I burst out laughing when I read this at Slow Travel.
“I did however spot possibly my favourite t-shirt slogan of all time adorning the chest of a slim Thai girl it bore the legend ‘Fat people are harder to kidnap’. So that’s the American anti-terrorist abduction strategy explained in full then.”
Yesterday, I handed in my dissertation. I’m happy with it. The thing I worried most about my research (and all my work at uni and as a consultant) is that I’ll write a report that says nothing new or useful, and that it will sit on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. I am, however, happy that I’ve said something interesting. Enough people have read it that I think that it might even be useful. So I have achieved everything I want from this year.
I said goodbyes. Many of those goodbyes were final. I’ve never said so many final goodbyes before. It was a strange, sad feeling.
After I gave in my work, Damjan and I packed up my room and much of the house. It took longer than I expected and I was frantic, worried it wouldn’t get done before we had to leave Cambridge. There were so many bits and pieces that I forgot I had — bank statements, chargers, computer warranties, souvenirs… But it all got done and as the taxi pulled up to the bus stop with two giant suitcases, a medium-giant backpack, a small backpack, and a shopping bag, my agitation melted away.
I am now at Damjan’s house with a cold but without any worries.
I will write again this week. Bye!
Damjan and I went to the British Museum on Saturday and also saw the musical Fame.
Damjan liked these teacups. No, we are not at Ikea — these are procelain cups from China, made hundreds of years ago!
Our London eating style is called ‘grazing’. When we see something that looks tasty, we buy a bit and eat it. Here I am at Leicester Square (‘Lester‘) eating a pork bun from nearby Chinatown.
Fame was interesting enough. It had no plot, just some shallow characterisations of about eight students going through four years of high school at the New York School of Performing Arts. Once I let go of all expectations of a plot line, I enjoyed it more. The dancing was goodish, although not of the standard you should expect from a West End production. Maybe this is what you get from performers who are musical theatre generalists, rather than dance specialists.
There were three girls in front of us who were too enthusiastic with the cheering and the dancing and the clapping. I think they knew one of the performers.
There are some things about the UK that seem so ordinary to the natives that they never think to mention them. In fact, such things are becoming ordinary to me, too, so I’d better write them down before I forget how weird they are.
The street lights here are orange. In Australia (and presumably all the other countries I’ve visited because I hadn’t noticed differently), street lights use white light, or occasionally, slightly blue light. Maybe it was a yellowish white.
In England (don’t know about the rest of the country), they use sodium arc lamps, which are orange. I don’t like them. They don’t seem quite bright enough.
If you want to own a TV or watch TV on your PC, you need to buy a television licence. This is in addition to what you pay for a TV and costs about £135 a year. I believe it goes to fund the BBC.
The TV Licensing Authority is aggressive, like a debt collector. If you don’t have a TV licence, you can get threatening letters (‘If you don’t pay up, we’ll send our people along to search your house’). People tell me that the Licensing people drive around in vans equipped with special detectors that know whether or not you are watching TV illegally.
There is a High Street chemist (pharmacy, drugstore) chain called Boots. I think this is a silly name.
If you see a nice restaurant, there is a 50% chance that it belongs to a chain of restaurants. Those restaurants that look like once-offs are actually not. ‘Chain store’ and ‘quality’ are not mutually exclusive terms here.
Everyone uses cheques here. It feels old-fashioned. Back in Oz, if I needed to handle lots of money, usually I sent it electronically. Here, cheques are even used to paid small amounts, like £5 for a movie ticket. If you deposit a cheque, it takes almost a week to clear. If you transfer money electronically, it takes at least three days to get to the account. This country runs on slow. It drives my American friends nuts.
Street signs are stuck on buildings or walls instead of on poles at intersection corners. This makes signs difficult to find because you can’t predict where they will be or at what height or even what style of sign it will be (will it be a metal plate with old fashioned writing or a modern bright green label?). I wish they’d get some consistency.
For my first six months here, I assumed an engineer was an engineer. I see vans go by, which have written on them, ‘scaffolding engineer’, ‘air conditioning engineer’, or ‘boiler engineer’. I thought it was interesting that so many engineers have started small businesses.
Then Gina told me that in the UK, anyone can call themselves an engineer. All those engineers I saw driving past are what we in Australia call ‘tradies’ or tradespeople. At best, we call them engineering technologists. I grew up somewhere where an ‘engineer’ presumably had a four year university degree.
Because of the way British people use ‘engineer’, I’m told that engineering is a relatively low status profession. When you say that you’re an engineer, people think you fix air conditioners. Perhaps this is why professional qualification (chartered status) is such a priority in the UK and not so in Australia.
I have been thinking about whether or not this ambiguity is a problem. I don’t like professional snobbery, especially as experienced tradies and draftspeople know more about ‘engineering’ than graduate engineers and get paid less. It doesn’t quite seem fair. Other people say that one should be rewarded for having slogged through four years of university.
Maybe this isn’t a question of snobbery and superiority. Maybe there is a case for having two different names for engineers and tradespeople because they do different things. Whether or not one occupation is ‘better’ than another is for society to sort out. It’s a separate issue from the terminological one.
After all, would it be sensible for a legal secretary to be called a lawyer, or a nurse to be called a doctor?
If UK’s engineering associations decided this was a problem, how could it solve it? How do you ‘take back’ a term, say to people, ‘Sorry, guys. You can’t be engineers any more’? It doesn’t seem like you can do that. They could invent a new term for university-qualified engineers, I guess, either using a new word or some sort of modifying descriptor. Or they could continue down the path of chartered status and try to reduce public confusion through advertising (‘Doing something big? Check if your engineer is chartered!’).
The beginning of the end was when I tapped out my last paragraph and did a final proof-read.
The middle of the end is now. I printed my work and today, sent it to the binders.
The end of the end is next Friday, when I pick up my hard-bound, gold-crested, no-expense-spared dissertation and hand it in to the department.
Then it will be the beginning of the beginning all over again — except, thank goodness, for the five weeks of nothing of nothing in between!
I was idly thinking about how easy it would be to organise a 10-year high school reunion. Through Facebook, I’ve already found 50 high school mates. There are probably twenty more out there in Facebook land who I haven’t spotted or who I didn’t know well enough to make into Facebook friends.
I would create a Facebook group for the class of 2000, then use the group to organise a reunion for 2010. It might have to be that far out because it seems like we have scattered all over the world. If everyone gets in contact with everyone else they know, I’m sure we’d have a good proportion of the year level. We had just under 300 people all together, I think.
So, say 120 agree to come and half of them bring their partners. That’s 180 people. Thinking about the logistics, how would we pay for venue hire, catering and music? Maybe we could ask for $10 per person (at the door or pre-paid?).
I just found a catering company that has finger food menu for $9 per person.
I’m sure we could get the high school to hire out the school hall. Stick an MP3 player into the sound system, then voilà , music!
Haha, I just had a flashback to our high school socials, which were also held in the school hall. I remember what a highlight it was, to dress up for that one night of the year, then go to school and dance. There must have been teachers milling about to supervise, I don’t remember. What a strange situation, yet I never thought of it as strange before.
I remember our debating team arranging for substitute debaters from the year below us so that we could go to the social. That must have been in Year 9.
I wonder if the school still organises socials? I wonder if fourteen year olds these days are too grown up for that kind of event?
Ah, finally I get it. Thank you, Wikipedia!
(Actually, this is an ‘Euler diagram’. What’s the difference between this an a Venn diagram?)
I don’t like slugs. Or worms. Slimy things make my skin crawl. I don’t like butter, either. Because it’s slimy.
Di doesn’t like spiders. She says that they make her freak out. It’s probably something to do with all the legs, dozens of clickity-clickity sounds as they power overhead on the ceiling or towards you on your bedside table.
One morning, I came down the stairs from my bedroom and saw something a bit odd. There was a stack of towels jammed up against the foot of Di’s door. When I rounded the staircase, I saw a piece of paper stuck to the kitchen door. It said:
Joan
I am staying at Phil’s because I saw a huge spider. It was this big:
Di had drawn a circle bigger than my fist. Now, that’s a big spider.
In the days following, Di, Phil and Ashley killed two giant spiders downstairs. Their weapon was the broom. They found one behind the fridge and another near the bathroom.
Thank goodness we haven’t been infested by slugs. I am shuddering just think of it.
I’m good at school. Good at learning, being in class, doing homework. It almost doesn’t matter what the subject is. There is one subject, though, which I don’t like — languages.
I’ve been thinking about this. There is no reason for me to single out languages for particular dislike. Objectively, languages should be one of the most enjoyable subjects. You learn something useful, you learn about other cultures, it’s easy enough to understand (not like theoretical physics, say). I even remember eating sushi and onigiri in the Japanese classes I did for three years (I have retained nothing from these classes).
I think it’s because I associate learning languages with pain and failure. I went to Chinese school most weekends for ten years. Then I did four years of Chinese at university. The classes were always too hard for me. There was barely one moment in those fourteen years of study in which I felt competent or stimulated. Instead, I felt embarrassed, frustrated, angry, bored, and despairing.
I could not (still can’t) understand why people learn Chinese, or any language, for fun. How can it be fun? It is so hard and makes you so wretched. You can’t ever get on top of it. You will always fall short.
I am glad that I can still speak and write (and type) Chinese, in spite of moving to Australia before my third birthday. While being miserable in Chinese class, I thought, ‘This must be what it’s like to be bad at school. No wonder people hate it.’ I remember being so grateful when classmates helped me understand the work. I wonder if that inspired me to help people in other classes?
Now that I’ve figured out why I hate the idea of doing language classes, maybe I can wipe the slate clean. Maybe I can stop myself from cringing at the thought of learning a new language.
Add another run to the scoreboard!
Tonight, Di and I cooked ‘oven baked risotto’ from my favourite cookbook. It was very tasty. We fried bacon, onion and a bit of butter. Then we poured in the cherry tomatoes, white wine, and chicken stock and stuck it in the oven. Our oven is slow so it took 40 minutes instead of 20. But it got done, and we mixed in the parmesan.
I think I am a little tipsy from finishing the rest of the wine bottle.
Including the chilli I cooked earlier this week, this brings me up to 14 out of 101 recipes in the cookbook.
For lunch, I went to Matt and Rachel’s house for Matt’s birthday BBQ. I ate an ostrich burger. I’ve always wanted to eat an ostrich burger, ever since I saw it being sold at the Cambridge market. I also ate a giant slice of cake.
Nearly everyone at the party was Australian. There are a lot of Australians in the UK. I feel kind of like a sheep, especially now that I’m going to work in London. I feel like saying, ‘I’m not a sheep! I came here by accident! I’m here because I mean it, not because it’s the done thing!’