Days 10 & 11

Wednesday:
On Wednesday, I was doing really well. I got up on time, got ready, got on the bus, got to my classroom early (if you say got that many times it starts to sound funny), sat down, received a syllabus, and started reading the course layout. It said: Lecture One: What is research? How do we conduct research? I thought, "Weird, I thought this was War & Memory... what sort of research will we be doing?" Then I looked at the class title: Research Methods II. In a panic, I asked the girls behind me what class this was, hoping that the professor had messed up, not me. They said, "Research Methods II", and I said, "I thought this was War & Memory." They laughed at me, obviously because they thought War & Memory is a stupid name for a class, not because they thought I was stupid.

I asked a lady in the hall if she knew where that class was. She didn't, but she pointed me to the English corridor, where I was able to look at the module schedule and see that the class was in a different building. I raced over to that building (which wasn't too far away) and got to the classroom, only to discover that the entrance was at the front of a HUGE lecture hall. Luckily the lights were all out because the professor was using a projector, and if anyone noticed me, they didn't say anything.

Beyond that, I went out shopping with one of the girls from the program (I now have a pillowcase for my pillow instead of a huge t-shirt) and bought some of the books I need for class. I also went to the Societies Fair, where you can sign up to join Societies, which sounds much more mysterious than it really is. It's basically like joining a club, except you don't get to hang around in tree houses or make signs that say, "NO BOYS ALLOWED", and instead of having secret handshakes and smuggled cookies from your kitchen, you get to do stuff together at the same time, like karate or funky dancing or liking science fiction.

Games I played:

1. The Metaphor/Simile Game: The only rule is that you have to make up really good metaphors/similes about stuff. My favorite that I came up with was "The wind blew my hair around like squid tentacles in a stormy sea".
2. The How-Many-Times-Can-I-Trip Game: Three times.

Thursday:
Thursday is my epic four-class-in-a-row day. Crime Fiction was pretty awesome. We're starting out with Sherlock Holmes and then going through the sub-genres in chronological order culminating in The Silence of the Lambs and some other book about a creepy serial killer (which are the only two books I'm not excited to read). I already know what I want to write about for my final paper, provided I can (the development of the detective/assistant relationship through twentieth-century Crime Fiction and the leveling of the relationship in twenty-first-century crime television). There's a question about motifs (which the pairing thing apparently falls under) on the practice essay questions, and the professor said the real ones should be similar, so as long as that one is still there, I can write that essay.

The next class, Welsh Culture & Folklore, was pretty good because she showed us lots of pictures of Welsh stuff and told stories. Then I went to my Charlotte Bronte class. We learned about Bronte's Juvenilia, which is stuff she wrote when she was 13-23. Apparently, when Charlotte Bronte was thirteen, she wrote these stories with her brother about a fantastical world based off of what they read about Africa in a magazine. In these stories (that she wrote starting at thirteen), they included all of this stuff about colonialism. For instance, the Glass Town represented the vulnerability of the colonialist system because it was made of glass and glass breaks easily. There are many other examples about how Charlotte Bronte thought a lot about colonialism and its affects on the natives colonialized as well as the colonialists themselves when she was a teenager. (I might be a bit skeptical of the extent of the actual meaning... it's possible her brother said, "Wouldn't it be sweet if the town was made out of glass?" and she said, "Yes!" but that's just conjecture.)

My last class was Myth & Saga, and I learned about Norse Icelandic mythology. We read an excerpt from a saga called Eirik the Red, which is about Leif Ericksson discovering America. My professor made a comment about Leif being called Leif the Lucky and how he didn't think finding America was all that lucky, and then he chuckled. I don't think he knows that Steve and I are Americans. I really wanted to say something in my American accent right after, but there wasn't an opportunity to.

Some important observations about Wales:

1. If you live on the 5th floor, you really live 6 floors up from the ground. There is (as far as I can tell) always a ground floor, labelled G in the elevator, which does not count as the first floor. It can be confusing when you are trying to find room 2.01 and only walk up one flight of stairs.
2. Things are sometimes backwards here. Not only do they drive on the left, but they walk on the left. This can be confusing for someone who, in addition to usually walking on the right, has a little trouble with remembering which is left and which is right (not that I am that way at all...).