Life in Leicester

Hello!

It has recently been pointed out to me that it has been over a month since I blogged, and the best thing I can say in response to this is that it seemed necessary to get on my feet in Leicester and to process more important things in my head first before getting around to sharing them with the world.

Now, however, I am finally starting to adopt a groove and a routine here, so I feel that now will be an opportune time to look back over what's been going on in the past few weeks and to try to give you the highlights, rather than a sprawling account of every inconsequential detail and every immoderate emotion that comes with moving to a totally new place for a year.

Please do forgive me for the delay!

Those of you who follow me on Facebook know that I have been doing a series of posts there called "Adventures in Biscuitry," in which I explore the vast and varied realm of the British cookie. Never have I come across a culture in which dessert is held in higher esteem as a necessity and a right of life, and frankly, this alone guarantees that the British and I are made to get along swimmingly! One of my goals as I go along is to transfer the Biscuitry posts here, and to add elaborations of other splendiferous desserts as I run across them. I'm thinking of setting up a day of the week for these - say, Sweet Tooth Thursdays, perhaps?

For today's post, however, I think I'd best give you all a run-down of where I'm staying, and my general class situation at "uni," the British slang for "university."

I was in Leicester for at least two weeks before anyone made any mention of class actually starting and my having to attend! There was International Welcome Week first, full of events - bus tours of the city, a ceili dance, a talent show night. Then there was Freshers' Week, "freshers" being the Freshman, and evidently British Freshers' Week is very unlike US freshman orientations. First of all, practically the whole school shows up and attends half the events, by way of free entertainment, free pizza, and give-away pens and USB sticks. No rolling into town on the Sunday before classes start here!

As far as I can tell, the main objective of Freshers' Week is to get everybody signed up for more clubs and societies than they can possibly participate in, and to talk about absolutely everything you can do at uni besides go to class or study. It was all terribly fascinating, and, between this and the cookies, and the postgraduate wine-and-cheese receptions for general postgrads, for our specific departments, for those of us with brown hair (kidding! but only on the last one), I was beginning to think that uni in England consisted solely of socializing, pub-going, being fed free wine by the faculty, joining clubs, going dancing, and occasionally eating Indian food (which it turns out I don't hate).

Eventually, in early October, a rather vague email instructed me that I had to attend an Induction for my course of study.  It turns out that the induction is an official day set aside for doing what US professors take care of in the first twenty minutes of class on that dreadful Monday after you've just rolled into town. Here's the syllabus, here's the course website, here's your advisor, now read the fool handout before you ask me about it, child! That kind of thing. Only rather more helpful and polite. This single day of induction counts as your course time for the first week, and, at the end of it, they tell you your first reading assignment and finally, finally someone sees fit to mention that you actually do have to attend class eventually, and that it actually does have an assigned room and timetable which you should probably know, come to think of it. This is, by this point, weirdly reassuring knowledge, as if to convince you that you have, after all, arrived at a school, rather than an extended social network of youngish people who like free wine and giveaway office supplies. (Though really, who doesn't like free wine and giveaway office supplies?)

And so my course schedule reads as follows - or, really, I should call it my "module" schedule or "timetable," to be all British about things. "Module" here refers to the entire course, rather than to a particular sub-unit or topic of the class, as you might otherwise expect. "Course" is not an individual class, but your entire course of study - in my case, my course is the MA in Victorian Studies. "Class" can be used as in the US, to refer either to the whole class over the course of a semester, or to each individual class session, e.g., "for that class I have Professor A," or, "class is cancelled today." So, my schedule is:

Wednesdays, 10-noon: EN 7001: Bibliography, Research Methods, and Writing Skills for Postgraduates.
Wednesdays, 2-4: HS 7499: Victorian Society
Every other Thursday, 10-noon: The Brontes

Or, in plain translation:
Every Wed: How to use the library (actually an extremely helpful class)
Every Wed: Long list of  terrifying Victorian statistics that somehow is totally fascinating anyway
Every-other-Thursday: Utter bliss, somehow accruing academic credit anyway.

Let me explain that last one a bit.

I have an entire course/module entirely on the Brontes. There are three students in it - all girls. We are such a small class that, when we were accidentally double-booked in our classroom, the professor didn't even bother to apply for a new room but just decided that from now on, we hold class in her office. Her office is on the thirteenth floor of the Attenborough tower on campus, which means that we have a fantastic view of all Leicester spread out below us. Quaint rows of cookie-cutter red brick houses, looking almost as if they were cut from paper and had sprung up like a children's pop-up book, extend until mounded green trees take over, and these run up the basin-shaped land, punctuated every so often by an old white smokestack from the true Victorian era, and then, at the edges of this bowl in which Leicester sits, there rise misty green hills-upon-hills, fading out into the sky, and suggesting that somewhere, perhaps, picturesque English countryside is rolling out for miles undisturbed. One almost couldn't ask for a view that looks more like it came from a BBC miniseries.

In this utterly apropos setting, we are asked to read one Bronte novel every two weeks, then to discuss amongst our four selves for two hours, while eating tea and cakes. (See? Sweets again. They're ubiquitous. Incorrigible. Omnipresent. Fantastic.) And, somewhere, somehow, some blessed soul not only calls this graduate school, but some other blessed soul pays for me to call this graduate school. I am in a certain species of earthly heaven, and truly grateful to God for this wonderful opportunity.

That said, it isn't flawless. I still struggle with missing people from back home quite a bit, and I still have my daily frustrations with a foreign culture - strange grocery stores, absurdly small kitchen space, and the most bewildering array of laundry soaps ever, none of which seem to have any definable link to ordinary US detergent.

On the whole, my flat is reasonably pleasant, though. I am in student accommodations, or, basically, the dorms, but they're a step above just the one-long-hallway dorms of which I have relatively unpleasant memories from freshman year. There are four individual hallways on each floor, and each individual hallway is one "flat" containing six rooms and a shared kitchen and bathroom. Four of my five flatmates are Chinese, and the remaining one is Vietnamese, so I don't always understand the animated conversations taking place in my kitchen, but they are all very nice girls, and we are getting to know each other a bit better.

My main frustration is the kitchen itself. We are provided with a refrigerator slightly shorter than I am, and perhaps two feet wide, to accommodate the food for all six people, and it is maddening to try to cram your groceries into any available nook or cranny. The stoves, also, are roughly large enough for use by an American Girl doll, and the kitchen cabinets and windows have all clearly been arranged in a way that will maximize the potential for banging heads and for rendering all other doors and windows temporarily either un-open-able or un-close-able. The hot tap turns out water so hot that it steams (the shower, on the other hand, persists in being a barely tolerable lukewarm), and none of the drains seem to have understood that it is their function in life to get rid of water, rather than to retain it indefinitely in the sink. Failing this, however, the tiny countertops, bizarrely placed outlets, and absurdly low ovens are all a perfect model of functionality and ease...

However, one must make the best of such things, and it could be said that at least I have a kitchen.

And so, there is your first real blog-taste of my experience in Leicester. More updates to come - the goal right now is once a week, but that may not happen immediately.

Love to you all!