Lectures, Pasta and How Technology is Ruining the World

Well, I'm bad at this blogging thing.

So this was my first week of classes! Classes here are typically split up into halves as "lectures" and "seminars," lectures being exactly what they sound like and seminars being when the class splits into groups to discuss the lecture material.

• Mondays at 1pm: Architecture of London 1838-Present

This should be a pretty cool one. Every other week will be a site visit rather than a classroom meeting, so we had our first meeting on Monday and then this coming week we'll be meeting at the Royal Courts of Justice to discuss that building. Should be fun.

The professor seems like she means business and the lectures should be informative. The first seminar meeting was really dumb, only two people had done the assigned reading (one of those people was me) and I'm one of the only people in the group with a background in art, everyone else seems to have it as an elective. They've also put all the Americans in one seminar group, I don't know why they've done that, as the entire group is Americans and one Dominican girl. I hope it gets better with time but the seminar did not look promising.

• Tuesdays at 10:30: Catholics and English Politics 1558-1603

This class is going to be fun, or at least very interesting. I came out of it feeling pretty good about everything. I established myself in the seminar as one of the primary talkers, it was me and this British guy Luke having most of the discussion with the professor. Unlike the other class this one is primarily British students with a historical focus; in the British university system, you declare your major before entering and then spend three years studying that topic exclusively. The foreign students are likely to be the only ones in any given class who aren't majoring in that department.

Anyway the discussion was interesting and I really expect to like this one.

• Tuesdays at 2:00: The Spanish Inquisition

This is going to be difficult because the professor speaks in a heavy Spanish accent. Interesting material, yes, but difficult lectures. This class also does not have a seminar section.

My Tuesdays will be filled with Catholics...

• No class on Wednesdays! What am I to do with all this free time?

• Thursdays at 9:00: Art in France- Manet to Early Picasso

It feels good to be taking a specialized art course. The professor for this one is young and cool and it looks like it'll be a really good class, all about modernism (which is not the same thing as modern art!) in late 19th- and early 20th-century French painting. Manet and Matisse and all that.

• And no class on Friday.

On Monday night, to celebrate classes starting, I made food! My first food. It was very exciting.

They've got this store called Asda, which is apparently owned by Wal-Mart. The one nearest to me--which is where I acquired my pasta and cooking implements and such--is more of a gigantic grocery store than a full-blown Wal-Mart. I've figured out a pretty solid way of feeding myself, which is basically pasta and sandwiches and soup and occasionally something else. Eventually I do plan to foray into meat so that I can make a chicken Caesar salad.

I have now met the entire flat; Ollie is a very nice British guy, Gale is a very nice American student, and Chris apparently doesn't actually live here, he just hangs out a lot because he's Becky's boyfriend.

Last night we all went out!! How exciting. There is a nice pub a few minutes down the road that me and Ali and Zamon and Gale and Becky and Raj went to.

pictured: a literal bottle of hooch.

I have tickets to go to a Maroon 5 concert tomorrow night, so during the day I plan to go shopping. I was going to do that today, but I've developed this problem of sleeping until 3pm on days I don't have class. I don't know why, and I haven't been staying up very late, and it shouldn't be jet lag at this point, but it's happening. Never noon or 2:30, always after 3. Very strange.

Now let me tell you a story about how I lost my damn mind in the grocery store.

what the hell?

So one of the big supermarket chains is Sainsbury's. They, like many big supermarkets in American, have the self checkout option. Let me tell you, there is nothing self about Sainsbury's self checkout. You have to get store approval for just about everything (ibuprofen, kitchen knives, etc), and when the machine wants store approval it halts the process until you flag down an attendant to okay your purchase. And then, once you get store approval, sometimes it freaks out when you try to bag an item, all "unapproved item in the bagging area" and you have to remove the offending item (a kitchen knife) so that it will let you finish your scanning, and you're basically not allowed to bag it. Even though you got approval.

And then it doesn't like my card, because in the UK my card always needs to be scanned by the cashier instead of swiped because it's different. The machine is incapable of scanning the card and requesting a signature, even though there's a scan-thing and an electronic signature pad right there, so I was swiping and swiping and it wasn't reading. "You are taking too long, do you still want to continue with this purchase?" yes you dumb robot, I am not the one making mistakes here. All the problems are on your end. Eventually I decided that the best thing to do was to cancel the transaction and go to a manned checkout line. But hey--you need store approval to cancel the transaction. 

Of course.