting, made her rounds, kissing everyone but stopping one person short of the full circle. Her cries of apology and frantic kisses when she realised her mistake made me even more anxious about getting it right myself. All in all, I am not very fond of the cheek kiss. I think I have too much of the famous British reserve. Such close physical contact with strangers makes me a bit uncomfortable and I always forget that people are going to do it, so they always catch me off guard and my first instinct is always to back away, looking confused and alarmed. Thankfully, most of the time I remember before I have a chance to offend anyone and dutifully give my kisses like a true Frenchwoman!

So after a month of living in France, life is good. I am also extremely excited about the upcoming week or so because my boyfriend is coming to visit in three days' time and my best friend the week after. I'm so excited I can hardly contain myself!

So the majority of this week would be incredibly boring to describe, it mostly involved classes and reading so I'm going to spare you all the details! I'm beginning to find my feet with classes and I'm noticing the same literary vocab coming up again and again which is reassuring for exams and for dissertation writing next year - I always find the right vocabulary is half the battle when it comes to writing literature essays, even in English.

This week, I've also made a decision regarding what I want to do when I graduate, since my degree is single honours German I've always been drawn to the translation side of things and was hoping to do a Masters in Translation Studies after I graduate but since I've been here I've realised how difficult it would be making a living from freelance translation and how competitive it is - I only really have three languages; English, German and French - and I realise that many people out there not only have more but also have more obscure languages and that's where the money is - I could always pick up a fourth language, Dutch perhaps since I could speak it fluently as a child and it would be easier to relearn. However, this week I have realised that my interest really does lie far more in literature and so I've decided to go back to a previous plan of teaching English at high school level. So I realise this is all slightly off-topic but it has been quite a major decision for me and so I've also decided to take an extra English literature course here to take that interest further and also to make my application to PGCE English a little bit more attractive, since I don't have a full English Lit degree.

Anyway, enough of that, what I really want to write about is the weekend! This weekend, Sarah and I travelled to Salzburg and it was amazing! I think it's always true of capital cities that they never fully represent their country - Edinburgh is very little like the rest of Scotland and Vienna is very little like the 'real' Austria but here we were trundling through genuine Austrian countryside with mountains and those really cute wooden houses. Salzburg itself was so pretty and it was really easy to get to. We spent 20 Euros on a Vorteilskarte which gets you about 50% off train tickets and so our return to Salzburg cost us just 44,80. We decided to go early saturday morning and come back on sunday evening so that we only had to pay for one night's accommodation. We stayed in the nicest hostel I've ever stayed in! It was 17 Euros for a bed in a dorm and the hostel had a really good party atmosphere, good food and everyone there was so friendly (although entirely english-speaking!) We bought a 24 hour Salzburg card which gives you access to all of the museums and sights as well as free public transport so we visited the fortress, Schloss Hellbrunn, Mozarts Wohnhaus, the toy museum and Mirabell Gardens at which point a combination of too many museums and too much beer the night before caused us to collapse on the train journey home! It was a really awesome trip and I definitely think I'll go back but maybe take an extra night just to be able to do everything at an easier pace - I was so tired when I got back last night!

My favourite part of the trip was definitely the trick fountains in Schloss Hellbrunn. Basically an eccentric, old, rich man designed a garden to amuse himself; it involves a variety of fountains spraying you with water as you pass by. There's even a table where he would entertain his guests by spraying water from their seats, they of course were not allowed to stand up until he did and so he would just sit and watch them wince. It's definitely the kind of thing I would do if I had ridiculous amounts of money!

Speaking of which, with the very welcome arrival of erasmus grants I'm really having to restrain myself from buying more things than I'll ever be able to ship home! I did buy a really warm winter coat today since my old one is both too big for me and has holes and tomorrow I'm going boot shopping - I did have to seriously restrain myself from buying a dress today which was both not in my size and out of my price range! I have to keep reminding myself that I want to be able to afford to travel more and so I'm trying to budget on little, every day things so I'll have the means to see more of Europe before I have to go back home to reality!

Ok, so this was the week that I was away exploring Washington, D.C and New York. So, this is actually last week’s entry that I didn’t have time to post as I was shuttling between cities on crazy buses.

Shopping in America is ridiculous. Firstly, because it is mainly done inside. To me, hailing from Manchester (rain, wind, rain, hail, rain – a typical summer) and Edinburgh (repeat Manchester’s weather, but ten times more extreme and ten degrees colder), shopping isn’t shopping without the added frisson of excitement that comes from pelting between shops whilst trying to avoid a soaking. And as I live in two cities, I’ve never really had the need to go to shopping malls, preferring walking down roads and braving the weather to pumped-out muzak and air-conditioning.

The mall is the quintessential American experience. The staple of every teen movie and most horror movies (a coincidence? I think not), they have always held a sort of fascination for me – I think it’s something to do with how they are both entirely artificial and yet at the same time try to emulate the outside world with their trees and fountains.

And why not plunge in at the deep end? On Saturday, I decided to brave the largest mall in the United States – the King of Prussia mall just outside of Philadelphia. The name, even though it’s actually named after a nearby town, says it all – the ostentation, the sheer size, the never-ending shops.

In order to get to the KoP from Haverford, it’s easiest to take the R100 shuttle train and then a bus. The R100 seems to be exclusively populated by homeless people and alcoholics, and catching it is always an interesting experience. It zips through the suburbs, and deposits its passengers at 69th Street Terminal – an exciting place where half of the adverts are in Korean, most things are broken, and the streets are eerily deserted for a transportation hub. As I’m still relatively new here, and don’t know how much things cost, I am perfectly ok with asking and people generally are perfectly ok with responding politely. Or, at least, all people other than Philadelphia-area transport workers who have so far been uniformly grumpy and seem to enjoy belittling anyone who doesn’t know exactly how much a ticket costs, or whether to pay at the beginning or end of the journey (it seems to vary with no rhyme nor reason).

Once at the mall, the shops and salespeople assail you. There are also food courts everywhere, with restaurants and fast-food joints, and it would be entirely possible to never need to leave. I could have gone a bit crazy and bought everything that I saw (yay for the weak dollar!), especially since the appalling state of the economy means that there are sales left, right and centre, and as someone with no property, no credit card, and no stocks or shares, I, like many students, am in a pretty safe place until job-finding time comes around.

And with that cheery thought, I’m going to leave you – sleep well.

Another week, gone again, time seems to be flying by! This scares me a little as deadlines are beginning to creep up but I keep putting things off, yet again it is Sunday as Eiffel still lacks the internet but seem to be too busy to worry too much.

Last weekend seems forever ago but my parents were here and we decided to go to Ypres (Ieper), which is in Belgium, where they speak Flemish, not French and where I was completely lost language wise but thoroughly enjoyed. On the Saturday we arrived late in the afternoon so we parked up (got confused by the ticket machine) and went for a wander. The town is stunning and it was a glorious sunny day so we sat in a café with a beer enjoying the view; the main square is flanked by medieval looking buildings all exquisitely restored after the First World War. The most impressive of which is the Cloth Hall which takes up half of one side sitting in front of the cathedral. On the opposite side of the square where enough chocolate shops to keep me happy for a year, waffle places and restaurants, we managed to escape all these and wander to the Menin Gate- the Menin Gate is a beautiful memorial to the soldiers of the First World War spanning the main entrance to the town along the ramparts. At eight o clock every evening the Last Post is played, we did not stay as it we would have been too late back but it is something we will do next time. It was very humbling.

Sunday we returned to see the museum, in the Cloth Hall, very much worth a visit and only 1 Euro for young people (under 25), it was saddening but informative and very tasteful. We wanted to do so much more but time was against us so we walked along the ramparts a little way before they had to head back for the ferry.

I seemed not to be in the lab enough this week, Monday was fairly productive but I quickly discovered I was ill on account of not being able to speak and despite my best efforts to care whether this molecule or that one was doing what it should be I just couldn’t find the energy. Lydie sent me home Wednesday and I spend Thursday in bed being looked after by Andrew and Rachel offering tea and sympathy. Friday I felt better though, ready for the weekend.

Japanese again this week, we were told to learn the Hiragana and Katakana- that’s quite a request… I’m planning on trying again after writing this but it’s hard to know how to memorise symbols that are so complex to me let alone actually doing it…

Friday night, feeling better, we had a small get together just Andrew, Rachel, Sarah, Rob and I, Sarah is my perpetual God send and I am also forever sorry because I managed to spill tea on (in if we’re being pedantic) her computer which she let me use for the internet. I’m sorry! When Rachel, Sarah and I are together we’re like the three witches from Macbeth, we cackle lots and have hysterics, it’s so much fun and Rachel seems to be able to make me cry with laughter every time I see her! We probably scare people with our insanity.

Thinking about it, seven weeks is not long and yet it feels like home here, I don’t walk around perpetually frightened about being spoken to in French and I’m getting better at understanding everything around me so if someone speaks to me when I’m not expecting it I can reply. You don’t really think about improving your language skills but I’m using them everyday, and not just for basic things, conversing in the lab is harder than I would have thought as some things are counter intuitive and you are so often trying to explain complex ideas. I wrote my literature survey proposal in French and Lydie is going to correct it for me, it was so difficult because the words are so specific to Chemistry so it meant reading French articles for references to the right words. It was really hard but I think worth it, I’m sure it will help in the long run. Speaking to others in conversation is getting easier too, in French class, which is always the best opportunity to practice lots (well not really practice, use is more appropriate) I love talking to people because we always end up talking about cultural differences which is endlessly fascinating.

One more week until half term, I’m actually heading back to Edinburgh for the week, tickets bought- just have to warn Lydie I’m leaving (which I am petrified about)- and collected (another palaver but that’s for next week), I’m worried that I’ll forget everything I’ve learnt…

Anyway, I have rambled enough. Time for Japanese and it’s another film night tonight, we have to get as much out of the weekend as possible. Next week it’s Rachel’s birthday, I’m planning to ambush her room with decorations…

Until next time…

This last week has been mostly about the studying for midterms and all possible forms of procrastination to avoid such brain work.  Successful strategies have included shopping downtown, going out for pub lunches, trips to the coffee shop and the well placed bank holiday on Monday, when Canada celebrated their thanksgiving of 2008. 

It’s pretty much identical to American thanksgiving, only a month or so earlier; something to do with harvest and being further north in the world…..  So, a lot of turkey, yams (aka sweet potatoes), cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and wine.  I had been adopted by one of my course mates in her bid to cook her first thanksgiving dinner away from home, with the help of a number of friends.  Between all of us it was pretty successful; everyone wished they had their stretchiest trousers on while continuing to attempt to consume all that was left, the sign of a good meal I think!

All in all there were 20 people sat round the dinner table and I found myself becoming a bit of shrinking violet.  Over the last few weeks I sometimes find myself getting very frustrated with my social skills; back home I’m generally pretty good at chatting away in groups of people no matter how large or small.  Over here, shyness occasionally sets in, which is a bizarre concept to me.  I’m hoping it’s something that’ll pass pretty quickly, I wonder if it is something to do with cultural differences…...  Time will tell I suppose!  I do think it’s about time I stopped compulsively comparing everything.  At the moment I probably say the phrase “back home we….” far too many times a day so I think it’s time to take things at face value as they are over here and not digress in to thinking about the Edinburgh version of things I’ve put on hold for a year. 

Aside from minor niggles everything is still going really well, unfortunately the Edinburgh contingent at UBC has declined somewhat and we’re now at a total of three people having gone home.  One for visa related reasons, and the other two due to course complications which resulted in the need to complete third year in Edinburgh in order to pass.  Not something you want to hear having already studied in Vancouver for 6 weeks! 

Yesterday it was the Canadian general election; predictably, the conservative party retained leadership in a minority government (no significant changes there) which renders much of the process unnecessary - it being the third election in four years.  With that completed all eyes are now turned to the presidential election across the border in the States which take place in three weeks time.

My eyes are currently focussed on the end of the week… birthday celebrations for a friend involving a night out downtown, and a very early start the following morning (5am!) to work on some hut and trail maintenance with the varsity outdoors club over the weekend.  Busy times if all goes to plan, but I’m not complaining!

Life has been pretty quiet since I got back from Germany just over a week ago. I've been here 3 weeks now and time is suddenly hurtling along at an alarming rate! As such, an entire week seems to have gone by without me really doing an awful lot to tell you all about!

On Thursday there was a student party at Le Carré, a club which, like the other 2 in Dijon, is quite a way out of town. There was a free bus though, and the drinks were cheap (or as cheap as they seem to come here, although the prices would have had most Edinburgh students bolting for the door) so we decided to head along. There seems to be a completely different timescale for nights out in France than in the UK. At home, even on an especially hectic night out, I'll usually leave home around 9pm and be snuggled cosily in bed again by 4am - and that's including a long, rambling, drunken walk back to my flat, and, let's face it, a lengthy stop at the nearest kebab shop. In France though, the first bus to the club was at 11, meaning we didn't get through the doors until after midnight, and the first bus back was at 5am. As it turned out, I was eager to get that first bus home, because my first efforts at clubbing in France proved disappointing. The club was small, with strange, glowing pictures of aliens on the walls, and it was absolutely packed with people. The dancefloor, and the rest of the place as well, was so crowded that you literally couldn't move and it was also extremely sweaty and smelly. The tight-packed crowd also allowed a lot of opportunity for drunken hands to wander wherever they pleased, and I was very glad to finally step outside for some fresh air and grab the nearest bus back to campus! It wasn't all bad though - I did get to meet and chat to a few French students in the queue for the bus and I got a good listen to some French rap! I also discovered quite a few stereotypes that the French have of the British, or more specifically, of female British exchange students. I heard the sentence "But you are English! So why aren't you drunk? / why are you pushing my hand away? / why aren't you wearing furry boots? / why is your hair all the same colour? / but... you speak French!" more times than I can count that night. I have to admit, I was unaware that the British are considered drunken, easy, badly-dressed idiots by the majority of French students! My attempts to convince them that I am Scottish fell a bit flat too. I also have to say that it was all just lighthearted banter and all the French people we spoke to were lovely to us and eager to chat and try out their English swear words!

Most of the British Erasmus students went to Paris on Saturday, taking advantage of the 15 euro return train that delivers you to the capital by 9am and brings you back at around midnight. I decided not to follow the crowd, and instead caught a train to Besançon with my coursemate from Edinburgh, Sophie, to visit our mutual friend Heather. I should note at this point that, no matter how trusting the public transport systems in Europe seem to be - if you get caught stealing your 1 euro bus fare the contollers are merciless and there is no escape! After that little drama, my bank account and my pride rather leaner than they once were, Sophie and I headed to Besançon, about an hour away from Dijon by train. It's about the same size as Dijon but seems much more lively - there were people in the streets! At the weekend! Shops were open! We didn't take too much advantage of this though, instead going on a walk up to the old part of the town to see the cathedral, which is beautiful, although I have to say I prefer the slightly worn charms of the one in Dijon, and an astrological clock, which we peeked at from around the door to save ourselves the 3 euro entry fee! It was a gorgeous, sunny day and we eventually went and sat in the park eating waffles and people-watching. It doesn't sound like much, but I have to say it was one of the best days I've had since coming to France; it was so peaceful and relaxed and for once I wasn't worrying about bank accounts or classes or...anything at all, and it was an amazing feeling.

In terms of day-to-day life, things are starting to settle down a bit now. I'm in to the second week of classes, taking a ridiculous amount of translation as well as Civilisation Français, Français pour les Etrangers and English literature. I know my way to all of these classes and what I'm expected to do for each, which, seeing as I am usually the least organised person in the world (and have the worst sense of direction), I am rather proud of! I'm still finding everyday life in another country quite tiring though - at the end of every day I collapse into bed absolutely knackered and with lots of new vocab spinning around in my head. As I said, though, I do feel my language skills improving, something I proved to myself with a second attempt at French cinema the other night. Granted, though, the plot of Mamma Mia isn't too hard to follow!

This week has been a pretty fun week. I finally got my essay completed at 3am on Wednesday morning and surprisingly, even though yes I did finish it very late I wasn't stressed out about it at any point like I normally am at Edinburgh. I felt very restricted to the 2,500 words limit rather than searching for things to say, which is sometimes the case at home. I think this is down to the teaching system here- as I said, I'd already handed in and recieved marks for 4000 words on the subject so all I had to do was put it all together and expand where I felt neccesary. I definitley feel much more relaxed here about work even though I'm doing it on a more regular basis than in Edinburgh. We're getting the essays from last week back tomorrow. Thats a quick turn around, considering we only have one class a week!

I've been putting some thought into (read: procrastinating) what I want to do after graduating at Edinburgh. Somehow, from somewhere, Law seems very appealing and I've been doing research into conversion schemes and MAs in human rights/international law. I don't want to be a laywer, but I want to work for NGOs dealing with sexual/domestic abuse, human traffking and/or exploitation of women and children so I feel as though having detailed knowledge of the legal systems would be highly beneficial, esspecially as I'd like to be involved in the policy making, representation and legal aspects of NGO work. So this is my new little project. Today I looked at some of the law courses on offer at Helsinki, as I am able to take modules from all departments so I have much more flexibility than I would do in Edinburgh. I've decided to sign up for 2 courses initially- 'economic, social and cultural rights under human rights law' which is actually a social policy course so will be more in my comfort zone for the start. Then in January, a 3 week course entitled 'general course in international law' (someone is good at thinking of titles!) which if I like it, there are 2 continuation classes later in the semester.

This seems to be my problem in Helsinki. As the entire university is open to me, I want to do everything. I have to take 60 credits- so 30 each semester- in anthropology/development related couses, but these only equate to 6 hours a week in class. As I'm on exchange and I only have to pass, I feel like this is a bit of a waste of a year. Especially because I can't really join any societies or get a job due to the lack of Finnish, so I may as well spend more time in university going to classes because they look interesting rather than for the credits. Edinburgh are going to think I've gone slightly mad on the credits when I get home as I am doing 43 credits this semester alone, and that only makes 10 hours a week in university! I don't have any exams, and some of the classes are assessed by 'attendence and contribution to class discussion' so I don't actually have to do anything other than turn up. At the most, the require one 2000 word essay which I think I can push together given that I don't really need to do amazingly well in them.

So in short, I will return to Edinburgh not only with an education in anthropology, but also one in Mongolian and Law. At least, thats to date but I'll probably find something else I want to do- the Literature classes look really cool too!

I feel really odd writing all of this. Almost as though I've suddenly grown up and I can admit to learning things for the pure sake of learning them rather than for the credits. Its not as if my social life will really die either- everyone else is doing the same, so we always hang out in the evening to watch a film or chat meaning my days are usually spent in my room on the internet, the gym or wandering around Helsinki trying to find something which isn't crazily expensive to buy.

Next week it is half term... so in this paragraph I have reverted back to being a child who needs a holiday after a few weeks of classes. Well, in actual fact this is week 7 and I have now lived in Helsinki for 8 weeks- and you know how many of my aims from the first few posts I've achieved? One. I finally bought some boots- 65 euros in the SALE but they're lovely. How many do I still have to do? Loads. Including important ones such as sending back my course registration form to Edinburgh- offically they don't actually know I've properly arrived yet, and registering at the police office so I can be a Finnish resident and get cheap travel. I'm going home via Vienna on Saturday for a week. This time its home home, so Derbyshire, where I haven't been for longer than 24 hours at a time since April. I'm off to see my best friend from home who is on erasmus in Vienna for the year. The entire population of Helsinki is coming too, well 4 people I know are. Two live there, one is going to visit a friend and the other is going as hes Australian and wants to go everywhere in Europe whilst he has the chance!

I'm still missing Edinburgh. There is so much going on right now which I would be a big part of if I was at home- EGP had their new people recruitment night tonight, and then my EGP team are having a reunion in December which I don't think I can go to as its impratical to come home for a few days, leave, then fly back to London a week later. If it was cheap I'd do it, but the flights are expensive. I am really glad that I'm here and I do love it, but I do wish that there was a budget airline RyanAir style route from Helsinki to Edinburgh, meaning I could go home for important stuff and it would only cost me £30 or something. My friend in Vienna can do that- she keeps complaining about the cost of her flight home, but in reality, she can actually go back. It feels as if Helsinki is so close yet so far from home. If I was in the USA or Australia or somewhere I'd know I was on the otherside of the world and I couldn't come back as it was way too expensive and impratical to fly for 10 hours to go home for a meeting at the weekend. But here, I am a 3 hour flight from London and only about 1000 miles away with a 2 hour time difference, so it feels like because Europe is so 'close' to the UK I should be able to get back for things like this, but I can't because of the silly transport links. Ryan Air flies to Tampere- who would ever want to go there?? Easy Jet have started flying to Gatwick from here which is great. Its just annoying that Edinburgh isn't that little bit closer to London!

Ah well you can't have everything. The fair people from last week are still here- you can win an England football shirt as a prize. Clearly the thing all Finnish people want to win!

So another week has passed and I have to ask myself again where exactly it has gone! I think this week has marked a turning point for me with regards to settling in here; since classes have started and the group I've found myself in becomes ever more comfortable with each other, I have really started to feel at home. The strange thing is that the more I feel at home here the more I miss Scotland. I have to explain here that I am really attached to Scotland and I love all of its traditions, the people, the landscape, the dialect - everything! So even though I've settled into something very much resembling my life at home (only without the presence of my family and Scottish friends) I feel an increased need to eat shortbread, read Burns and ceilidh dance just to feel closer to my homeland. This feeling is amplified by the conversations surrounding everyone's own countries - their politics and traditions - which occur often.

Othr than that, this week has been mostly taken up by classes which became gradually easier as the week went on, especially after I acquired a dictaphone to record them - something which I think allowed me to relax into it more, worry less about understanding everything, and taking really good notes in German, and so I was able to understand almost everything of the last lecture. I think I can see my language skills slowly improving but I still take ages to do any reading and I find it so frustrating when I know the answer but just don't have the words to express it. I keep telling myself to be more patient with regards to language acquisition but I really just wish I could swallow a dictionary (and my grammar book). I had my first language lesson today and it went really well - the class is really targeting the aspects I find most difficult which after paying 250 Euros for it I'm glad of! There is a lot of homework though and on top of the reading for my other classes I'm beginning to feel a bit overwhelmed by it all- knowing that if I had to do the same work in English I would be thoroughly underwhelmed doesn't help either.

Before I move on to the more fun aspects of my week I will explain the title of the blog. Here I'm taking four classes (not including the 6 hours of language lessons); 3 Vorlesungen (lectures) and 1 Proseminare. The lectures are all assessed by a final exam - either written or oral, and so there are no assignments throughout the year, just reading. The Proseminare is slightly different, like tutorials here, they're in smaller groups and generally have assignments, however the one that I'm taking only has one 5-10,000 word essay. After discussing it with the tutor, I've decided to write my essay on Roland Barthes and haikus; it frustrates me a little that if I was writing this essay in English I'd actually be really looking forward to tackling the topic, instead I'm just worried about writing such a huge amount in German! However, it is still something I'm very interested in so hopefully that will come across even if the language isn't quite perfect.

Other than classes and finally managing to attain my student ID card and bank card (thus getting a semester public transport ticket and the ability to do washing), there were a few nights out. Thursday was Sarah's birthday and so we celebrated by hitting Charlie P's karaoke night (I can feel a birthday tradition in the making)- it was a great night, made better by the fact that I only had to crawl across the road to get home (unlike Sarah who spent 2 hours trying to work the nightbuses but managed to get home fine with a few stories to tell! ;-) Friday was the official erasmus opening party which I didn't enjoy so much. A combination of being overlytired and the fact that it was incredibly hot and overcrowded with pushy, drunk people meant that I would rather have stayed at home, but it was good banter with the people we were with and we still managed to catch the last ubahn home.

On Saturday I went to Schoenbrunn zoo and gardens with two friends and it was an awesome day! We bought a ticket for 16 Euros which let us into the zoo, the greenhouse and the desert house (I can't think of a better english translation than that!). The zoo was founded in 1752 and so is the oldest zoo in the world (according to wikipedia, although I'm only sure that it's the oldest in Europe) and this made it all the more interesting. A lot of the smaller animals like lizards, bats and peacocks were free to wander around which was cool but also made for a number of 'scream as a bat flies at you' moments which we laughed about later! It was a really relaxing trip and we all ended up reverting to our childhood as we wandered around such a traditional zoo, taking pictures and talking about disney films.

Saturday night there was a big pyjama party in our halls. A couple of guys organised the first major get-together for everyone in one of the kitchens - it was nice to be able to chat to more people, also wearing pyjamas to party is one of my favourite things ever!

This week I'll be spending most of my time trying to get on top of reading for lectures before we head off to Salzburg this weekend - which I'm really excited about as a few of my friends went last week (I had lectures and so unfortunately couldn't go) and loved it. I've also just been informed that one of them has bought 'Sound of Music' on dvd which we'll definitely be watching before we go!

So until then...

This week has been miles, miles better than last week. Why? I don't know really. The only difference has been that I've got rid of that one course, and somehow the workload has seemed more copeable-with. This was the last week of Catalan Intensive Basic 1, we had the exam on Friday. It went pretty well I think, it was all multiple choice except for at the end where we had to write a paragraph or so. The thing about multiple choice exams is that you never really know how you got on, because every answer is made to look like the right answer! Catalan Basic 2 starts on Wednesday, which should be good because it focuses much more on being able to speak conversationally.

Anyway after the exam most of the class went to the pub for a wee celebration, it's a really nice international group, with people from every corner of the globe. I'm the only real English-speaker, and there's even one German guy who doesn't speak Castillian Spanish already, he's just learning Catalan and that's that. So we all speak a mixture of Spanish and Catalan, and then the German guy speaks to me in English when he doesn't know the Catalan words!

Later on Friday I went to a birthday party in Gràcia with one of my Erasmus buds, we walked round in circles, lost... and then realised we were in the right place all along. It was a good party, although most of his birthday presents were ladies' underwear and plants! Very random! Then even later that night I went down to Ciutat Vella to meet up with other people. After the bar, we went to a very odd nightclub where we were like in a very dim room upstairs... there was nobody else there and no music (?!?!) so we promptly trotted off to another club, and then another one a while after that. It was an eventful Friday night... my liver was probably a bit busier than it had been the rest of the week, but that's what it's there for!

Saturday was, as you'd expect, a bit of a write-off. Didn't really get that much work done. Thankfully I didn't stay in all day, at night I went round to a friend's flat for a while and then we headed off to L'Eixample to go to a bar called El Gato Negro (the Black Cat).

This pub had the largest menu of chupitos (shots) I've ever seen in my life. Think A1 sized posters... like outside a cinema. And then write the names of shots in columns. There were 4 of these things on the wall, all with funny names. One example (which I'm not going to translate!) was Mi Polla En Tu Boca. I'm sure you can figure it out! So when you get asked “what would you like?”, you have to tell them! In the end we settled for Harry Potters on a recommendation. Then they were set on fire, drenched in sugar and oranges and whatever, yum yum yum.

After zat, we went to a small discoteca, it was certainly not a touristy place. They played Toxic and Hung Up though, so I wasn't totally lost! All the rest of the time I was like “what's this song called?” So on Sunday I was downloading lots of music which I'm used to hearing in the clubs so I can try to understand the lyrics and stuff. It's better to be able to sing along! ;-)

The rest of Sunday was spent working. I manged to write my program in Miranda for LP, and my bash script for SO... and spent even more time pondering the mysteries of threads in Java.

The weather is still good, by the way. It's like shorts weather most of the time (although not for lectures), but there was rain one afternoon.

I don't know why but I think I'm looking less like a tourist, people automatically speak to me in Spanish now! Actually the other day I was approached by some annoying charity people in Plaça de Catalunya (you know, like the kind you get on Princes Street... please give £20 a month so that we can give free bibles to private school children, etc etc). Anyway they started asking me for money so I just put on my tourist face and said “sorry, I don't speak Spanish”. Hehe, yes I know I'm going to hell, but it worked...

It would be impossible for me not to acknowledge this worldwide finance crisis, despite how depressing the subject is. Norway has remained rather our of the bubble for the most part, thankfully, with many here not even knowing that such a crisis was taking place (that is a fact, one person needed to have the whole thing brought to their attention.) I have been doing all I can to not think about it, despite the fact that a very gradual rising panic is setting in regarding prices of living back home in my final year. Therefore, it was with glee that I received the email the other day informing me of the imminent payment of my ERASMUS grant: life here is so excessively expensive that I have reached the point where I no longer even realize the vast amounts of cash that I am spending! Budgeting is an absolute no-no if want to avoid inducing a mammoth panic attack, and food/drink bills are probably my biggest monthly expense (as an example, six cans of cider sets me back around 200 kroner, approximately £20, though would be even more expensive in any bar, explaining the popularity of pre-party drinks in this country).

Also on a finance-crisis-ey niote, the current hostile situation between Britain and Iceland makes me slightly coy about my nationality when considering the close nature of the Scandinavian lands. Newspapers last week ran the headline “Finance War: Iceland’s Prime Minister Geir Haarde is furious following British colleague Gordon Brown’s use of terror laws to secure the money that Brits have saved in Icelandic banks.” Whilst I’d be foolish to believe everything that I read, Britain’s actions certainly throws a spanner in the works with regards to Alex Salmond’s constant lauding of the successes of independent lands such as Norway and Iceland, and desire to reflect their success in the future, should Scotland become independent. I am forced to think about where my ‘loyalities’ lie in such times: the finance crisis has so far made little impact upon my life in Norway, which enjoys a stable economy, but Iceland’s situation is beginning to unsettle Norway ever so slightly. I have no great political agenda, but cannot deny that since my arrival, I have constantly identified myself as “Scottish” rather than “British,” and am always careful to address the difference for anybody who struggles to understand. Moves such as Gordon Brown’s last week affirm my decision to do this, with Britain not identified as number one bestie in the European stakes, I’m sure most people would agree. Becoming an international student has absolutely played a part in addressing my national pride in a way that I never imagined, but has also created confusion for me: whilst proud to be Scottish, there are many, many things that I wish that I could change within society at home, and would hate for people to associate with me on the basis of my nationality (this stretches beyond people’s initial drug-andswearing-fuelled connections to the film Trainspotting, by the way). However, with the current instability of more than just finances across the world at the moment, many things are likely to change in the near future, and everything has become impossible to predict. I continue to be a Scottish ERASMUS student until further notice, and this will continue to cause slight problems at parties with our English friend who wishes she could identify herself as British but feels that she can’t once myself and our friend C say Scottish: these are the ridiculously trivial things that I’d identify as the politics of ERASMUS, the little issues that raise their ugly heads frequently, considering that everybody’s second question upon meeting after asking your name is asking where you come from. However, please don’t get me wrong: it’s mid-term now, and things in Oslo are generally looking rosy, hideous finances aside.

I’m writing a bit late this week, it’s Sunday but the internet still isn’t working at Eiffel, I’m still holding out a little hope but it’s not looking good, so I’ll be posting this from the lab again.

After the cheese and wine party last Friday (was that only last week? Time seems to be going strange) the weekend continued in the same vein, no work and lots of socialising. A girly shopping trip to Lille on Saturday with Rachel and Sarah was just what we needed after the night before and we sat outside ‘La Presidente’ café with hot chocolate enjoying the autumnal sunshine.

Sunday we went to the ‘Palais des Beaux Arts’, it was free (the first weekend in the month) so almost every other Erasmus student was there too, a lot of them we knew and it seemed odd to know people in Lille. It’s worth a visit there are a lot of sculptures and paintings but mainly I enjoyed seeing the building, it’s like Beasts castle- maybe I’ve mentioned it before…

We attempted to do some work on the Sunday evening… its very hard to get yourself into work mode because although I’m in lab all day everyday and when I’m not I’m in lectures, it still doesn’t feel like Uni. Not proper Uni, I can’t quite convince myself of how important this year is and subsequently am now building up quite a pile of stuff to do. Add onto that my voluntary move to do a French test (why?) and learn Japanese I’m thinking maybe I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.
Well, I like making things difficult.

Japanese started on Monday in frighteningly fast French, which I mostly understood, the emphasis in the class is equally on written and spoken Japanese; I would choose a language with four alphabets… I really enjoyed it though and will definitely be making a large effort to keep up with both the French and the Japanese. Talking of French, I’m now pretty sure my French teacher hates me, Andy moved to my class this week and she loved him, just to make the difference more obvious! I was politely brushed over again and again; this may be a good thing- less talking, but also less learning.

I think I got a bit further in labs but I sort of feel I’m going backwards as one of my experiments didn’t work, can’t understand this as it worked before, and some of my analysis has been a bit off… I have been feeling a bit ill as well so have put off practical work in favour of writing up and writing a ‘proposition’ for my literature survey, yet again biting off more than I can chew by writing it in French.

On Tuesday we partook of more culture by attending a concert held by the university orchestra in which Sarah was performing, she plays Flute, I thoroughly enjoying it but then again I have the musical prowess of a teaspoon so I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t perfect, besides they played Pirates of the Caribbean, I adore the music so I was happy. Also free wine and food was offered after so we could stand around looking arty and, in my case, pretending to know something about music.

I am learning though- Andy gave me a piano lesson this week, theory (sort of) and all, I don’t think I’m a natural and it takes every ounce of concentration but I enjoyed it and hope to carry on but I haven’t practiced- I hope he doesn’t tell me off…

I got trapped in ‘Le Furet Du Nord’ (bookshop) again, and I only went to the small one at V2 (shopping centre), I only wanted to buy a Japanese book in case I couldn’t keep up with the French but ended up buying a fiction (an English fiction (mainly because it was eight Euros cheaper) book which is bad because when I read I tend to leave reality and get less done than usual.

What this means is that I now have an even bigger pile of work to do, since this weekend I’ve been out with my parents and tonight am hosting a film watching session involving nachos cooked courtesy of my newly acquired (thank you Mum and Dad) microwave and possibly wine…
Oops, work is going to have to wait… ‘Til tomorrow at least; arg another week with more lectures but on the upside I have Japanese again and there will only be one week until half term! Yay.

Oh well here goes, until next time…

Well the weekend did indeed prove to be more exciting than the first week! Four of us made a fairly impromptu decision to go to Germany for three days for Oktoberfest, but when we discovered how expensive it was to get to and stay in Munich during the festival, we decided to go to the smaller, closer, cheaper version in Stuttgart instead! The Cannstatter Volksfest is held in what seems to be a giant car park outside Stuttgart every year and was started by Wilhelm the 1st as a harvest festival to celebrate the end of a severe famine in 1818. Now, though, it's just a giant beer festival, although there is a 24 foot tall totem pole made of fruit to remind everyone of the event's origins!

We had a meeting on Thursday afternoon with the head of the English department to help us organise our timetables, so we arranged to catch the train from Dijon to Strasbourg in the evening. The meeting, of course, lasted longer than we expected it to and we had to make a mad dash for the station, which is about half an hour away from campus - thankfully we had trundled our suitcases along to the meeting, which got us some extremely strange looks from the French students! The trip was fairly uneventful and we got to our hotel in Strasbourg with no problems and spent a rainy evening wandering around in search of a pub. There don't seem to be very many pubs in Strasbourg but we eventually found one called Marco's and had a good evening in the end. The next morning we had a 2 hour TGV trip to Stuttgart where we planned to wander the streets in search of a hotel, because we hadn't managed to find anything online before we went. French train stations are confusing places, but we found the board with our platform number on it and made our way onto the train in good time. We were a bit confused as to why our TGV train wasn't all new and shiny and sleek-looking like the one on the opposite platform, but we assumed that the regular trains would just go faster than usual on a TGV scheduled trip. Nevertheless, we watched the sleek-and-shiny version whip out of the station with some regret, knowing that those versions had buffet carts. We removed our shoes, got our MP3 players out and were settling down for the trip when the tannoy beeped and a tinny, electronic voice announced that were welcome on board this TER service to Bale, calling at pretty much every destination except Stuttgart. At this point, the other passangers were extremely amused to see four panicky, barefoot British girls sprinting off the train, trailing headphones and shoes in their wake, screaming and shrieking and wondering how on earth we could have made such a mistake! It turned out that we had indeed got the right platform when we had looked, a good 8 minutes before the TGV was due to depart, but the platform had been changed at the last minute. 'This is France you know' the man at the information desk told us sternly. In the end, he agreed to put us on the next train to Stuttgart without charging us any extra and, 4 different TER trains and 3.5 hours later, we were there!

In the end, we found a hotel without too much hassle, we simply presented ourselves at the tourist information desk outside the train station and announced that we needed a hotel. The woman on the desk made every effort to comply with all of our requirements (a youth-hostel, or a 1 star hotel in the center of Stuttgart and with easy access to the Ubahn so we could go to the beerfest) but in the end the best she could come up with was a 5 star hotel 40 minutes out of Stuttgart with easy access to the Ubahn. She assured us that we were very lucky to find anything at all because that weekend the city was playing host to the beerfest, an important tennis match and a Champions League football game.

Thanks to the mixup with the trains and the time spent at the tourist office, it was early evening by the time we arrived at the festival. My first impressions were of noise, food-y smells and lots and lots of neon light! The festival is set up a lot like a carnival, with lots of rides, food stalls and picnic benches. There were lots of families and young teenagers about and a really cheery, festive atmosphere. We headed over to smallish beer garden where we purchased our plastic cups of wine (which earned us a dirty look from the barmaid - who drinks wine at a beer festival?!) and sat at one of the picnic benches where we got chatting to some middle-aged German men who wanted to know all about life in the UK. We stayed for a few hours and then went of in search of the party. The Cannstatter Volksfest has seven massive beer tents - each holding around 5000 people, and filled with long wooden tables and benches. Each of them also had a massive queue of people desperate to get in. We merrily pushed our way to the front (surprisingly no one complained, and no one else tried to push in - everyone waited patiently in their place in the queue) and smiled winningly at the security men until they let us in. The tent was huge, noisy, smoky and grubby, there were Germans clad in lederhosen slipping about on the floor, which was covered in spilt beer and ketchup, but the party atmosphere was palpable. Our friends at the beer garden had told us that the Stuttgart beer fest was identical to its more famous twin in Munich, except that it was 'much more German'. This was extremely true. I didn't see anyone else there who wasn't German, but this made us something of a novelty. Everyone wanted to talk to us, to ask why we weren't in Munich, to teach us German words and dance to German folk music with us. After purchasing our Jaegermeister (more German than wine, but still not beer!) we once again defied the stereotype of the British love of queues and rampaged our way to the very front of the tent, next to the stage, where we clambered onto the nearest table and danced to the YMCA. I have to say, Germans have extremely good taste in cheesy English music! Every 15 minutes or so the band would hold up their drinks and sing a song and everyone in the tent would do the same and then toast each other and all drink out of someone else's glass. Unhygenic it may have been, but it was fantastic fun!

We spent two days in Germany, mainly at the festival although we did attempt to do a bit of city-centre sightseeing in the pouring rain. By the time we headed back to Dijon early on Sunday morning we were exhausted and smelling strongly of smoke. Germany hasn't yet adopted the smoking ban and we hadn't packed enough clothes! It was strange to have been away from Dijon, even for a few days, because I still hadn't completely adopted it as home. It felt as though we were coming back from a holiday, except the place we were returning to was just as unfamiliar as the holiday destination had been. A combination of this feeling, exhaustion and stress about not yet having my timetable organised when classes were starting the following day, sent me spiralling into a truly horrible bout of homesickness which lasted a couple of days. I spent my time in floods of tears in my room, frantically searching ryanair's website for the next flights back to Edinburgh and telling myself how much I hated France and what a mistake it had been to come. Then my amazingly amazing best friend made a timely entrance on msn and reminded me of the state she had been in a week or so earlier and of all the words of wisdom I had thrown her way. She came to Europe a week before I did, and told me that I was having the exact same experiences as her, only a week later and that everything would look much sunnier soon. As usual, she was right. I attended my first classes and found them, for the most part, perfectly manageable. I met lots of new people and made a real effort to spend as much time as possible doing new exciting things, or even mundane things, to keep my mind off home and give me other things to think about. And now, thankfully, I feel much better, and slightly guilty for saying mean things about my lovely new home, even if it was only to myself! I've enjoyed my first week of classes so far, although I'm taking quite a few translation classes, which are part of the English as a foreign language course, so I've spent quite a lot of time listening to tutors explain that, in English, you have to write the days of week with a capital letter, and that quotation marks look like this: " ". Some of the classes have been useful though, and I can feel my French, and most of all my confidence in speaking it, improving all the time.

Bon dia a tots! And another one bites the dust (another week, that is!)

Well that was week 4 of my classes, and it was pretty intense. Before leaving Edinburgh, I had to choose the classes which I intended to take here in Barcelona. UPC (the Uni here) recommended that I took 20-25 ECTS credits, but nah, Edinburgh said I needed at least 30. So! I put myself down for 30 credits of Informaticsy things. Then when I arrived, of course I started Catalan Intensive Basic 1... which is finished this coming Friday, and I'm also down for Catalan Basic 2. To cut a long story short, this semester I would be ending up with 38 credits.

Of course, my timetable sucks big-time. I have two 11-hour days, two of the days start at 8am, a clash between two subjects , and solid blocks of 6,7 and 8 hours of classes with no breaks. I found last week, uni-wise, to be extremely tough going. I had an assignment which I was really difficult because in the lab session I fell behind everyone else trying to make sense of the technical mumbo jumbo in Catalan lying in front of me.

My Peripherals and Interfaces lab on Wednesday was also really difficult because of the Catalan (for some reason I'm fine with lectures in Catalan... I just get completely lost in the labs). On Wednesday night while still in classes at about 8.45pm I suddenly realised... WHY THE HELL AM I STILL HERE?!?

So I made the decision to get rid of one course... and I'll still be left with slightly more credits than I need anyway. Especially since my grades here won't count towards my degree classification, this wasn't a hard decision!

So, I emailed Edinburgh to see what they said... yes, no problem, go for it.
Emailed UPC to get taken off the list for PI; no, sorry, you cannot change your Matrícula after week one. WHAT?!?!?! Anyway after a bit of persuasion they have made an exception or something and have taken me out of the course.

If anyone reading this is coming to the UPC ? it's a great university but beware! Don't take on too much work because you might not be able to get rid of it!

There is light at the end of the tunnel though, this coming Friday I'll be finished the intensive Catalan and PI will be gone, so things should hopefully be more manageable.

Aside from all this university nonsense, what else have I been up to? Hmm...

On Tuesday night I went to a club called Sidecar with a bunch of Spaniards from my residence for an Anti-Karaoke night. It was not what I expected at all (for example, there were no drunken renditions of Angels, Brown Eyed Girl,or Bohemian Rhapsody. Here's a wee video to give you an idea..

So yeah, that was fun. Less fun, on Wednesday I went to get my infamous NIE/DNI number (Número de Identidad de Extranjero). As advised, I got up early and went and queued outside the police station for an hour before it opened... what they say is true, it is a complete performance from start to finish. Basically it took me from 8am to 12 noon to get a print-out with a number on it... waiting in this queue, going to another police station, trying to find a bank which will let me pay the fee, going back, queueing again. But, it's done now, and I met some nice people waiting in line too! My advice ? make this priority number one, get it out of the way as soon as you arrive in Barcelona... you won't regret it.

On Friday I went out for dinner to an all you can eat buffet place, but I didn't "salir de marcha" for a change, because on Saturday morning I was catching the Renfe to Port Aventuras!

Port Aventuras, a.k.a Universal Mediterranean (where the Halloween festivities have already started!) Having been to Universal in Florida, Port Aventuras wasn't quite as good. It was more like Alton Towers (not that there's anything wrong with Alton Towers!). Anyway, really fun day! They have some awesome rides, including Furius Baco which goes from 0 to 135km h-1 in 3 seconds.

On Sunday I went to the cinema to see a pelí... "Reflejos." I think the English version is called Mirrors, but, being in Spain, I wouldn't know! As usual with this type of movie, I jamp* out of my seat like a million times, but it was a good laugh! Here's the trailer: (*Yes, I know jamp isn't a word.)

Looking back at when I went to see Ché, El Argentino back in Orientation Week, I understood about 600% more of the Spanish in Reflejos... which is a good feeling! I pretty much understood the lot, yay. I must be making progress. Well, I am. Still not fluent though, but patience laddy!

Afterwards we went to a Pizza Fiore for tea, and I must say... YUM. I don't think I ever want to go to Pizza Hut ever again!

Anyway that's it for today!

If someone were to ask me about the differences between the University of Edinburgh and the University of British Columbia they would probably regret it as I launch in to an excessively long tirade.  However, I think one of the first things I would mention is the fact that UBC is a campus university.  The campus does have a lot to offer, for example, on Wednesday, Mobile (a Canadian rock band from Montréal) were playing on one of the fields as part of a tour sponsored by MTV and one of the big mobile phone networks.  With the concert being at 4pm in the afternoon, attendance seemed to be mostly made up of bemused people heading to the buses rather than the rock fans of UBC but it was certainly an entertaining event.  These sorts of things, combined with the multiple shops, pubs, cafes etc means you don’t really need to leave campus too frequently.  However, I find it bizarre that an entire week can go by without having crossed the boundary line, and so when it comes to the weekends it then seems imperative that you venture in to the outside world.

This weekend I took the venturing a step further and joined the UBC Varsity Outdoors Club (VOC) on a kayaking trip up the Indian Arm fjord.  So, on Friday afternoon my backpack and I trekked in the pouring rain to catch the bus to Deep Cove, our starting point for the trip.  The delightful weather seemed to be doing its best to stop the trip and when we arrived at the kayak rental shop it became apparent that any possibility of taking boats out that day were pretty much non-existent.  Whitecaps plus a group of relatively inexperienced kayakers is a poor combination.  Luckily a member of the group had some very well placed parents living nearby so the trip turned in to an extreme camping experience which consisted of cooking in their backyard, wine and cards, and sleeping on the floor with a roof over our heads….. So not very extreme at all!  On Saturday morning we decided to give the kayaking another shot, this time with a rather higher success rate. 

The Indian Arm Provincial Park is a beautiful part of North Vancouver, the fjord has steep, densely forested sides which come down to the water’s edge and there are waterfalls and seals a-plenty.  This makes paddling up the inlet a fantastic experience - regardless of the excessive amount of water falling from the sky!  Towards the end of the day we found ourselves needing to get out of the way of the stormy weather pretty pronto.  We managed to find an area to camp just behind a pebble beach which had a derelict cabin.  Derelict translating to damp, stinky and covered in glass from the smashed in windows…..  Sounds nice eh?! Actually it was pretty luxurious in comparison to what might have been.  As the high winds and torrential rain continued we ate our yummy camp food and settled down for an evening of chatting and singing random songs with the aid of the VOC songbook.  Sunday morning we awoke to find the storm had passed leaving glass-like water and we packed up and set off back to Deep Cove. 

Feeling more confident of our paddling skills and in the absence of rain we felt it was still necessary to be soaked by the end of the day.  We went about achieving this using the water pumps that each kayak is equipped with as weaponry against each other.  Very entertaining and leaving us all looked slightly drowned rat –ish, especially as the rain chose to join in the fun and games as we arrived at our destination.  All in all it was a brilliant weekend; I met some really lovely new people who I hope to see more of round campfires and campus. 

I returned to UBC soggy and in serious need of a shower and a long sleep.  All those things accomplished I am now ready for the week ahead which sadly encompasses a lot of work that needs doing as the mid-term exam and essay season approaches!

Yet another week of activity after event after deadline after party, and I find myself sitting on my bed listening to the BBC From Our Own Correspondent podcast. Yesterday, one of my friends told me that I was beginning to sound American – so I’m listening to the most English thing that I can get hold of here – thank God for iTunes.

The main excitement for me this week was that on Friday I trekked into deepest Philadelphian suburbia to be one of the few thousand that Barack Obama would be addressing. Despite the early morning start, the lack of food, and not really knowing where we were going or how to get there, I ended up in a high school stadium with three of my friends, a handful of Pennsylvania political movers and shakers, Obama, and three thousand other people. And I was blown away.

If you’ve come here for the incisive and bipartisan political commentary, you should really find another blog since this one is about my experiences at an American liberal arts college. Having seen very few famous people in real life, being barely twelve feet from Obama himself was an awesome experience solely in that regard. Never mind the fact that he seems to be the first American politico with policies that even an avowedly liberal quasi-European (me) can agree with, or that listening to him speak makes me want to go out and change the world, or that he seems to have a very real (I’m touching as much wood as I can get my hands on) possibility of winning the American Presidency. Even after the speeches by local and state politicians had sufficiently fired-up the crowd, and the musical interlude had got us chanting and dancing, and the anticipation had become frantic, once Obama appeared we fell silent and clung to his every word.

Enough mawkishness for now – I am British after all, and I did promise last week to tell you all about the Screw Your Roommate Dance. I got screwed, as did everyone who wanted to be. Fear not, this is not sexual, it is merely the act of being set up with someone you don’t know by a mutual third party who then gives each person a line which is then read out in front of an audience of all those being screwed, and then the person with the other half of the line jumps up and shouts out their line, thereby uniting the screw couple into one awkward entity which then goes to dinner together. Complex? Sort of. Horrendously awkward? Fairly. Lots of fun for everyone watching? Of course.

My favourite part was when one guy forgot the words to his line, and stood stumbling over the words “What what in the butt”, whilst his screw date tried to save him from embarrassment by shouting out a line unprintable here, which he steadfastly ignored in his effort to complete his lyric. Dinner with my screw date was fine as a big group of us went out together, and we then repaired to a party where we all had a riotous time. Haverford may make us work our arses off, but they think up some pretty ingenious ways for us to have fun, too.

Next week is my Fall Break (half term – how quaint!), and I aim on being in Washington DC, Baltimore and NYC, so you may have to wait for your weekly dose of slightly confused ramblings on the American college experience. Ciao for now.

This week marked my return to Edinburgh, and now I'm back in Helsinki I can't stop myself from thinking about home. I was only there for four days meaning as soon as you've got yourself settled its time to say goodbye again. And I hate goodbyes so subsequently spent my last few hours in a mess of tears and cursing myself for being such a traveller. Its times like these when I wish I had a simple life with a desire to stay in the same place for longer than a few months. In the last year I've lived in the USA for 4 months (summer 07), Edinburgh for second year, Mongolia for 4 months (summer 08) and now I'm in Helsinki.
It also made me realise that Edinburgh is still happening, and I am not part of it. When I'm in Helsinki I think "wow, its amazing here, I love it, I'm so glad that I came" and forget that the Edinburgh world is still happening, but now I've been back I've seen all my friends in 3rd year and being president/other high up committee members in various societies and now I'd really like to be part of all of that too!

Its now week 6 in Helsinki, and I have an essay deadline for tomorrow. I've not really started it yet and its 7.30pm but I'm really not worried about it, unlike Edinburgh where I stress out like crazy in the last evening. Its because I've already sumbmitted around 4000 words on the topic in my weekly reflection papers on the readings, and I only need to write 2500 for the essay. These reflection papers have been marked and commented upon so I will just use them and add to it. I already have a basic idea of what I am doing, I just need to string it all together.

Today I decided to leave my Finnish class (yes, even though it does have a good teacher and I only joined last week after leaving my 1st class) as I have realised I don't actually have any desire to learn Finnish. It feels as though I am going to classes as I feel obligated to due to being in Finland and that I am doing it because I feel I should rather than because I want to do it. Its fine at the moment as I only have 3 classes, but in 2 weeks time I am starting another 3 and I'd rather concentrate on them than feel obliged to do Finnish. I can learn Mongolian here, which starts in October, and I'd much rather continue with that as I want to go back in the summer and do my anthropology dissertation work there. I'm actually interested in Mongolian, which is a better place to be in than I am with Finnish. If the Finnish class was going to teach me anything useful then I'd stay, but I can not think of a situation where I am going to have to ask someone when their birthday is and what their favourite subject at university is... I'm no longer twelve years old! If we were doing questions you get asked in shops, food names, transport problems and things which had an actual relation to my life in Helsinki I'd be much more up for learning the language.
I now have to email the teacher and explain that I'm leaving (scary!) and tell myself that I'm not just being the stupid Brit abroad who can't speak the language. I have my reasons!

This week it is international week in the university. I was supposed to go and represent Edinburgh at an Erasmus meeting today, but um, I kind of fell asleep (got back at 2am last night and was up at 8 for classes) and didn't end up going. Hopefully Helsinki students will still come to Edinburgh next year even through my failure to jazz the university up for them! There are a few interesting things happening, but it all feels a little fake to be honest. At the moment there is a huge argument happening between HYY (Helsinki University Students Union) and the International student societies and reprepsentative boards. Basically, here, the international students have to make their own societies and events as the general ones opperate all in Finnish and aren't really accessible, or bothered, about attracting international students. So there are a few such as the debates society and international soc, who cater for us. Now, this is when it becomes very EUSA-y ... last week room allocations for the year were dolled out, and although the international groups need a big room for their activities they were given a tiny one because one of the bigger Finnish run societies complained and has this group has more power within HYY, they won. And what has followed is a massive argument via email which fills my inbox every day. It all sounds slightly petty and VERY like EUSA stuff at Edinburgh. So now HYY has organised this international students week to show us how valued and amazing we are within the university. Great.

One of the biggest things happening this week is the final game of the group stages for our very own Erasmus FC. This is completely unrelated to the international week, by the way. The boys are utterley convinced they will win the leauge even though they have lost one game out of three, and still have a long way to go to reach the final. If they draw or win tomorrow, they will be in the quater final stages... which they clearly will given that they are on a par with Real Madrid and Chelsea, skills wise, apparently. I really hope they win as otherwise we will never hear the end of it, but then, we never hear the end of it if they do win either so its Catch 22. It is cool having an 'erasmus' thing as it means we all have something to share and get excited about, as the Finnish blocks in our building all have various Finnish things to do and we're stuck on our own in block C trying to create entertainment in our little community. Actually thats another thing which is annoying, in my accommodation there are 4 blocks. But all of the exchange students are in C block, meaning we don't actually get to see or communicate with the Finns in blocks A, B and D as the blocks are kind of like houses in Pollock thus totally seperate to each other.

A fun fair came to Helsinki this week. It was opperated by a very vocal, fat, English man --- "roll up ladies and gents, come n pay your money, only 1 euro a go, 1 euro a go to win some dead good prizes" --- and we wonder why the Europeans think we're idiots.

I should really start my essay now!

Wow, so this week has passed by in a complete blur, but definitely a very happy one!

Last sunday's erasmus night at Nelson's bar saw the start of a week of erasmus parties and discovering our local - Charie P's, an irish pub across the road from halls which plays fantastic music (the entire pub was staring at us as we gave a very loud and bouncy rendition of 500 miles on thursday night), has a great, studenty atmosphere and real irish barmen who we made friends with and consequently ended up with free drinks! Other nights out included Erasmus Karaoke and an outing to a tiny wine cellar in Stammersdorf (half an hour from the centre of vienna by tram, or 'bim' as the locals call it) both of which were good nights.

Other than that this week has been fairly quiet in comparison to the weeks before it. Or perhaps not quieter, just a bit calmer. I have finally managed to sign up for classes after a 5 hour wait in a queue on monday although I still don't have a student id card, a semester ticket for public transport (something I have discovered would be handy) or a bank card; without these things I cannot: take books out of the library, print anything off, wash my clothes (luckily I have borrowed my friend's card to do some washing) or collect my really awesome free gift from the University (an official uni wien bag!) So hopefully after tomorrow I will have all of these things, although I seem to have said that a lot recently.

Last wednesday was supposed to be my first class but the tutor didn't show up and so the class (Einfuehrung in die Lyrikanalyse) was cancelled. I atleast now know that the class is small (only 10-12 people) and that there are two other erasmus students in it. Tomorrow is my first lecture and I'm looking forward to finally getting started on some classes after an amazingly long summer holiday (exactly 5 months!)

Saturday night was the annual 'Lange Nacht der Museen' where every museum in Vienna (and I think nationwide) is open until 1 am, you buy a ticket for 11 Euros and it lets you in to all of them. I went along with a big group of friends and so it was really banterful. We started off in the interactive Haus der Muzik where you can conduct an orchestra and experience what it's like to be inside the womb (strange, that's all I'll say!). We then moved on to the slightly more grown-up Naturhistorisches Museen and Kunsthistorischesmuseen; the buildings themselves were an attraction and there was so much to see in both of them! We spent most of our time in the Naturhistorischesmuseen but still didn't manage to see everything and then went to the Egyptian, Roman and Greek exhibitions in the Kunsthistorischesmuseen after a well deserved coffee break! It was an amazing atmosphere with so many people there and it was good to do it all with friends - I definitely think I'll be back to all three museums at some point this year.

This week I have also booked flights to visit my best friend in France at the end of the month and I really can't wait! Even though I've really settled in here and met some really awesome friends, I still really miss my Edinburgh friends and my family - so it'll be so cool to catch up with Hannah. A group of us have also decided to take a trip to Prague in November since it's only 6 hours on the train and we can spend a long weekend there. There's so much to experience this year and I want to do it all, I just hope my funds will stretch far enough!

So this week I've really started to feel at home here - I no longer need to take my map with me every time I step out the door; it's so much easier to just laugh about the crazy admin system when you know that everyone is going through the same thing, and even though I've been struck by the dreaded freshers' flu there are movie nights, hot chocolate and mutual sympathy with new friends to cheer you up!

So until next week...
Ciao!

Firstly, apologies for this hiatus in blogging efforts!

Things have been busy here for the past while: academic deadlines creeping up slowly, various social ventures to look forward to, and the cold weather becoming a daily feature! This morning whilst taking a walk around Sognsvann lake I noticed the first frosty patches underfoot, and the evenings are crystal clear, the cold is cutting! It's beautiful though; last week or so a few of us ate together and then went up to the same lake around 9.30pm, it was so black and dark, but the skies were amazingly clear, I have never seen so many stars in my life! We all froze to death lying on the ground and looking up at the sky for goodness knows how long, it was incredible to see such a clear view of the night sky, satellites, shooting stars and all.

Anyway, asides from the inevitable cold creeping up on Oslo and my previously untapped love for nature somehow making its way into the world (entirely unexpected trust me), things have been calm whilst also being busy, as silly as that sounds. The academic term is in full swing here, and we are half way through semester, unlike many of the universities in Europe! As such, I have important deadlines looming: two of my subjects require large essays which will be graded as a very simple pass or fail, and which I am required to pass before I can take the end of term exam. I have been working on these slowly, hoping that it really does pay off to begin these things well in advance. I have also found a lovely Norwegian friend who is willing to reprimand every grammatical error that I make, which despite sounding like a horrific basis for a friendship, is exactly what I need.

We have planned a November trip to Streptokåken hytta: a hyttetur is a Norwegian institution! It is almost impossible to explain, but almost every Norwegian family owns a second home, most often situated in the heart of nature somewhere, perhaps by a fjord, in the grandeur of the mountains, etc etc (they really don't do these things by halves). They are most often very simple, some without running water or electricity, and families take every possible opportunity to spend long weekends and often weeks on end during the summer months staying in their hytta together. The University of Oslo own at least one large hytte for every faculty in the institution, and we will be renting the Veterinary faculties hytte in November for a ridiculously good price. There are at least 10 of us heading out, including a friend who studies in the Swedish department who will be traveling to Oslo from Uppsala, and I can’t imagine that we will be having anything other than an almost ridiculously typically Norwegian weekend together in the middle of a freezing cold forest, with a massive log fire and lots of good food, drink and company! We are also already having to think about renting another for next semester when the snow comes, as the competition is fierce; these weekends are incredibly popular. A weekend of snow and skiing with new good friends would be the perfect thing to look forward to returning for next semester! And rather scarily, next semester is already on my mind a lot when i realise how quickly this semester is flying by. I have endless decisions to make concerning subjects for both my time here and my final year in Edinburgh, and it almost feels like thousands of things that I want to experience before returning home. I suppose these thoughts should motivate me, rather than depressing me slowly, ha ha.

Oh, and last but not least, rather importantly I have now changed my University degree: having previously been a Joint Honours student in English Literature and Norwegian, I have decided to go ahead and pursue Scandinavian Studies as a Single Honours degree. My so-far short ERASMUS experience has been the best thing to ever happen to my social and academic life, and my interests are far and wide when it concerns this area of the world and all it has to offer (barf, I know, how overly keen of me). Truthfully, the decision almost made itself.

Saturday morning again- this is a tradition in the making, I can tell. I’m still in bed in my new studio enjoying the space and the shower with actual taps rather than a push button. I’m also somewhat worse for wear after last night.

This week has been strange, I feel like I have just arrived again but this time it as more successful. Last weekend was wonderful, the weather was amazing; so sunny and warm (for Lille- renowned for its constant cloud cover, just like Edinburgh) and I spent the entire weekend enjoying it and completely relaxing for the first time. I sat outside whilst my clothes were in the laverie and just enjoyed the feel of the sun on my face.

But as always the weekend was far too short- I had to sort out all of the admin. for my move and just like before I was shunted from pillar to post concerned about the accuracy of my French; as a result of this I wasn’t in labs as much as usual, and it was useful to only have two lectures.

Labs are going much, much better; I still sometimes feel on edge and the lab itself is disturbingly quiet and sometimes people come and talk at me and I panic wondering if I understood correctly and then worrying about what they told me I would be doing. Although this week Lydie- my ‘maitre de stage’ (tutor)- said that I was doing alright so that cheered me up and I managed to collect dry solvent from a big scary machine (and the fact the instructions are written clearly on the front does not detract from my happiness.)

I have been thinking a lot about the work I have to do for Edinburgh this week; the literature survey and the essays, I know there will be a lot of reading for both but I’m excited about the literature survey because I might not have to do it on my project here, I would like to look into drug development for mental illness and am hoping it might be possible.

So, I moved into Gustav Eiffel on Wednesday with the help of Rachel and Andy (my new neighbours) and Sarah and Rob. They all came gallantly to my rescue and helped me cart all my stuff across campus in two Auchan trolleys, feeling very stupid I hasten to add, and running up and down stairs was tiring. The glass of wine (okay bottle-[alright bottles]) was well deserved although when I went to sleep I felt like I was in a bric-a-brac shop having to climb to my bed through the stuff that had just been lumped everywhere.

It feels like I’m back to square one though, needing to buy even more things for my room.

French classes started again yesterday, it made me realise that I actually have improved since I arrived. Not with grammar but the way I speak is more natural, more colloquialisms and not worrying as much about saying the wrong thing but I don’t think the teacher likes me very much. She asked everyone else loads of questions but only asked me one in the whole three hours.

We, I say we, I mean Rachel and Andy really (I let my room out to be the cloakroom) had a cheese and wine party- it had to be done, we’re in France after all! I got very confused about what language to speak after a few glasses and even came out with some Russian which the Czech people understood. Most people speak very good English, which makes me feel wholly inadequate but it is odd to hear yourself say something in French when you don’t expect to.

Anyway, it’s the weekend again, I think my Japanese class starts this week but I don’t know where, Andy agreed to give me piano lessons which he may live to regret but I’m excited about that too. I want to try to get a topic for my literature survey this week and my parents are here next weekend so it should be a busy week. Hopefully not as stressful though.

(The title is just because tea and biscuits is the best combination and no matter how many French things I adopt it can never be replaced. The stereotype is actually, quite shockingly, true…)

Until next time….

Thank Goodness the lab has the internet...

Life is so busy here! Just when I think being away from my crazy life at Edinburgh will give me a relaxing university life here at Miami, freshers week ended and my week of auditions began. Those of you who know me well will understand that I am what I like to call a ‘compulsive applier’, meaning something like the freshers fair is a complete nightmare for me. I find it very hard to say no to people, and so when I’m surrounded by societies all dying for my contact details and offering freebies in return, I completely cave under the pressure.

Last year in Edinburgh I spent almost an hour signing up to societies and ended up being involved in several sports teams and 3 drama productions in my first term – a total of almost 27 hours rehearsing in my spare time outside of my academic life! Therefore, as I headed over to the Miami freshers fair, I had a steely resolve that I would be picky this year. Holding on firmly to my roommates, I pushed through the thousands of freshman to find that not only were there more societies than Edinburgh, the fair was more than triple the size and freebies extended to personal electronic equipment rather than the odd pen or notebook that Scotland offered me. Needless to say, I lost my roommates almost immediately and only emerged, slightly dazed, after 3 hours (!) of saying yes to everyone I met. I’m ashamed to say I have a slight memory block at this point (my mind sometimes forgets traumatic experiences) as to which societies exactly I signed up for, but as I searched through my 3 huge bags of free food and stationary later that evening I was somewhat surprised to find a Miami GAY AND PROUD mug that had obviously been thrust into my trembling hands. I sheepishly blocked their incessant messaging from my already overflowing email inbox, although I do admit that I love the mug!

However, I digress from the point at hand. People were always telling me before I came here that things in the USA would be BIG – but I never really thought about it until I emerged from that traumatic freshers fair. The cars are huge, the buildings are massive, the highways are ridiculously wide and the people – well, I’ll save that for my next blog; keep tuning in!

As I mentioned in my introduction, I love to dance – any form, but especially ballet, jazz and gymnastic dance – and so I was especially excited to sign up for the cheerleading and dance teams. Although I like to pretend that I’m British and proud of it, I’m ashamed to say that there has always been a small screaming scantily clad girl with pom poms lurking inside me, and that girl was pushing to get out. Miami has several dance teams, including the cheerleaders that perform at football games; dance competition teams that travel to external championships and hip hop dance teams that perform around campus. All these societies raped me of my contact details at the freshers fair, and so it was with great excitement that I signed up for audition times…

…Great excitement which faded rapidly as I arrived at the gym and was immediately surrounded by tanned, flexible, petite dancers. I don’t know if dancing is compulsory for USA high schools, but it really seemed as if every girl I had met danced to the same, and mostly better, standard than me – who has been lucky enough to have extra curricular dance lessons for 17 years (Thank you parents!) Unlike the UK based dance teams I’ve been part of, showing your midriff during tryouts were compulsory for all wannabe cheerleaders, as was an advanced technique in gymnastic tumbling. All romantic notions stemmed from the film ‘Bring It On’ went down the drain pretty suddenly and my week of auditions gave my self-esteem quite a knock! However, I was delighted to be chosen for the Miami cheer dance competition team – ‘Miami Motion’, whose outfit was by far the cutest and whose dances seemed slightly less provocative, thank heavens. I’ll tell you more about how the team goes as we begin practising!

I have too much more to say, but I’ll save it for now. Do keep in touch and keep commenting!

A rather tired (but thinner and fitter) Kate x

Byron Bay is Wicked and Finding Nemo

Being a science student at Edinburgh has meant I’ve never had reading week off so ‘mid-semester’, or ‘spring-break’ as all the American’s call it has been an amazing novelty to me! I did two trips; Firstly a road-trip to Byron Bay in ‘Wicked Campers’ and then a marine biology field trip to Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

Six of us hired two ‘Wicked Campers’ www.wickedcampers.com.au for five days and drove down to Byron Bay, a cool hippy town on the coast a few hours south of Brisbane. It really was everything we expected; a totally chilled out town with beautiful beaches and national parks. It was my friends 21st birthday which was the main reason behind hiring the vans and everything about it was epic!

The Wicked Vans fit three people in the front when you’re driving and the back has a table and seating during the day and turns into a massive bed at night. They’re pimped out, covered in graffiti and each one has a totally different design; we had ‘BB King’ :

which was sooooo random but the design was really cool haha! We bought Walkie Talkies to communicate between vans which came in really useful when we were navigating our way around and to play games between vans on the freeway.

The road trip itself was so much fun and we arrived at night and ended up camping on a cliff-face looking out onto the bay on the first night. We pretty much chilled out on the amazing beaches all day, went surfing, cooked on the beachside BBQs (a brilliant feature of Aussie beaches), and then drank and socialised round our cooking-stove-fire at night. We stayed in a campsite for two nights so we could get hot water and other than that parked on the cliff-face under the stars. The whole trip was amazing … it was really cool to cook for ourselves and have the freedom of having a car. The novelty provided endless amusement and luckily they were really easy to drive. There was a surprising amount of space in the back but it got so incredibly hot in the mornings and forced us to wake up at 8am everyday due to the immense heat inside the vans!

I can’t really get over how much fun we had … it was really cheap too. It cost about £70 per person for 5 days in the vans and then about another £40 for petrol, food and campsites. Staying in hostels would have been at least £10-£15 a night and then we would have had to pay quite a bit to get there and wouldn’t have been able to get to the good beaches without a car. Here's a picture of our favourite beach where we spent most of our time:

The comedy the vans provided made it money well spent without a doubt- I can’t wait for the next roadtrip!

The second part of my mid-semester was a 5 day field-trip to ‘Heron Island’, a tiny island on the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. The island is soooo small, you can walk round the circumference in 20 minutes! It was really stunning – the water was crystal clear, a hundred shades of blue with white sands. There’s only a research centre and a 5-star resort on the island so it’s really empty and it really felt like we were on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, especially because there was no mobile phone reception! This is me jumping about:

Luckily we didn’t have to do that much research, the course is a bit of a joke to be honest – it’s full of International Students who want to do this field trip. There’s not even one Australian in the class. We did a project on damsel fish and their behavioural responses when we placed a mirror in front of their coral home. We were trying to see if they attacked their reflection in the mirror (indicating strong territorial behaviour) or whether they didn’t care at all. It was pretty fun snorkelling around and duck diving to record data, especially since some of the fish went mental and repeatedly attacked the mirror.

Apart from that, we had a lot of free time to chill out on our deserted island and snorkel. The research station organised boats to take us out to some great reef areas and we snorkelled with sharks, stingrays, masssssssive turtles and thousands of fish. I was pretty happy because I found Nemo living in his anemone with his dad. There were some really impressive coral formations and really beautiful fish. We saw lots of sharks – white tips, black tips, reef sharks, carpet sharks and one of the groups snorkelled above a tiger shark, the most aggressive shark predator! Our tutors said they’d never seen one before so they were really lucky/unlucky depending on the way you look at it! It was pretty crazy because I started craving shark sightings by the end of it!

They arranged a night snorkel for us too which was really incredible. We went out in groups of 8 with torches. It was like a rave out in the ocean because we all had glow sticks attached to our snorkels so they could keep track of us! The water wasn’t that cold and it was amazing being under the stars – which were out of this world by the way. It was pretty scary at night and we saw a carpet shark camouflaged against a boat wreck which was terrifying because it eyes glowed and you could see it’s hooked teeth! We saw some absolutely huge turtles too which were amazing. On the last day I got up at 5am for the sunrise and went for an early morning snorkel which was the most incredible one of the week. The water was totally still and there were only five of us in the water so the fish were really chilled out and there were loads of them swimming about. When the light hit the water the colours were amazing and it was gorgeous.

The evenings were fun-filled with loads of beach parties and drinking games. It was cool to meet new people from all over the world and I made some really good friends. The middle of the island was one big tropical forest so we would go for late night walks on the trails and get freaked out by the immense numbers of birds around the place.
All in all, the past 10 days have really been immense. This country has so much to offer, it’s great to explore without time constraints. Despite having the best time, it was really nice to come back to college – I was starting to miss everyone! This week filled with far to much work – I have two assignments and one exam. Better get started!

The past few weeks have mainly consisted of lots of uni work and lots of uni nights out so I’ve been getting a real feel for student life over here. This has led me to reflect in some detail on what it means to be a student in Australia.

Despite spending a year abroad here at University, my experiences are very different from the Aussies that are just doing their normal thing.

Firstly, it’s not common to move away from home for University like it is back in the UK. I’m living in a college on campus which is a pretty similar experience to the first year of Uni in Edinburgh but College Life is a lot more structured than Pollock Halls and it has more of a family feel to it as everyone’s really close. There are only 10 colleges on campus, and there are about 200-350 students living in each one. Since it’s not common to move away from home for Uni, the people at college are mostly from small towns in random places that don’t have a University near them. Also, since Aus is a relatively new country, especially in comparison with the UK, Universities over here don’t really have rankings like we do back home so you don’t move away to a ‘better’ school and there’s no above-par academic schools like Oxbridge or Edinburgh 

Since most people live at home with their parents, they tend to stay friends with their mates from high school and don’t have a separate divide from home/uni like we do in the UK. Since I live in a college, I don’t see this side of Australian student culture but you can feel the differences around campus during the week in lectures. These differences are pretty interesting but as an International Student it’s even more different. We integrate pretty well with the Australians at college but we have formed our own groups because we all go travelling at weekends and in school breaks and bond quite a bit then.

I’m still trying to make the most out of college as possible. The soccer season for the girls has just finished – we came joint second overall in the inter-collegiate league which was pretty cool since we weren’t taking it that seriously. We had two matches on the last day which was painful and it was so hot but we won against the most annoying all-girls college so we were pretty stoked. The boys won the overall football cup which was really impressive because they came out of the season totally undefeated. It was highly down to them having four amazing Brits on the team, including one of the Edinburgh First Team boys who’s on exchange out here with me, so that was pretty cool! Now that’s over, I’ve been looking to other activities to fill my time … I doing ‘Dancefest’ which is another inter-collegiate competition where each college does a mini dance show. Rehearsals are going pretty well so I think it’s going to be a success! The weather’s been getting really hot recently too so we’ve been playing quite a bit of Ultimate Frisbee outside in the afternoons with a bunch of people from college which is sweet! There’s a big inter-college ball coming up soon which should be a lot of fun and then my college have a boat cruise down the Brisbane River arranged for a few weeks time too.

Then it came, the recess week which marked the quarter point of the way through this random year abroad along with another milestone, oh yes, the big 2-1. I think birthdays are tough generally, unless you’re having a child-like birthday party complete with sugary foods, cream cakes and the resident clown, you are just shown that another year has passed and are left with a million questions as to what happened to it. Knowing that I was to spend this specific birthday in Singapore felt like the anti-climatic feeling one gets with new years and such dates wouldn’t matter; I was in Asia! Perfect for me even more, was the fact that my very birthday coincided with the start of recess week and subsequently my planned trip to Borneo.

Hitting the northern Sabah region of Borneo was a last minute decision as plans for Cambodia fell through and the less adventurous exchange students opted for beach hopping in Bali. Borneo, it just sounds so exotic, a place where only David Attenborough would go and hold big bugs and hug orangutans. We took a bus into Malaysia and from Johor Bahru took a flight to the third largest island in the world, Borneo. Needless to say, lack of organisation and a late night led us to stand at the immigration crew for two hours while the least pushy of our crew managed to arrive at the airport three minutes before the check-in deck closed spurred on by Malaysians whooping. Once the drama had settled an uneventful flight followed, we landed in Borneo and I was old. I know, 21 is the start of life, it’s a great age, its where all the great stuff happens, but I didn’t feel 21, I was just about getting used to no longer being a teenager and then bang I’m a proper adult. Nothing I’ll ever admit to again. Anyway my mind was briskly taken off such things as we ventured on canopy walks in beautiful jungles seeing pitcher plants and the famous rafflesia, a plant which eats anything and as a consequence smells like rotting human flesh. A nature walk brought about lots of monkeys, an eagle and a very fat orangutan called Vicki. She seemed content as the American tourists fed her with bananas and blinded her with their SLR flashes. I personally got the feeling she didn’t like me, but the guard told me her sombre expression was indifference.

Then came the biggest challenge of my new found adulthood; climbing mount Kinabalu. 20th highest peak in the world, tallest in Malaysia, 4095m above sea level, half the size of Everest, all these facts left me shaking in my cheap trainers I had bought especially for the hike. We began the climb midday and a few vertical inclines later, all were exhausted but mustered on due to our 4ft guide’s enthusiasm, this was his 100th climb. About 7km up we stayed in a mountain lodge, all a bit delirious and seriously underprepared for how cold it would be. After purchasing some gloves, hats, scarves – all things we’d never use again in Asia we made our move at 2am in order to reach the summit for sunrise.

Now, I’m a pretty optimistic kind of girl, but as I couldn’t feel my legs or hands and as I was pretty much sleep walking I was left thinking to myself ‘what kind of holiday is this?’. The last half an hour was the worst, the climb was intense and we were to hoist ourselves up by a rope in the complete dark. Hitting the peak was incredible for the sense of achievement but it was the epic view, watching the stars fade and the sunrise that will stay with me for a while. Pretty much; indescribable. We marched down like champions and our reward of a buffet eagerly awaited us. After gobbling down a few plates of banana bread, fish and rice we proceeded back to the main town of Kota Kinabalu to revel in our glory. The bed, the linen, the hostel all felt like paradise and sleep was beautiful and perfect. However, midway through this gorgeous sleep I was awoken by Simon who told me he’d thrown up everywhere and needed some assistance. I went to help, only to realise my stomach was trying to tell me something too. Two hours later with my head still firmly perched on a toilet seat, we realised that food poisoning had become us.

A few runs to the bathroom and a lot of Imodium later, we got ready to fly back home. The taxi ride to halls was the most interesting, as I suddenly felt like I was returning ‘home’. Granted, my home looked like some tacky resort and my room had the slowest ceiling fan known to man, but it was mine and I couldn’t wait to get back. Realising that you’ve adapted and understanding how easy it was to become used to things filled me with some notion of pride. I’d turned 21 in Borneo, I was home and I still had 2 days left of recess week for the Formula one; bring it on Everest!

One month down, seven to go……. As of tomorrow I will have been a Vancouver resident and student for one month exactly which has somewhat taken me by surprise.  I still feel as if I’m settling in and getting to grips with all that this place has to offer.  For example today I went to my first rugby training with the UBC Thunderbirds and on Thursday I’ll be at the new members meeting for the Varsity Outdoors Club.  So I guess in some ways it seems like I’ve got off to a pretty slow start. 

Academically, this is definitely not the case, in the last week I’ve had three exams, one assignment and an assessed tutorial.  The assessment has given me a chance to see how my grades might compare between here and back in Edinburgh, so when I was initially delighted to see 73% on one of my papers (an A grade back in the world of Kings Buildings and George Square) I later learned that this translates to a measly B minus on the UBC campus.  Ultimately this year is all about passing; the grades don’t count towards my degree classification so all the pressure rests on fourth year.  Realistically I really need to get myself in to a working frame of mind or next year will be a disaster!

Anyway, back to more current events!  Highlights of the last week include spotting my first Canadian celebrity.  Dion, (Stéphane not Celine!) the Liberal party leader for Canada interrupted my cocktail drinking in a bar on campus to make a grand entrance after he had made an appearance at one of the university theatres as part of his campaign trail.  There is a general election on October 14^th so in theory I may have seen the future prime minister!  By all accounts Vancouver has its fair share of visiting celebrities as it pretends to be other cities in various films such as X-men and Juno.  Rumour has it that Julie Andrews and ‘The Rock’ are to be seen around at the moment, although what they’re doing in a film together no one knows. 

 

Over the weekend I spent one day working then took advantage of the good weather on Sunday to hike up Grouse Mountain (Vancouver’s equivalent of Arthur’s Seat…. only 900m higher.)  The “Grouse Grind”, as it is affectionately labelled, is a 2.9km trail which climbs 853 metres which basically equates to being a lot hard work and 2,830 stairs.  I made it to the summit at 1,127metres in 90 minutes which by all accounts is about the average time of most mere mortals.  For those who fit into the superhuman category, 24 minutes is apparently the time to beat.  I arrived at the top and appreciated the stunning views of Vancouver before watching the sun set which was a truly memorable experience.  I think it was the first time in my life I’ve ever heard a group of people applaud the sun as it disappeared behind the mountains. 

 

The journey down on the Skyride cable car was equally as impressive as it provided an aerial view of Vancouver and all the city’s lights.  After a day of being a tourist I arrived home immensely tired; needless to say the 7am alarm clock the following morning was not appreciated…. Welcome to week five!

Another exhausting week. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever not be tired during my time at Haverford.

Election fever is becoming infectious, and I was finally able to register to vote (there’s no voter fraud here, folks, I’m an American citizen) after schlepping to get my Social Security Number and filling out far too many forms. I, along with everybody else at Haverford, spent Friday night watching the debate between Obama and McCain on television, and then bashing McCain afterwards – I haven’t yet met a Republican at Haverford.

On the student politics front, Sunday night was spent at Plenary (like Edinburgh’s AGMs) on the gym floor voting on everything from changing grammar in the constitution to demanding letters of apology from the faculty. Haverford students get really into Plenary, and everyone brings blankets, pillows, work, food and drinks, and makes a social occasion of directing the future of the college. I took my English Literature reading (Walter Benjamin and Freud – whoop-de-doo) and played hearts.

Haverford really encourages student involvement in every aspect of college life. From Plenary to deciding what food to include in the week’s menu, students can have their input heard and actually acted upon. Student politics is a lot more fun at Edinburgh, if only for the leaflets, rumours, and scathing newspaper editorials on candidates’ policies, but the very fact that students are so involved in all areas of the college here means that what they promise during elections can generally be achieved.

Food is a case in point. Whilst Edinburgh students were powerless to change the frankly appalling JMC food due to the use of outside catering companies. Haverford students, meanwhile, work in our cafeteria (the DC – short for Dining Centre – très original) and student input has resulted in different foods being served, theme days, and the use of local and organic produce. Consequently, dinner tonight was genuinely delicious – chicken roasted in herbs and spices, sautéed organic green beans, Mexican rice salad, sundried tomato focaccia bread, peach pie and berry cobbler. I would have had thirds, but then I’d have had to spend an extra half hour in the gym, and I’m busy enough as it is.

The title of this blog was uttered today by my friend Peter - Haverford has lots of squirrels (our mascot is the Black Squirrel - and they're real!), and they aren't in the least scared of humans. As the college is an arboretum, they have plenty of trees in which to sit and occasionally scare passing students.

This weekend is the excellently-titled Screw Your Roommate Dance where we have to fix up our friends with people they either like or don’t know. The dates remain a secret until the night of the dance, when pre-arranged phrases are read out uniting the couples.

Obviously, there will be a full report come next week.