Sundries and Supplies

I know of five grocery stores and have been to four of them (I have yet to go to the Co-op, mostly because I hate hippies). There are also a variety of specialty food stores: butchers, bakers, and the like (though, as far as I can tell, no candle-stick makers). Though I have been to each of the grocery stores at least twice, and one I frequent about once a week, I still have not quite gotten the hang of grocery shopping in Aberystwyth.

It seems an odd thing to say: get the hang of shopping for groceries. The stores here are completely different than in America, and like anything else that is different, it takes some adjustment. By my mother's house there are four places a person can by groceries that are within a ten minute drive. Five, if you count the grocery section of Target. The Jewel and one of the two Meijers are actually across the street from each other. Two behemoths of food stuffs, spread across the width of a city block, with massive parking lots holding scores of cars. Inside, there are aisles and aisles of all sorts of household related items (even more home goods at the two Meijer stores and the Wal-Mart). The cereal aisle holds dozens of generic and name brand cereals of all sorts; whole bread aisles with a variety of bagels, breads, flat breads, English muffins and the like. Produce sections that require their own area code. If you need anything culinary, so long as it is not too exotic, you can get it at one of the four stores.

Here, the stores are tiny (with the exception of Morrisons, a mighty store at the far south end of town). Today I stopped by the middle sized stores looking for bread, milk and chips (I also got some bacon, which was on sale). The entire grocery store is four aisles wide. Most of the store (and this is true of all but one, and includes Morrisons) is comprised of freezer or refrigerated shelves. It seems that the Welsh really like their frozen, ready made meals. There were two whole freezer chests of take-away style Chinese food, and two other freezer chests of take-away style Indian food. A whole section of frozen pizza, frozen ready made meals, and frozen meal parts. It could be that the store is arranged this way because of the high population of students (and I do notice that my roommates tend to go for the easier to make food).

Nonetheless, I think it's odd that I can't find chicken stock, either boxed or canned. There doesn't seem to be a need to make one's own pan sauces or anything of that nature. The number of ready made sauces I can find is likewise limited. Unless, of course, I buy a frozen ready-made meal. Then, I can get a variety of gravies and sauces.

There has to be a place for a person who likes to cook to find things that he needs to cook. I might have to break down and go to the hippie markets. Sigh...organic, fair-trade goods crammed into a tiny place with constant reminders that my very existence is killing the planet. The things I do for good food.

International Flavors

Despite having trouble understanding myself as an international student, I attended the International Student Association's Phony Olympics tonight. We all met at Scholar's Pub supposedly dressed in the garb of our national sport. One Lithuanian woman came dressed in a basketball jersey, which I found odd. But I remember the Lithuanian's put together a damn fine Olympic team last summer Olympics.

Aberystwyth has a much more diverse student body than the window from my dorm would have led me to believe. There were also more American students here than I would have imagined. Both were pluses.

At the beginning of the night, things started rocky. I tend to show up at the time things are scheduled. Odd, I know. When I showed up at 8:00, there were few people in the bar, and few people that looked International. I found two girls, the Lithuanians, sitting upstairs. So I went to the bar, and ordered a Coke.

Now, I don't drink, which is unusual in America, but here it's a downright bizarre sight. The bar tender didn't seem to know what to make of me.
"A coke?"
"Yeah."
Pause.
"...Okay. A pint of a half?"
Not knowing how long we were going to be there, I ordered a half.
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye as she filled my glass.
"Thanks."
The half-pint cost me nearly two pounds, so I decided that was the last of that. I took my tiny drink upstairs to where the Lithuanians were speaking some Slavic language and seemed to ignore me. I sat next to them, my Cubs shirt sending out clear signals that I was American, and was looking for other people wearing sports clothing. Two tall blond women joined us at the table, one German, the other Czech. We struck up an uncomfortable conversation - small talk about cultural differences, and how to pronounce words. I was hailed as some sort of knowledge expert when I knew the noun form of 'to apologize' was 'apology.'
"See," their German friend said, "We should hang out with more Americans. They know English."

It is a humbling experience to be with people from other European countries. Almost all of them spoke several different languages, and would, at times, code switch between the two of them.
"I am not drinking, no," the Czech woman said, "I took medikament today."

About twenty minutes or so into the night Brad, an American exchange student, came over to the table, and a Malaysian law student, joined our group. Brad and I shared a love of the more independent or alternative comics, so we talked about Chris Ware, Jason and some of other favorites.

Meeting Americans abroad is always an experience that seems to ground my identity. Right away, people can peg where I am from by my accent. This one undergraduate girl I met was from Billings, Montana, and had visited Chicago once.
"Oh...you're from Chicago?"
"Yeah."
"Like actually in Chicago."
"Sure, I lived in the city for a while."
"I visited there once, I loved it."
"Where did you go in Chicago."
She starts laughing at this: "Chi-CAW-go! HA HA HA HA!"
I reminded here that there were almost as many people in Aberystwyth as all of Montana.

The night turned into a pub crawl at that point. There was a race to the next pub to see who captains would be. After that, there was tug of war (which Team America won; U.S.A! U.S.A!) outside a bar that was having a military themed party. These sort of games were cute, and the younger students seemed to have a good time with them, but these sort of things are a little behind me. I was not alone, and many of the post-graduate exchange students stood around making smarmy remarks. Which I was good at, and wish they would make an Olympic sport.

The International Student Association was a nice experience, all in all. I talked with some people my age who are not in the English department for the first time since I got here. The majority of the people there were undergraduate students on exchange, there for six months. This added a slightly bittersweet quality to the night as I realized I will, more than likely, never see any of these people again past May. Bitter: because I genuinely liked some of these people; sweet: because I am more of a resident, they are more of a tourist.

Standards and Bars

I went to London in 2006 for New Years Eve. It was a good time: got dressed up, ate some of the most delicious food I have ever eaten, took a walk along the Thames, and watched the fireworks from Millennium Bridge.

Then we tried to walk to the Tube, which was free for the night. I was expecting a crowded Tube ride; what I was not expecting were the 12 million other people trying to do the same thing. At this moment, I became keenly aware of seediest side of human nature.

London did two things I thought were either genius or completely misguided:
1) They made the Tube free: this allowed for people to get drunk without driving. Always good. But that also gave people carte blanche to go out rather than having people over.
2) they closed all but one entrance and one exit of the Tube stations: this funneled everyone into one place, allowing for a smoother flow of people; that is, it would have had not 12 million people gone to the same place.
It's hard to say whether or not those were good ideas, but with those numbers it's hard to say what would be the best manner of handling the situation. Can there be degrees of anarchy?

This is not that entirely different than going out in any large scale metropolitan area (and by large scale, I mean New York, LA, Las Vegas [small in indiginous population, but that is known to balloon around special occasions] and my home stomping grounds, Chicago). I have been in crazy, public situations before: Taste of Chicago for the fireworks every year between 1996 and 2003. The biggest difference between these two situations (New Years Eve in London and 4th of July in Chicago) is the open liquor law. You can't walk into a bar in Chicago, buy a beer, in a bottle, and walk out with it. You can in London.

The same is true of Aberystwyth. Tonight, after reading some dense Russian Formalist Theory (I know; I am a hoot), I wandered into town to blow off some steam, clear my mind, and get away from my room. The walk was mostly solitary until I got to the more centrally located area. Now, because I don't drink, and because hanging out in a bar on Saturday night by yourself is lonely, I haven't really tasted the night light in Aberystwyth proper. I went to a bar on a Sunday night, and it was, not surprisingly, subdued. On a Saturday, at midnight, the situation was entirely different.

There is a dense package of bars on the western edge of town, including one particularly hopping joint on the pier. There was a mixture of quieter, local bars, filled with grim-faced stool jockeys watching the TVs; larger, better lit places with fancy florescent drinks and young girls tossing coins into jukeboxes; and dark, black-lit thunderous clubs filled with aural hallucinations and several types of intoxications. The streets will filled with every variety of partier: girls dressed inappropriately for the cold weather; dudes in hoodies and tennis shoes; crisp, collared shirts and meticulously gelled hair; punk-rock girls with spiked hair and nasty attitudes spelled across their t-shirts; and one girl dressed like she lived in Bedrock. All of this was like any other college town.

What was different was the surprising number of open bottles people just wandered around with. In every square, on every bench, there were a collection of revelers drinking booze purchased singularly, and nearby. This would never fly in America, and it might have something to do with the number of guns per citizens in both respective countries, but I have seen fights start over the dumbest things when people don't have the benefit of a glass bottle to use as a weapon. I could not imagine what two hot-headed Americans would do if they could purchase a weapon at a bar.

I am told that the government on a national level is concerned about drinking and behavior, and that the open bottle policy is being reconsidered. Maybe it's my experience around violent drunks that has me believing that these laws need reconsideration; or maybe it's because I don't like being hit with bottles. It's hard to say.

One thing that I was impressed with here was the sheer volume of taxis that were scuttling drunk groups up and down the hill. One might wonder why a town of roughly 15,000 needs four bus routes and two fleets of taxis. It's a twenty minute walk into town, and while I would like to think that most people would walk it if taxis were not available, I know better. The taxis prevent people from being too lazy and driving into town, getting drunk and driving home. As I was walking home, I would see three taxis flying up the hill, bumper-to-bumper. All three would pull into campus and drop student off, just to return down the hill and repeat the whole process. Again, it's not a long walk, and I imagine that the time spent outside, barring total inebriation, would probably do the less drunk some good; that said, I am glad to see that Aberystwyth has done something to promote responsibility. Carbondale, and even Chicago (as I found out after New Years Eve), is criminally understocked in taxis.

But, as I passed two blond girls talking, but not really talking to each other, just sort of tossing words out into the night, the differences reduced to a non-point:
"Where are we?"
"Look, the pier."
"I didn't want to get drunk."
"Pier...peer pressure."
This one locked eyes with me:
"Peer pressure," she said, "do you hear me. Peer pressure."
They stumbled through the darkness continuing the conversation in this manner.

National Library Tour

Wales has an interesting history. In 878 AD, the Welsh tribes were brought under one ruler, Rhodri Mawr. Before him, during his reign and after, the Welsh fought off waves of invading Saxons, British, Vikings and Irish. Sometime after the Norman Invasion of 1066, the Welsh were taken into what is now recognized as the United Kingdom. It wasn't until the Magna Carta was established that Wales started to regain some sort of national recognition. In 1282, the Llwelyn II was killed and Wales was finally, officially and completely, under British rule. From this point forward, the oldest born son of the King or Queen was called the Prince of Wales.

Over the next several hundred years, Welsh uprising were quelled time and time again. It's a small country, and mounting an army probably was very difficult. Today, Wales is said to have over 3,000,000 people. For a country that takes up 8,000 square miles, that is not a lot of people.

In the nineteenth century, there was a cultural resurgance, and Wales started to elbow some room for a National Identity. The largest city, Cardiff, was overrun by British, so the cultural center of Wales was Aberystwyth. Here, in 1872, the first Welsh national University was built by funds raised by the locals, completely free from the English government. After that, the country began raising money for a National Library and Museum. A well-read doctor, Sir John Williams, with a library of some 25,000 books, pushed the hardest for the library, and eventually the location was secured (for free: donated by a farmer who had extra land). As a consequence, though, the Museum was located in Cardiff.

The library held a design contest, and several ornately designed building in the style of the US Capital building were passed over for a squat, square building that was capable of dealing with the sometime severe weather that can hit the hill it is perched on. In 1911, work began but was put on hold for World War I followed by the Great Depression. Funds and materials were hard to come by, but the library officially opened it's doors in 1916. Due to the financial concerns, some corners were cut and some of the embellishments were scrapped.

The majority of the Library, as you see it, is what was built at the beginning of the 20th Century. It is a copyright library, meaning that it owns the rights to anything published in the UK (one of six copyright libraries). It collects books, newspapers, magazines, journals, videos (in all formats), wills, paintings, slides, manuscripts, and so on. Most of the media that is not books are related to Welsh history or people, including some 800,000 photos of Welsh people doing Welsh things.

The International Students were invited to an after-hours tour, and I could not say no. Because it is not a lending library, none of the materials are available to visitors outside of the two designated reading rooms. If someone wants materials, they can order it from the desk, and in a half hour or so, somebody will bring it to the appropriate reading room. You can peruse it there, making copies if needed, and then return it. There is a restaurant (with a bar), a shop several galleries and a movie theater. We were taken to both reading rooms (which are gorgeous), the art gallery, the history gallery, the rare manuscript room, and the stacks (which visitors are not allowed to view, but they made an exception for us). Here is what I learned on my two-hour tour:

1. Roald Dahl was Welsh. Along with a lot of people you don't know and Dylan Thomas.

2. Fearing that they would lose their language or fleeing religious persecution, the Welsh established colonies in Canada, Ohio and, oddly enough, Argentina. There is a series of painting of the Welsh in South America, which I imagined resulted in a lot of sun burns.

3. The Ohio Welsh are connected to the Library through the Wales-Ohio project. Three counties in Ohio are recognized as being primarily Welsh, and can trace their lineage back through Aberystwyth.

4. 90,000 wills are on record. If you feel you are owed something by a long lost Welsh relative, Aberystwyth should be your starting point.

5. The first book written in Welsh, dating back to the 1200's, is rather unadorned. The Welsh poetry, history and folklore was compiled and transcribed by a poor farmer in the area and written on vellum, which at the time was actually calf skin. The handwriting is huge, in an effort to suggest that the words on the page were worth the expensive paper (but not the gilded edges or fancy cover). The librarian assured us, though, the handwriting got much smaller towards the back.

6. The Welsh stake a claim on Barack Obama, and have a whole exhibit set up to show that his mother has some Welsh in her (several generations back).

7. Did I mention that the Welsh had a colony in Patagonia, Argentina (outside Buenos Aires). Yeah, does anyone else find that really strange?

8. There is a free tour Monday Morning at 11:00 am and Wednesday afternoon and 2:15. We were quizzed on this.

9. The cells that hold the films, rare manuscripts and valuable paintings don't have sprinkler systems, but instead pump carbon dioxide into the area to suffocate and fires or trapped workers.

10. During WWII, Luftwaffe using the huge, squat white building on a hill as a signpost. They could have bombed it, but found more value in it as a marker for which way to bomb England.

11. The books, maps, newspapers and so on are stored on movable shelves (not as nice as the movable shelves at SIU, but you know...it's America). The library has over 100 miles of stacks, and those that measure stacks argue it is the longest set of stacks in Europe. The shelves that contain newspapers weight 11 tons, but take no more than a child to move due to the magic of lever and mechanical advantage.

12. The addition, built in 1996, houses the stacks and the administrative offices of the 300 employees (as much as a factory building sofas might employ). It is the primary economic provider for the town, meaning there is an exceedingly high ratio of librarians to people.

13. The basement of the stacks are designed to withstand the weight of the upper six floors in case of earthquakes. Number of earthquakes to strike Wales in recent memory: 0. Nonetheless, prepared.

14. Before WWII, fear from the Spanish Civil War lead a forward thinking Welshman to tunnel into the hill and create storage for all the valuable material. The vault was finished in August of 1934; the next day WWII started, as if on cue. The Magna Carta spent the war in the vault.

It's a fascinating place, and if you come to visit me, expect to tour the library. As our tour guide said today: "When your family comes out, the library is the perfect place to get a beer and take a tour."

Dual Purposes

Ostensibly, I am here to write a dissertation. If you are wondering how that is going, please refer to my dissertation blog, found here: http://keegansbookblog.blogspot.com.

It's not terribly interesting reading, unless you find rambling entries about comics interesting. Wait...this is not good salesmanship.

That blog is the most transcendent piece of augmented reality prose you will ever see in any media imagined, or unimagined. In the history books, the canon of literature will be reduced to this: Beowulf; some poems about elves and flowers; a few plays involving trees, shoes and lost love; T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland; novels that are just enough Daniel Defoe, but still interesting; Keegan's Book Blog.

Read my works, ye mighty, and despair. Percy Bysshe Shelley Keegan

The Hardest of Questions

Most of the time, when I meet a Welsh person and we get to talking, the inevitable question arises: What brings a person from Chicago (or America) to here? True, looking at the map Aberystwyth is located in the middle of nowhere between nothing and nothing else. It seems as if someone was trying to get as far away from Birmingham by only walking directly west. When they got to the coast, this person stopped and formed a village around him.

Truth be told, though, this is a popular vacation spot of visiting tourist. This is obvious by the sheer number of hotels, taxis and buses in the area. My walks along the sea front take me past at least a dozen brightly colored hotels that advertise vacancies.

So there are reasons why someone might want to come to this small town situated on the coast between two hills. But the original question is why and how I found my way over here.

The stock answer I give in academic circles is that the department, with Will, Peter and others, is pretty established, especially in the literary field that I want to study. This is going to be my answer when applying for jobs, too:
"Why should we give you a job? You went to a tiny school in the corner of a tiny country miles away from anywhere?"
"Because Aberystwyth is the best little University that you have never heard of."
"Oh? Well then. Welcome to Harvard."

While this is certainly true, narrative theory is certainly not popular in the states, and both Will and Peter are well read and published in the fringe types of literature I am interested in, this is really not the reason that I packed up my life and left all behind.

Truthfully, between you and me, I was running away from Illinois. I had spent my whole life in that strangely shaped state, framed by rivers and Cheeseheads. Granted, for college, I pushed the boundaries traveling as far West and South and the state provided. The rest of my Illinois Experience was spent living in Chicago, the North-easterly corner. However, until this move, I had never lived outside the land of Lincoln.

Knowing one place well has it's advantages. It was nearly impossible for me to get lost almost anywhere in the State. When driving back and forth between Monmouth and Southern Illinois, I would often take back roads to break-up the trip. I had an extensive knowledge of which roads I could take to get where, and which smaller cities sign-posted my trip home. All in all, I was tired of Illinois.

By extension, I was growing tired of America. This is not to say I had some Hemingway-esque desire to expatriate because I found my homeland deplorable. Quite the opposite: I really like being American.

However, never having left America, it begged the questions of whether or not I knew America. There are lots of cultural theorist who argue that the outsider has a better perspective of an object than one who is close to it, and there is probably some validity to that idea. Some epistemological thinkers would argue that to know something, you have to know the opposite. To know good, you have to know not good. To know happy, you have to know not happy. So, by extension, to know America, I need to know not America.

But this jarring experience is going to shed light on more than what my origin country means. It will, in the long run, shed a lot of light on who I am. I am going to spend a lot of time explaining my customs to people, looking at myself through the eyes of other people. People who might not understand why it is I stay up until four in the morning watching DVDs of the The Venture Bros. This sort of self-examination is not possible when constantly surrounded by like-minded individuals.

And that, my readers, is the long and short of it: this trip to nowhere is the best way to know where, and who, I am.

Getting Down with the Sickness

This is the first time I came down with any sort of sickness since having been here, and I am a little upset it was not something more fun or exotic, like Traveler's Diarrhea, Malaria or Cholera. That would make for a much better story than, "I came down with the sniffles that my housemates had last week."

That said, being sick, and 3000 miles from anyone that knows me, makes for a miserable sick day. Usually, when you are sick and someone who cares about you is there, you can squeeze out a free meal, can use the pity to get you out of chores, and usually get to watch what you want on TV. When you are sick and alone, making food, taking showers, and so on becomes a testament of will.

I woke up with a completely congested head. The sort of congestion that makes you suddenly aware of how much more your head weighs when filled with a viscous green fluid. Had I been at home, I would have moaned and groaned until someone got me a bagel and some juice. Here, I had to stumble down stairs, trying to balance this new head on my sickened shoulders to get my cereal and milk. Then, I stumbled back upstairs and ate the uninspiring cereal in silence, drank my milk, and tried to figure out who was going to take care of all the refuse. I was sick, after all. I shouldn't be taking care of my plates and spoons; I should be laying down, watching ESPN while my family tip-toes around the house.

Being apart from people when you are sick sucks, but so does being a grown-up. I had to work today, despite being congested. When I was seven, this sort of request would have seemed strange to me. Excuse me, I would think, but I have to blow my nose regularly. Clearly I can't do math. Luckily, there was a drop-hours call out, so I truncated my shift and was spared from having to grade essays in a stuffed-up stupor.

But my adult responsibilities don't end there. I have a paper due on Wednesday, and a significant amount of reading to get done between then and now. So, I stumbled over to my bed with the ever entertaining Longman Critical Reader: Narratology and tried to plow through some dense, quasi-mathematical descriptions of the narrative process when I should have curled up under the covers and watched cartoons.

I am still in my pajamas, at 6:30 at night, trying to get the will up to cook myself something for dinner. Or at the very least, make a sandwich. The kitchen is downstairs, though, and the dishes need to be washed. I'm sick, I whine to myself, this is just unfair.

Collegiate Differences

While entertaining blog entries are a nice side effect, the real reason I am here is to finish what I started many moons ago: getting an education. I started in August of 1985, and hopefully in May of 2013, I will be finished. Granted, I was out of school for a few years as I had forgotten to really think about what I wanted to do with my life once out of college. As much as Monmouth did bestow on me a wonderfully flexible liberal arts education, they did not really prepare me for the brutal fact that no one was looking to hand me a job. My senior year I was corned by Mark Willhardt and Rob Hale, and they told me that grad school might be the best choice for me.

Originally, I was going to be a fiction writer, but, well, my fiction is terrible. Also, I am unmotivated, so writing without a deadline was never something I could do. It seems my creative gene needs a kick in the pants, and life after college provided fewer kicks than I had hoped. I tried to get some of my college writing published and was unanimously rejected. After two years of unsuccessfully trying to get published and unsuccessful applications to MFA programs, I tried to get into some MA programs. My second round, I applied to Southern Illinois University, was accepted and did rather well.

Determined not to make the same mistakes twice, I applied to grad schools early, 10 total, and was accepted by two: here at Aberystwyth and at University of Washington. Neither one offered much in the way of compensation, but the price tag on Washington was more prohibitive than Aberystwyth, so here I came.

Not that I mind, actually. I have attended three different institutes of higher education, and is like nothing that I have ever attended. I went to the small school in rural Illinois (Monmouth College, in scenic Monmouth, Illinois), and was attended to as one would imagine at a small school: the professors all knew me by name, they all took great strides to help me academically, there were tons of engaging conversations to be had at any time. That said, Monmouth does not open doors. No one has heard of the college, and while the faculty is amazing, few have regional recognition, to say nothing of national recognition.

Southern Illinois was a different experience entirely. First, it was HUGE, the second biggest university in the state behind the venerable University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana. The faculty was massive, and several of which were publishing regularly (many had books out, or were in the midst of publishing books). My adviser had two book length studies of Stephen Crane published while he operated trains in Iowa. He was mentioned in the acknowledgment pages of several reputable books, and taught one of the first graduate level classes on comic books. That said, I had to fight tooth and nail to get noticed at that school. The professors had their own concerns, and a department of roughly 5,000 undergraduates and nearly 100 postgraduates to worry about. I was a small fish in the ocean. I felt, often, that my needs were not high on the list of priorities (I could understand why), so in many regards I felt that I was unprepared for my PhD at that school.

Aberystwyth lands somewhere in the middle: its bigger than Monnouth and much smaller than SIU. The faculty is large, but the department is smaller. There are not many PhD students (I have met two, and they mentioned about four or five others), so my supervisor is well acquainted with my project, with my writing style, with my expectations for the program and what I want to do afterward. Will is focused on not only making me a better scholar and writer, but ensuring I know how to publish my work, get accepted to conferences, and get a job at the end. Though, without classes, teaching assignments or an office, I feel really isolated from the rest of the learning community, and have riddled my friends (read: Erika) with tons of academic problems they neither understand fully or care about.

Probably the biggest problem with this program is that it requires a certain amount of motivation that I lack. I am trying to keep on my studies, but lying around not doing anything sounds really enjoyable whenever I pick up a dense book about narrative theory or comic studies. That said, I am actually interested in my project, so I can usually rustle up some get-up-and-go if I sit around long enough. Hopefully, though, as Aberystwyth becomes routine, I can manage to get more work done. I begin drafting my introduction soon, and should have the first portion of my dissertation done by March, maybe late March.

If anyone has ever considered European academia, particularly British academia, I highly suggest it, especially late in academic career. There is a pragmatism here that is lacking in the States, but I don't feel the focus on getting a job later in life detracts from the education I am receiving.

Then again, I have been here a month, so I could be totally misconstruing the situation.

Pub Quiz

Having gone to Buffalo Wild Wings, the idea of a Pub Quiz was not surprising to me. At the aforementioned wings bar (and no, not the bar in Wings), there were TVs asking questions, and you could punch in your answers. All good, unobtrusive fun.

Pub Quizzes here are much different affairs.

I was invited to go to the quiz by Megan, one of the other PhD students, here in her fourth year. Her housemate Rebecca, also an older PhD student, was there as well. We later met up with two of Rebecca's friends from the film studies department and Alisha, an MA in the English department.

Alisha, it should be mentioned, was blind. I didn't know this right away because she wasn't there with everyone else. She was coming over later. After a little while, we all began wonder where she was. It was then, after she was late, that I found out she was blind. She was just going to wander over on her own. Of course, we were upstairs, which made it impossible to find us.
"So, let me get this straight," I asked. "You left your blind housemate to come over here. Alone. And then sat upstairs? Now that she's late, no one has thought to maybe find out where she is."
"That's a good point. I'll send her a text."
I thought that was the meanest thing you could do. Her phone would buzz, and she would try to answer it, getting nothing but silence on the other end. She knows something happened, but can't retrieve the information. Turns out her phone reads the text-messages to her, making the simple act seem less mean. Eventually, it was determined that Alisha was downstairs, and Megan went to retrieve her.

Then the quiz started. Our team name was "My Life is Average," which turned out to be prophetic as we scored the average score. The quiz was done on paper, and each team was given an answer sheet and a set of pictures. We were to identify the pictures, some of which we easy (Gerard Butler, Buddy Holly), some were difficult due to their positioning (Kylie Minogue had her hand in front of her face and looked a lot like Sheryl Crow), and others were distorted to make it impossible (Bruce Willis had his chin made to look like Jay Leno).

Once we finished, we swapped papers with the team next to us, and the bar lady read the correct answers. We did not fare well on that round, scoring a 50%. I was surprised, though, at how it was graded. Being a devious person, and out of sight of the Pub Quiz master, I wondered why we didn't just pretend that we didn't have an answer sheet, or pretend that we had swapped, fill in most of the right answers, and jog down to report our scores. As it turned out, the pride came in knowing the right answers, not just having the highest score. Which is why England never wins at basketball, and loves soccer so much.

Being American turned out to be quite an advantage. One question featured American cities, and we had to identify which states they came from. Another one had phrases ending in sports terminology, and we had to guess the right sport (blitz, quarter, down, etc. = American Football), and one question was about the youngest assassinated US President (JFK).

In the end, though, I felt like calling shenanigans on the whole thing. The team that won had nearly 20 people on it. The sheer number of people on a team is going to increase the chance that someone will know the answer. Why not fill a whole side of the bar, and have them answer the questions collectively. Also, I am fairly certain that one team had a Blackberry and a fast typist.

All in all, though, it was a good time, and my first experience in a bar outside the US. I don't know when I'll go again, but I have started brushing up on my soccer terminology and the names of famous rugby players.

Defamiliar Voices

I had some time between a meeting and when I had finished eating, so I wandered to somewhere quiet in the Arts Center, overlooking the art gallery, and hunkered down for some light reading: Postmodern Narrative Theory by Mark Currie.

I usually have trouble focusing in large groups of people, finding myself distracted by the conversations that surround me. I like to know what is going on around me, and I am fascinated by the conversations that I can hear snippets of:
"No, I'm telling you. Three days tops. You should see the doctor."
"Fugly, dude. I'm telling you, Fugly."
"I'm not racist, I just don't trust Mexicans."

Here, though, two things tend to prevent me from getting lost in conversations:
1) The British talk exceedingly quiet. I became very aware of how loud I talk within the first few social outings I have been to. Maybe my hearing is shot from all the loud concerts I have been to, the bands I have played in, and so on. But I don't think so. People err on the side of courteous and speak very quietly.
2) Because the accents make it hard for me to figure out what people are saying, the quiet din of conversation just melds into white noise. Like waves crashing on the beach, or static fuzz of a radio station barely coming in.

This particular day, as I tried to make it through a particularly dense chapter about linguistic terminology deconstructing structuralist narrative theory, I heard the first American voice I have heard for some time.

Now, through the wonder of Skype, I have kept up with my American voices, so it wasn't jarring for that reason. But I have yet to hear any American voices in context. Here, two tables away, this woman was talking to another young man.

It could have been the person, or the conversation, but her voice cut through the white noise like a Ginsu knife through a leather belt, a tin can and a tomato (STILL CUTS EVEN SOMETHING SOFT LIKE A TOMATO AFTER ALL THAT!). One might assume that an American voice might help relieve homesickness, or instantly bond me and this stranger. Quite the opposite happened. Instead, I was suddenly embarrassed to be an American.

Again, had a well-spoken American sat talking politely with some British folk, the situation would have been different, but this woman peppered her speak with "like" and other vocal mannerisms pulled straight from Clueless. She was loud: laughing loudly in the quiet Arts Center, talking loudly, interjecting into the conversation loudly ("Oh. My. GOD, I KNOOOOOOWW!"), stepping all over the other people in the discussion. Here I am, tucked into a quiet corner of Wales, miles away from anything listed on the British Travel Council's website, and the one American I run into was a caricature, and not of something awesomely American like Barry Bonds or Great America.

Granted, my salty language and appreciation of the finer points of Transformer movies probably does not make me the best representative for American culture, but I am careful not to seem pushy, loud and obnoxious. Of course, if one is pushy, loud and obnoxious, keeping aware of your cultural surroundings is probably not high on the list of said person's personal attributes. When she began talking about how much she could drink (tacitly implying that she was awesome because of this), I packed my stuff and left the Arts Center, secure in my pretentious belief that I was a better expatriate than her. Now, I thought, where can I get me some Mickey Ds?

The Lady at the Post Office

It has been some time between writing entries, and this stems mostly from my lack of free time. I still live and try to assimilate myself into my British surroundings, but I have less time now that I have started work on my dissertation and have begun working for SMARTHINKING again.

I have, though, begun to feel more at home. I feel less and less like people can see the "Americanism" on me, or smell it, like funk. My housemates even integrated me into a social event, playing this game "Lyrics" (one round, my partner and I kicked ASS), and a knock-off version of Jenga in which the pieces were wider than three times their length (making for an oddly shaped, and inherently wobbly structure). All in all, I don't feel like too much of an outsider.

Accept at the post-office. There is a post at the top of the hill attached to this small grocery store that is really convenient for me. I can walk there, do my shopping and mail some post cards as the mood suits me. The first time I went there, a really pleasant woman helped me mail out a half dozen post cards, and even attached the stickers and licked the stamps for me.

Every other time, this tiny crone of a woman has helped me. And she does not make it easy on me.

The first time, I handed her a stack of post cards, like I did the other time with the other woman. She looked at me, and the post cards, like I had handed her a stack of Mormon pamphlets I wanted her to read and give her friends. She flipped through the stack, and said, "Are all of these going to America?"
Despite clearly having written U.S.A. on the bottom of each, I played along, "Yes ma'am."
She slid them back under the glass, which seemed odd to me, and huffed off her stool. She came back and tossed a handful of "Air-class" mail stickers under the glass.
"You'll be needing these," she sighed. And then added, as if I couldn't manage, "They go on the card."

She did some quick math and told me the total (which, I have to say, is really expensive). I paid her, and slid the card back under. She put a stack of stamps on top of those, and slid them back with no further instructions.
"Thank you," I said, and went to find somewhere to affix the stamps.

Today, I went to mail a package and there she was again, smiling with stiff lips, thinking of all the ways that she could make my life difficult. I walked to the window, noting the large sign that said PARCELS, and said, "Should I put this in there?"
"What? No. You put it on the scale," she replied, bitterly. Aw, hell, I thought, here we go.

She weighed the package, and started a series of half-sentences that I was supposed to understand, and then reply to:
"You...what is...where...do you...where is...what..." She stopped, looking at me, waiting for my reply. I froze. What should I say? I thought. I don't want to offend her more than my existence already seems to.

After a moment, she collected herself. "Where is it going? Do you need a customs label?"
"Umm..."
"A customs label? One of these? Here, put it on there."
She slid a customs label under the glass to me. I looked at it totally confused, first because I wasn't sure I needed it, and secondly because I couldn't read it. I mean, I could see that there were letters on it, but none that I could combine in any semblance of a sentence. I looked up at her, and she was speaking in Welsh to the other woman, casting sideways looks at me. I returned to the label trying desperately to figure out what each box was for. Finally, deciding the package was too important to have a half-assed label, I said, "Excuse me, but do you have one in English?"

You see, the one I had was in Welsh, which looks like no other language I have ever seen, and had French subtitles, another language I am not familiar with. I can speak English, read German, and have a cursory understanding of Spanish, none of which was useful here. It seemed to me that asking for an English label was not beyond the realm of understandable requests.

But that I held a Welsh sticker in my hand begged a different question: how did I end up with this sticker? That woman had a choice: a sticker in English or a sticker in Welsh. Having dealt with me to this point, American accent and all, she decided the Welsh sticker was appropriate. I started to hate this woman.

Evidently, they didn't keep a stock of these stickers around, and she sighed, loudly and in English, before hopping off her chair and staggering around looking for one. After slamming a few drawers, she found one and threw, literally forced it under the glass at me. "Can you fill this one out?" she asked. How long would I spend in jail for murdering this old woman, I thought. I could argue that, having ended her life in the most exciting way possible for her at this stage of the game, I had done her the service of avoiding a painful end that was, I assumed, just around the corner.

As I tried to make sense of what to put on this sticker, she barked out commands. I hurriedly scribbled down some vague descriptions of the contents, and estimated a value. "Here, just give it to me," she said, clearly annoyed, and letting everyone know that I was inconveniencing her, the line, and possibly the entire country. I crammed it in the little box, and handed her my credit card.

Okay: a word to the wise, if you go somewhere distant, check out the means of credit they use. Here, the cards all have chips in them instead of magnetic strips. This makes my card extremely outdated and often the focus of curiosity. Knowing that all the card readers only read the cards with chips, I have taken to handing my card to cashiers, who more often than not look at me like I just arrived off the boat. "No honey," the woman at the grocery store says slowly, enunciating clearly, "you put it in here. HERE."

The woman at the post-office did the same until I noted that it was a "slide-card," a term some people use. "Well, then, give it to me, and I'll see if I can manage."

She ran my card, eying me over the register the whole time, probably trying to figure out who I killed to get this foreign card, and how long I have been living in her city, fouling it's purity. From this point forward, she refused to look at me, and instead just eyed the non-existent line behind me. She took the plethora of receipts, had me sign one, and flipped my card and the remaining receipts under the glass. Without so much as a "thank you" she made it abundantly clear that our business was finished.

I made a decision right there to avoid the post office at all cost, using the one twenty minutes down the hill, with much longer lines instead of this convenient but off putting post. The walk is worth it to feel like I am not a strange interloper.