10/7 - 10/14 and Stonehenge

Note: I wrote this last week but never posted it.

I think I'll make this one a little quick, because I have to wake up early tomorrow.

I actually went to modules (classes) this week. They're not too bad. I have Linear Algebra + Calculus A (one module) this semester, which is just a cakewalk for me, because I've taken through Calc C. I have an independent study with my advisor, Tony Solomonides, for another math module. My other two classes are: Britain in the long 18th century and Intro to Visual Culture. I have both of those classes with John. My history teacher is actually from America, but she moved 35 years ago. We had a field trip around Bristol this week, which was pretty boring actually. But we met a guy in our class from Scotland, and had a couple of pints with him. His parents work in Dubai, and he was telling us all about the man-made islands shaped like the countries of the world and the indoor ski hills they have there - it sounds crazy. I'd like to go someday, I think.

I think Monday night was Nick's birthday - he didn't tell us until late in the afternoon that day. We brought our flatmates, Vidar, and Marta along,(everyone else had to be up early) and took him out to some place called Revolution for drinks and shots. Naturally we tried to give him the most random assortment of shots possible to get him to hurl. But Nick held up, and the bar closed before we could get him over the edge. I went with him to get cheesy fries, while everyone else went to bed a little early.

Tuesday I went out to Academy with Dali, Sud, John, Marta, Vidar, Nick, and probably one or two more I'm forgetting. They had a stage show that involved naughty nurses, which I'm not going to explain any further. This week, Vanilla Ice is going to be there, and no I'm not kidding. Unfortunately, I'm going away for the week and I'm going to miss it.

Wednesday night we played football again, and we have a growing crowd: Ed and Mikey came, some English guys, along with J.B. and Ben and everyone from last week. Mikey is a skater kid, and he's really good at football. Ed is kind of overzealous and wierd, but really nice. He sucks at football though. My team had all 3 Americans and Ed on it somehow, and we ended up losing 10-1 or something crazy. Tanj knocked me over on one play, and I scraped up my knee nice and pretty. Afterwards I cleaned up and we played a poker tournament in Ed's flat. I was doing quite well until Vidar took all of my chips in one hand. At least there were free chocolate pretzels, which was well worth losing the 5 pounds (kind of). I spent the rest of the night learning these 3 Indian girls names that I kept forgetting: there's Aanchel (on chell), Shreya, and Sehar (say hair).

Thursday evening my Mom showed up! She's here until next Monday. She just popped in for a little bit with Julie, and stayed at her hotel that night. She came again Friday morning, but I had to leave her alone for a little while because I had Calculus. When I got back, we explored around Bristol a little bit, went to Tesco and bought loads of food, and then went to "King William's Ale House" for some steak and ale pie. I left her alone for a little bit to go eat some Vladimir pizza down in flat 22. I ended up burning my hand pretty bad cutting one of the pies. I feel bad for my Mom, she must think I'm getting injured all the time over here.

Saturday morning Mom made French toast. I made the joke that it would just be regular toast for Mai-lys, and it turns out she hadn't heard of it before! She did a little research later, and it turns out its actually called "pain perdu" in France. And Americans actually used to call it German toast until the first world war, when it was changed due to anti-German sentiment. She left all of this in a note for me under my door. Mai-lys, your so smart.

So anyway, we all feasted on French Toast, and my mom made a pumpkin spice cake. It's nice to have some real food for once! We lounged about most of the day Saturday, because we have big plans: Monday morning we go to London, Tuesday morning we leave for Rome, and Thursday morning we leave for Paris! We get back on Friday. I wish we had a little more time in each city, but it'll have to do.

Saturday evening was the Rugby game! All the international students met up at a pub named O'Neills to watch. Lora put French flags on my face in fingerpaint, which in retrospect was a really bad idea on my part. Don't go to a English pub with French flags on your cheeks. You have to wait at least 15 minutes longer to get your drink at the bar first of all, and you spend that 15 minutes getting hassled by drunk English people. One guy kept giving me trouble, but eventually we hugged it out. France lost in the last few minutes thanks to the wonder leg of Johnny Wilkinson. All the French were miserable, which of course made the Brits even more cheerful. Mai-lys said she was going to go to Clifton suspension bridge and jump.

So we had a somewhat humiliating walk home, considering our losing teams colors were painted on our face and people were celebrating in the streets. After we went back to flat 22, where i showed off my supreme arm-wrestling skills and gave some flowers that weren't mine to Aanchel.

Sunday Mom and I went to Bath. We got there a little early so we could do a little sightseeing before we went on our guided tour to Stonehenge. It turns out I missed pretty much everything my first time there. I got to see a lot more Roman architecture, which was great. I got a Cornish pasty on top of Pulteney Bridge - I found out that it's pronounced past e, as in rhyming with nasty, which is just silly. Here's me in front of the bridge:
I also walked around in this little maze thing in a nearby park, and then we went to the King's and Queen's baths. There was some half-naked acrobats outside - my mom was more interested in that then I was. We also bought some fudge at some place that claimed it was the World's Best Fudge. It was too sweet - I've definitely had better fudge.

We left on our tour at 1 o'clock - there were about 15 other people in the bus I would say. The guide gave us all kinds of interesting info about the landscape on the way to Stonehenge, and we saw some cute little houses with thatched roofs on the way. Stonehenge itself was amazing. I didn't think we'd be able to get as close as we did. Everyone says it's just a pile of rocks, but it's much more really:

No one knows why they built it...my mom says it must be aliens. They gave us a free audio tour thing, and it explained how it was built. They used wood pile-ons to lift up the stones on top, which weigh...quite a lot. Slowly they would put wood underneath each side until it reached the top. That's your history/engineering lesson for today.

After taking about 200 pictures of stones, our tour moved on to a little village called Lacock. Lacock has a total of four streets, I counted. There was a cottage that had flowers outside, so I stuck some money through their post slip and got some flowers for Marta. The whole village can best be described as quaint. They filmed a couple of films there, including Harry Potter. We also got some ice cream from an ice cream truck.

After we got back to Bath, we took the bus back and called it an early night. We left the next day for London/Rome/Paris in a 5 day extravaganza that was amazing! I'll update on that soon.

Cheers Drive!

Ok ok, so this blogs supposed to be about my studies in Europe and I haven't posted a single thing about it yet. I've been putting it off for too long, so here it goes from the beginning:

I woke up early Sunday, nervous and excited. After one last family breakfast, I did my last minute packing up and watched the Giants lose again. Then after a couple of hours of "Am I forgetting anything?" me and my mom left for the airport.

We brought Chris, because he's going to NJIT right next to the airport. After a very sad goodbye with my mother, I checked my guitar and behemoth bag, which was actually 3 pounds overweight but they let me get away with it. Then Chris and I talked about how excited we are for what the future would bring. I think he's going to school is going to do wonders for him.

Ok so on the plane I sat next to an elderly couple from somewhere nearby Bristol. They hate air conditioning apparently. They gave me the inside scoop on Bristol and what to expect. He said I should go see the suspension bridge and go to Bath, both of which I did. He also suggested I go to Prague, but we'll have to see. The plane trip was long and I didn't get much sleep. It was cool when the sun came up though, the clouds were really pretty and you could also get a pretty good view of Ireland's farmlands and such.

When I got off the plane, my taxi wasn't waiting for me like planned. So I had to keep calling UWE from a payphone until they sorted it out. When the taxi did come, he was very nice. He gave me a pretty detailed tour of the city. He also told me that in England, the two things you can never trust are the women and the weather, which was a good laugh. I tipped him 5 pounds and went to go in Nelson House, but they don't have an office there where you pick up your keys. I had to go all the way to campus and back with the taxi just to get them. I tipped him another 5 pounds for that, but I just found out that you never tip taxis here - in fact, you rarely ever tip anyone! That's good for keeping my bar/club expenses down a little bit, at least.

Ok so when I finally got in my flat, I was all alone. So I unpacked and tried to take a little nap (I was exhausted) but I couldn't. So I walked around until I found a Wilkinson (not Sainsbury, long story) and bought my cleaning supplies. When I came back, I ran into my first flatmate, Nick. I also kind of met my flatmate Piya (I don't know if that's spelled right but it sounds like pea ah, she's from Finland). She was stuck behind the door, because are lock was jammed somehow. So me Nick and Pilla spent a good 5 minutes trying to open the door as our first experience together. Since then, we've gotten a new lock.

I accompanied them back to Wilkinson to get supplies again, and we went and ate at a Subway. That night, me and Nick stayed up and had some Strongbow, which is a type of apple cider. Apple cider is very popular here, and it has about the same strength as beer. We were both really jetlagged though, so we stayed in that night.

The next day, John arrived, with his friend Hannah. Hannah goes to UWE, but studied at TCNJ for a semester, along with her boyfriend Dali. Christina also arrived, and she's from Germany. I still don't know my last flatmates name actually, but it starts with an M and she's French. I'm actually going to make sure I know it by tonight, as I told her she has to come with us to watch the rugby game with our french friends. More on that later.

So Hannah took us to Asda, which is basically the British Walmart - in fact, it's owned by Walmart. It's part of "the Walmart family." Hannah took us out to a pub for a couple drinks, and she taught us a bit about british culture. When you get off the bus, you have to say "Cheers drive!" They actually say cheers quite a bit, instead of saying thank you.

I kind of forget the order of what nights were, so I'm just gonna say some of the things I've done now. It's probably my own fault for being too lazy and waiting until i was here almost 2 weeks to post anything.

I think on the second or third day we were here, we went to UWE for orientation. International students get there own special little 4 day thing, and then freshers have a whole week as well. However we ended up skipping most of it, because it's mostly things like "don't go out late at night alone" and etc. We also had icebreakers, where we had to remember everyone's name and associate it with an animal. This was by far the funniest part of orientation, because everyone was foreign and not everyone had a good grip on how to speak English. Vidar from Norway couldn't think of any animals, so i told him he could be a vulture. No one could pronounce Paulius the Panther's from Lithuania's name because he says it kind of wierd and fast, like this: ball loose. Other notable people from the circle was the very foxy Fiona the Fox and the lovely Loren the Lion, both from France. I've also talked to Cidar the Camel from Germany, but i haven't seen him in a little while. I was John the Jaguar, and John Bryndza was John the Jackass.

Ok so I think we went back to Hannah's flat that night and met some of Dali and Hannah's friends, and had fajitas and some drinks. We also watched The Mothman Prophecies, which is an essential part of any good night. John left Thursday night to go to London to see his girlfriend Caitlin, also from TCNJ and I've also never met, and me and Nick stuck around in Bristol for the weekend.

On Thursday evening, we met a bunch of French guys who are fantastically fun. Vladimir is a 6'5 giant who loves "vode kah". Jean Baptiste is a slick guy who tried to teach me French curse words when I was drunk. Ben has a ludicrous hair cut, and drinks too much Vodka Red Bull's. Also there is Loren the Lion, who's a crazy artist. And Damien, who I think is probably gay. In some ways stereotypes of the French are very accurate, and in other ways they aren't. For example, they are all very fashionably dressed and they all smoke cigarettes. However, they aren't snobby or mean to American's at all, at least from what I've seen.

We went to one of the bars on campus (there's 3 - did i mention British people love to drink?) for the rugby game, which was France vs Ireland. I think the score was 25-3, and it was good fun for all of us at the table. I think we watched a soccer game, Man U vs Chelsea, on friday with them too, but it was a bit boring.

English students started arriving in Nelson house on the weekend, and there were a number of parties in the dorms to welcome everyone in. I played this English drinking game called arrogance. You put however much alcohol you want in a cup and then flip a coin. If you lose the call, you drink, and if you win you pass it on to the next person. Unfortunately it doesn't matter what your drinking, so you could end up drinking 2-3 different types of drinks in one, ugh. Of course this happened to me, and it was a very large cup because it got passed in a full circle. I met a bunch of British people, who's names I don't really remember at all. I do remember one black guy named Solsa, or something like that, he's fun. I think I went out for my first doner kebab that night. The only way to properly describe them is, the most delicious drunk food on earth.

I think Saturday or Sunday morning, me and Nick walked to the Clifton Suspension bridge, which wasn't really that exciting, but that's ok. It was about a 40 minute walk, mostly uphill on the way there, so some nice exercise. Apparently it was built in the early 1800's, so it's quite old:


Sunday evening there was an official pub crawl, where a whole bunch of students from Nelson House went bar-hopping. I went with Loren Lion and met her flatmate, Marta, from Poland. She talked to me a little about Poland and how they have vodka with a blade of grass in it. I have a bit of a crush on her, but I haven't seen her since that night, unfortunately. I only had one beer that night and left when the group moved on to the next pub, because I was a little tired of drinking.

This week we spent going out to clubs with Dali and Hannah's friends, who are mostly Indian. There's Sud, Zak, Tanj, Raj, Shalini, 2 Becky's and a Lisa, and also a few others i'm forgetting. (No guarantees that any of those names are spelled correctly). Lisa's from Ireland, and after talking to her a lot at the club last night, I've got a bit of a crush on her as well, haha. All of them are a lot of fun, and we've had all kinds of fun together.

I'll try to give a rough outline of how almost every night has gone this week: we walk over to Dali's flat at around 8-9 with something to drink. We sit around and chat and play drinking games, such as Code or Ring of Fire, which is Kings to us Americans. Code is a funny game because there is no real code, but you just say four random colors in a row and people say if its right or not. If you're wrong, you drink. You don't tell 2-3 people that there isn't a code, and you watch them get confused as hell.

Around 10 or 11, people say they're ready to go out. Then there's a waiting period of about an hour, where we're waiting for other people to join us. At 12 o'clock, we leave, but then we wait in the hallway for someone. Then we wait in the elevator lobby for someone. Then we get downstairs and wait for someone. Then we finally leave for the club, where we're out until 3 or so, dancing to the same 20 or so songs. I'm not a very good dancer, and I sweat alot when it's that stuffy, so I doubt I'll be attracting much women on the dance floor, but it's fun anyway. Anyways, after that you have the option of going to get drunk food, going to the casino (I haven't gone yet, I think that's probably a bad idea with my funds), or going home and passing out.

Ok so Monday night we went to some bar named Tiger something. I tried to escape the round of sambuca by dashing onto the dance floor, because i knew i was going to throw up if i did it. Alas, Hannah hunted me down and forced me to join, and I had to rush up the stairs afterwards to the bathroom to throw up. That's ok though, because John has me outclassed: he knew he was going to throw up on a sambuca shot as well, and Dali forced him to take it. He did, and thought he'd managed to keep it down. But then he threw up all over the bar. Take that, 2 pound cover charge!

Tuesday Night was Oceana, which is a huge nightclub on the waterfront. I went with the Frenchies and Nick. Oceana has 6-7 different rooms that all play different music. The bottom floor is like a psychedelic one I think, then there's Icehouse which plays the typical club music and is air-conditioned. Next to that, there's Aspen, Colorado, a ski lounge theme, Paris, which is a snooty sophisticated bar I think, and the one on the third floor is supposed to be New York. That one's fun, it's plays funk music and the dance floor lights up all different colors, very funky. There's also a couple other bars that are smaller and hard to explain. Oceana is really fun, but it gets kind of crowded.

Wednesday night we went to Syndicate, where John had a dance-off with some crazy guy. He's got some pretty sweet moves, I must say. He's why cavemen painted on walls.

Last night was Panache, which wasn't really that great of a club. They closed at 2, which is a little lame, and the DJ wasn't very good. Also, I took a shot without looking very closely at it, thinking it was sambuca, which is cheap here so everyone does it. However it was tequila, and I very nearly threw up. Afterwards, we walked and got some food. I talked with Lisa on the way, who told me about the cultural differences between Ireland and England.

I've been planning a few trips. I'm going with John, Dali, Hannah and many more to Amsterdam Oct 25th-28th, which is exciting. Nick may or may not come, depending on if his friend is coming to visit him later. John convinced me and Nick to go with him to Istanbul, which is apparently dirt cheap once you get there - 9 euro for top rated hostel rooms... Also I just read in my email that my mom wants to come next month and go to Paris, which would be thrilling. Maybe I can convince her to come to Italy too, because I can't find anyone to go with me yet. I'll be going to London when the Giants go to play, and probably at least one other time. Oktoberfest got scratched off the list because I didn't plan it early enough. It's too hard to get there now. Also, we'd like to go to Dublin and to Spain at some point to see a bullfight. It all depends on how long my money lasts really!

Yesterday we took a big trip to Bath. I went in Taj and Shalini's (sha lay nay) car, and Taj told me about crime and CCTV here. Apparently there are cameras everywhere here - Big Brother is watching you! It's only about a 40 minute drive, and Bath is very nice and quaint. There's a lot of shops, and of course there's the Kings and Queen's Baths, which is a cultural heritage site:

I just took a picture of the outside. There's a museum inside you can go look around, but it's expensive and not everyone wanted to do it. There's also a lot of other nice buildings, including some that don't really make sense, like this one:















We went to a pub there and I had my first fish and chips, which was delicious, and also I sampled the local Bath brew, which was decent. And then after that, we walked around a little more and headed back to Bristol. I think I'll try to update this a little more often so i don't have to write for forever. Cheers!