July 6th

Since I've gotten to Cambridge I have been neglecting checking my email daily.  I have been getting to it at least semi-daily, but that's really not enough.  So I check my email at 8.20 (class begins at 9.00) and I have 2 emails from Dan.  The first is to the class in general asking if someone would please switch and do the presentation he was supposed to do that morning because he just realized he had a scheduling conflict and had to attend a lecture instead.  The second was just to me, with a powerpoint he made attached asking me to present it for him.  Of course I emailed him back and told him I would.  Speaking in front of people has never bothered me, not to mention it probably helped me gain more favor in the eyes of the Zoltan (prof.).  Oh, another note, at the beginning of seminar, Zoltan asked to borrow my pen,

"You zee I ran into him at ze pozt offiz yezterday and borrowed hiz pen there.  He is ze keeper of ze pen!"

After seminar I was done with classes for the day.  I went to the Pembroke cafe where I met up with Mr. Watson (another student, he calls me "Carolina") and had lunch.  It was at this time that he explained to me what "Cambridge" is.  It is probably bad that I didn't know this until now, but here it is.  The University of Cambridge is not really a single institution.  It is the collective body of all of the colleges in Cambridge.  That's about as simple and straightforward of an explanation as I can give.  A much needed nap was acquired after lunch.  Later I spent a few hours working on this blog and talking to my girlfriend, then getting a few items from Sainsbury's.  I knew that it was mentioned that I needed a rainjacket ("waterproofs" they call them) to make the highlands trip.  After looking around in the outdoors shops the cheapest I found was 22 pounds.  That's pretty expensive, so I decided not to get one.  Upon returning to my housing I checked my email to find the itinerary which stated that one was required to have waterproofs or they would not be allowed on the trip.  I begrudgingly made the trip back out to buy one.  I'm not about to miss hiking in Scotland because I wouldn't buy a rainjacket that I will use anyway.

For supper I had BBQ meatloaf, some sort of vegetable stew, and noodles.  The food from the cafeteria is ridiculously good.  It is also expensive, but I look forward to at least a meal a day there.  After supper Mr. Watson and I headed to CUS for the briefing on Scotland.  Mims, one of the PA's joined me in seating.  She is studying chemical engineering in Cambridge (i.e., she lives there and studies full time).  I enjoy talking to her because we often cross subjects where things are completely different from America and she doesn't realize it.  For some reason this seems strange to me as she is a PA and has contact with so many of us Americans, but I suppose most of them are too busy asking questions about the English system and don't mention anything about their own.  Upon leaving the briefing she invited me to a pub with her friends later, and I told her I would join them.

Leaving the briefing was a bloody mess.  We immediately were going to sign up for the Highlands hike.  Everyone wanted to go, but there were only 280 spots (and about 350 students).  I pushed and tousled and fought to the table and just when the paper was within reach the PA supervising it announced there were only two spots left.  Now if people were coming and signing themselves up it would have been one thing, but no, people were sitting at the table, not letting other people get up to it to sign it, and signing their friends names as they shouted them across the room.  Total bullshit.  I had my own pen, so I struck my name on the paper while she was writing right above it.  She was pissed because she had had one other person to sign up but I had taken the last spot.  She wrote their name in between some names.  Things that piss me off.

After running my errands I met up with Mims at the Panton Arms pub.  Turns out all her friends were Asian, and they had filled the table.  Mims and I squeezed in at different places and really didn't have any conversation.  I instead talked to a few fellows named George and Jimmy.  They answered two long standing questions I have had.  The first was, why in asian places do you see store signs and advertisements partly in Asian but with a few english words thrown in?  The answer was that for one, the shop owners or advertisers want to give off the image that they are smart or better than others because they know another language, or specifically english.  The second reason is there are so many visitors to Asian countries than can not read or speak any Asian characters, the familiar english helps to draw customers in.  My second question was why do they commonly throw english words into their speech when they are speaking chinese (in their case)?  The answer to that was simply that the english word was so much simpler than the Asian counterpart they just preferred to use it.  Intriguing.

It was a good day, and tomorrow morning I leave for Scotland.