I’m really enjoying having a bike and riding it everywhere. The actual riding is fun but also, I am consistently amazed at how quickly I get to places. I was really proud of myself when I figured out how to ride without sitting on the seat. You know you look like a professional when you can pump the pedals really fast without sitting down.

In England, it is compulsory to have lights on your bike. I bought krypton lights, which have a greater beam than LEDs. The down side is, of course, that they chew through light bulbs and batteries at a faster rate. I have an emergency set of C batteries in my bag, just in case.

My housemate, Dianne, was the victim of an unfortunately common crime in Cambridge: bicycle theft. The unusual aspect of this particular crime was that her bike was stolen from our backyard. That’s a bit of a creep thought, isn’t it, the idea that someone has been prowling your home?

Hundreds of bikes are stolen in Cambridge every year. The chance of recovering the bike is very low. Di was resigned to having lost her ₤65 investment. She considered punishing herself for not locking up her bike more securely by denying herself the pleasure of bike commuting. In the end, her family and friends convinced her to rejuggle her student budget to buy another bike. After all, biking is one of the fundamental Cambridge student experiences.

Last night, Di got a call from Alex, the person who had sold her the bike originally. Alex buys bikes early in the summer, when students are leaving. He then spends months repairing and refurbishing the bikes, which he sells to new students in September and October.

After Di hung up the phone, she rushed into my room.

“Joan! I have to tell you this! Alex just called and he says he saw my bike in town! He knows it because he worked on it. He says it’s definitely my bike!”

“What? Where is it?”

“He saw it parked outside a pub and he says he’s going to call the police right now. He’s hidden the bike in a little laneway around the corner, you know, to buy some time.”

“Wow. What a nice guy. But gosh, I hope that there isn’t someone who bought the bike from the thief and is now worried because she can’t find it.”

“Yeah… but Alex says hopefully we can now find the person stealing all these bikes. That’d be so awesome.”

I’ve decided to rationalise my social circles. There are many ways to meet people as a new student at Cambridge. A few days ago, I decided to concentrate on my interactions with the people from my house, my course and my scholarship group.

The casualties of the cull include people from the dance club, Australian and New Zealand Society, Commonwealth society and my college.

To my friends back in Australia, I’m sorry for the sparseness of my communication. You have not been culled. Hopefully, when my eBay-bought laptop arrives next week, I will return to my chatty self.

I’m so pleased — I’ve been cooking!

Today, I invented a BBQ-flavoured fried rice. Then I fried an egg and garnished the meal with tomato and cucumber. It was very pretty.

I had an starter of oven-baked sweet potato chips. I bought a pack of sweet potatoes, sliced one potato and sprinkled the slices with salt and pepper. They were very tasty. Unfortunately, I burned myself on the hot oven tray

I made congee the other day, too.

As you might be able tell, there is a lot of leftover rice from a dinner party we had on Tuesday. The only things you can do with left over rice, really, are congee and fried rice.

I got an email from my parents saying that my bank had sent my account activation details to Australia.

More madness!

What would have happened if I had been renting in Australia or had sold my house? What if there was no one to intercept my misdirected mail?

I went to the bank to alert them of this stupidity. They apologised, saying that someone had accidentally switched around my current and previous addresses. I am skeptical, though. Somebody told me the same thing had happened to them. I think there may be a systemic fault here.

On Friday, I went to the bank to see if my cheque had been cashed. As you know, things were getting desperate.

“Hello! Can you please check if I can get money from a cheque I deposited on Monday?”

The lady at the cashier looked on the computer. “It says the money is in your account now but…” She paused and started counting on her fingers, muttering, “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…” She looked up. “We recommend you wait six days before you withdraw proceeds of a cheque. It’s been five days. You can get the money on Monday…” She trailed off as I looked at her incredulously.

The bank recommends I wait five days? She’s doing me a favour by making me wait to get my money?

The lady could hear how silly her statement was. “You could withdraw the money using your cashcard at the ATM over there.”

“I opened the account two weeks ago and you haven’t sent me the details yet. I don’t have a cashcard.”

She looked apologetic.

I decided to play the pity card. “Is there some way, any way, I can get money today? I’ve only got £5 in my wallet now.”

“Let me check with the manager,” she said. I handed over my ID cards and she took them with her into a back room.

Three minutes later, she came out with a key and a smile. “How much money would you like?”

Success!

My first three days in England were spent at the Peak District. It’s a beautiful pastoral area about three hours north of Cambridge. Being used to the wild beauty of places like Australia and New Zealand, the tame English countryside presented a new kind of prettiness.

These sheep were in front of our hostel.

On our ‘day off’, a large group of us decided to climb Back Tor, a very large hill near Edale.

The 2.5 hour walk ballooned into a 4.5 hour hike when our navigator got lost SIX TIMES. He once said, “I’m 99% sure we’re going the right way!”

I don’t normally post photos with recognisable people in them but I couldn’t resist this time. I hope you don’t know him but if you did, you would understand that this photo captures a lot of this person’s personality.

As a group, these scholars represent some of the best and brightest in the world. The following photos show that intelligence didn’t stop us jumping an electric fence or two.

After jumping electric fences, we trespassed on very pretty private property. When people are lost, they tend to be willing to cut across anything to get to a recognisable landmark.

For the first time in my life, I am poor. Or rather, psuedo-poor. I am down to the last £5 in my wallet. This £5 has to last me until my scholarship cheque shows up in my bank account. I’m hoping, hoping, that will be tomorrow.

Being psuedo-poor, here are the luxuries that I cannot buy until fortune smiles again:

• Fruit
• A bicycle helmet (considering how clumsy I am, riding without a helmet is particulary hazardous.)
• Phone credit
• Accommodation (I cannot pay me college fees yet.)
• The services of the college washing machine or dryer
• Print credit
• Gym membership
• Dance lessons

And this is what I’m having for lunch right after I finish this post:

• A 90p olive bread I bought from the market
• A free chocolate sample that people from Cadbury gave me as I whizzed dangerously by on my bicycle
• Free soup from the special room I told you about
• Water

Luckily, most of my dinners this week are provided for. Last night, I had a welcome dinner at New Hall for the students of my MPhil program and others. Tuesday night was formal hall (a formal three course meal with sherry, port and wine) and tonight is my matriculation dinner. On Saturday, I will be on a River Thames boat cruise in London.

My life is an odd mix of poverty and privilege at the moment.

I still haven’t got a computer yet. I am writing from a special room at Cambridge, which has been set up for people on my scholarship. It’s a really nice room. There are couches and tables, free newspapers, wired and unwired internet, a foose ball table and a free drinks vending machine. This is the first time I’ve been part of something that has translated to ‘creature comfort privileges’. The previous scholarship holders tell us newbies that it is quite easy to pull rank here in Cambridge just by citing our funding body.

It sounds like my course is going to be intensive. I have classes from 6-8 PM on most Mondays and Thursdays. This wipes out many of the dance classes I wanted to get to. Oh well. I’m here to learn, not dance.

I’ve got some photos of where I’m living. I’m really pleased with the place. We have four people living in a reasonably large house. We’ve made friends with each other. In fact, I’m skipping a couple of social functions tonight so that I can hang out at home to cook with housemates.

Besides. I’m sick. I’ve got quite a nasty cold. A night at home will be better than one at The Cow, where there will be two for one cocktails.

This is my room. I have a ‘large room’ in a house, for which I’m paying about £90 a week. This seems expensive to me but there are others who are paying more.

Here is my bed in more detail. I brought the pillowcases, bedsheet and doona (‘duvet‘) cover from Australia and bought the doona at Argos. Argos is a catalogue store; it sells almost everything you can’t eat, at huge discounts to any other store. It can do this because it doesn’t display any of the items in-store. Instead, you look through a big catalogue, pick out the item you want, put in the form and the store assistants bring it out to you.

I commented to an English student that this was a bizarre concept. She laughed because Argos had been in business her entire life so it seemed quite normal to her. My housemate, Alex, is from Norway. When I showed him around Argos, he was quite delighted. This is a form of shopping particularly suited to men: know your target, hunt and destroy. None of this time-wasting browsing stuff that girls are often keen on.

This is where I’ll put the computer when I eventually get it. God, I hope it comes soon.

Note the Argos catalogue on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf.

This is where I keep most of my clothes. There isn’t much space for clothes. It’s a good thing I don’t have many (for the first time in my life, I am not crippled by choice).

See all the bathroom products on the chest of drawers? I bought most of those in the first week of arriving. I discovered that shampoo and conditioner are very expensive in grocery stores like Sainsbury’s. I am now a loyal patron of Boots, which is an English pharmacy superstore. I even have the loyalty card to prove it.

I brought quite a few pairs of shoes to Cambridge. I had an interesting time finding the blue pair during my second week here. I wanted to get shower footwear. In Australia, we call these ‘thongs‘ but in the rest of the civilised world, a ‘thong’ is an underwear/swimwear g-string. I am now required to call these ‘flip-flops‘.

The kitchen is our house’s communal space. We often stand around here talking to each other. For a week, we were limited to using the stove top only because none of us knew how to operate a gas oven. We ended up having to ask the domestic bursar. Quite a few people laughed at me when I told them this.

Because we’ve worked out how to light the oven, we’re going to cook home-made pizza tonight.

This is me cooking chorizo pasta. It turned out really well. As a result, my housemates think I can cook. I will see how long I can maintain this charade.

This is our first house dinner. Most days of the week, though, we go have dinner at the college dining room. Everyone at Cambridge belongs to a college. I chose my college because people told me it has the best and cheapest food. I have not been disappointed. It costs me around £2 to eat dinner at college (about AU$5.20), which is very cheap in England.

We have a big backyard, which has become a bicycle parking lot. I bought a bike a few days ago. I’m not sure I like having a bike. You have to park it, lock it, look after it. It reminds me of having a car. I haven’t had a car for more than a year now. Almost every student at Cambridge has a bike. As a consequence, there is a strong support industry in bike lock sales and bike insurance.

One evening, we pulled out the kitchen chairs and sat in the darkness of the backyard. Di lit some candles for us to sit around. There is now a pool of wax.

This is absolutely one of the best things about our house: location, location, location! We live on the ‘ethnic’ road of Cambridge. I have found three Chinese grocery stores on this road. There are also stores and restaurants featuring Indian, Algerian, Turkish, Greek, Brazilian, Korean, Japanese and vegetarian food, second-hand bookstores, wine stores, and supermarkets that open late. It takes me about six minutes to ride to the Engineering department, seven minutes to get to the centre of town and half a minute to the nearest doctor (who I visited this morning and who agreed with my self-diagnosis that I have a cold).

I took this photo early yesterday morning. Goodbye for now!