Happy Evacuation Day!

I love Gawker, because it makes history fun! (Well, that's one reason among many.) Here is a great "article" about Evacuation Day, the anniversary of the day (November 25!) in 1783 when British troops finally left the newly independent US of A.

Also, regular visitors (Dad...) will know that one of the best parts about the site is the hilarious comments people leave. My favorite this time is, "What's great about this post is the conclusion, unspoken but obvious, that we all lived happily ever after."

Happy Evacuation Day!

Guy Fawkes Day

Tomorrow may be a big day in the U.S., but here in England the real cause for celebration comes this Wednesday. The 5th of November is Guy Fawkes Night, a.k.a Bonfire Night, or The Night Guy Fawkes Failed to Blow Up the Houses of Parliament.

In 1605, a man named Guy Fawkes and a bunch of his fellow Catholics devised to detonate the Houses of Parliament, thereby killing the Protestant King James. He came really close to pulling it off -- he managed to set up the gunpowder under the building and everything -- but someone caught wind of his plan at the last minute and put a stop to it. Fawkes and the other conspirators were tried, tortured and executed.

So now, to celebrate the fact that Fawkes and friends weren't able to eliminate the royal family, every November 5 people set off fireworks and burn effigies of the Catholic traitor. Awesome holiday if I ever heard of one!

British as a Second Language

Everyone knows that English people talk funny. They have fancy accents and use nonsense words and go on and on about sports that most of us have never even heard of. So I was prepared to hear some language that isn't used in the US, but to which I've been exposed by watching British movies and reading Harry Potter; things like lift instead of elevator, football instead of soccer, favourite instead of favorite.

But when I finally arrived, I was really surprised at how little British English I actually knew. For example, did you know that a zucchini is called a courgette over here? And an eggplant is an aubergine. Also, aluminum is aluminium -- note the tricky second "i" (which makes for a fifth syllable).

There are also some really important distinctions that I wish I had known about before coming to the UK. I knew that English people use the word trousers far more frequently than we do, but I figured it was interchangeable with the word "pants." Oh, how wrong I was. Turns out pants actually means underwear; only underwear, never anything else. And everyone knows what it means to smoke a fag, but I didn't realize that the word also refers to a type of English sausage until I saw faggots and mash (mash is, of course, mashed potatoes) on a restaurant menu.

Slang, too, is really funny, but I'll save that for another time, because most of the slang I've learned is kind of...inappropriate.

Of course my British friends like to laugh at the weird stuff I say, too. (Actually they really like to hear me swear, but I think that's just because it's surprising.) They had never heard "sketchy" before, but they all got it immediately (dodgy). For some reason one of my flatmates took great pleasure in the fact that I said faucet instead of tap yesterday, but maybe she's just easily amused. Oh, and the other day I was making a quesadilla for dinner (which really impressed my flatmates, by the way!) and I asked the two guys who were in the kitchen at the time if they had a spatula I could borrow. When I was met with blank looks I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I don't know what else to call it," and I was starting to try to explain myself when one of them said, "No, we call it a spatula too; we're just trying to remember what that is."

A Well Good Time

This past week has been well fun, as my flatmate Ez would say. (She would also say, "It's well sunny today," or, "This pasta I made tastes well bad." Or, if she felt like really confusing people, she might even say, "I like my steak well rare.")

Anyway! A fun week. My classes started on Tuesday, and I already have a lot of reading and writing to do, but most of it seems pretty fun. By next Friday I have to make up a synopsis of the screenplay or stage play I want to write for my final drama project, which is a little daunting. I'm really looking forward to that class a lot, though; it seems like it's going to be a real challenge. Plus we get to see our final projects performed in class by our classmates! So that'll be tight.

And I've been up to more fun than just going to classes, if you can believe it. Almost all of my nights here so far have involved sitting around the table drinking (mmm...cider...) and chatting and meeting really cool new people, either in the Union Pub on campus or in the kitchen with my flatmates and other friends. Last night my flat did a poker night, which was really fun. The drinking age in the UK is 18, so you'd think the university would be overrun with wasted first-years who are away from home and able to buy booze for the first time. But actually most people I've met have been pretty casual about drinking.

I'm guessing that's probably for a couple of reasons. First of all, American freshmen have to sneak around in order to drink, but that fun element of secrecy and stealth doesn't exist here in England. Also, the alcohol laws aren't really as simple as "legal at 18." You can't buy alcohol until you're 18, but you can have it in a restaurant with your parents when you're 16, and you can be served it in a private home as early as age 5. As far as I can tell this takes some of the excitement out of drinking: when you've been allowed to do it with your parents for a while, it's not such a huge deal when you can buy it on your own. Finally, the "normal" age of a first-year is 18, which is just barely legal, but in actuality a good number of first-years are a year or two older than that. Of the 8 first-years in my flat, I think only four are 18: two are 19, one is 20 and one is 21; and they're all starting as first-years for various reasons: a few took a gap year, and one changed his degree so he's starting university over. So these guys, having been able to buy booze for a while, are pretty mellow.

We've also had some really fun parties since I've been here. The best was the first International Students' Society party of the year, on Wednesday. The ISS rented out a club in Norwich for the night, and I had a lot of fun dancing and meeting loads of students, both international and domestic. (The ISS has a reputation for throwing great parties, so they attract people from abroad and home.) There's also a Quiz Night every week, and my friends and I went to the first one of the year. It was a special event for international students because we were the only ones on campus, and my team tied for first place, with 27 1/2 points. I won a killer tat of a flaming skull, so I put it on my hand and impressed people with it all week.

Anyway, tonight I'm hanging out with my friends in my flat again, and then tomorrow I'm going on a walking tour of Norwich, so I'll put up some pictures when I get back. And speaking of pictures, check out the photo slideshow on the left! Clicking on a picture will bring you to the gallery where you can see all of them. Night! : )