October 7, 2011
We are settling in now, at home and at school. Wally’s second week of classes is now over, and he has mountains of reading and two significant projects to do. Our instructor Elizabeth (Liz) Evenden kindly permitted Maria to sit in on a class this week, where we were deciphering ancient text together: everyone enjoyed it immensely, including Maria, of course!
Then Thursday Maria and I had our first German class, about 28 students learning together. One of the first exercises was learning where we were all from: two were from England, 4 from the US, and the rest were from Bangladesh, Uganda, Thailand, Iran, Italy, Ireland, Iceland, Mauritus, Norway, China, India, Spain, Chechnia, Taiwan, France, and Turkey. Wow! It was a great class, and it felt like the two hours passed in about 10 minutes. Looking forward to next week!
I had an entry written up for you last week, but my computer evidently didn’t like it. The highlights were Krispy Kreme doughnuts on the quad at school, the fact that they do have Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, and Subway here – although Subway’s best- selling sandwich here is Chicken Tandoori – and the fact that we haven’t gone in any of these establishments will not be surprising to any of you who know us well. The pubs here have better food and better names – The Queen’s Head, The Three Tuns (a “tun” being a about a pony keg of beer or ale or cider), and The Slug and Lettuce. We still have to explore about 8 more here in Uxbridge and surrounding towns, too.
The good news about the library: it is ultra-modern, including a device that lets you stack all your books that you want to borrow in an opening/shelf in a machine – it’s enough space to hold 5-6 textbooks – and it reads the books and checks them out to you in about 3 seconds. The other good news is that we grad students have our own study area just off to the side of the library that is available to us 24/7, reachable only by a postgraduate ID card. The other good news is that they are building/refurbishing the 3rd floor (the 4th floor in America) as another grad-student-only section inside the library, which includes the special Shakespeare Authorship Collection.
The only bad news is that it isn’t quite ready up there yet, so I have to avoid workers there during the day if I want to get into that section. (At night, it’s no problem. I just walk in like I own the place.) The best news is that, unlike the other three floors of the library, this is a completely quiet zone. On the bottom three floors, this place is quite abuzz with conversations, some quite loud at times. And they’re not small snippets of conversation, either – they’re lengthy epics that drive you nuts if you’re trying to concentrate. Before the top floor was accessible, I actually asked a librarian if they had a special “would you shut-the-h@ll-up” zone anywhere in this library? She laughed and said it was bad, but that it usually settles down after the first few weeks. Liz says she sometimes walks around and looks at the most blatant offenders and says, “exactly what are you doing here anyway?” She’s really mean, too – I like her a lot! Maria also talked to the assistant director of the library last night and she may soon be helping catalogue and shelve the new section!
In household news, we got a mattress topper and it seems to have done the trick for Maria’s back. We also bought a TV table and set our large dining-table-size coffee table on top of it, making it a nice work table and eating table, too. We have a friendly black cat who visits us regularly, jumping up into the window or through the back balcony railing to be petted for a while before he goes out again. Our apartment is really nice – we’ll try and post pictures soon – but our view out the back balcony is not much right now as they try and sort out an endangered species of newt that may or may not be living there. (Insert Monty Python reference here, all of you!)The weather is now changing after a month of warmth and sunshine, and we’re looking forward to a great autumn season here! More later, and thanks for reading!
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