Friday, October 31, 2003
Happy birthday, Jessica!
I didn't send a card, but am hoping that 28 is a great age for you. I also hope you're enjoying the Friday opportunity to be festive, and that the Hallowe'en parties are good (that goes for any of my North American peeps reading, not just Jess).
Last night I opted for the lazy person's costume (hey! I have a kilt! I'll put my hair in pigtails, wear a tight shirt and be Hit Me Baby-era Britney Spears/random schoolgirl) and went to the Canadian and American Societies' joint Hallowe'en party with John, Laura and Pranav, the three American Decision Sciences masters students. One of Laura's friends is a Hallowe'en baby too.
John has a blog so I don't need to describe last night. Yay for conscientious webloggers who do my work for me. He'll probably post Pranav's pictures, and maybe some of mine once I get a LAN cable for my new shiny blue laptop. It was fun, it was very smoky, and my throat still hurts from the smoke and from shouting over the music and from the smoke. I smell like smoke all over again now having just gone to the Three Tuns (campus pub) for a pint with Eric, Mark and Tom, three part time OR students, after class. Good times.
Now I'm headed home to do laundry. The excitement. But tomorrow morning, bright and early, I am on the train through the Chunnel to Paris. Wheeeee, je suis supergiddy. A la prochaine!
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
High Fidelity
My intrepidacious brother got a second or third part-time job (he's a student too) last week. His favourite book/music store in London, the Book & Comic exchange, was hiring, so he called them up. This was his screening interview:
"Who was in The Smiths?"
"Morrissey, Johnny Marr... Andy Rourke... hmm, I can't remember the drummer's name."
"What hits did xxxxx have?" band name omitted because a) I've never heard of them and b) I don't want to destroy their screening questions
"Sadly, that's a gap in my '80s knowledge." Note: this was a bluff, he didn't know them either, but guessed at decade.
There was a third question, which my brother got partly right, and then:
"Right, do you want to come in and write our general knowledge test?"
He did very well on the books and jazz sections, decently on the pop/rock sections, so the guy had him write the comics and some other test to see if they should train him as a buyer. He only got 14% on the comics test, so for now he's just casual staff at their Pop & Rock exchange.
When he told me last night, I was all, "Hey, you're working at that store from that book that turned into the movie in Chicago with John Cusack..."
"High Fidelity," he supplied.
"That's it." (It was late, I was non-verbal. Nick Hornby, I think you're wonderful, truly.)
"I think the selection might not be quite as good," he said, but has promised to tell me wacky second hand music shop stories that I can share with the world.
Sunday, October 26, 2003
Further proof of globalisation
The street I live on has a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonalds, Burger King, Subway, Starbucks, and probably more American franchises I'm forgetting. I keep meaning to check out the menu at Subway -- there are many weird (to me) sandwich topping combinations in this country, and I want to see if Subway adapts to local culture at all. If tuna and sweetcorn is an option, the answer is yes.
This afternoon Future ISConsultant and I were in the kitchen unpacking groceries from Brick Lane and Spitalfields Market. A car was illegally parked across the street, with the windows open, Eminem playing loudly. A little kid (9, 10?) was sitting in the front passenger seat, singing along an octave or two higher "I'm sorry, Mama. I never meant to hurt you" and gesticulating wildly. I was torn between laughing and "awwww"ing.
Future ISConsultant's assessment:
"He's a rude boy in the making, but for now he's very sweet."
EL GUAPO, HE IS THE HERO OF CAT TOWN AND HE ALWAYS SAVES THE DAY THE DAY
CAT TOWN is the funniest thing I've seen in at least a week.
Saturday, October 25, 2003
"Found a cure for being sure"
I went to the first Director's Dialogue. Partly because Howard Davies seemed like an interesting, intelligent man when he spoke to us at the postgraduate induction, and partly because I'm trying to fill in some of the many gaps in my understanding of British politics and how things work here. Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP, apparently the Left's favourite Tory, was interesting and intelligent too.
His answer to a question from the floor made me rethink voting -- what it's for, how it should work, what would make more people do it. The questioner asked him about proportional representation and whether, given Letwin's support for people being able to choose their education and medical providers, and to vote on local police authority, whether he also supported voting reform.
Previously, I was in favour of PR. I like healthy opposition parties that can actually provide a check on the ruling party. I also like (hypothetically) the idea of feeling like my vote actually counts. It would avoid the weirdly distributed results of "first past the post" where, for instance, a province ends up with one party holding 97% of the seats with less than 60% of the popular vote.
Letwin's position was that, yes, first past the post has cost his party seats for the last two elections, but he will continue to support it even if that leaves the Torys out in the cold for the rest of his life. His reasoning is that after 1949, West Germany's proportional representation system meant that there was essentially no change in government policy for 50 years -- there was no clear majority, so the elected parties kept forming coalitions. I don't know enough about post-war Germany to evaluate that, but whatever.
In Letwin's view, the great strength of democracy is that if the government is seriously off track, it doesn't take that many voters (under first-past-the-post) to kick them out and opt for a change. I hadn't looked at it that way before, and it's a good argument. It just seems to work weirdly in a more-than-two party system.
Bruce Anderson of the Telegraph thinks Letwin is one of the only interesting potential candidates for the Tory leadership. Howard Davies asked him about his ambition, and he claimed not to want to be Prime Minister. He also acknowledged he didn't expect anyone to believe that until there's an opening and he refuses to run.
In other Prime Ministerial news, today is Jean Chretien's 10th anniversary as Prime Minister, and the 10th anniversary of the first time I voted. For the Natural Law Party, because I was 18, and foolish, and didn't feel my vote was going to matter anyway. Plus wouldn't it be cool if we could all yogic hop our way to world peace? I might have voted more wisely if there'd been some form of proportional representation, but I can't guarantee it.
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Stupid things I've done after dark on Monday nights, part 2
I slacked off on course work in the second half of last week and last weekend -- Friday I felt like I was catching a cold, so I stayed in bed until afternoon, mainlining zinc lozenges while I listened to The Weakerthans' Fallow and reread Amanda Davis' Wonder When You'll Miss Me (both of which are excellent and have curative properties), and then ate dinner watching the swans at sunset on the Round Pond before going to the departmental Masters students welcome party. One of the Americans went to Notre Dame for undergrad and is thus following the same educational path as Jed Bartlett. He says he'll give me a cabinet post when the time comes.
Saturday I spent at Shepherd's Bush market replacing the sheers for our windows and eating delicious hummus and the freshest naan ever (at Coffee Bar & Restaurant Dillyan, run by very friendly Iraquis), then getting extension cords and other miscellany at Argos, and then meeting PhDNovelist and her husband for coffee. Sunday my brother and I went grocery shopping in Chinatown and at Planet Organic and my flatmates and I went out for Indian food in Brick Lane for dinner.
I also did a bunch of reading and work for school, but not enough. Mondays, I have classes from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with only a couple of hours' break, and my first piece of assessed course work was due at 4 p.m. Tuesdays, I have classes from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with no breaks at all, and most of them had exercises that needed to be done before class. The department front-loads the week so that the part-time students just have to attend courses two days a week.
After the weekend, I was mostly done the assessed work and only partly done the exercises. So Monday night, after class was done at 6 p.m. and salsa class was done at 7:30, I started working on the problem sets in the 24 hour computer lab. And reading the Times Online and the other Times Online, because I wasn't that tired and not having a computer at home is making me very binge-y when I do have net access. By the time I decided to head home, it was 1 a.m. It was also quite cold.
As I walked towards the tube, I noticed that there are far less people on the street on a pre-dawn Tuesday than there are on pre-dawn Saturdays. As in, none in sight. When I got to the first intersection, a couple of drunk young Eastern Europeans (I'd guess Russian, but I'm not certain) were getting there too. I did a very quick risk assessment and decided they were harmless. They'd done some sort of other assessment and decided I needed to be chatted up. As I crossed the street they were asking me if I worked around there and when I said I was a student, the taller one said he goes to LSE too. What a coincidence! It's like fate.
I ignored them mostly politely and took a different turn than they did. One said, "I think she's from California" so I laughed and turned to say I'm Canadian. Which was dumb, because then they wanted me to smile again and I didn't want to prolong the conversation. But we parted on friendly terms as they told me I didn't need to worry, and I told them I wasn't worried, I was amused.
Then, at the bus station, I'd just missed the bus so had to wait in the cold as many buses that were not mine passed. A couple of French men got to the stop five minutes after I did, and it was nice to discover my French isn't too rusty and I can still tell people their bus had just left and it only comes every 20 minutes.
This shouldn't be an issue, as I'll be ordering my laptop as soon as my debit card lets me, but no more cold walks home from the 24 hour computer lab and no more conversations with drunk strangers on the street.
Stupid things I've done after dark on Monday nights, part 1
(or: Mum, you should probably skip this one.)
No, really, you'll just worry.
So, a week ago Monday I needed to get a text for one of my courses. The on-campus Waterstones was sold out, but the Imperial College branch had four. Aside: don't they have a great url? Ick! Ack! Uk! After my very long day of classes (more on this soon) I took the tube to South Kensington, found the bookstore, and bought the text five minutes before they closed at 7 pm. Great, no problem, no stupidity yet.
Imperial College is just a few blocks south of Kensington Gardens. I live less than a block north of Kensington Gardens. Until I get my student travel card (should be arriving in the mail soon), I've been buying carnets of single zone 1 tickets, as that's way cheaper than day passes and mostly I'm just going back and forth to school once a day. I bored you with that info to explain this: it was a waste of £1.10 to use a ticket to get home from Imperial, and since there are no direct links, it would have been a waste of time too.
So I headed north to the park, and then west a bit. I was planning to walk around the park, but when I reached the entrance to the path that leads straight to my place on the other side, there were other people, runners and commuters, walking in and out. My bag was getting very heavy. Taking the path was the shortest route. Besides all the other normal-looking park walkers providing a sense of safety, the path is wide, the trees aren't close enough to it to be sheltering crazy serial killers, nothing bad could happen, right?
You may disagree, but I decided the path was a good idea. Lalala, walked along it, no problems until I reached my exit and the gate was locked. I went east to the next exit, and it was locked too. At the next gate, another woman was just coming back from it headed to check out the gate I'd just found locked.
We turned and went west, gathering three more locked-in-the-park-after-dark people. A gate or two on, one of them noticed that the brick wall next to the gate, though topped with spiky iron bits like the rest of the wall, could be climbed because the hill rose beside the gate to make getting on the brick part feasible, and the iron part was just short enough that you could straddle it without impaling yourself if your legs were long enough. Which mine were. So if you're ever locked in the Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park, head for the exit on Bayswater just west of Queensway. Midgets are hooped, unless they're less than 15 cm in diameter and can squeeze through the gates.
Mum, if you've read this far, the whole thing was really okay -- it was only around 7:30, and I had my mobile phone, so if all else failed I could have called the flatmates to rescue me. But you probably shouldn't have read Dennis Lee to me at an impressionable age.
Report from Mexico
My parents are in Mexico (actually, I haven't done the timezone math, my mum might still be in the air). I just got an update from my dad:
So far, trip in Mexico has been mostly drive, drive, drive then eat fresh shrimp then sleep then more of the same. The shrimp has been delicious.
Monday, October 20, 2003
Enquiring minds want to know
One of my other weird (and I mean that in the nicest, most appreciative and loving way) friends asks:
1) What is the force required to knock over a 110 pound woman?
2) What is the force required to knock out a persons front teeth?
3) What is the force that a .002 gram piece of glass would require to puncture a person's eye?
If you have even a general idea about an answer, it will do.
I'm hoping there isn't a bad story behind these questions. If you have general ideas about answers, you can use the shiny new comment system.
Sunday, October 19, 2003
Wisdom on the bus
I met up yesterday for with my favourite Oxford PhD and not-yet-published novelist (those of you from Kelowna know who I'm talking about) and her lovely and charming husband. They'd taken the bus in. As they passed St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the two old British men sitting behind them asked the other,
"What's that, then?"
"It's a church, innit?"
PhDNovelist later made me laugh more as she described visits with her grandma, which typically start out with the exchange
"Are you still a vegetarian?"
"Are you still smoking?"
and then proceed with a lecture from her grandma about the evils of vegetarianism, "It's not healthy, you know," as she puffs on a cigarette.
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Cockroach killing tips (untested by me)
Here's a five step plan for getting rid of roaches. This link makes boric acid and diatomaceous earth sound like good things to try.
More esoterically, some guy I know (gee, can I vague that up for you?) wrote:
When we had roaches at Sh**House (the smaller silverfish sized kind) we went to Chinatown and got Chinese chalk (which is apparently illegal). The idea is you draw lines under the fridge and stuff and when roaches walk over the lines they eat the chalk and die. I believe we determined that the chalk was just powdered glass, and we assumed that the roaches would eat and have their intestines torn up (though the packaging claimed it attacked the nervous system).
We also bought lots of wax paper and duct tape, we drew pentagrams with the Chinese chalk and then duct taped a layer of wax paper onto the bottoms of all the cabinets.
The reason we went through all this is because one day SomeGuyIKnow'sRoommate decided to use the oven after no one had used it in a long time and swarms of roaches came crawling up the wall behind the stove. Quite disgusting really. But after we did the whole pentagram thing we never saw roaches again, of course we didn't have heat so they might have all just frozen to death.
Don't you love the internet? I asked for clarification on the pentagram thing, and he replied further:
How big were the pentagrams? Were they on the inside lower surface or the outside-prependicular-to-the-floor bottom of the cabinets?
Just one large pentagram on the inside lower surface of each cabinet
should do it.
Also you should add comments to the blog for those of us with too much free
internet time at work.
Duly noted.
Good interview
I was about to e-mail some people the link to this NY Times interview of Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, and then I realised, hey! I have a blog!
You'll need to sign in to read and it's only available free for a week or two, but it's worth it for the Marlon Brando story.
Bugs
Saturday night I saw a decent-sized cockroach in the kitchen. I screamed in surprise. Future Ambassador came running. After killing it, we did the dance of totally gross freak out. Future ISConsultant saw another one in the bathroom Sunday night, but did not scream. Tuesday night, I heard a scream from Future Ambassador's room. There was a fairly large spider on her floor. She cleverly trapped it between two sheets of paper before smushing it with a shoe. Future ISConsultant protested that spiders shouldn't be killed.
"It was bigger than a spider! It was a spider scorpion!"
Future ISConsultant and I have volunteered for future safe, live spider removal duty. Future Ambassador says that's fine for spiders, but spider scorpions must be killed.
Send any cockroach killing tips to christinaInLondon
telus
net (or my LSE address if you happen to know that).London Kicks Ass Moment 123
Sitting on the sidewalk on Kingsway, just outside the Holborn station this morning, was a young man, scatting the melody but not the words of Fly Me to the Moon.
Into a traffic cone.
He sounded really good.
London Sucks Ass Moment 107
The entrance to the Lancaster Gate station normally smells vaguely of vomit. This morning it smelled pungently of crap, for no visually apparent reason.
Sunday, October 12, 2003
Politics
I didn't go out Friday night. It was raining so I hung out with 2 of the flatmates instead. Spent the rest of the weekend doing homework/reading, other than a break today to get organic produce at Spitalfields Market, and am in the library now working on a problem set. The first reading Future Think Tanker had for one of her courses was The Communist Manifesto (or at least something by Marx). She said it's odd how at times Marx sounds a lot like Tom Friedman.
Marx isn't on any of my reading lists. When I'm more caught up I'll write about my courses, which are almost all interesting so far. For now, I just learned about the BC Government's tax grab attempt from The Georgia Straight. I'm relieved the government backed down, but totally disgusted that they made the specious argument that The Straight's not a newspaper in the first place. As usual, Vaughn Palmer clarifies what's going on, without the Sturm und Drang of The Straight's press release.
I'm realising I've been out of the loop, news-wise, since getting here. I didn't know Izzy Asper died last week until I went looking for the Palmer column.
Friday, October 10, 2003
Getting lost and getting pissed
My brother has a policy in London of getting off the main streets and navigating by dead reckoning. I'm adopting that, and have already found a better route from the tube to school and back. There's a small, non-chain sandwich shop en route, and the avocado sandwich I ordered this afternoon only cost £1 instead of the £1.45 it was supposed to. I'm not sure if the guy behind the counter was being nice because I looked particularly hungry, or if there's a discount after two, but it was a good sandwich.
This navigational policy also leads to being lost quite a bit, with all the non-right angle intersections and the streets that bend slowly and subtly. I'll be walking along StreetA quite certain it's parallel to StreetB, and suddenly it intersects with StreetB. When it's an intersection I know but haven't been down the StreetA branch of before, there's a strange moment of confusion resolving to joy, like when you run into a friend unexpectedly. Either that, or the following starts going through my head:
You spin me right round, baby
Right round like a record, baby
Right round round round
I'm gaining more understanding for all the lost souls in Bloomsbury who keep asking for directions to the British Museum. Four years ago I spent my first few nights here in the hostel across the street from the museum. It's one of my main reference points and I can actually help out the tourists.
I was walking about in Bloomsbury this afternoon, getting my fourth student card (one for LSE, one for ULU, one for the National Union of Students, and one for a discount on buses/trains/underground). On the way back to LSE, some guy ran into some other guy he knew:
"Hey, you pissed?"
"Mumble mumble, How you doing?"
"Good, are you pissed yet?"
"A bit."
It must be Friday evening.
Last night my American roommate, Future Think Tanker, convinced me when I got home that since the pub down the road had a Thursday night special of 3 shots for £2, we had to check it out. Ow, ow, my rubber arm, twisted.
We did not, in fact, get pissed. We were both tired, and if you avoided the dirty and/or gross sounding shots there were only a few options, and they were apparently 3 for £4.50 not £2. But the local crowd seemed good, so we'll probably be back, drinking not quite so girly drinks. Tonight, we're thinking about going to Crush if I'm not feeling too old for all this.
Unrelated to all the above, Tukul wrote:
I think you're missing something though - i.e. the "About" page which updates us on the story so far - okay, so you're at school but for what? why? what's your motivation? what were you doing before? Your stalkers...er..readers want to know!
Which I might do this weekend after I'm caught up on reading and assignments and putting together the £15 bookshelf I got at Argos, that has 70 goddamn screws and not enough pre-drilled holes. Why oh why did I leave my power drill in Canada?
Things I've lied about so far
- My phone number - if I emailed it to you yesterday, the last two digits are currently 62 instead of 41. I thought the BT engineer had fixed this and will be calling them this afternoon to see if this is a permanent thing.
- The number of tube stops to school - as of this morning, the Queensway station is closed, so I'm now a 5 minute walk and 5 stops from school. The station was supposed to close tomorrow for two weeks, but the lifts broke down ahead of schedule. Fortunately I left early for class.
Thursday, October 09, 2003
Bits of what I've been up to since getting to England
I arrived in London 18 days ago. It feels like at least twice that. Classes started Monday and I can't believe I haven't been attending lectures for weeks. It doesn't help that Monday's course timetable goes from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., so by Tuesday I'd already done a week's worth of learning.
In the last three weeks I found a place to live, put together a lot of furniture, joined my flatmates in complaining to the property manager about various deficiencies, got a cellphone, got the land line connected, blah blah blah moving exhaustion cakes. I still have to get a laptop and broadband internet connection at home, but I'm feeling a lot more settled than I did a week ago.
I'm living 6 tube stops from school with 3 other grad students, 2 others from LSE and one from SOAS. Between the four of us we've got 6.5 citizenships (alphabetically: 0.5 Botswana (18 years residency), Britain, Canada, Kenya, Portugal, USA, Zambia) and none of us has managed to make the lightbulb for the hall fixture stay in the socket.
Despite that, our place is quite bright, has high ceilings and big windows, two bathrooms, and only the hall for common area, as we had to turn the "lounge" into a bedroom to make it affordable. Heat is included. Very very included, and the heaters are effective. We've taken to calling the flat "The Sauna". The air outside is nippy but I'm keeping my bedroom window open in order not to roast.
I've started saying things like flat, and lift, and tube, in non-North American ways. This is actually bugging me and making me feel pretentious. But when the subway driver announces he's not going to be stopping at my stop because the lifts are broken, it seems silly to insist on calling them elevators. I draw the line at the clothing for your lower body -- pants means the clothes you put over your underwear, not underwear, and I don't care how many funny looks I get.
Last week, at Fresher's Fair, I signed up for the Canadian club and Women in Business and expressed interest in the Mountaineering and Sailing clubs. Now that school has started, it's obvious I have time for very little of that nonsense. I'm going to dance a couple nights a week, and maybe join a photography club for darkroom access, and that's it, other than all the career fairs and random lectures by smart people that always seem to be going on here.
Last night I went to the free introductory Ballroom-Latin-Tango classes at ULU and danced until my feet were sore, and then danced some more. The Swiss exchange student I was paired with for Ballroom and Latin ended up at LSE as his second choice, instead of SFU in Vancouver. The other Swiss student I tangoed with was an excellent lead, complimented me on my "perfect ochos" and kept apologising for ambiguous leading whenever I screwed up. I'm looking forward to next week.
