Wow, I've actually neglected my blog for a while. It's interesting to note that I neglected my blog during the week where I didn't have much work to do...oh, how I've become an expert procrastinator. But look! I should be doing a paper for American history now! So here I am.

Not that I really have a ton of interesting things to say. I turned in that big paper and small web project on the 2012 London Olympics that I was procrastinating so violently in the last few posts, and I feel good about them (well, the paper, anyway...the project was kind of thrown together, but I was proud of myself for learning how to make a webvideo in the span of three hours). I also had a stupid presentation for American history that actually went better than I thought (we got a 60 on it...I know that would be a D in America, but in England, a 60 is the equivalent of a B+. Go figure). Since all of that, I've been shooting all around campus trying to get answers about my potential UEA transfer, running errands in and around Norwich, fighting with the Royal Mail, giving a walking tour of Norwich in the rain, and visiting Emma in Cambridge. This week, I'm going to London on Wednesday to see Phoenix (!!!), coming back for classes on Thursday, and then training up to Scotland with Dickinson friends on Friday for the weekend. And that's only this week: these next two weeks are so jam-packed with travel I can't even see straight, but I'm excited, and it's the perfect time, since once I get down to doing this stupid American history paper, there's an unusual lull in coursework.

However, it's not a long-winded Chelsea blog post without a bulleted list. Hi-ho!

-The clocks changed in England on Sunday (yesterday), so it now gets dark at 5PM as opposed to 6PM. And it's October. I've been told that in December, the sun can set as early as 2 or 3PM and rise as late as 11AM. I actually find this quite cool, since I've never been one of those people emotionally affected by the weather, but it just means I have to be more careful about how late I'm out by myself, since it gets dark so early.

-There was a rare Beatles photo show at a random little art gallery in Norwich last week, so of course I went. It was £5 to go, but I just had to. The guy that owned the gallery was there, and he was talking to me as if I was a potential customer, telling me all the prices of the photos listed didn't include framing costs or VAT (tax). Believe me, mister, if I had the money to buy a £1000 signed photo of the Beatles from the Mad Day Out in 1968, I would, but I think my UEA sweatshirt and American accent should have told you that I was a poor interational student that's just nerdy about the Beatles.

-My lovely flatmate Rosie and I have been slowly making our way through season 1 of both 24 and the West Wing, shows I've been meaning to get into for years. Unfortunately, the stupid UEA library only lets you take out DVDs for one night, so we have five-hour-long marathons every night and renew the discs we don't finish the next day. I can see myself becoming a total West Wing nerd.

-Because no one really reads this blog, I feel like I can talk pretty freely about my process of trying to transfer to UEA (it's not exactly strictly confidential, but I'm not too keen on Dickinosn finding out about my plans too soon, and I don't like telling everyone my big plans before they're set in stone). Apparently, the two professors I have on my side are quite optimistic about it all, but ever since I found out that I need to be granted several academic concessions to have my Dickinson course credits count at UEA, I've been a bit nervous. That might seem obvious to everyone else that it would be necessary, and I assumed it would be necessary, but basically it's not up to individual people that decide if my Dickinson courses were good enough to transfer: it's a computer program. If my credits and number of courses don't match up with what's required, the computer might just throw it out and say "no," and then I'll have to go in and fight individual people to get on my side all over again. If I don't have an answer by the beginning of January, I might go insane.

-I've decided that if I'm staying at UEA, I'm going to buy myself a proper phone to last me the following year and a half. Nothing against the cheap one I have, but...I can't text on a regular number pad anymore. Once you go QWERTY, you can never go back. I'm like a monkey on crack when I try to text, and it takes me upwards of 5 minutes to send out a simple message. I'm a fan of the LGKS360, which is a perfect combination of touch-screen and QWERTY buttons.

-Because I'm actually (mostly) enjoying myself at university for the first time in ages, all of a sudden, my Wooster years feel very far away and long ago. In the process of applying to UEA, I had to dig up the saved PDF file of my old Common App to get accurate SAT and AP scores off of it, and I couldn't even remember writing some of the things on there, let alone doing them. I took the math SAT II? I barely remember taking the SAT IIs. It was strange to look back on all the technical (and therefore kind of useless) statistics of high school like that...very few of my Wooster memories have anything to do with academic material I learned in a classroom. I learned time management, responsibility, and a good liberal arts base, among countless other valuable things, but I've forgotten almost every essay, project, test, presentation or other pieces of work I produced there. At one point in my life, I knew all the major English kings in order and what they did thanks to Ms. Maxwell's AP European History class, but now I just remember a few odd inside jokes from the classroom and perhaps some of the stranger facts included in our textbook. I guess that's what gets me about education: there's all this song and dance about the actual information you learn in the classroom, but rarely do you ever need to use any of that stuff again, so you forget it. During my transfer process, I've been thinking a lot about the ideology of education, so expect a blog post about that soon.

Last night, I had a dream I was at Dickinson, applying to study abroad at UEA. In the dream, I was sleeping, and I got a phonecall very early with the result of my application, and the guy on the phone told me I had been rejected to study at UEA because I didn't like Dickinson that much (it doesn't make sense, I know, but it's a dream). I told him that one of the only reasons I stayed at Dickinson was in order to study abroad at UEA, but he wasn't having it.

So I woke up, all stressed out and disappointed that I wouldn't be able to study abroad at UEA. It took me about three minutes to realize that I just woke up in England at UEA. I laughed.

I think this probably speaks to my worries of not being allowed to stay on and graduate from UEA, but to be honest, it would be absolutely ridiculous for them to reject me since I ALREADY GO HERE (and my transcript isn't too shabby, either). I'm not actually that worried, but I kind of almost don't know what I'd do if I couldn't stay on. That's a bad outlook to have in case it doesn't work out for some other reason, but I'm attached to the country, the city, the university, and my friends here. My mind has been made up about what I want to do for my last year of college/university, and I don't change my mind often with regard to things like this.

P-R-O-C-R-A-S-T-I-N-A-T-I-O-N

-I think I'm losing my knack for buying concert tickets. White Lies, who opened for Coldplay at Wembley, are coming to UEA on November 23, so I thought a month and a half was enough time in advance to try to buy a ticket online. Wrongy wrong wrong. Apparently, it's already sold out. The odds are good that I can scalp one closer to the date of the show (there are Facebook groups solely for selling UEA event tickets), but really. Additionally, I learned a few months ago that Snow Patrol would be playing three dates at the Royal Albert Hall, on November 23, 24, and 25 for as cheap as £22.50. It took several weeks to get myself sorted: figuring out who was coming with me (they bailed), figuring out which date of the three would work best in my schedule, making a reservation at the Arran House. So last night I go on both the RAH's site and Ticketmaster...and all the tickets for the date I want to go to, save for the really good £75 tickets, are all sold out. I did, however, find that www.viagogo.co.uk is the UK equivalent of www.stubhub.com, but the cheapest tickets there cost about £50, and that's way above face value. I think I'm going to ask my parents if the ticket can be my birthday present (though I'll probably have enough money saved from my weekly stipend to cover the ticket come November--I put away about £20 per week for things like this).

-I've known this for years now, but it's worthy of repetition: Cadbury chocolate is far superior to Hershey's. I love chocolate, don't get me wrong, but I've always been the sort of person that would choose Pringles or nachos over a candy bar or cake. Here, I eat more chocolate than I ever have in my life simply because it's that amazing. I ate half a HUGE bar of dairy milk chocolate last night, which I'm pretty sure is about three or four times the serving size (but I wouldn't know, since UK labels don't HAVE serving sizes listed, which I'm always going to be bitter about).

-Because I have all the time in the world these days and all, on a whim I bought a packet of airmail envelopes and a pad of airmail paper from the post office on campus. Perhaps after this week, I can actually write the occasional letter: the stationery is cute, and who doesn't like to get mail? As we all know, I also like to write my butt off, so we'll see if I can actually afford the time to be cute and send letters.

-Seven of my friends and I are going to Edinburgh, Scotland, over the weekend of Halloween! We booked the hostel last night and our train tickets this morning, and I'm quite excited for our little mini-vacation. It's nice to actually be going somewhere a bit far (technically another country!) and leaving the massive mounds of work behind. Besides Scotland, however, I'm going to Cambridge for the day next Friday to visit Emma, and then I have two trips to London coming up as well (to see Phoenix on the 28th and to go in for Guy Fawkes on the 5th of November). If I can snag Snow Patrol tickets, I'm going again on November 24th as well.


-I'm well aware that I should be working on my paper, but I only got out of class an hour ago, and in ten minutes I've got to go food shopping, so this is a good time-kill. It's interesting, though: the problem with my paper is actually getting over the mental hurdle of DOING it. I've rarely ever had this problem before. I only really learned how to procrastinate last year, but now I'm a professional, it seems. I think it's going to turn out alright in the end (well, at least it'll be interesting to me and be up to my standards...we'll see how well it fares for a grade), and besides occasionally freaking out about it being too short (ME? Worrying about something being TOO SHORT? Has this ever happened before?), I just have to force myself to DO it. I also need it to be finished by Friday so I can have the weekend to work on my other two (lame) projects.

-In direct contrast to my moronic American History class, my Politics in the USA class is quite good. However, because I'm actually American, I often find it hard to separate my personal opinions and spins on issues from what is neutral and appropriate for a classroom setting. Because everyone else in the class is British, though they may be interested in the issues surrounding healthcare and the Nobel Peace Prize, for example, I'm the only one talking about things with any sort of emotion in my voice or with any sort of personal stake. I've also been inundated with stories presented with one side's spin or the other on it for my entire life--I don't think we have really any truly neutral major news source in America. That's not really the case in the UK: the BBC is government owned, so it can present stories without bias (or at least, with much less bias than the major news networks in the US). Everyone else is more used to hearing the neutral, middle ground, whereas I barely even know what a neutral news story looks like. At any rate, I need to keep my personal opinions out of conversation more often, but I realize that I'm bringing my bias into what I'm about to say approximately every thirty seconds. Perhaps this class will be a lesson in being objective as well.

Right. On to my paper.

I know this is my hell week and I shouldn't be blogging (ironically week 42 of the year...I better get good grades on all of this), but my laundry's in the machine now, and I think I'm allowed to be unproductive for 20 minutes.

-My Politics in the USA professor is obsessed with American dental care. He has quite nice teeth himself, but he's mentioned what nice teeth Americans have at least four times in four weeks now. Every time we come across a picture of Obama or Biden, he remarks on the "far superior" American dental care. Perhaps it is superior, but we pay through the nose for it.

-Apparently, the idea of having a flat, unfitted bedsheet between you and the comforter/duvet is unheard of in Europe. I noticed this while staying in the Arran House: It was just a fitted sheet and a duvet, with a throw blanket at the foot of the bed in case you got really cold, but I guess I didn't think this was a national phenomenon until my (lovely) flatmate Rosie cracked up when she saw I had TWO sheets on my bed. After thinking about it, I realized that the reason they don't do flat sheets is because with their comforters (called duvets), you take the decorative, outer layer off of the actual warm part, kind of like a pillowcase for your comforter. So when your comforter/duvet gets dirty, you just take off the cover and wash that, which is much easier than washing the whole bulky thing. Because our comforters don't often have covers, we have a flat sheet between our bodies and the comforter so we just have to wash the thin sheet and not the whole bulky comforter every few weeks.
I am a genius.

-They turned on the heating in our flat, which I was glad about for approximately ten minutes. It's cold in the mornings, so I thought being able to turn up my radiator when I get up would be a good thing. Perhaps that is a good thing, but the aggravating part is that the radiator is always on, even if just a little, so our rooms are saunas now. Additionally, my floor is unusually warm since they turned on the radiators, with very warm spots interspersed all over the carpet. I'm not concerned by this, since it's probably just a pipe running under my floor, but it does make the room even warmer than it needs to be, and walking across my room is kind of like wading through a kiddie pool with lots of "warm spots."

-I went to the admissions office to talk about transferring to UEA. Apparently people do it all the time: they had a pre-printed instruction sheet/checklist to give me titled "Guidelines for Visiting Students Wishing to Complete Degrees at UEA." This is very, very awesome. However, I wasn't necessarily expecting to have to reapply to UEA since I already go here and was accepted once, but I actually have to apply to the school directly for my final year, using the British version of the Common App, called UCAS. It doesn't look hard or onerous, but it is time consuming, and I'd love to have an offer to stay by Christmas both so I can get my plans in order and just to get it off my mind and have time to think about what I'm going to do. Perhaps after this week I can start looking at it. I might as well apply, presumably get in (not that hard, since I already go here--as long as I don't fail everything or get into trouble, I should be fine), and then decide from there.

There hasn't been all that much going on these days short of having to do work and often procrastinating that work. I certainly knew I was getting myself into an academic environment on this program (duh, it's study abroad), but I didn't really think studying is all I'd have time to do. At the same time, I didn't imagine that I'd have a lot of time outside semester breaks to travel extensively, whereas it seems as though others did, so I'm not too terribly let down in that respect (though I do plan to go to Scotland over Halloween with friends, with a few trips to London sprinkled in as well). I just kind of wish I could afford the time to scrape myself out of my room more often, because all the work I've been assigned can be done from anywhere in the world, and I (might) only be in England for a year.

However, I'm working on that last part. I met with my advisor on Wednesday, and I asked her about potentially permanently transferring to UEA. She says she's almost positive it's possible and that more people do it than I might think, which gave me a huge surge of confidence and excitement. I'm going to the International Office on Monday to start asking questions. Perhaps everything could be sorted out sooner than I'd hoped.

I've always counted myself as a pretty down-to-earth sort of person, but I hold more stock in things like gut feelings than I should. My gut feeling since the first few days in London has been that I'm not really going to be living in America again for quite some time, short of winter and summer holidays. I honestly believe that I'm going to finish my degree here (hopefully on schedule, in one more year--if they tell me I have to stay on two years to get a degree, I might reconsider), and then my goal will be finding a job here, which might place me in England for the next five years or so. I see myself shopping in Tesco and Superdrug and Topshop in my mid-twenties rather than Stop & Shop, CVS, and Gap. Short of desperately missing my car and driving, Target, and diners and pizza joints, I can and hopefully will spend the majority of the rest of my life in England, and I think having a degree from a British university (that I like better, that suits my academic needs better, and allows me to live the way I want to) is the gateway to that. We can cross the bridge of "will my future kids go to Wooster?" when we come to it (tee hee).

If I get told that actually, it's quite painless and easy to transfer to UEA permanently, then there's the question of when I actually do it: January 2010 or September 2010? I'm not so bitter towards Dickinson and this program that I feel the need to ditch them the second I get the chance, but since my winter semester at Dickinson isn't paid for yet, I wonder if it would make more sense for me to lose the Dickinson banner sooner rather than later. Then, in place of Dickinson's Humanities 310 course in the spring, I could take up another UEA module that would actually apply to my major and would further me along the course of graduating on my 3.5-year schedule. Academically, it actually makes a lot of sense. I just would be sad to be in any way cut out of the Dickinson group--I would imagine I would still be fully welcome to come to the informal things, like our Thursday pub nights in Norwich, but I'd be sad if I would no longer be invited to the monthly dinners at the Dickinson house and the like. Perhaps that wouldn't be enough to keep me tied to Dickinson for that last semester, but I'd prefer not to have to give up the group dynamic before I might be forced to next year. I'm part of a small group of around 30 people again for the first time since Wooster, and my year so far has been all the better for it. I'm not ready to give that up yet.

We got issued facemasks to protect ourselves against H1N1, so these are our new family photos:

Argh, they get cut off by the sidebar, so to see the whole photos, click on them.

Remember that post I made recently about food? How I said I didn't really mind "cooking" for myself that much?

Yeah, nix that. Last night, I think I managed to give myself food poisoning. Of course, that's an unconfirmed, suspected diagnosis, but according to various internet sources (including Wikipedia), an acute yet violent attack of nausea and vomiting is almost always food poisoning. I feel fabulous now, as well, so I don't think any sort of stomach virus would have come on so quickly and then left after six hours.

I had grilled cheese and tomato soup for dinner, grilled cheese from Kraft singles and white bread, and tomato soup from a can. I've eaten all these things before without problem, and it tasted fine and all that. I washed my dishes after eating and then sat around in the kitchen for another hour and a half to two hours, talking with my flatmates. Then, all of a sudden, I started to feel really bad, so I went back to my room, and I didn't leave the bathroom until about three AM. Today, I feel perfectly fine, so I must have purged whatever was knocking me out, which is why I suspect food poisoning. I'm suspicious of the canned soup now...what else could have done it?

Anyway, not that I think this was exactly my fault, but so much for being OK with my lame excuse for cooking: I'm now going to be extra careful. Now, to avoid H1N1...one kid on the Dickinson science program has it, and many people in the University Village do. Many of my Dickinson friends are sick, but no one with H1N1 yet. Today in my politics lecture, there was so much coughing going on that if I had been given my issued facemasks yet, I would have considered putting one on. One guy in back of me just had to be breathing heavy on me too. I don't think this fall/winter is going to go down well on the health front.

What IS it about people and tea in this country? I know that historically tea has been important to the United Kingdom and blah blah, but it's more than a fondness, I think: requirement of tea seems to be embedded in British DNA. I've concluded that the Great Britain's love of tea is not just a stereotype: it's fact. Two of my flatmates claim to never really drink tea, so they're the exception to the rule, but one of my other flatmates probably drinks enough for all six of us. In Watching the English, tea is kind of glossed over as something that the entire country is obsessed with, but apparently the amount of time it takes to do something (like repair a toilet or hang a picture) is often measured in both units of time and cups of tea: "It took me two hours and three cups of tea to fix that door!" My flatmate's mom just dropped her back off at the apartment after a weekend at home, and it went without saying that she had to have a cup of tea before getting back on the road.

As previously mentioned, how you prepare tea is apparently also an indicator of class, according to Watching the English (which is my new Bible, if you haven't noticed). Everything is an indicator of class in this country, but tea is one I can actively observe and learn from: only the very posh and the very poor take sugar in tea. I think everyone takes milk, it's just how much you put in that's important: the milkier, the lower the class. Even the brand that you buy is telling: Twinning's is posher than PG Tips, for example.

Tea is also supposed to have great curing qualities, physical and emotional. When people were suggesting that we have cups of tea when we were all royally pissed off by our syllabus last week, I think we would have chucked the mugs out of the window, but apparently it's not about the tea itself: it's about wasting time making the tea so you can think of what to say to a distraught or upset person. Making tea (and toast if the person is really beside themselves) is a displacement activity, since the whole premise of Watching the English is that English people are socially inept and need that extra time while the water is boiling to think of what to say (I think that's a bit stupid, but beyond a couple of points such as that, I do think the book has some value).

Me, I've never been a huge tea fan. Hot tea, iced tea, I just don't really see the hype. However, I'm quite enjoying the convenience of the electric kettle we have in the kitchen, now that I've learned that the little flakies floating around in there is harmless limescale and not mold. I've now taken to drinking multiple cups of hot chocolate per day, and I have to say I quite enjoy it. I reckon that the Brits have something in saying that hot drinks make you feel a bit better when you're moping and busy. The question still remains, though: why doesn't everyone have to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes if they drink so much tea? You'd think that would be the inevitable result of all this consumption of liquid, and you would think the result of a nation theoretically having to pee all the time would be that they would have quite nice, spacious bathrooms. This is the exact opposite of true.

There are some things about this country I'll never understand.

Of Potatoes and Crumpets

I know I've never cooked in my life, but I'm already feeling the pain of not having an oven. The doorless box mounted on the wall, called a "grill" by my flatmates, doesn't count, after trying to make oven chips in it yesterday (i.e., frozen french fries). I took them out after 10 minutes (they were still frozen solid), dumped them on a plate, and put them in the microwave/convection oven for 30 minutes and they turned out OK. Now, I'm doing the same with a baked potato: from frozen, it says to put the things in the oven for 50 minutes. This makes me a bit wary, but I suppose it's the only way I'm going to learn. From now on, I'm no longer freezing things: I thought things you bought in the freezer section had to go in your freezer at home. Apparently, this is not so, especially when I'm just going to eat the things in the next week and they have no hope of going bad. I'm now in my room waiting for my potatoes with cheese to bake, and I feel a bit scared by the fact that I'm leaving something cooking unmonitored in the next room. I also wonder about how much radiation a microwave emits when it's on continuously for 50 minutes.

Speaking of microwaves, I'm on the hunt for microwave popcorn in this country. Apparently it exists, but only in larger supermarkets that I really haven't spent a lot of time in yet. At any rate, it's not as common here, but I've been craving it.

I'm loving crumpets. I always thought that "crumpet" was just the British word for an English Muffin, but it turns out that crumpets are denser and cakier than English Muffins, and all-around fabulous. You toast them (not cutting them in half, just sticking the whole thing in the slot) and then spread butter or nutella on the top, which then soaks into the entire crumpet via little holes on the top. They're fabulous.

In general, though, the whole "cooking for myself" thing hasn't been that bad. I can buy my weekly groceries with around £20-£25, so I have more than enough of my £60-stipend for our weekly night on the town, and I save the rest for travel. Mostly I stick to buying things that just require heating up, and I think I'm not going to get much more adventurous than boiling pasta or making grilled cheese sandwiches (which I seem to have a good talent in...who would have thought?). This is fine with me: I don't have time to make anything more exciting, nor do I have any desire to even if I had all the time in the world. My one really adventurous exploit was trying to make my Tesco-bought cheese sauce taste like something: they don't do alfredo sauce here, so anything you buy in a cheese sauce basically just tastes like somewhat salty milk. I decided to add garlic and a bit of paprika...it made it better, but certainly nothing like real alfredo sauce, and subsequently, I positively reeked of garlic at my friend's birthday party. I don't think it's worth it to really try to perfect this, but if it seems easy enough, I might try it sometime. I just miss buying a cheese sauce with the spices already mixed in, since I like cheese sauces more than tomato sauces any day.

I hear sirens, so perhaps I should go check on my potatoes (nah, we live very close to a huge hospital...still. I'm checking).