With three weeks under my belt, and a quick three weeks at that, I feel like less of a wandering fool on campus; it did take me a while to comprehend that the ground floor is commonly called Floor 0 instead of Floor 1. I know where all my of my classes are and am starting to get a feel for the one's I'm going to be skipping. On a semi-related note, the habits of crowds of people are absolutely infuriating. There are normally only 1 set of doors to get out of big lecture halls and every time you try to leave the people in the next class stand directly in front of them and do not let anybody get out. You have to push and shove your way through a crowd to leave and nobody moves. Moreover, people like to sit three-wide on stair cases and don’t move when you are walking up or down so you have to essentially jump over them. People walk 5 wide on the sidewalk and don’t move over when you have to pass going the opposite direction. I often feel like an asshole because I just run into people but hell, if they aren’t going to move then why should I?
It is still a bit strange for me to be on a campus that isn't directly connected to a city which limits the places I can go on a daily basis without having to spend one or two quid on a bus fare. There are a great deal of similarities to U.S. college culture. The relative distribution of individuals among their majors is still the same. Math and accounting are dominated by the Asian demographic and all of my teachers speak poor English. The other parts of the business school are a mix of down to earth people, people who like to wear suits and ties, and those ultra-conservative folks who are kind of hard to get along with. Professors drone through white PowerPoint slides with black bulleted text. Overall, much is similar between the education systems except the relative difficulty of the course work (much less demanding in Britain). History, like usual, brings interesting and very poorly dressed folks. Maybe I shouldn't be talking about dress codes though since I have moved to the bottom of the ladder in that department since coming here. Damn pea coats, scarves and brown/black leather shoes.
With the expansion of my free time, I decided to go check out the basketball courts and workout facility. Let’s just say that it’s not exactly the SERF. They only have 2 basketball courts and they aren’t open – you have to reserve them ahead of time if you want to play basketball because other people are always playing strange European sports. If you don’t reserve it, then you have to go at the specific times during the week that are allocated for basketball, it’s weird. The overall talent level is pretty horrendous although people tend to think they are good. It really is difficult to be good because offense and defense are just chaos with no rhyme or reason to anything; nobody moves where they are supposed to, rotates, helps, cuts or sets any screens to speak of. After realizing how out of shape I was, I headed up to the workout room and, for the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged in a weight room. Not exactly the meathead-palooza that you get in the States.
Every since I’ve been here, I have been running into Madison references all over the place which seems incredibly strange to me. I think the first one happened while we were watching the NFL Playoffs in London. During the halftime report the awful announcers for SkySports (a pathetic attempt to copy ESPN) made a phone call to their NFL correspondent in Madison, Wisconsin. First of all, I had no idea who the guy was and he knew nothing about football. Second, why the hell would Madison be the place to go to get an opinion on the NFL? Maybe Indianapolis or New York would have been better options as they were the ones who were playing. The next one happened after I came home from a club in Coventry at 3am on a Saturday night. Pretty spectacular club, the first three songs that played after we got drinks and got to the dance floor were Jump Around, Get Low and Soulja Boy haha! Anyways, I got home, went to the kitchen to make some food and turned on BBC Radio to hear them debate the ‘most European city’ in America and decide on Madison, Wisconsin!! I don’t really know if that’s a good or bad thing but I laughed out loud none the less. Again, what are the chances? It seemed ironic to me especially since absolutely nobody knows where Wisconsin is, much less Madison. When I’m out I’ve resorted to telling people I’m from Chicago a lot of the time so I don’t have to try to explain U.S. geography.
There are a lot of other things I have a lot of trouble explaining to the British population. The first is just how cold it is in Wisconsin. People always think I’m crazy when I go outside in just a long sleeve shirt when everyone else is bundled up. I always try to explain how this weather (40-45 degrees) is practically like spring to me to no avail. I have resorted to telling everyone that the average temperature in January is 10 degrees colder than what our freezer in the kitchen is set at! It is also very difficult to try to convey just how epic drinking culture in Madison is. If you haven’t experienced a football game day, Mifflin or Halloween and don’t understand the concept of a house party it really isn’t easy to try to talk up the way we party. Thank god for YouTube. Needless to say, my flat mates really enjoyed Jump Around! Then there was informing everyone about beer pong, flip cup, quarters, beer bongs and keg stands. I felt like I was reading a story to little kids with wide-eyes and open mouths.
Other than an unpleasant early morning evacuation reminiscent of the 3am wake-up calls in Sellery when drunk people pulled the fire alarm and made us all get up and walk outside in the freezing cold I don’t have any real adventures to report other than a few delightful drunken evenings (I’ve instated Thirsty Thursday!). However, I am heading to Paris next week from Feb. 12th to the 16th and am really excited about that! I will make sure to write and post pictures shortly after that to keep everyone up to date on my travels. I hope everyone is doing well on the home front and, like always, stay in touch!
Cheers,
Patrick :)
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