Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
I spent nine hours in the library today doing work with almost no interruptions. For the last half hour I was getting so restless that I was basically jumping up and down in my chai until finally I realized I have to leave or I will go insane. Unfortunately I didn't cover all the material I had to for the day. Isn't that insane? Parsing algorithms for syntax analysis, 200 pages of literary criticism of Evgeni Onegin (first of three books down and I have to write the essay tomorrow!?!), 275 pages of calculus covering material that took me two years to learn and which I haven't used since high school... When. Does. It. End?
Answer: On Friday. Well, the math part does anyway. The culmination of this Hellish week that started today will be the 4 hour exam on Friday morning. Although I guess technically I will have to start reading "A Hero of Our Time" immediately after the exam is done if I don't want to get behind on my work. Oxford is so much fun :D
In other somewhat related news, I spent most of my weekend following the adventures of Jack Bauer through his first longest day. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the show (which is not to say it's actually good but still...) One thing I learned from the show, however, is that I must be a terrorist. Maybe I don't realize it yet but, as one of my new favourite quotes says, "Jack Bauer can torture you into giving up information you do not possess."
Anyway, I have to go to sleep now so I can wake up even earlier tomorrow and spend even more time studying. Life is fun :D
http://www.notrly.com/jackbauer/index.php?topthirty - the only thing that has made me laugh in the last week.
26 January 2009
18 January 2009
Oxford through my camera's lens
Ooo-kay, I finally wandered around for a little bit yesterday with a camera in hand and so you guys get to see some pictures of my dorm, college and the town in general.
So this is my dorm- The Isis Hotel. It's not much to look at but the rooms inside are pretty nice. Some more about that next time however.
This is my college's graveyard and also happens to be the only place on campus where smoking is allowed. The part of a a 12th (or maybe 14th?) century church you see is currently our library. It is a beautiful building although only a small part of it is visible in this picture.
This is the street leading to my college but it also happens to be a good example of a small Oxford street.
This alley is actually the only entrance to a tiny square with several pubs in it. I need to go check them out sometime soon because they looked really nice.
Buildings in Oxford are happily unconformist when compared to the endless rows of identical homes in London. True, they don't match in the slightest and you can often see a stone building easily twice as old as the US standing next to a pink aberration built only a couple of years ago but that has it's charm... I guess.
More than half of the traffic in Oxford consists of bikers and most of the rest consists of buses and cabs. What this means is that sights like these are very common all over the town. I'd be tempted to get a bike myself but the cheapest one I've seen so far that's my size was 100 pounds... I can walk anywhere in 30 minutes anyway.
This is a view of the main quad of Christophe's college. A lot larger than mine and also one of the newer ones- it's barely 150 years old I think.
And quite unrelated but I still feel the need to brag about it- Christophe and I cooked last night. I hadn't eaten anything quite as delicious since I left home (true, I've mostly survived on fast food since I came in the UK, but still...). It just makes me envy him even more for having a kitchen next door instead of two floors away.
Okay, enough pictures for one day. I am also starting to catch up with my life- a couple more days of daily posts and I might actually run out things to write about. But then again, I'd have more than enough stuff to do over the week so I am not really concerned about not having to spend time blogging :)
So this is my dorm- The Isis Hotel. It's not much to look at but the rooms inside are pretty nice. Some more about that next time however.
This is my college's graveyard and also happens to be the only place on campus where smoking is allowed. The part of a a 12th (or maybe 14th?) century church you see is currently our library. It is a beautiful building although only a small part of it is visible in this picture.
This is the street leading to my college but it also happens to be a good example of a small Oxford street.
This alley is actually the only entrance to a tiny square with several pubs in it. I need to go check them out sometime soon because they looked really nice.
Buildings in Oxford are happily unconformist when compared to the endless rows of identical homes in London. True, they don't match in the slightest and you can often see a stone building easily twice as old as the US standing next to a pink aberration built only a couple of years ago but that has it's charm... I guess.
More than half of the traffic in Oxford consists of bikers and most of the rest consists of buses and cabs. What this means is that sights like these are very common all over the town. I'd be tempted to get a bike myself but the cheapest one I've seen so far that's my size was 100 pounds... I can walk anywhere in 30 minutes anyway.
This is a view of the main quad of Christophe's college. A lot larger than mine and also one of the newer ones- it's barely 150 years old I think.
And quite unrelated but I still feel the need to brag about it- Christophe and I cooked last night. I hadn't eaten anything quite as delicious since I left home (true, I've mostly survived on fast food since I came in the UK, but still...). It just makes me envy him even more for having a kitchen next door instead of two floors away.
Okay, enough pictures for one day. I am also starting to catch up with my life- a couple more days of daily posts and I might actually run out things to write about. But then again, I'd have more than enough stuff to do over the week so I am not really concerned about not having to spend time blogging :)
17 January 2009
First impressions and the London orientation
So I arrived at my hostel a little before midnight instead of around 6 PM which meant that I wouldn't really get to see much of London that night. But my orientation was going to start on the following morning so I decided to wander around the streets at least for a little bit to get some feel for the city. In that first night, pretty exhausted from the trip and still confused that people around me weren't speaking Bulgarian anymore, I discovered several things which really surprised me:
1. London has no building with more than 4 or 5 floors and they are mostly identical.
2. All the streets in that city are one-way and mostly single-lane.
3. Despite the streets being one way I still expected the cars to come from the wrong direction.
4. London is a BIG city.
5. Everyone has an accent.
Now you can probably tell that some of these are obvious and others are obviously wrong. After having a couple of days to think over this I think I have explanations for my impressions:
1. Well, London obviously has tall building but the thing is that the vast majority of building seem to only have a couple of floors. In that I guess it's not all that different from most other European cities I've seen but I somehow expected it to look much more like Boston or New York with their towering buildings and skyscrapers.
And, seriously, it is almost impossible to tell apart the buildings on a street most of the time. They are not only built identical but their owners have made no effort to change the front, to make it unique in any way.
2. Obviously false. I just happened to be walking around a neighbourhood with particularly small streets. However, the British seem to love their one-way street and almost all the streets in Oxford are like that (granted that is probably due to the fact that it is difficult enough for one car to fit in there).
3. London crosswalks always have "look left/right" written in huge letters on them but I kept looking in the wrong direction. In fact I still do. It's unsettling but not particularly interesting. Anyway if I do get run over by a bus, you should know it was almost certainly because I looked the wrong way before crossing.
4. Well, it is a big city. It's a huge metropolis in fact. I knew that before I arrived but the thing I did not expect was that the center of town is not concentrated in one place- it is all over. It took me two days of walking- I probably went more than 10 miles, to cover most of the sightseeing spots. Unfortunately other than the rather impressive Westminster abbey I didn't see anything particularly interesting- beautiful parks and buildings either empty or filled with tourists with the intermittent drizzle and gray clouds as background. Overall the London architecture left me unimpressed.
What London does have is a... a feel? Character? I am not sure how to describe it but the city feels different from any other place I've been before. It's like what I had expected from Vienna but where Vienna let me down, London surprised me with it's individuality. Well, maybe before I start talking about individuality, I should go visit more English cities.
I guess this is the natural place to show a few pictures but I wasn't moved to use my camera even once during my visit. Well, I'll go to London again soon and maybe then I'll feel more eager to explore the city and take pictures.
5. This is the best part of this country so far. Everyone has an accent! And I don't mean that they speak differently from Americans. I believe I've heard a dozen or more radically different British accents so far and there doesn't seem to be a prevalent one. It makes it a little hard to understand what people are saying sometimes- not because I have a difficult time understanding any particular accent but because I don't really know which one to expect before the person starts talking. And there is still this fraction of a second when I marvel at what I am hearing and don't pay attention to what they are actually saying.
I am sure this will go away soon enough and if I were to read this in a couple of months or even weeks, I'd wonder what I was talking about but right now it is the most entertaining thing aspect of England for me.
Well, this post got too long without me describing any of the particulars of my orientation so let me describe it in a sentence: "Quite entertaining but rather unnecessary." Still the people at the London office of IFSA-Butler did a great job and they are really nice. Are any of you guys going on programs though Butler?
1. London has no building with more than 4 or 5 floors and they are mostly identical.
2. All the streets in that city are one-way and mostly single-lane.
3. Despite the streets being one way I still expected the cars to come from the wrong direction.
4. London is a BIG city.
5. Everyone has an accent.
Now you can probably tell that some of these are obvious and others are obviously wrong. After having a couple of days to think over this I think I have explanations for my impressions:
1. Well, London obviously has tall building but the thing is that the vast majority of building seem to only have a couple of floors. In that I guess it's not all that different from most other European cities I've seen but I somehow expected it to look much more like Boston or New York with their towering buildings and skyscrapers.
And, seriously, it is almost impossible to tell apart the buildings on a street most of the time. They are not only built identical but their owners have made no effort to change the front, to make it unique in any way.
2. Obviously false. I just happened to be walking around a neighbourhood with particularly small streets. However, the British seem to love their one-way street and almost all the streets in Oxford are like that (granted that is probably due to the fact that it is difficult enough for one car to fit in there).
3. London crosswalks always have "look left/right" written in huge letters on them but I kept looking in the wrong direction. In fact I still do. It's unsettling but not particularly interesting. Anyway if I do get run over by a bus, you should know it was almost certainly because I looked the wrong way before crossing.
4. Well, it is a big city. It's a huge metropolis in fact. I knew that before I arrived but the thing I did not expect was that the center of town is not concentrated in one place- it is all over. It took me two days of walking- I probably went more than 10 miles, to cover most of the sightseeing spots. Unfortunately other than the rather impressive Westminster abbey I didn't see anything particularly interesting- beautiful parks and buildings either empty or filled with tourists with the intermittent drizzle and gray clouds as background. Overall the London architecture left me unimpressed.
What London does have is a... a feel? Character? I am not sure how to describe it but the city feels different from any other place I've been before. It's like what I had expected from Vienna but where Vienna let me down, London surprised me with it's individuality. Well, maybe before I start talking about individuality, I should go visit more English cities.
I guess this is the natural place to show a few pictures but I wasn't moved to use my camera even once during my visit. Well, I'll go to London again soon and maybe then I'll feel more eager to explore the city and take pictures.
5. This is the best part of this country so far. Everyone has an accent! And I don't mean that they speak differently from Americans. I believe I've heard a dozen or more radically different British accents so far and there doesn't seem to be a prevalent one. It makes it a little hard to understand what people are saying sometimes- not because I have a difficult time understanding any particular accent but because I don't really know which one to expect before the person starts talking. And there is still this fraction of a second when I marvel at what I am hearing and don't pay attention to what they are actually saying.
I am sure this will go away soon enough and if I were to read this in a couple of months or even weeks, I'd wonder what I was talking about but right now it is the most entertaining thing aspect of England for me.
Well, this post got too long without me describing any of the particulars of my orientation so let me describe it in a sentence: "Quite entertaining but rather unnecessary." Still the people at the London office of IFSA-Butler did a great job and they are really nice. Are any of you guys going on programs though Butler?
16 January 2009
Arriving in the UK and all that exciting stuff
So the closest thing I had to a New Year's resolution was deciding that I'll start updating this blog as soon as I get to England which is now... well, just several hours short of a week ago. I actually felt like a lot longer had passed but I guess exploring two cities can do that for you. Anyway, I didn't have regular internet access until yesterday afternoon hence I haven't updated the blog. But better late than never...
My trip to London is probably the most "fun" flight I've ever been on (which kind of shows that I haven't had too much trouble with airplanes but whatever). It goes something like this: we board the airplane in Sofia, everyone is finally in their seats and there are only a couple of minutes until takeoff when the captain makes an announcement. "Ladies and gentlemen, my name is... *blah-blah-blah*... I am sorry to announce that due to the dense fog at Heathrow our flight will have a delay of three hours." Everyone stares stupidly for a second and then people start complaining loudly about having to spend three hours in the cafe and going through check in again when the captain adds "Ladies and gentlemen, we are hoping to get an earlier time slot but if we do, we will only have about 15 minutes to take off, therefore I will ask all of you to remain in your seat." >.>
Well, over two hours later (we did get an earlier time slot) we finally take off and quickly get to London... and start flying pretty circles over the city... and flying... and flying... then our beloved pilot announces "Our time slot was pushed back for half an hour and we waited but just now they pushed it back another hour and we are almost out of fuel. We will land at Gatwick, refuel, take off again, and land at Heathrow in a couple of hours" (Note: it probably takes less than that to drive from one airport to the other.)
Well, we spent something like an hour more in the plane at Gatwick, before we were told we would actually get off there. Turns out there were something like six or seven other flights that were told the same thing at the same time and we easily overwhelm the staff at the much smaller airport. But eventually I get my luggage and I finally step on UK soil (wasn't really an epiphany moment but oh well) a little over five hours later than expected. And if that doesnt seem like much consider that the actual flight time is about two hours.
Okay, this turned into a large enough post (that I doubt anyone would actually read but even a week later I feel somewhat relieved by telling the whole story over again) .
My trip to London is probably the most "fun" flight I've ever been on (which kind of shows that I haven't had too much trouble with airplanes but whatever). It goes something like this: we board the airplane in Sofia, everyone is finally in their seats and there are only a couple of minutes until takeoff when the captain makes an announcement. "Ladies and gentlemen, my name is... *blah-blah-blah*... I am sorry to announce that due to the dense fog at Heathrow our flight will have a delay of three hours." Everyone stares stupidly for a second and then people start complaining loudly about having to spend three hours in the cafe and going through check in again when the captain adds "Ladies and gentlemen, we are hoping to get an earlier time slot but if we do, we will only have about 15 minutes to take off, therefore I will ask all of you to remain in your seat." >.>
Well, over two hours later (we did get an earlier time slot) we finally take off and quickly get to London... and start flying pretty circles over the city... and flying... and flying... then our beloved pilot announces "Our time slot was pushed back for half an hour and we waited but just now they pushed it back another hour and we are almost out of fuel. We will land at Gatwick, refuel, take off again, and land at Heathrow in a couple of hours" (Note: it probably takes less than that to drive from one airport to the other.)
Well, we spent something like an hour more in the plane at Gatwick, before we were told we would actually get off there. Turns out there were something like six or seven other flights that were told the same thing at the same time and we easily overwhelm the staff at the much smaller airport. But eventually I get my luggage and I finally step on UK soil (wasn't really an epiphany moment but oh well) a little over five hours later than expected. And if that doesnt seem like much consider that the actual flight time is about two hours.
Okay, this turned into a large enough post (that I doubt anyone would actually read but even a week later I feel somewhat relieved by telling the whole story over again) .
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