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Oct. 1st, 2004 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieFirst of all, thanks to everyone who commented on the entry right before I left!
Second of all, I'll pass out my address and phone number to those who need/want it ASAP. Lemme know if you want to send me stuff. ;)
Third of all, here's the daily journal thing I've been keeping since I got here and can finally post now that I have internet access (well, of a limited sort) in my room. (Warning: it's LONG.) I'll see what I can do about getting ITS to let me access my webserver, at least, so I can upload pictures I've taken and let you all see them.
Without further ado...
Day 1
A combination of late planes and busses without enough capacity for people and luggage ensured that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rowdycamels and I got to Exeter somewhere in the neighborhood of dinner time (although of course to our jet-lagged bodies it was actually breakfast time...) tired, hungry, cold, and having spent far more time at Heathrow than we ever wanted to. With any luck, that was the low point of the week.
Days 2 and 3
Okay, we'll do this as a good/bad comparison.
The Good:
- My room is huge, especially for a single, and it has a sink in it (which isn't quite so special when you realize you have to handle a bunch of doorknobs before you can wash your hands after going to the bathroom, but...). The kitchen is nice, though there isn't quite enough refrigerator space, and the ovens and stoves are gas (more on that in the "indeterminate" section). There is a toaster, though! I'd heard there wasn't, and was thinking I'd have to buy one. The toilets and showers are plentiful and each in their own little room, instead of being stalls in one big room.
- Chandra is in my flat, Ellen, Stewart, Sarah, and Kate are all in the flat one floor down, and Whitney is in the next building over. We have a nice little group going that I hope isn't getting too cliqueish--but none of us want to go into town by ourselves just yet, and we have a bunch of meetings and stuff to go to together, so even if we wanted to, we can't really separate that much.
- The other flatmates I've met seem nice. I've only met five others (out of eleven, minus me and Chandra): a British boy named Alex, a British postgrad named Elly who's highly entertaining, a German exchange student and a French exchange student, both girls.
- The surrounding countryside, if not necessarily all of the campus, is gorgeous. It reminds me a little of the hills at home, only steeper. Maybe a cross between Middle TN and the Appalachians (which I swear we saw slightly smaller versions of on the way from London to Exeter). The only downside is the fact that the campus is sort of vertical, and even a half-mile walk (which is standard between most useful buildings) takes forever. I suddenly miss the flatness of Gambier and Kenyon. :-(
- I had fish and chips (and peas) at a pub last night. Hee. Chandra and I got carded, too. The others either looked their age or acted more confident than we did. Sort of silly though; all any of us had to drink was water.
- The closest store to campus, a little gas-station-without-the-gas-but-more-food thing called Spar, has giant TV dinner versions of cottage pie which are yummy. (Cottage pie is ground beef, onions, and gravy covered in mashed potato. Very tasty.) And only £1.99, and it makes two meals! (See "The Bad" for my money issues. Oy.)
- We're travelling to the following places next month with the group:
- Day trip to Bristol to see something called Stourhead (?) and a performance of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.
- London for a three-day weekend to see various plays and sightsee. We're travelling by train. Yes, Nick, I will say "choo choo!" on the train. ;)
- St. Ives in Cornwall.
- People stop for crosswalks. No, really, you can just about walk out into one without looking in assurance that whoever's coming will stop. It's amazing. They'll mow you over anywhere else, but crosswalks are safe.
The Bad:
- My room faces a very busy sidewalk and is right across the street from one of the two bar/nightclub/meeting house things. This presents two very, very big problems. 1.) I feel like I live in a fishbowl, even though I live on the third floor. I am contemplating leaving my curtains shut all the time and presenting the image of an antisocial hermit. And 2.) Every night until at least midnight, there is loud, bassy music and drunken shouting right outside my window. Earplugs are of no use. As if that weren't enough, this morning I was woken up at seven AM by the trashman picking up all of Cornwall House's dumpsters VERY, VERY LOUDLY. And then several seagulls got into a fight outside my window. At that point, even though I wasn't planning on getting up for an hour, I gave up on the idea of sleep.
I'm going to try and get something that makes some white noise (although not a fan, because it's freezing already in here) to mitigate the outside clamor a little, but I doubt it'll do much good. Anyone know any good ways of soundproofing a window? Seriously, I'm ready to caulk the damn thing if that'll help.
- The city center--where the grocery stores are, most importantly--isn't exactly within what I would call walking distance, especially with a lot of heavy bags. Putting them in a backpack does help, but not a lot. I'm trying to look on the bright side of getting exercise without actually working at it, but I have a feeling the bus will be calling very, very soon, even at 70 pence a pop. I did three trips into town and back yesterday. Never, ever again. My feet will never forgive me for that.
- Everything is INCREDIBLY expensive here. I think I'm at a disadvantage because in the South, the cost of living and wages are all about 15% lower than the national average for the USA, so the sticker shock is even worse for me androwdycamels than most of the other Americans here. Some of the northeasterners I've talked to have said they find the prices equivalent or even cheaper than they're used to. Meanwhile, I keep looking at prices, thinking they're about what I'd pay at home, and then realizing that, no, actually, that price is in pounds, and the exchange rate is currently £1 = $1.85 or so. My expectation of eating for about $2 a meal has gone up in smoke. It'll have to be at least $3 per meal, if not $4. I was hoping to save money on food and other necessities in order to go on more expensive and interesting trips, but now I'm not so sure. I mean, if chicken breasts are about $8 for four instead of the $3.75 I was expecting to pay... It might even be better to buy textbooks online and get them shipped to the UK. I swear, it would be cheaper.
- It's cold here. Like, really chilly, especially in my room, where the heat hasn't been turned on. And when I told the study abroad director chick (who manages to be both hyper and exceptionally sarcastic at the same time--I really want to get to know her better, 'cause she seems like a lot of fun) that Ellen and I had been waiting out in the cold in London, she told me it was "quite warm, actually." And there are people running around in T-shirts while I shiver in my nice, warm, fuzzy-lined raincoat. I am so going to die of hypothermia this year.
The Indeterminate:
- The stove and oven are both gas (I've only ever used electric). According to Stewart, this involves turning on the gas, lighting a match and throwing it into the oven or burner, possibly blowing up the building. I think we'll have to get some of our more knowledgeable flatmates to help us out the first time.
The Weird:
- I don't think I'll ever get used to people driving on the left side of the road. I mean, I look both ways anyway at home before crossing, so that's okay, but it still weirds me out to see cars going down the "wrong" side of the road.
- What's up with all the drinking? It's nice that everyone seems far better able to hold their liquor than at Kenyon, but everything in the guide to orientation booklet seems to have either "pay bar available" or "going to the pub afterwards" attached to it. Can students not be without alcohol for two hours, or what's going on here? Does the same thing happen clandestinely in the US and I'm just oblivious?
Day 4
*looks around blearily* When I find out whoever was screaming and yelling outside my window at two in the morning, I'm going to hunt them down and gag them. And then I'm going to break the sound system in Cornwall House. If it's like this every night, not only do I not see me getting any sleep (at least before 2), but also I don't see me ever getting anything productive done after 8 PM. It'll stop after orientation, right? Only on weekends? I could deal with it just on Friday and Saturday nights...
In other news, I put up pictures of you people, Kenyon people, and a whole bunch of Kenyon scenic photos I had all around my room. It looks less like a well-appointed prison cell and more like a dorm room now. I'll take pictures of the room and put them up if I can ever get online...
Days 4 and 5
I found out that I have a four-day weekend, Thursday-Sunday, every single week this semester. Wahaha! So does everyone I know except Chandra, who has Friday off but not Thursday. Ahem. There will be much travel. I'm only in class or movie screenings (once weekly for screenwriting) for nine hours a week, which is about five less than at Kenyon (of course, I am taking two fewer classes...that might have something to do with it...even though I actually get a class' worth of credit extra each semester here...)
Oh, and Elly taught us how to use the stove. Yay, we don't have to light matches around gas! There's a nifty little igniter button you push after turning on the gas. Excellent. I guess gas is more common here...at home, nothing that's cooked in the oven gives directions like "preheat oven to 400F/gas mark 6" like the stuff I buy here does. Our packages just give the temperature, and gas folks are on their own.
Aaaaand we've had group dinners for the past two nights. It's been nice.pezprez did the first one last night, and then we had a potluck stir fry in Stewart's wok tonight. Both meals were very good, very filling, and relatively quick. I see communal dining becoming much more common. I'll have to get some ground beef for that nifty hamburger/celery soup over mashed potatoes dish, or maybe something as close to cheesy chicken broccoli as possible... We played two more rounds of Stewart's board game, Space Station Zemo, as well; it's very entertaining, but long. Very long, sometimes. And I am so bad at it. But, dude, you get to fight other players with an atomic stapler, a seat-seeking missile, and a machete launcher, among many other things. And a footless lemming can attach itself to your leg. C'mon. It's great.
Day 6
Again with the loud music. I can still hear it over the music I'm listening to on headphones. It sounds like several bombs going off in a continuous row. *glares in the general direction of the Lemmy* *sends hateful vibes at the Lemmy sound system* Mom's sending me some bubble wrap to put over my window. Hopefully that'll help...if nothing else, it might make it a bit warmer in here...
Today was the first day that I didn't go into town at all; I finally have enough groceries stockpiled to last me through a couple days, and I think I've bought everything I need to cook them in. I spent a pleasant morning in the library doing internetty things, and an equally pleasant afternoon getting free stuff from Matz's office that people from last year left behind (a blanket and four books for my classes, including a paperback copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, which takes care of just about every book for my Renaissance drama class, woo!) and going to a "Devon Cream Tea." Never having heard of such a thing, I decided to make the trek to the entire opposite side of campus at four o'clock, taking pictures along the way--pictures I would upload and show everyone, except that uploading anything seems to be very blocked at the moment. Sigh. Anyway, it is very tasty, and I met a lot of nice people. Okay, so milk in the tea and no sugar in sight was terribly odd and not particularly wonderful, but golden raisin scones with blackcurrant jam and clotted cream are yummy. I had two. It was basically dinner. This blackcurrant thing seems to be exceedingly popular; I like it a lot, at least in juice and jam form (not so much as a yogurt).
Discovered "Cardiac Hill" on my way to and from the scone place. I've been down mountainsides shorter and more level than that thing. These people don't seem to believe in rails or steps on steep inclines, and this one had a rail all the way up, and several places with a few steps so that you don't fall down on particularly vertical spots. I had to go through the set of dorms that's been condemned, as well. It was like Chernobyl or something. The dorms look like something out of Communist Russia--they are literally square grey boxes with windows. There's absolutely no decoration on the concrete. They're falling apart; letters that make up the names written on each one are missing, and plant life has taken over in many places. And there was nobody around the entire time I was walking through them, and during the ten minutes or so I stopped to pet the sweetest cat that wandered into my path. That cat would've been perfectly happy to sit in my lap and purr forever.
Also discovered that British keyboards are not like American keyboards. Is there an extra key in the home row? It feels that way. Also, various symbols are in very strange places.
And now I'm gonna try and sleep through the evil music...
Second of all, I'll pass out my address and phone number to those who need/want it ASAP. Lemme know if you want to send me stuff. ;)
Third of all, here's the daily journal thing I've been keeping since I got here and can finally post now that I have internet access (well, of a limited sort) in my room. (Warning: it's LONG.) I'll see what I can do about getting ITS to let me access my webserver, at least, so I can upload pictures I've taken and let you all see them.
Without further ado...
Day 1
A combination of late planes and busses without enough capacity for people and luggage ensured that
rowdycamels and I got to Exeter somewhere in the neighborhood of dinner time (although of course to our jet-lagged bodies it was actually breakfast time...) tired, hungry, cold, and having spent far more time at Heathrow than we ever wanted to. With any luck, that was the low point of the week.Days 2 and 3
Okay, we'll do this as a good/bad comparison.
The Good:
- My room is huge, especially for a single, and it has a sink in it (which isn't quite so special when you realize you have to handle a bunch of doorknobs before you can wash your hands after going to the bathroom, but...). The kitchen is nice, though there isn't quite enough refrigerator space, and the ovens and stoves are gas (more on that in the "indeterminate" section). There is a toaster, though! I'd heard there wasn't, and was thinking I'd have to buy one. The toilets and showers are plentiful and each in their own little room, instead of being stalls in one big room.
- Chandra is in my flat, Ellen, Stewart, Sarah, and Kate are all in the flat one floor down, and Whitney is in the next building over. We have a nice little group going that I hope isn't getting too cliqueish--but none of us want to go into town by ourselves just yet, and we have a bunch of meetings and stuff to go to together, so even if we wanted to, we can't really separate that much.
- The other flatmates I've met seem nice. I've only met five others (out of eleven, minus me and Chandra): a British boy named Alex, a British postgrad named Elly who's highly entertaining, a German exchange student and a French exchange student, both girls.
- The surrounding countryside, if not necessarily all of the campus, is gorgeous. It reminds me a little of the hills at home, only steeper. Maybe a cross between Middle TN and the Appalachians (which I swear we saw slightly smaller versions of on the way from London to Exeter). The only downside is the fact that the campus is sort of vertical, and even a half-mile walk (which is standard between most useful buildings) takes forever. I suddenly miss the flatness of Gambier and Kenyon. :-(
- I had fish and chips (and peas) at a pub last night. Hee. Chandra and I got carded, too. The others either looked their age or acted more confident than we did. Sort of silly though; all any of us had to drink was water.
- The closest store to campus, a little gas-station-without-the-gas-but-more-food thing called Spar, has giant TV dinner versions of cottage pie which are yummy. (Cottage pie is ground beef, onions, and gravy covered in mashed potato. Very tasty.) And only £1.99, and it makes two meals! (See "The Bad" for my money issues. Oy.)
- We're travelling to the following places next month with the group:
- Day trip to Bristol to see something called Stourhead (?) and a performance of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.
- London for a three-day weekend to see various plays and sightsee. We're travelling by train. Yes, Nick, I will say "choo choo!" on the train. ;)
- St. Ives in Cornwall.
- People stop for crosswalks. No, really, you can just about walk out into one without looking in assurance that whoever's coming will stop. It's amazing. They'll mow you over anywhere else, but crosswalks are safe.
The Bad:
- My room faces a very busy sidewalk and is right across the street from one of the two bar/nightclub/meeting house things. This presents two very, very big problems. 1.) I feel like I live in a fishbowl, even though I live on the third floor. I am contemplating leaving my curtains shut all the time and presenting the image of an antisocial hermit. And 2.) Every night until at least midnight, there is loud, bassy music and drunken shouting right outside my window. Earplugs are of no use. As if that weren't enough, this morning I was woken up at seven AM by the trashman picking up all of Cornwall House's dumpsters VERY, VERY LOUDLY. And then several seagulls got into a fight outside my window. At that point, even though I wasn't planning on getting up for an hour, I gave up on the idea of sleep.
I'm going to try and get something that makes some white noise (although not a fan, because it's freezing already in here) to mitigate the outside clamor a little, but I doubt it'll do much good. Anyone know any good ways of soundproofing a window? Seriously, I'm ready to caulk the damn thing if that'll help.
- The city center--where the grocery stores are, most importantly--isn't exactly within what I would call walking distance, especially with a lot of heavy bags. Putting them in a backpack does help, but not a lot. I'm trying to look on the bright side of getting exercise without actually working at it, but I have a feeling the bus will be calling very, very soon, even at 70 pence a pop. I did three trips into town and back yesterday. Never, ever again. My feet will never forgive me for that.
- Everything is INCREDIBLY expensive here. I think I'm at a disadvantage because in the South, the cost of living and wages are all about 15% lower than the national average for the USA, so the sticker shock is even worse for me and
rowdycamels than most of the other Americans here. Some of the northeasterners I've talked to have said they find the prices equivalent or even cheaper than they're used to. Meanwhile, I keep looking at prices, thinking they're about what I'd pay at home, and then realizing that, no, actually, that price is in pounds, and the exchange rate is currently £1 = $1.85 or so. My expectation of eating for about $2 a meal has gone up in smoke. It'll have to be at least $3 per meal, if not $4. I was hoping to save money on food and other necessities in order to go on more expensive and interesting trips, but now I'm not so sure. I mean, if chicken breasts are about $8 for four instead of the $3.75 I was expecting to pay... It might even be better to buy textbooks online and get them shipped to the UK. I swear, it would be cheaper.- It's cold here. Like, really chilly, especially in my room, where the heat hasn't been turned on. And when I told the study abroad director chick (who manages to be both hyper and exceptionally sarcastic at the same time--I really want to get to know her better, 'cause she seems like a lot of fun) that Ellen and I had been waiting out in the cold in London, she told me it was "quite warm, actually." And there are people running around in T-shirts while I shiver in my nice, warm, fuzzy-lined raincoat. I am so going to die of hypothermia this year.
The Indeterminate:
- The stove and oven are both gas (I've only ever used electric). According to Stewart, this involves turning on the gas, lighting a match and throwing it into the oven or burner, possibly blowing up the building. I think we'll have to get some of our more knowledgeable flatmates to help us out the first time.
The Weird:
- I don't think I'll ever get used to people driving on the left side of the road. I mean, I look both ways anyway at home before crossing, so that's okay, but it still weirds me out to see cars going down the "wrong" side of the road.
- What's up with all the drinking? It's nice that everyone seems far better able to hold their liquor than at Kenyon, but everything in the guide to orientation booklet seems to have either "pay bar available" or "going to the pub afterwards" attached to it. Can students not be without alcohol for two hours, or what's going on here? Does the same thing happen clandestinely in the US and I'm just oblivious?
Day 4
*looks around blearily* When I find out whoever was screaming and yelling outside my window at two in the morning, I'm going to hunt them down and gag them. And then I'm going to break the sound system in Cornwall House. If it's like this every night, not only do I not see me getting any sleep (at least before 2), but also I don't see me ever getting anything productive done after 8 PM. It'll stop after orientation, right? Only on weekends? I could deal with it just on Friday and Saturday nights...
In other news, I put up pictures of you people, Kenyon people, and a whole bunch of Kenyon scenic photos I had all around my room. It looks less like a well-appointed prison cell and more like a dorm room now. I'll take pictures of the room and put them up if I can ever get online...
Days 4 and 5
I found out that I have a four-day weekend, Thursday-Sunday, every single week this semester. Wahaha! So does everyone I know except Chandra, who has Friday off but not Thursday. Ahem. There will be much travel. I'm only in class or movie screenings (once weekly for screenwriting) for nine hours a week, which is about five less than at Kenyon (of course, I am taking two fewer classes...that might have something to do with it...even though I actually get a class' worth of credit extra each semester here...)
Oh, and Elly taught us how to use the stove. Yay, we don't have to light matches around gas! There's a nifty little igniter button you push after turning on the gas. Excellent. I guess gas is more common here...at home, nothing that's cooked in the oven gives directions like "preheat oven to 400F/gas mark 6" like the stuff I buy here does. Our packages just give the temperature, and gas folks are on their own.
Aaaaand we've had group dinners for the past two nights. It's been nice.
pezprez did the first one last night, and then we had a potluck stir fry in Stewart's wok tonight. Both meals were very good, very filling, and relatively quick. I see communal dining becoming much more common. I'll have to get some ground beef for that nifty hamburger/celery soup over mashed potatoes dish, or maybe something as close to cheesy chicken broccoli as possible... We played two more rounds of Stewart's board game, Space Station Zemo, as well; it's very entertaining, but long. Very long, sometimes. And I am so bad at it. But, dude, you get to fight other players with an atomic stapler, a seat-seeking missile, and a machete launcher, among many other things. And a footless lemming can attach itself to your leg. C'mon. It's great.Day 6
Again with the loud music. I can still hear it over the music I'm listening to on headphones. It sounds like several bombs going off in a continuous row. *glares in the general direction of the Lemmy* *sends hateful vibes at the Lemmy sound system* Mom's sending me some bubble wrap to put over my window. Hopefully that'll help...if nothing else, it might make it a bit warmer in here...
Today was the first day that I didn't go into town at all; I finally have enough groceries stockpiled to last me through a couple days, and I think I've bought everything I need to cook them in. I spent a pleasant morning in the library doing internetty things, and an equally pleasant afternoon getting free stuff from Matz's office that people from last year left behind (a blanket and four books for my classes, including a paperback copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, which takes care of just about every book for my Renaissance drama class, woo!) and going to a "Devon Cream Tea." Never having heard of such a thing, I decided to make the trek to the entire opposite side of campus at four o'clock, taking pictures along the way--pictures I would upload and show everyone, except that uploading anything seems to be very blocked at the moment. Sigh. Anyway, it is very tasty, and I met a lot of nice people. Okay, so milk in the tea and no sugar in sight was terribly odd and not particularly wonderful, but golden raisin scones with blackcurrant jam and clotted cream are yummy. I had two. It was basically dinner. This blackcurrant thing seems to be exceedingly popular; I like it a lot, at least in juice and jam form (not so much as a yogurt).
Discovered "Cardiac Hill" on my way to and from the scone place. I've been down mountainsides shorter and more level than that thing. These people don't seem to believe in rails or steps on steep inclines, and this one had a rail all the way up, and several places with a few steps so that you don't fall down on particularly vertical spots. I had to go through the set of dorms that's been condemned, as well. It was like Chernobyl or something. The dorms look like something out of Communist Russia--they are literally square grey boxes with windows. There's absolutely no decoration on the concrete. They're falling apart; letters that make up the names written on each one are missing, and plant life has taken over in many places. And there was nobody around the entire time I was walking through them, and during the ten minutes or so I stopped to pet the sweetest cat that wandered into my path. That cat would've been perfectly happy to sit in my lap and purr forever.
Also discovered that British keyboards are not like American keyboards. Is there an extra key in the home row? It feels that way. Also, various symbols are in very strange places.
And now I'm gonna try and sleep through the evil music...
no subject
Date: 2004-10-01 11:25 pm (UTC)But, then again, it is a gorgeous place. And the temperatures get better towards summer. Shame it's winter approaching now.
It is a gorgeous place. And after spending two winters in Ohio, where temperatures rarely get above freezing for months at a time, I really don't have room to complain about the cold here...