It seems that as spring came into High Wycombe, I disappeared from the blog. Which in essence is true. In the time since my last blog, it has basically just been me living the rhythm acquired here, and not a whole lot of exciting trips to report about. Not that I don’t do anything, but I guess that it has all been so normal to me now that I haven’t seen the need to report on any of it. Look at it as a sign of integration!
Since I last posted I did go out to see Cambridge though. This wasn’t even my first visit there! When I drove into England I got so lost by the poor road signs on the highways that I ended up in Cambridge before realizing I was heading north instead of west, I think it will be wise to install a compass in my car. Speaking of which, just last weekend as I did my weekly shopping did I pass the 1000 km mark since leaving my front door in Holland. Which is rather remarkable since I could easily drive this distance in less than two weeks in Holland, but here it took me two months? Going back to Cambridge. Getting there took us nearly 2 hours and we took the wrong train which stopped in every Hill Billy village in the countryside. This did make the train trip enjoyable as well though, I for one have never realized the amount of country side England has, vast plains with small hills being used for nothing, a farm here, an abandoned silo there. Cambridge itself is a very beautiful city with university buildings so old that it could make anyone visiting there feel young. One of the most extraordinary buildings there is the King’s College Chapel, a big church with a lot of decorations on both the in and outside. We couldn’t resist going in there to take a look and see what it was like. I think I probably saw the biggest organ ever, even beating the ones that Satan and Dracula like to use in the movies. Walking around in Cambridge and seeing all different types of architecture can easily fill a good day, and that is what we did! Only when it started raining (always a grim reminder that you are in England), did we go into the Fitzwilliam museum and found a nice exhibition on European art from the 17th to 18th century. And as we once again were with a very diverse group of people, everyone (including myself) enjoyed looking at the paintings. The thing that struck me the most though was that all of the British paintings being displayed there had to do with the bible. Now this seems pretty normal for this time period, but as we looked at German, French and Dutch art, it was either more subtle or not there at all. This goes ties in with another observation I’ve made over the past few weeks, every village, town and city is literally swarming with churches. Even here in High Wycombe I will have passed three churches before I see my first pub! People say that in New York, and other US cities, there is a Starbucks on every street corner, I think here there is either a Church, Mosque or other place of worship on every corner. And if it’s not there, there will be sign saying that it is three houses down the road. And does this encourage the British people to attend church? I don’t think so, the churches don’t really seem to be pulling in the people, but they are all still standing there using up space and wasting money. Maybe Starbucks should try to set up in some of the churches, they could make coffee with holy water and probably attract new audiences into the churches. Oh, I almost forgot, the churches that do seem to do really well though, are the ones that offer services in Polish. As there is major reconstruction going on in the town centre here, the area is also swarming with Polish people. Last week I even ordered a coffee in Polish! Imagine that.
I did get a taste of the British religious endeavors last weekend though. It’s probably more Irish than British, but a reason to get completely pissed (British for drunk) is good enough for most of the people here. It was St. Patrick’s Day!! The biggest Irish pride day of the year and probably celebrated in more countries unofficially than officially, but a real happening nonetheless. On top of that it was the day of the final matches of the RBS Six Nations rugby tournament. This is something I started watching in the pubs and really started enjoying, I feel pretty familiar with the rules now but don’t have the ambition to play myself. Ok, so back to St. Patrick, aka St. Pat, Pat, Paddy, Paddie, the list goes on. Out of all the English people I’ve asked what this guy was all about, no one could give me a clear answer. “He was some Irish dude that got rid of all the snakes in Ireland apparently. “ It was probably the most repeated answer I got, so that’s what I settled with as well. Until it was actually St. Patrick’s day and he now stands in my mind as the one true holy man from Christianity as he now encourages people to go down to the pub and drink Guinness all day long! Normally the pubs in town open at noon, but on St. Pat’s they were all open at 10 am and they were filled already! These British must have woken up, looked at the calendar and said “Ok, I’ve got 30 minutes to get to the pub”. (Just as a side note, one of the things most regularly said and thought by the exchange students here is “Argh, British”, with British pronounced with the local accent, Bri’ish. This statement is used whenever we encounter something none of us can explain but seems perfectly normal here; one of the examples is the double water tap system I explained earlier). So in accordance with this great tradition, me and my housemate went into town at 11 and straight to the pub to drink a coffee, one of the two black drinks allowed on this day. Then we did some shopping, ate something back home and went back to the pub to watch the rugby. By this time we were joined by another four or five people and the St. Patrick’s Guinness adventure had begun! Watching sports in the pub is really a happening here in England, it doesn’t really matter who is playing, or what they are playing for that matter, there will always be plenty of people who support a particular team and will shout, cheer and cry for them. So after Ireland had won the first match of the day, they had won the championship, then when France won the second game of the day, they had won the championship. It was then up to England to score 60 points more than Wales in the final match of the day for them to come out as champions. What happened though, is that Wales beat the English with an almost pathetic effort by the English team. This was actually a bad thing, I had been in the pub with several French people cheering for the French team first, and then we thought it would appropriate to support Wales in their match against England. Now at the end of this match we did get a couple of angry british looks, but still a lot of people came over to congratulate me on the French victory …they all thought I was French even with my Dutch farmer look. Now comes the sad part of the story. Normally this pub serves food until 9pm and with the last match ending at seven we thought we’d order some food so we could stay in the pub the rest of the night. However, because of St. Pat’s they had stopped serving at seven, so we were just out of luck and actually had to leave to get food. When we arrived back a couple of hours later, there was a line to get into the pub …with a waiting time of one and a half hours!! This is the only “real” Irish pub in town, and although most of the other pubs had official St. Patrick’s celebrations, this was the place to be. We decided to go to another pub and drink some Guinness there as it was really cold and we didn’t feel like standing in line. When we returned 2 Guinnesses later to the Irish pub, the line had gone and the party was still in full swing so that’s where we finished the night and cheered for the one true holy man until closing time. To recap, on this day I had been to four different pubs, went in and out of one them 3 times and since closing time in the UK is 2 am, we had an after party until about 4. Now you might think why is he so elaborately describing this day of foolish drunkenness to us? Well since I am in England, not only to study but explore their culture as well, I thought it appropriate to comment on my adventures on one of the UK’s most fitting annual celebrations.
As far as school goes, it’s being going ok. Nice sentence there. We have finally begun to do some work and assignments are now coming through and I have finished some of them. I think I commented earlier on how I thought that these assignments were too easy as some of them only required 1,000 words and were worth 50% of the final mark. Now, if you have read through the whole thing up till now you have read 1,661 words. So a thousand words literally is nothing. But that is the catch, try to say exactly what you want/need in such little words in the most difficult part of the assignments, it really limits your abilities to explore topics but forces you to be very precise. However in an assignment I had to do for my finance class, 75% of the grade was simply putting some numbers into excel and then a brief description of the results, which really was not a whole lot of work but all of the local students did freak out about it, so either it was too easy for me or I thought too easy of it, should I receive a grade for it before I leave here I’ll surely comment on it. Which brings me to another interesting thing, we only need to receive a grade of 40% to pass an assignment or a course. I’m not sure about this but I think there is a dark side to this as well, if you only need 40 to pass, that means it will be nearly impossible to get anything close to 100, and that a 75 will be quite the accomplishment as well.
Last night I went to my first official gig here in the UK. Disappointing really, that in the two months that I’ve been here now I’ve failed to really go to a concert, and what I went to last night was hardly one as well. One of the barmen from my favourite pub said that there would be hardcore (punk ;p) show in a local venue here in town and said that I would most likely enjoy it. So there I went, a 30 minute walk to the venue which I had never been to before because it’s pretty far out of town and upon arrival found the place pretty empty. There were about 30 people there, including four guys on stage playing already, but I found out later that the place could only hold up to 100 people max. When someone says hardcore in Holland, it will refer the likes of Thunderdome, when someone says hardcore in the US it refers mostly to the New York Hardcore punk scene(or the decedents of it), and here it’s something completely different. The bands playing played something that combined screamo, hardcore, emo, rock ‘n’ roll, and even a little taste of the electronica side of things. Nonetheless, all the band members, and crowd looked like love deprived emo kids and all of the lyrics to the songs were screamed through the microphone in such a way that I couldn’t understand a word of it. Normally I have no problem with this kinda thing and actually enjoy it, but this time there were four bands doing the exact same thing and not a single note was actually sung, two of the bands even wanted to encourage the crowd to sing-a-long with the 1:15 minute screaming sessions which surprisingly they couldn’t. I think this might be a new generation of hardcore which is great, but when critically analyzing it even some of the people that were there agreed with me that there were little possibilities for this kind of music. Even the emotionally drunk emo kids want to sing-a-long to something while they cut their wrists and not have to mumble words that could possibly be different words and give a completely different meaning to it. Now, you may not get the impressions that I didn’t enjoy myself at the gig, I actually did. It was good to hear fast drums, guitars and having the kick drum dominate when the blood in your neck moves up and down. And probably if the venue was filled I would have moshed for a while, but now there was only a little hardcore dancing going on, and for those of you who know what that is will also know that that is not violent enough for me.
As I now have three pages filled in word and feel like I’ve rambled more than actually said anything I will leave it at this for now. If you got through the whole thing in one pull without drinking a beer than I congratulate you, have you not managed and aren’t even sure that you read, or even understood, all I’ve written then I don’t blame you, I myself am actually too lazy to go read through it again to see if all makes sense, which at this point doesn’t even really matter anymore does it?
Oh and Nard, before you do a word count, yes it is 2,452 words.
This post was created under the influence of Incubus’s “Light Grenades” and Social Distortion’s “White Light, White Heat, White Trash”.
