Christmas in England!

For info about why I'm writing about Christmas even though it's March, look at my previous post from earlier today.

I was simultaneously impressed and horrified by the extent to which everybody is obsessed with Christmas here. It's pretty cool to see how everybody comes together and makes a big deal out of it, but it's also quite insane - Christmas preparation here started in September!

Needless to say, we had a lot of pre-Christmas celebrating. The highlight of this was a fake "Christmas Day" which happened the weekend after classes ended for the term. We crammed 20 people into my little kitchen for a dinner complete with turkey, stuffing, Yorkshire puddings, and everything you can imagine. For a slightly more multicultural twist, I got everyone to help me make latkes. We also played pass the parcel, opened gifts from a secret Santa that we organized, and had a Christmas tree. Tonnes of fun!

If you want more photos, there are probably some on Facebook - but they're all pretty similar, just depicting the fun and chaos.

Don't worry - I haven't died!!!

It's March 1st, and apparently I haven't updated here since November 1st, which is a pretty dismal track record. I have a lot to tell about - the end of term, including a fake "Christmas Day," travelling around with Elmo over the holidays, getting crazily excited about my course this term, and a snow day, followed by my birthday. And more recently, starting training at Allsorts, preparing for my trip to Morocco (just a few short weeks!), fundraising for Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and working on my dissertation. I have lots of pictures to show off!

I'll try to do justice to everything I've done so far by making several blog posts, rather than one long one that doesn't have enough details or photos. So you'll get to time-travel by reading my blog. Enjoy.

It's been a while since my last post, so I think I have quite a lot to update on. Since I last wrote, I've gone on some amazing hikes, visited London for a day, and generally had a great time hanging out in Brighton and on campus with friends.

About two weeks ago, I went on a hike with some friends in the Cuckmere river area, which is a short bus ride from Brighton. We were supposed to go with the walking society, but missed their bus and decided to go by ourselves anyways. We didn't go on as long a hike as we'd planned to, but still had a great time tramping through fields and admiring the sheep. Sheep seem to be extremely plentiful in this area of England! These pictures are of the Cuckmere river where it meets the channel, and a double-decker Brighton bus in the same area.

Another source of amusement here is the small litter of kittens we've adopted. So far we've seen three, a ginger boy, a calico, and a little black one. The ginger one is very bold, but without question the black one is friendliest. Earlier this week, she actually sat purring on my lap! It was sweet, and really surprising since she's technically a feral cat. We've been buying them cat food, and trying to tame them a bit - the black one, of course, is making the best progress. The ginger one just steals the "bait" and runs outside with it. I don't think we'll make a housecat out of him very soon.
As you can see from this next picture, though, the black cat is slowly but surely becoming a pet. After we coaxed her into the house for an afternoon, she ran upstairs to my bedroom and sat for a while under my chair while I did my work. I would have let her stay, but she's not yet litter trained and I don't feel like cleaning up after her. If we can get her litter trained, perhaps we'll let her inside more often when it's cold out. So far, she's happy to come into the house, but won't let us shut the door when she's in here; she's afraid of being trapped inside, and I don't blame her. There are a lot of us, and she's very, very small!

Last weekend I went to London for the day on Saturday, which was wonderful. I went alone, because I wanted to explore the Museum of Natural History at my own pace. As it turned out, it's half-term here, and with all the kids out of school the museum was even more crowded than usual. The exhibits were so packed that I spent most of my time admiring the building and its grounds. As you can see, though, the architecture is amazing; the whole building is covered, inside and out, with intricate stone carvings, and the exhibits that I did see are very well laid out. I'll have to go back another time, though, because I didn't see the library and archives, or the dinosaur exhibit, which is apparently amazing.

I spent the rest of my time in London just wandering around. I went through Kensington Gardens (where I saw this statue of Peter Pan) and Hyde Park, then window-shopped near Oxford Circus. In the basement of a cashmere specialty shop, I tried on and almost bought a beautiful emerald green cape. I had wrongly assumed that the basement would be a discount area, and that the "nine-ninety-nine" cape would be nine pounds, ninety-nine pence. I was wrong, as I discovered when she rang up the sale - the cape was nine hundred, ninety-nine pounds! I had to satisfy myself with a picture of it, taken on my cellphone camera. I sadly do not have that much money for an item of clothing, no matter how regal it is!

In the evening, I walked along the Thames from the Tower of London to Victoria station. I've wanted to do that walk for many years, after imagining when I last visited (when I was eight) how spooky the bridge and tower would look at night. It was quite a long walk, especially after having walked all afternoon, but well worth it. The bridge is absolutely stunning at night; I took literally hundreds of pictures, none of which really did it justice. I crossed the river several times, on many of the various bridges, because there were so many things to see. Even though nothing was open, London is just magical in the dark. One of the highlights was passing Southwark Cathedral, which is extremely old and looks incredible lit up at night. When I passed by, its bells were ringing to signal 9 PM, and were almost deafening. I probably sat outside the church for fifteen minutes, just listening to the bell service.

Being so close to London is another thing that I really love about Brighton - I can go there for the day for less money than it would cost to spend the night there, and it took me just 90 minutes to get from my house in Falmer to the front steps of the Museum of Natural History. I plan to go back several more times; I have a very, very long list of museums and neighbourhoods to explore!

Another amusing thing in the last couple of weeks was Hallowe'en last night. Since I lacked a good costume and actually had forgotten about Hallowe'en until it was right on top of us, the only thing that I had to dress up in was a hockey jersey that I'd brought for international night. Fortunately one of my friends had some makeup to give me a black eye and bloody lip, so I made a reasonably convincing beat up hockey player, or perhaps an over-zealous hockey mom. We had a great time dressing up some of the boys in drag (at the back, you can see Tom wearing a very skimpy dress and Ella's bra!) and covering each other with fake blood.

Today I beat the rainy-weather blues by going out for lunch with Anna's aunt Margaret, which was lovely. Even though she'd never met me before, Margaret offered to spend some time with me, and treated me to a wonderful lunch. She reminds me a lot of some of M'mou's friends, so I had a great time chatting with her. I think both of us also got a kick out of the meal we had at Food for Friends, a fantastic vegetarian restaurant in Brighton. We both ended up ordering the same thing - squash with nuts in a phyllo pastry and a mango salad - and it is probably the best meal I've had since I got here. I then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through Brighton on a hunt for a cheap cake pan (which I found at a 99p shop) and also stumbled upon a craft fair at the Quaker House, which was small but had some lovely stuff. There are enough nice things here to make up for the recent miserable weather!

Life in Brighton

Well, I've gone a long time without posting anything at all, but that's mostly because I'm busy. I haven't quite forgotten about the outside world, although Sussex does seem to have a bubble effect.
This is a photo of the Stanmer church, in the park near campus. A lot of the scenery here seems to belong in a painting. Even when it's rainy, it's an absolutely gorgeous place.

I've pretty much settled into my little house on campus, and had about a week and a half of classes. Right now, I'm taking Nature and History (third year course about environmental history in tropical climates, which is really cool and not as scary as I thought); The New South Africa (second year history course on post-apartheid South Africa); Statistics, and Spanish. In one Spanish lesson I managed to more than double my vocabulary, and it's similar enough to French that hopefully I'll pick it up fairly quickly.

I've made several friends here. For the most part, they're louder and drink much more than my friends in Canada, but they're absolutely awesome and I'm having a great time. I do tend to duck away and do readings whenever people get drunk, however, because drinking here involves substantially more alcohol than I'm used to. I can't afford to buy that much beer, and the amount that the British drink would probably kill me fairly quickly. Fortunately, they're mostly pretty sane and don't drink every night - a lot of the time, we just end up sitting in somebody's kitchen/bedroom/hallway and chatting, or watching movies.


The Sussex University campus is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but it's amazing. The other day we went for a walk in the country; we only need to walk about three minutes to encounter cows on the hills behind our house! You can see them grazing from our front windows. Just west of the campus is Stanmer Park, which is a national nature reserve with a beautiful old mansion, a church, and plenty of open space and trees. The campus is in a little valley, surrounded by green hills. I've seen several cows, and a small handful of horses, all within a couple of kilometers of the university. I'm looking forward to exploring the countryside more with the walking society.



I've visited Brighton a few times already. The university isn't technically in Brighton, but we're just a couple of train stops away, or about half an hour on the bus. Although the buses are more expensive than I'd like, they're generally quite efficient and I still get a bit of a kick out of riding on a double-decker bus. The trains are also very fast, and cheaper than the buses.

Brighton is an absolutely stunning city, with several parks, gardens, fountains, beautiful old houses, and a nice boardwalk/trail along the seafront. I had a great time on Saturday biking along the seafront from downtown Brighton to a little historic town called Rottingdean. There seem to be lots and lots of little villages here, and most of them are accessible by bus. It's nice to be able to explore rural areas without having a car. Brighton has several nice neighbourhoods for shopping and exploring. So far I haven't seen any cheap areas to buy clothes and things, although they apparently do exist, but there are some good-looking charity shops which I'm probably going to browse in. They seem to have some surprisingly nice stuff, and there are lots of them downtown. There are so many nice cafés that it's hard to choose where to go for lunch when I'm in town for a day. On a nice Saturday afternoon, many of the downtown streets are teeming with people, and there are street vendors, buskers, and sidewalk cafés. Everybody seems very friendly, which isn't the reputation that the English generally have.

Fortunately, Brighton has several functional stores, such as Robert Dyas (where you can buy lots of household essentials, most particularly lunch containers and doorstops) and Argos, a catalogue store that sells basically everything, often at extremely cheap prices. There are lots and lots of pound shops, which are very popular among students. It's amazing how many things you can buy for a pound that are easily five to ten pounds in other shops. It's not too hard to live cheaply if you don't buy lots of clothing and trinkets.

My residence is a five-bedroom house in a cluster of about sixty townhomes at the edge of campus. Of the five of us in my house, three are international; Tomo is from Japan, and Ray from China. The other two, Tony and Ella, are both from London. We spend a lot of time with our neighbours from next door and two doors down. It's a nice community, without everybody trampling on each other. The houses are pleasantly spacious - my room is probably twice the size of many residence rooms in Canada - and the walls are thick enough that I managed to sleep soundly even when both my British housemates had their significant others over for the weekend. Although we're designated as a quiet house, we're still quite social. That does mean that I have to be good about managing my study time, because it's hard to get work done in the evenings; there are just too many things to do and go to! It seems like there's a social event (or several) every evening.

I'm getting involved in a few campus societies. The Walking Society organizes hiking trips, both in the local area and elsewhere in England. In November, I'm planning to go with them to Cornwall, Dartmoor, and the Lake District on two weekend trips. I've also joined the choir. It's a more serious choir than the Vic Chorus. The conductor calls it a "self-auditioned" choir; he gives us the music, and people who feel that they can't keep up can choose to drop out. That way, we don't need to deal with the stress of auditions (great for me, because I sing well enough to handle all the music, but get really nervous about auditioning) but can still work with fairly high level music. Some of our repertoire is actually rather challenging, which is a nice workout for my brain. We're expected to be able to sightread, and at least right now we're doing many fairly substantial works. Next week we'll get to take home our music, so I can describe it in more detail then.

I'm also a member of the LGBT society, which has weekly meetings on Tuesday nights, and coffee hours on Wednesday mornings (one of which starts in just a few minutes). It's a fairly active club, so hopefully it'll fill the void of not having TEACH with me here! There actually is a group in Brighton called Allsorts which is similar to TEACH and SOY rolled into one organization, but it's quite competitive to get to volunteer there so I might not get in, since I'm just here for one academic year. I am planning to take on some sort of a volunteer opportunity, though. Right now I'm looking at either running a newspaper club at a local primary school, or planning events for International Women's Day. The university runs Project V, which is an initiative designed to get students more involved in volunteer work in the local community. It's very helpful, because they have informative listings of volunteer opportunities, and will even reimburse my travel expenses to get into Brighton or whatever other areas the volunteering takes place in. For such a small city, there seems to be a wealth of community organizations, and it seems like the social services are very strong, at least in this part of England. In particular, there are a multitude of free after school programs for disadvantaged children, and great infrastructure for people with disabilities. Volunteering is quite popular among students here, probably helped by Project V. I'm quite pleased to see that, because there seems to be lots and lots of rather wealthy students here while the local communities often are much less well-off.

So, that's a rather long snapshot of Brighton. In the next few weeks I'll probably travel further afield and plunge deeper into my coursework, so expect more updates. I'll also try to get some photos of downtown Brighton - so far, all of my pictures are of the Falmer area near campus.

Greetings from England!

I don't really have time for a full post now, because I have lots and lots to do. But I just thought I'd post to say that I got here, and that everything is going nicely. The flight was completely uneventful, I'm gradually getting over the jetlag (it's not so bad, because everybody else stays up until 4 am and sleeps all morning too) and my house is wonderful. Brighton is a beautiful little city - I've done a fair bit of exploring on a quest to find plug adapters.

In a few days, once I can get internet in my room instead of the computer lab, I'll make a longer post and tell you all about my cute little house and Brighton and the South Downs area.

Cheers!

One more day!

In case you didn't know, I'm leaving for England tomorrow afternoon. I'm pretty much packed and ready.

I don't want to post my address on my (public) blog, but if you send me an email I'll give it to you. If you give me your own address, I might send you a postcard. If I have time, that is, because I've realized that I'll probably be drowning in readings. In England they say "I'm reading history" the same way that here you'd say "I'm specializing in history" and they really do mean it! I have a feeling that I'll have about twice as much reading there as I did last year. I don't mind, really, since I tend to enjoy my readings, but writing might fall by the wayside. We'll see.

On the upside, I have Thursdays and every second Wednesday off in the first term to go off and frolic.

VERY excited at this point! And quite possibly still in denial.

Welcome to Dragon[flies]

Welcome to my newly revamped blog. I've done a lot of cleaning up, and changed the title - I figured that Dragon[flies] would be fun, since I'm getting a bit sick of the Paper Bag Princess theme and after all, this is mostly going to be a travel blog.

I'll start posting once I think of some interesting things to say :)