A Proper Post

A Proper Explanation of the Following:

I'm overcome with work to do (see: choppy previous post) but there's so much to say, to describe, to write. I'm overcome with a kind of hatred for these web-diaries, I'm overcome with wanting to communicate with who I love back home, and I need to be overcome with wanting this to be my home. If I write about it, maybe it will become dear. Maybe I can revel in its beauty if I can share it with someone else. Increasingly in my life I'm shown beauty, and increasingly in my life I can appreciate beauty, but increasingly in my life I want to share beauty with people who are beautiful to me.

A Proper Description of England:

The Weather
Out of the three weeks I've been here, 75% of the time has been slightly overcast to sunny, the other 25% has been primarily overcast to rainy. I consider myself a lucky person. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds welcomed all international students at a dinner at the beginning of the term, and he thanked us for bringing the sun with us from our respective countries, and to relish it while it's present because it shouldn't last long. Right now it feels like November weather -- my body is fooled into thinking pumpkin pie is right around the corner and I keep telling myself that, though its barely October, the English don't even celebrate Thanksgiving anyway. This weekend I need to go shopping for a few more winter things, as it will only get worse and I'm already pretty cold. I'm hoping that when we get a new boiler in the house (hopefully tomorrow), things will get better. The whole time I've been here we've been living with a broken boiler, which means no heat inside the house and no hot water in the taps, so we wash dishes after we put on a kettle. Thankfully the shower is fed through a separate machine and heated electrically, so we haven't suffered too much. I've been needing a space heater in my room, though, because I really hate leaving my warm bed in the morning to set my toes on the cold floor.

The People
Nice, Generally quite nice, and the stereotypes of old English men who call you "Love" and the people saying "Cheers" and "Ta!" for everything are true. They really do drink tea regularly (3ish cups daily) but I think the cold also has something to do with it -- a cup of tea warms you all the way through. They really don't drink coffee, and a 2 week long quest to find a coffeepot was almost absurd -- they had no idea what I wanted if I didn't want an espresso maker. They're generally nice and conversational, and more than once I've been approached and asked about the American elections because they've heard me speak like one. They like greasy foods and big Sunday dinners (called carveries).

The Town
Like a small big city -- loads of shopping, loads of people on the weekend running around. The campus is on the northern tip of it, and I live slightly norther than that, so to get to the city centre (nothing is spelled -ter) is about a 20 minute walk. I'm loving the walks everywhere -- no bike, no car, and a proper blister on my heel that's healed and hardened, and I'm ready to go. The train station is the farthest, being almost a half hour. Campus is less than ten minutes away, and most of classes are centralized over a building or two. People are really into shopping, though, which is why its so busy on the weekends. People are really into fashion, as well. I'm probably the least-best-dressed around here.

The Shops
There's a giant open-air market in the centre of Leeds that has anything and everything you could possibly want. I bought my sheets/towels/shampoo there the first day I got here. It's monstrous and for some reason it closes at mid-day on Wednesdays, the only days I've tried going back. I've looked for an organic grocery store and found one, but it was supremely expensive, so I stick to a supermarket called Morrison's for the most part. It's in town, so I don't go often, and when I go I stock up. Since I'm cooking for myself almost every meal, I've been doing more grocery shopping than anything else. There's a tiny shop around the corner from my house owned by a very nice Indian man, and I go there for the daily basics (and things I don't want to carry for a 20 minute walk home): milk, eggs, wine. He has a teeny tiny vegetable section that reminds me of a little Nicaraguan shop, so I've gone there to get some eggplant or onions or potatoes a few times. It's hard realizing that I'm only one person and thus I should only cook a small portion of food for myself. I've never really cooked just for myself. I've always lived in a place where I could get food easily (at a dining hall) or lived with people I cook with and for. Here, we eat at different times and the boys all cook together and they cook fairly big meals that center around a meat dish. Tonight I made a vegetable-rice medley and while it was simmering on the stove I remembered that the recipe fed 4 and I couldn't believe that I'd forgotten that I wasn't 4 people. The large-family mentality will never leave me.

The Accents
People from Leeds sound very different from people from York (20 mins away), who sound very different from people from Lancaster (40 minutes away), who sound very different from people from Birmingham (2ish hours away), who sound very different from people from Liverpool (1.5 hours away). I'll not even start on the Irish and the Scottish and the Welsh and their dialects. I can't tell where people are from, but it's been interesting learning bit by bit how to tell them apart.

The House/Area
I live in a 4 story house of sorts, it's attached to the house next to us and it goes on for a whole block, and that's how the neighborhood works. Rows and rows of houses fill the Woodhouse and Hyde Park areas, and it's mostly a student community -- students who go to my university or the other 2 that are in town. I walk past Hyde Park to get to campus every day, a nice little park with a place for the skateboarders to practice and beautiful green grass. With all the moisture that it gets, it's quite a pretty park. There are walks through it lined with trees and if the ground weren't so wet and the air wasn't so cold, I'd sit in it all day long. Lately a few men have been playing around with a remote control helicopter in the park and programming on a computer to make it go by itself. Leander says there's a tiny circus that comes to the park every now and again, but it's not regular, and it's not very good, but everyone goes anyway. Farther into the Hyde Park area is a tiny Picture House with one screen and 2 showing per day and a Hyde Park Picture House cat with a handkerchief around his neck and a bowl of milk next to the concession stand. I've been to see 2 films there, and I've loved it! They show old or independent films, and they have a balcony and beautiful red curtain that they open and close before the movie.

In my house, there's a basement, with 2 bedrooms and 2 boys in them, a main floor with a living room and kitchen and teeny tiny hallway with 2 bikes and a shelf system for mail and 2 pairs of someone's wellingtons (rainboots). Then there's the second floor with 2 bedrooms and 3 girls living in them and a teeny tiny bathroom with a little window opposite the shower so you can open it if you're in the shower and suffering from too much steam. The bathroom is painted blue with little sea creatures stuck to the walls and 7 people's shampoo bottles and tubes of toothpaste stuffed everywhere. Then there's the third floor with 2 bedrooms, one of which is mine, one of which is another boy's. The third floor bedrooms are stuck into the roof, so part of my ceiling is slanted, and part of it is a huge window panel that sticks out of the roof so I can see the street below. Its beautiful, but it's also very cold -- the glass doesn't keep out the cold very well! I have a nice little room with one red wall and a small closet and dresser and desk and bedside table. And a radiator with a little wire rack so I can hang my clothes on it to dry after I've washed them (no driers here).

The Roommates
They're from all over! The 3 boys are quite the team -- 2 of them, Ben and Amlyn, are practically married, they cook together and wash dishes together and go to school together and study together. The boys are called Ben, Joe, and Amlyn. Ben's from Yorkshire, the county we're in, and so his family lives like a half hour away by car. He's in the nursing program at the University of Leeds and he's about to go on placement in a hospital til Christmas. Joe's from York, which isn't too far away, either, but his accent is different from Ben's. He studies Sound Engineering at Leeds Metropolitan University which is farther in town. Amlyn is Welsh, so his accent is very different, and his Welsh is much better than his English (Welsh is such an interesting language). He's studying nursing like Ben. The 3 girls are wonderful -- Stef, Leander, and Lucy. Leander and Lucy share a room and they've graduated from University a little bit ago and work in town now. They're trying to get into a program to teach English in South Korea soon, and they're both from a town called Grimsby which is farther south. Leander and I have hung out the most, she's such fun, she likes to talk and I love to listen to her talk (she's got my favorite accent of them all). Stef is German, but she's spent half her life here in England, so her english is flawless. She's studying Chinese and spent last year in China on an exchange program and has a Chinese boyfriend, so we hear her talking to him on the internet in Chinese all the time.

The Campus
I love my English buildings! They're 2 older buildings separated into "Houses" -- meaning they have 3 different doors on the front of it with different numbers on them. So I'll have a seminar in House 10 but that doesn't mean I can't get to it from entering through House 6. There's a nice common space in the middle of House 7, called the Lounge, and the doors have beautiful doorknobs and the stairs have beautiful wooden banisters and they creak in the way stairs should. The windows open upward, the way windows should, and the professors have windows in front of their desks and sit next to bookcases of loads of old books like professors should. They have wonderful names, too, like Alaric Hall, David Lindley, Tracy Hargreaves, Denis Flannery. The campus on the whole is made of old brick buildings, though some are newer and have more glass and interesting angles to them. The drama building is my favorite new building, it has black blocks all over it and the blocks alternate with small windows, so it's half window, half black stone. The student union is humongous, with 2 grocery type stores, a few restaurants, about 3 clubs, a pub, a bookstore, a smoothie shop, a university clothing shop, and administrative offices stuffed into it. It's the largest student center I've seen!



Perhaps more will come later on the courses and professors, but right now cold fingers are stopping me from going any further.

And my heart is still in Atlanta.