Week 2.5

“I hate American sports, especially football. The games take five hours. And I hate all the substitutions, it’s as if three teams are playing. The chants are horrible, not like the our football [soccer] ones when Manchester is playing. All you have is Defense, clap clap clap. And there are always two pricks in the stands, one holding a ‘D’ and the other one a fence. But you tailgate for the games right? You get on you BIG American trucks, fill it up with gas and burn it all day long. Drink some of that pathetic Coors Light, beer for girls, with no calories. And after all of that you still have to watch the game”

Yikes. All we were trying to do was to make conversation over lunch. I don’t think any of this is mean spirited, but that is the perception of what America is and what it stands for. One one of the articles covering the Virginia Tech shootings, America was described as land of contradictions with our ability to mourn the deceased and our ability to do nothing about gun control. It’s been a learning experience to observe the perception that the States creates here.

For one, it’s no longer surprising to me that the people are so knowledgeable about American politics and America, in general. Sometimes I walk down a typical British street just to see Starbucks, Borders, Pizza-Hut, McDonald’s, KFC, all next to each other. And of course some pathetic recently released hip-hop song is playing in the background, even in respectable clothing stores. There’ s a particular liking here for that “Girlfriend” song, that features one of the dumbest rhymes ever written by men. “He’s like so whatever, you can do much better”. But back to my original point, with the globalization, American products and the culture have had a very strong influence on the culture here. American television shows dominate the lineup, and all the Hollywood movies are played in the cinemas. The result is that some of this culture no longer feels foreign to the English. It is their own. Thus when they’re following the current events in the States, they are following the development of their own culture as much as America’s.

On Tuesday we went to Stratford, the birthplace for Shakespeare, to see a play ‘Seagull’ by Chekhov. I really enjoyed the performance. I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to follow it so the day before I borrowed the play from the library and read it. I love having free time to do things like this. I always say “if only I had more time, I would ___”, and now I can actually fill in the blanks. It’s great to be able to sleep 8-10 hours a night, not worrying too much about school work. In some sense, the gained feeling of clarity in the thought process makes for a much more valuable learning experience.

Speaking of classes, I had my first tutorial meeting on Monday. It was rough. I expected the first one to be a relaxed discussion of what we’ll be covering during the term. Instead, it turned out an hour-long questioning session, covering every aspect of QM that I am supposed to know by now. I was completely caught off guard and having not done any Quantum for almost a month, I forgot some of the things that I should have remembered. I did much better on more advanced topics than the introductory ones, which probably left an odd impression on the tutor. We’ll see. I’ll be doing most of the 134 curriculum, plus a lot of additional topics ranging from quantum computing and teleportation to entanglement and cryptography. Sounds exciting! (to me anyway). I’m also pretty happy that I will be doing problem ’sheets’ as they call them, instead of weekly papers.

I also found out that Schroedinger was a fellow at Magdalen college, with which I’m affiliated. Also, when we went to see Christ Church with the architecture class, there were paintings of John Locke, and Lewis Carroll hanging on the walls. As I mentioned, we visited Stratford, the birthplace of Shaekspare, and in Bath, we saw where Jane Austen lived and the theatre where Charlie Chaplin first started performing. Pretty bloody amazing.

One a different note, the service at restaurants is very far from amazing. Most dinners end up taking three hours because everything is done so slowly. At Stratford, we were looking for a place to eat, walked into this fish place, looked around. We didn’t like what we were seeing, so we started to leave. At that point the person behind the customer exclaimed “What’s wrong with you people?”. As someone later suggested, we should have responded “What’s wrong with your face?”.

Week deux

Sign in a hostel: “Americans, don’t talk so loudly”

The second week began a tad slower. I actually went to class for the first time in a long time. The non-tutorials are taught in the seminar room within the Stanford house, so it’s a short walk down the stairs. I also had to get books, which turned out to be a much bigger hassle than I expected. There isn’t a centralized campus bookstore, it’s just a collection of your typical borders, and atypical oxford university press and Blackwells bookstores. Basically to get books to you need spend hours searching in the isles or ask someone to help. Most of the time the books need to be ordered anyway, and then they come in 2-3 days later.

On Wednesday, we went to a Wiccan witchcraft ritual with the ethnography class. And we didn’t just observe, we got to participate. The ceremony began by establishing a protected circle in the middle of the room (the high priestess carried a dagger above our heads to do so), there was some meditation and passing of blessed water and bread. They were celebrating the coming of the summer, and invited some of the pagan Gods to join us in this celebration. We did various witchcraft chants, a simple dance, and a song. It was amusing how practical and materialistic the Wiccan tradition seemed to be: they were clearly trying to recruit new members amount the newcomers and so they stressed that their magic can help people get a job, fall in love etc.

Then for the Architecture class on Thursday we met in the courtyard of Christ Church (the place where they filmed Harry Potter) and study the development of styles throughout the history of the college. It’s rather amazing when you’re learning architecture simply by observing and drawing guesses from what you’re seeing. Gothic and Neo-Classical…a billion to go.

Friday was 4/20. Saw a guy playing a triple guitar on Cornmarket st. There was also a bike accident around there, the bike traffic seem to be really intense, they’re flying in all directions and, unlike Stanford, you can’t afford to skip stop signs and run lights. I think the biker was struck by a garbage truck and died and the scene of the accident.

On a much happier note, I’ve been seeing quite a few of museums around Oxford. Went to the history of science museum, where they preserved Einstein’s blackboard with some General Relativity constants written on it. They also had marvelous 17^th century microscopes, and all kinds of flasks and laboratory instruments from the past centuries. I also went to the Ashmolean museum, definitely impressed by the European paintings. They have a humongous Pissaro collection.

Then Saturday, we went to the city of Bath, a beautiful historic site with the artifacts from the Roman times, namely baths . The full name of the city is actually Bath Spa. We got a free 2-hour walking tour around the place, the guide was fascinating by herself. It was this naive 60-something year-old woman who would ramble on about how there are many Asians students in Bath University working really hard. She said “and by Asian, I mean Chinese”. And then she said “We have a lot of immigrants here to drive the buses”. What a politically incorrect lady!

From Bath we managed to get a tour of Stonehenge. I am so glad I got to see it, it’s that very impressive visually (a lot of people are disappointed when they get there) but to realize how long ago it was constructed and the amount of effort that must have gone into building it is truly perplexing.

I have my first tutorial meeting tomorrow, will report back on how that goes.

First Week

“Just because we are all speaking the same language, doesn’t meant we necessarily understand them.”

I have so many impressions during the first week, you’ll just have to excuse the choppiness of the upcoming post. The arrival at Heathrow went pretty smoothly. From the airplane window, I could see exactly what Kate Fox described as a typical English town, a million red houses clustered together and curvy streets intersecting at oblique angles. The humongous golf courses, soccer stadiums, and cricket fields also dominated the landscape. Once we landed, the plane wouldn’t let passengers out for half an hour because of a bomb-scare at the airport earlier that day. Some things are pretty universal. Once I got mu luggage, I had to go through the passport control: there was one line for citizens of the EU, U.K. and Sweden, and the other line for for everyone else. It felt odd to be in other line, especially since it took much longer. After half an hour of waiting and 3 answered question, I got through the passport controls, quickly picked up my luggage and went outside. The bus to Oxford was really close by.

I bought a “return” trip ticket, sat back and smiled. I was in England, driving on the wrong side of the road. I was full aware of this idiosyncrasy but it nonetheless made me smile. It’s like someone reproduced a picture from their memory and got one detail wrong. The bus ride was only ~90 minutes. I was mostly watching the traffic: lots of station wagons, hatchbacks, all kinds of little cars on the road, and the landscape: country homes, green pastures for sheep.

The Stanford House is only 1 block away from the bus stop on High Street. It felt good to finally arrive, I hadn’t slept the previous night at all, it turned out to be a long, and tiring 40-hour day. But first I had to make it to my room. Matt and I are in what we refer to as the “tower”. It’s a nice, spacious double but to get here, you need to walk up a round, lighthouse-like staircase with no rails. Carrying the suitcase up was fun, to say the least. The rest of the houses is even more obscure. It used to be 6 separate building that were stiched together suing staircases. When you see it, it looks like one of Escher’s famous abstract paintings. And of course to layout makes no sense, to get to the basement where the library and the laundry are, you first need to walk up 2.5 storeys, and then go through a few fire doors and make your way down. These fire doors are always kept closed, and it’s not even clear whether there’s anything behind them or not. I still would have a tough time finding the music room, nor could I draw a layout of this place. I mostly get to rooms by remembering where I ended up the last time I tried to go somewhere and got lost.

The first several days were really chaotic. It reminded me of orientation week freshman year, except the people are much more mature and metting them is less awkward. Plus I knew a few kids coming in, that was helpful. I’m affiliated with Magdalen College, a stunning Gothic castle right across the street. In fact, wherever you go in Oxford, you’re bound to see stunning Gothic, Normal, or Victorian architecture. They filmed the Harry Potter scenes in the dining hall at one of the nearby colleges. It feels so much different from Stanford. 1891 vs. being established in 13th century. History and Traditions just permeate this place. There are also some contemporary building, the newer colleges and the science labs are not, thankfully, Gothic. Although as you can imagine there has been much controversy (still going on) regarding their construction. The English people may have a number of false stereotypes, but the obsession with tradition is completely true. It is completely normal to do things one way just because they have been done this way for centuries, as opposed to always looking for the most efficient manner of accomplishing the task. For example, we had to take an oath to get our library card. And until a few years ago, they could make you put your right hand on the Bible, whether or not you were religious.

I found out that I really like walking by myself. Don’t get me wrong, it is tons of fun to socialize and get to know other people while walking with a company, but I have been putting an effort into really absorbing everything Oxford has to offer. I just go for a stroll, bring my camera along and see where that takes me. We actually don’t have food for the first two weeks (the term here starts later than we arrived), and so this is a good excuse to go outside of the University and see the town as well. Although it’s very unusual to me how to University is intermixed with the Town. While it is very clear what category each building falls to, there’s no campus per se. It’s just various colleges built near the center of the city of Oxford. There is no bubble because there is no place you can point and say” that’s the campus”. Although of course there are bubbles of their own, I get the feeling that not too many people leave the colleges where they belong. The tutorials are done in the college of affiliation, and that’s where you go to the gym, library, pub as well.

Speaking of pubs, I think they’re pretty awesome. It feels good to acquire alcohol legally, plus it’s fun to try out local beers and such. You order them by a pint, which is actually quite a bit of beer from you’re used to drinking cans. So far I’ve been a big fan of Guinness and Newcastle. They also have delicious fruit and berry flavored beers, probably designed with women but who cares, I drink them anyway. I’ve been mostly going out with people from the house. One time at the pub, we saw a group of 5-6 English folks playing drinking games. We asked what there rules were and got a very warm welcome (they were pretty drunk) and an offer to stay. That was, by far, the best night here. One game we played was called “If I have the highest card”. Basically, the cards are given out, face down. Then you have to lick it and stick it to your forehead. So you never see what your own card is. Then you go around the circle and say “if I have the highest card, I will do ____”, filling in the blank. People said anything from “I’ll buy everyone a beer” to “I’ll finish everything on this table” to “I will kiss my roommate on the lips”. Then the people who got the ace actually have to do what they set out. We saw a quite a bit of stuff, ranging from that roommate kiss, so a flaming man-gina. I didn’t know what the last thing was either, if you want to find out ask me, but lets just say it involves fire. There was also a game of God Save the Queen, and a game of Yeeeha, but yeah, drinking games with Brits were fun. Somehow all the pubs close by midnight (often 11.30), so we had to go a Jamaican bar, a REALLY sketchy place (although here they say dodgy instead of sketchy, maybe sketch-ball translates to dodge-ball, i don’t know), filled with smoke, and other niceties.

The next day after that pub adventure, we departed to the Lake District in the North. After a pretty extended bus-ride, we stopped at this 16th century house made entirely of wood. The mahogany preserved really well, so it’s still standing although there isn’t a single parallel line left on the facade. The house is as crooked and twisted as it could be while still standing. We then stopped for a 2 hour walk around the lake, around the place where Wordsworth lived and wrote. Some people went to see his house, but I opted to join the walking group. It was a very scenic lake, but it was just a preview what what was to come the next day.

We left the Lake and after a quick 30-minute bus ride arrived at our hotel in a town called Cockermouth. Don’t worry, there have been enough jokes about that already. The day consisted of a 10-mile hike in the mountains, reaching one of England’s tallest peak of 1km. We were led by our 60+ year old British professor, Dr. Tyack, who’s on staff at the Stanford House. The guy is in spectacular shape, he was very much on par with the 20-year-olds for the entire 10 miles. It was physically challenging, the first couple of climbs were the hardest, and then it got a little easy. The way down was also surprisingly hard. The whole thing became known as the “Tyack” challenge. Before asking who wanted to join him on this hike, he described the experience as “strenuous” and recommended most of us engaged in something less daring while he was hiking through the mountains. Then he proceeded to tell us that it tends to be very cold at the top, and that he expects most of us to get lost on the way. Of course you can’t tell Stanford students they can’t do something, because then he was joined by a surprisingly large group. And still at every peak he would say ” well you could go back now, because the next peak is really challenging but I’m gong forward”. One time he basically started off while some people were still resting despite concerns of those with him. Awesome day. By the way the weather here has been fantastic (people here say it’s summery), 70 almost every day and it hasn’t rained yet!

While on the trip, the bus driver explained the rules of cricket to my roommate and me. We ended up catching half a game on television later on in the day. It started to make some sense although the terminology of wickets and unders is still a bit alienating. In short, it’s like baseball with two bases. I also watched a couple of soccer games when Man U was playing. Absorbing the culture of sports as well. On the way back from the Lake Distract to Oxford, we stopped at Manchester. We ended up seeing the Imperial War Museum, the Lowry gallery and also got a glimpse of the stadium.

The British television so far has been unimpressive to put it lightly. We have 6 channels, and they’re all crappy. From what I can tell, most people watch American shows that all air here. From Sex and the City to Friends to Lost, you can find just about anything. I’ll still to watchig Lost once a week, there’s nothing good on besides that anyway. I have been impressed by the news coverage of international events. I learned so much about the state of American politics from just picking up a newspaper. The Virginia Tech tragedy was page 1 of any newspaper. It’s so mind boggling that this happened, I just can’t wrap my mind around it.

So now I’m back in Oxford. I narrowed down what classes I’m taking: besides the tutorial in physics (which was finally arranged yesterday), I’ll be doing a class on British Ethnography, and Architecture of Oxford. 13 units. It’s such a different coursework from what I’m used to, and I’m only going to have a classes 2-3 days a week, for a few hours a day. I can’t stay I accomplish a whole lot in the free time though, it’s easy to get distracted. Another thing that’s different from what I’m used to is the gender make up: there are 45 students in the program, 13 guys. Although it seems like there are even fewer, like in my ethnography class (by no means a women-dominated field), it’s 8 girls and me, a complete reversal of your typical math/physics class. It’d odd, but I’m not complaining.

I went to a comedy show at the Oxford Playhouse last night, it was titled “Pride, Prejudice, and Niggas”. It’s not surprising, that the show caused very much controversy because of the title, among other things. It was a black American stand-up comedian from the South who has lived here for five years. Definitely an interesting background. Here’s one of the more memorable jokes:

Please don’t read this if you’re at all sensitive to anything:

——————–

He was talking about how he loves film and he appreciates the “fuck you” type of film, no forced happy endings, just be realistic about consequences. So he once saw this short 15-minute Japanese film that just blew his mind. It takes place on a bus going through the countryside. The driver is a small, 20-something year-old girl .All of the sudden two guys stand up in the back of the bus and yell out that it’s a robbery. They collect everyone wallets and watches while everyone just sits quietly. Then the come up to the girl-driver looked at her from head to toe, grabbed her outside and proceeded to rape her. Everyone in the bus looked at the window to see what was happening but no did anything. One man tried to stand up but was held by his wife. Finally a young 16-year old kid in the front of the bus ran out and tried to tackle the two robbers. He couldn’t overpower both of them so they forced him on the ground and cut his angle with a knife. The scene ends with both the 16-year old and the girl driver lying on the ground. The girl is the first one to get up, she slowly, mechanically gets in her feet and gets on the bus, into the drivers seat Everyone is quiet. Then the guys managed to get up. He manages to stumble and crawl to the entrance while yelling out “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help you, I’m so sorry”. But the girl yells at him “Don’t get on”. She throws out his backpack, closes the bus doors and drives away. The 16-year old starts slowly making his way in the direction where the bus was going. First he sees one ambulance, then another, and five or six more ambulances are standing in his way. It turns out the girl drove the bus off the cliff, and the movie ends to the audience’s horror.

So the comedian tells us all of this and he’s like “But I never understood if the girl drove the bus off the cliff because she thought no one inside deserved to live or women are just shitty drivers”

—————————

This turned out to be a pretty long update. I’ll post some pictures later on, and definetly write more next week. For the time being my cell phone number here is (07726) 232-562. I don’t understand why the area code is 5 digits, but in any case, the incoming calls for me are free. Just saying.

Did you see that?

On a night when Alex Rodriguez’s clutch grand-slam home run in the bottom of the night with 2 outs won the game and when Eddie Curry’s 3 pointer with less than a second to go in the 4th quarter forced the overtime and the eventual Knicks victory, writing about anything else would be far too… common.

UK Monday

There are times when Internet just runs out of things to offer. Trust me, I know. When you’ve read every single sports story in ESPN, CBS Sportsline, and sports. yahoo.com, when the new podcasts will only come out at midnight, when wikipedia loses its charm and when Youtube search results are all clips you have already seen, you are forced to create own content. This will be a blog for my travel to and around England for the spring quarter of this year 2007. We’ll see what happens beyond that, after we see whether or not I’ll actually post anything while abroad. The New Slang is a vague enough name, it can refer to just about anything. And it’s the kind of song you listen to more than once.

Tuesday was the NCAA Tournament Championship, the last game of the college basketball season. It was also the opening day for Major League Baseball. Passing of the Torch. Tuesday was the first day of classes at Stanford this quarter, but I spent the day at home getting ready for Oxford. It was odd not to be back on campus and spend the day going from classroom to classroom. It hit me for the first time that I’m doing something different. Flight’s on Monday.