Back By Popular Demand

I know it has been more than a week since my last post, and I regret it… sort of. Just think of it as a good sign and that I’m keeping myself busy. I left you with the story about the little trip to London and that was almost two weeks ago, so I’ll do my best to give an as accurate as possible story of the events since then.

So I had my first full week of school! Before coming to Wycombe I had heard stories from students who had been here before that the courses were all very demanding and at a higher level than what they were used to at the INHolland University. Needless to say, I was full of good expectations in the hope to properly challenged academically during my stay here. This has been somewhat disappointing though. I do find the teaching style nicely refreshing, as it is more “open”, more discussions, and the classes are all very well prepared and presented at a level I would only expect. Only the actual material presented to us, and what we are required to know is of a disappointingly level. On top of that the local students don’t really seem to keen to get to deeply involved in discussions and the teaching staff struggles to get any participation out of them. I have already found myself trying to take up an active role just so we don’t waste 5 minutes looking around us to see if anyone would please be so kind as to answer the question given by the lecturer.

Another nice addition to my weekly schedule has been an English language class. “English for Academic Purposes” All of the exchange students were required to take a test last week to see what the level of English was and to ensure that everyone was placed in the appropriate class. The very demanding test, consisting of a reading comprehension test of half a page of text accompanied by 5 questions and an essay assignment, was more of a joke than a serious language skill test in my opinion. I couldn’t resist but to use the “big” words they tried to avoid in explaining the essay assignment, and of course make the intentional silly mistakes and trying hard to get as much American spelling in there in the hope that I would be place a low level class. This didn’t work though, I still got a score of 77%, which was along the lines of what everybody got, meaning that either everyone was at the same level or that the test was flawed and inaccurate. I will not complain too much about this though because I will get 7.5 ECT’s (University/College credits), or as one of my lectures in Holland said ETCTCDTSTDC’s, for successful completion of this course. It will take 2 essays (in English) of at least 500 words, which is just about how much I’ve written up to now in this blog. HAHAHA in the pocket!

The nights here in Wycombe have been very unpredictable as well. Because we with such as big group of actively going out exchange students there’s always someone partying somewhere and most of the time the rest of group will join in eventually. The school student’s representation, the Student Union, also has their own two room club at the main campus in the town centre, which is fully run by students I think. This is one of those places that you don’t really want to be because it has a slightly bad reputation, not without cause I must say, but because the beers are cheaper than in any other pub, it is a very viable option. The main reason for their bad reputation is their choice of music I think, and if that’s not it, it should be. After about 0:00 the only thing that came flying by was boy band music from the 90’s, and it wasn’t even the theme for the night. Hearing the backstreet boys again once in a while is fun, if it’s played three times an hour, with other crap in between such as Five and N Synch it really does go to setting a lower level of entertainment for the night.

Almost all of the other pubs in town are a great place to sit down, drink a couple beers and share a lot of laughs. I have been very happy with the fact that every pub serves Guinness standard from the tap, this is a trend that I think Holland should definitely follow. By far the best pub in town in O’Neill’s, which is actually a big Irish pub chain across the UK I think. This is one of the few places in town that will bring in live bands to come and play in the weekends and they will refrain from playing cheesy pop music during the night, instead proper rock songs. If there is a place I will frequently visit it will be O’Neill’s.

In all this excitement in talking about pubs and beers I have almost forgotten to mention that past Sunday our exchange group made another cultural trip and this time it was destination Oxford! It was another cold Sunday morning, with temperatures of maybe just over or under 0 C, but nonetheless very sunny. This time we didn’t take the train but the bus, because this would be able to drop us off right smack down the middle of Oxford, and I think it was because Oxford was build when everyone still had a sword under their belt and went on far away travels to kill in the name of the Lord, that there was no train connection to the centre of the town. Again we were with a group of about 15 people and the driver of the National Express bus was kind enough to provide us with a discount for the bus return ticket. After about 45 minutes of cruising through the English countryside with nothing but green pastures and old farms along the way we arrived in Oxford.

There’s three things plentiful in Oxford; Churches, Universities and old buildings. Of course the first two go hand in hand with the old buildings but not all of them would fall under those two categories. The classic and seemingly untouched architecture of all the buildings in Oxford really gives the visitor the feeling that he has stepped back in time. This feeling won’t last long though because there were a lot of Starbucks coffee shops but it was nice to even get that impression for a little while. Oxford houses a 30 some universities, which is either really scary or really exciting, and of course as a center of knowledge there has to be a strong Christian regime around to compensate for all this intelligence. Should any of you ever visit England I would definitely recommend going to Oxford, the splendor of walking down the ancient streets and seeing some of the original pub names really makes it worthwhile for a visit.

Ok, we are almost completely up to speed on my UK (zeg joeekeee) adventures. After returning from Oxford however I had fallen ill during the night, and spent most of my Monday either in sleeping or what felt like hallucinating in bed. I didn’t have temperature meter with me but I’m pretty sure I had a fever amongst other things. I managed to fall asleep around the afternoon and I did not wake up until late Tuesday evening. Luckily I didn’t have school on Tuesday, but I had missed two lectures on Monday and even though I wasn’t feeling better yet on Wednesday I was determined to show commitment to my English class, so I attended that. Looking back that was a mistake, but still an experience worth suffering for.

Thursday luckily all classes were cancelled due to the heavy snowfall, there was about 10 cm of it in the morning and that meant that all public transport had ceased to operate. It was nice to see all of the trees, houses, streets and my car covered in snow, but it started melting before noon already leaving a big mess everywhere. And now we’re basically up to speed again, I did go out last night, and yes to O’Neills, but I didn’t drink that much, didn’t feel like it yet anyways. Also I will refrain from posting pictures with this blog because there have been some complaints about the slow loading of my blog. However, this is an issue of your internet connection and not my pretty pictures :P, but still to please the mobs I will not post them this time, maybe next time, whenever that may be!

This post was created under the influence of Arrow’s Classic Rock 500.