Arrival:
September 10th. We officially left the country at 930PM on September 9th. Sometime early morning we arrived in Iceland. I want to go back there and stay for a few days on our way home because its a beautiful place. Anyways, shock to the system: it was 34F outside..it was cold! Syracuse/Boston was mid-90s and ungodly humid when we left. Can't say I didn't enjoy the cold.
When we got to the Manchester Airport in England it was raining. Glorious! Unfortunately its been quite sunny since. Alan and I had our first British food in the airport. We dared to get sandwiches, a lunch staple here. For some reason, they think that if there's no mayo (which I can't eat), there needs to be something else to keep the bread from getting mushy. They use a "reduced fat spread" or butter on every sandwich. Everything. From Alan's ham and cheese to my tomato and cheese (I wasn't all that daring to try the British version of Mexican chicken sandwiches). Then we had a nice long bus ride through the countryside to Sheffield.
Cool thing about England is that they don't really do highways. They have some roads like it that go through the countryside (which is amazing), but most of the time, you're traveling through villages and towns and cities. I wanted to sleep, because I was tired and my body thought it was 5AM, but it was too tempting to look at the amazing architecture that has made England my dream destination for nearly all my life.
International Student Orientation Week:
Alan and I signed up for this thing for international students to arrive a week before intro week (which is when you register the week before classes actually start, more on that after). We met a lot of interesting people from all over the world. Rose, you would have died from all the people you could've met! Alan and I went to a few of the seminars, walked all over the Sheffield city centre area and housing area and prepared for the day we could move into our first apartment together.
One of the fun things that they had planned for us was a trip to Chatsworth (http://www.chatsworth.org/). It's a ridiculous house. We didn't get a good photograph from outside, but if you look around the website, its pretty incredible. The inside is just ridiculous. Then, they had the entire backyard. There were at least three man-made ponds, a rockery (much bigger than Easton's), a waterfall (pictured behind us), and a hedge maze. Yeah. A hedge maze. Alan and I found the Tri-Wizard Cup there, too. We won!
Intro Week:
Intro week is when all the students register for the National Health Service with a school doctor if they want and register as a student for classes. In America, this is all done online. In England, we do everything in person. It was a lot of steps, very hard because we had to walk everywhere and not everyone knows where we should go for different things, and I'm very glad its behind us. Now, we have doctors and student cards that we can use to get into buildings and get really cheap bus fare!
Intro week is when all the students register for the National Health Service with a school doctor if they want and register as a student for classes. In America, this is all done online. In England, we do everything in person. It was a lot of steps, very hard because we had to walk everywhere and not everyone knows where we should go for different things, and I'm very glad its behind us. Now, we have doctors and student cards that we can use to get into buildings and get really cheap bus fare!
Fact about doctors here: since medicine is socialized (a fantastic idea), we get free healthcare for the next year and the school doctors are certified NHS (their national doctor standards) doctors. Also, all medicine is cheap. Pretty amazing!
view from the castle hilltop
the keep of the castle
a 14/15 century cathedral
Alan and I at the top of the castle
The cool field trip of this week was to the Peak District, which is a national park. It's really big. We hiked up mountains and went through villages of Neolithic origin. We saw a Roman fort, a castle, etc. Pretty cool. Very inspiring to the archaeologists. This is a picture of Alan and I at the castle (its on top of a hill) and you can see the countryside and village below. The other picture is from one side of the castle, the cliff. To get up, you have to go on the other side and do tons of switch backs to walk up. And of course, it rained on our second field trip as well, so we
Sept 24- The First Week of Class
Okay, so first you need to understand this timeline. From Sept 10-15 is international week. From Sept 15-23 is intro week, and then finally, on Sept 24, classes start. We have been in England for two weeks before we see the inside of a classroom.
Something that reminds me I'm not in America (because its really not that different, but then, it also is very different) is class. I have a four day weekend. I have class from Tuesday-Thursday, but they're really full days. Maybe 5 hours of class a week. But even so, they're shorter days than I had in undergrad. So it's strange. I feel like I have all this time open. My management courses have tutorials, but they're every other week (like discussion groups). Its much different teaching here and they don't really give homework, but I have lots of reading available to me and I'm going to every class and taking lots of notes and studying hard to get a good grade. My goal is to graduate with distinction, which is hard to do here. The grading system is different.
I'm also going to do an internship with a local museum. I've gotten a centralized topic idea for my dissertation. I am also going to join the archaeology departments journal if I can.
Alan has this really awesome class that takes him out into the field all day on Friday to look at landscapes and apply the themes he has been learning into practice. My classes are more focused on management and use of the materials, which is great, so I don't have to learn how to do accounting, but how to look for the information that will help me and learn to interpret and look for it. So we both have cool classes. This week was intro week for classes, so the further they get going, the more we will tell you!
Our final assignments (due sometime in January are 75% writing and the rest are tests, of essays. The writing is about 20-25 pages for each class. Alan has four, I have five.
Today:
Saturday is our lazy day. Today Alan and I did a glorious nothing. Well, we've read and done some cleaning. I did laundry (which takes all day because we have a washer/dryer combo and each cycle takes about 3 hours). We also tried the ASDA online groceries to compliment our normal Tesco and Eurospar quick stops for fresh produce. We're really awesome about eating lots of veggies and healthy breads, but we miss some of our American staples. Like dill pickles, cookie dough, and baking soda. ASDA is a little more variable because its online, so we were able to find some of our own cooking materials. Here, we've found that people shop for a few days and probably visit the grocery store 3-5 times a week. We are trying to stick to cooking for ourselves (much cheaper), which means stocking up on the essentials.
Another fun thing about England is that the Royal Mail is fantastic. I ordered all my books last Saturday. I have all of them, plus my JKR book today. That's 8 books on the cheapest shipping option there is. It's amazing! And we got Alan's extra desk chair in less than 24 hours of ordering it!
Now that I'll be updating regularly (as time permits), posts will be shorter. Feel free to comment or privately message me and if you want to skype, let me know! I go to bed by 10PM so that I can wake up around 7AM and get ready. We like to walk when its not raining, and that's about a 30 minute walk (2.5 miles) that everyone in university housing does, so we get ready early. It's also nice to get up and explore, even if most shops and school buildings don't open until late. Time is different here in England.
Cheers!
Lauren and Alan
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