Gosh, has it really been a week?

I've been a bad little blogger.

This week was good. Quite long. I had my first classes - one session on Monday, one on Wednesday. Yes, that's right - I'm only in class four hours a week, and my weekend is 4 days long. It's... interesting. A bit of a change. But it means that I actually have time to get all my reading done, as well as having a life and goofing off a great deal - which is completely exceptional for me.

So what were the highlights of my week, you ask?
Well, class has been quite good. It is seminar-style, meaning we all talk, instead of just listening to a lecture. It is therefore relatively familiar to me, and I've already been speaking in class a great deal, and feeling like I have pretty much got a handle on what is going on. I am already learning a lot - the material (about London and York in the 18th and 19th centuries - the structure and architecture of the cities, the way they were depicted, etc.) is very engaging and is unlike anything I've studied before.

The other highlight of the week was probably training at the radio station. It only took an hour (as compared to WESU's many hours over several weeks), but exposed me to a great deal of new concepts. URY (University Radio York) has less of a broadcast range than WESU, and is pretty much a student station, but it has a great pedigree, as it is the oldest legal independent (non-BBC) radio station in the UK. They have some amazing technology - they use a good deal more computer technology than WESU, including a program which enables you to set up a show from your home computer, drawing both from the URY digital music collection and your own - and then broadcast said playlist from the URY studio without, say, burning a CD. Your uploaded music from home is just there, in the computer, ready for you. And that, my friends... is magic. I can't think of any other way to describe it. And I always like things that add to the magical world of radio broadcasting...

This week I also: cooked a good deal (including my first time ever cooking tofu) and participated in my college pub's pub quiz with some of my American friends (we managed not to come in last place!). I'm sure I did other things, but I can't much remember now.
Oh! I bought a big Doctor Who poster! That was exciting - AND remarkably cheap. Even considering the exchange rate, posters cost about half as much here as they do in the US. The Doctor cost me £2!

This weekend was also quite fun. On Saturday morning I got a message from my friend Patrick (PhD student from the Netherlands; I've mentioned him before) asking if I wanted to go to the aquarium in Hull - which I did, of course. Hull is... downriver from here, and despite travelling there yesterday, I have no idea how far away it was. Patrick, as a post-grad, is allowed to have a car, so he drove - and it was worth the trip just for the views along the road. Little villages, huge expanses of fields with Yorkshire-type heights in the distance; sheep... it was nice. And slightly surreal, as I've not gotten used to the UK roads yet; left-hand driving and roundabouts... and to make matters more confusing, I was riding in a European/US-style car, with the passenger on the right.
The aquarium (The Deep) was nice - their fish collection, so to speak, wasn't especially expansive, but the exhibits were informative (and entertaining), and it was fun to walk around with Patrick and look at fish and watch all the little kids run around being so excited... and, yes, of course, I was pretty excited, too. I love fish!
On the way back we went to a bigger supermarket than my usual ones, and I managed to find canned beans, which was good - every other place I've been to had only baked beans and chickpeas in cans; all other beans are dried, which can be a pain, since you have to soak them overnight, which therefore requires you to plan quite far in advance for meals - which I never do.

I have been meeting more people in my dorm block, which is nice. It's sort of funny, though, because a lot of them are about 2 years younger than me - at times it feels like being back in my freshman dorm at Wesleyan, which is not necessarily a bad thing - it can be very social, and entertaining.

I think that is all I have to say, for now... Other than that my overhead light in my room is broken, making a bit of a strobe-light effect when I turn it on... so I'm living a rather dim life right now, illuminated only by my desk lamp. Eventually I'll ask someone about getting this fixed...