Luke from UEA in the UK here, sharing some amusing instances of English politeness.
Linguistically speaking, politeness is marked by lower lexical density (spreading the same message over more words), like the difference between ‘Go away’ and ‘Excuse me, but if it would be amenable to you, would you be so kind as to please consider moving in a direction that is oriented away from my current situation?’
Well, I’ve found signs and packaging to be interesting markers of this kind of politeness in English society. From this:
to the ‘lightly salted tortilla-flavoured Mexican-style maize crisps’ that we would call ‘corn chips’, to this:
or this:
or the email I got from UEA Accommodation the other day:
‘we politely remind you that taps are turned off by turning them clockwise.’
Then, of course, there are the times when they aren’t so polite:
Luke Bagnall writing on me and my girlfriend Tilly’s snowboarding trip to the French Alps during Reading Week.
More bludgey degrees the world over appear to have at least one thing in common – a week off from classes in the middle of semester for no determinable reason, usually called something vaguely suggesting productivity (‘Reading Week’, ‘Study Week’, ‘Postgraduate Week’) but never actually living up to that suggestion. Kind of like the Patriot Act. Anyway, in the UK, this week is especially superfluous due to the miniscule amount of contact hours we have, so Til and I decided to put our Reading Week to good use by spending it snowboarding in France.
We had a massive journey through London to ski shops and such before we left, and I found the train advertisement below pretty amusing:
I like how the Australian expression is the big one in the centre.
Les Deux Alpes featured on the board in the English snow shop.
From Grenoble airport we had a massive trip in a pre-booked taxi which for some reason left its meter on the whole time, causing us occasionally to pass nervous glances at each other as it crept towards 280 euro, hoping the driver wasn’t going to try and make us pay when we arrived.
That first afternoon we met our roommate Jean-Paul, another Aussie, then went for a ‘splore.
Surrounded by les boulangeries!
Cool roof snow
Random fox! Babelfish says: Hey!!! Made as me … Smile!!! But our French-speaking friend Caroline says: Hey!!! Do what I do … Smile!!!
We were feeling pretty French by this point. Every time I heard someone speaking it I’d get one of the four to five French songs I know (‘Champs-Elysees’, ‘Ta Douleur’, ‘Radio Song’, etc.) stuck in my head. Like how I almost racistly think of that Just Car Insurance ad voiceover that goes ‘Jhia, ru’ or something when I hear Asian languages. Also at this stage we were hungry, so we decided to have a French feast. It was amazing! The bread! The cheese! The BUTTER!
That night we were s’posed to meet the rest of the people doing the package and our guide person thingy in the bar. We headed down to the hotel bar looking for a rowdy pack of Australians, but they were nowhere to be seen. Then this Canadian girl said hi unexpectedly, and I confusedly said it back, to which she replied ‘I don’t know you but I can see you’re from Australia from your jumper (I was wearing my uni hoodie). Are you on the Topdeck tour?’ Ten seconds later I caught up:
‘Oh! Yes!’
Turns out she was the guide person thing, Chrissy. For some reason this awkward exchange repeated itself like, four times over the week, each time for different reasons. She spotted us from a chairlift and waved one day, but was all geared up and far away, so that took a good thirty seconds (who else could it possibly have been, Luke? You’re in the middle of the French Alps, for Christ’s sake), and then we ran into her in the bar and she had her hair down for the first time, so I didn’t recognise her again!
Chrissy was sitting with Jean-Paul, and informed us that we three comprised the entirety of the tour group. Three people! Apparently she often gets numbers as big as forty, but we had three! We were a bit surprised, but it turned out to be good ’cause we could go places we couldn’t have if there were more of us, and Chrissy and Jean-Paul were really cool.
We made plans to meet up again later for some guided exploration and went upstairs to have dinner. All our meals were included in the package, which could’ve sucked, but thankfully the foooood wassss incredibllllle. Different stuff every day, but always delicious, always baguettes and icecream. I cannot communicate in words the awesomeness of three French-cooked buffet meals a day. I ate so much that despite all the snowboarding and the cold weather and such, I stayed the exact same weight. The food in general in Les Deux Alpes was really good. There was the incredible lolly shop where we accidentally spent 15 euro, and Crepes a Go Go, where Tilly and I devoured caramel- and cheese-drizzled crepes respectively.
Also, they drink cider from bowls!
Til and Jean-Paul being led by Chrissy
Our accommodation.
The Polar Bear – an English pub.
Getting foggy.
Then there was the actual snowboarding. So good. It’s going to be pretty crap going back to Perisher after that. I improved substantially while I was there. Finally got the proper motion down, under the keen tutelage of our instructor Nancy, who had to keep translating her instructions solely for our benefit, and who could never remember the word ‘above’. But even Tilly learned some stuff from her (Til’s gone to the snow every year since high school started).
We were a bit worried at one point that Nancy was spending so long explaining things to the French people in our group, and then kind of just talking for thirty seconds to us, but Chrissy explained that it just takes longer to say things in French, as evidenced by these signs:
=
And while we’re on the subject, we found this display pretty funny:
Franglish?
On the Tuesday night, Til, Jean-Paul, Chrissy, her friend Owen and I all went out for a big one. Got a bit messy, learned some good drinking games, danced, and played with the camera:
‘Fingers in the middle!’
Til and I with Jean-Paul and Owen.
At one point some green face paint emerged from somewhere, and I narrowly averted having it forced upon me. For some reason I’ve always had some irrational aversion to face paint, even when I had my Lion King fifth birthday party and Mum made me an awesome Simba costume – she convinced me to let her paint my face like a lion and I could wash it off if I wanted afterwards (thinking I’d be convinced by how awesome it was) but I insisted I wash it off. Tilly wasn’t so prudish, but she paid for it the next day when she couldn’t get it out of her eyebrows and she was wearing orange so she looked like an Oompa Loompa, moreso than this picture reveals:
‘What do you get when you guzzle down sweets? Eating as much as an elephant eats …’
That’s okay though, ’cause judging from the picture further above I looked like a giant smurf in camo on the slopes.
While we were out I kept noticing things different about the drinking culture in France. All the bar people drink while working, but they’re all just generally more … responsible? Maybe that’s why we have such strict laws in Oz. At one point I saw the bar girl filling up this keg with beer – it was kind of like a gigantic transparent tube with a tap, and I thought ‘here we go’. But no, the gentlemen who bought it simply kept it next to them, refilling their glasses politely and drinking it in a responsible amount of time. I was floored. In Australia, the sole purpose of such a contraption would be to pass it around drinking it as fast as possible and sculling it beer-bong style. Later that night I saw some guy buying a massive bottle of Champagne at the bar, which wasn’t weird until I saw him taking it back to his table. It was four young guys with Champagne glasses, taking photos of themselves. Not allowed in an Australian bar, haha. The men also all kiss each other hello. Often on the lips. So different!
On the subject of diverging cultural conceptions of acceptable masculine behaviour (haha): they’re really into their foosball over here, apparently instead of pool? Can you imagine four beer-bellied, tattooed, shearing singlet-sporting Aussie blokes crowded around a foosball table in a pub? VBs in one hand, handles in the other? We were just sitting next to a foosball table and these three French guys asked us if we wanted to play. Jean-Paul, being a more experienced European traveller than I, immediately declined. I was on the verge of accepting when another one turned up, making their number an even four – and lucky for me ‘cause they have CRAZY skillz. It would’ve been pretty embarrassing.
I think it has something to do with passion – that’s why the Europeans love soccer so much. We’re too cool; laconic. Emotive displays make us cringe. We’re embarrassed by the idea of a sport where scoring is so rare that it necessitates explosive outbursts of joy, a sport that encourages you play-up your injuries – it’s just not cricket (hardee har har). Aussie men need a pub game where they can stoically stand back, an approproate distance from one another, drinking their beers, taking stock, and casually sauntering up and knocking a ball into a hole with a big stick, not the intensity of foosball, squeezed in around a table yelling. Maybe it’s all the pulling and spinning and gyrating of those little knobs that doesn’t appeal to us, I don’t know.
Their clubs reflect this kind of thing as well. Obviously there’s all the Dance RNB Hip-Hop Pop stuff we get in Western clubs, but there’s also this weird kind of ballady folkie empowering anthem type-stuff that’s sung in some European language which gets a reaction out of them that the other stuff doesn’t. They all stand around in a circle swaying and singing along and waving a pointed finger around in the air for emphasis. It’s kind of cool and kind of cringey, I think because it’s related to something that was in fashion for the rest of the world in the nineties, which originated in Europe but never died out there. I got some footage of this on my iPod, but once again this site doesn’t allow mp4 uploads.
I think the clubs we went to were more fun/nostalgia-oriented and less cool-oriented. Let’s just say I thought I’d danced my last Macarena when I stopped going to school discos, and I had no idea I remembered all the words to ‘Mambo No. 5’.
The morning after our big night, I slept in, but Til’s been too ingrained with the Australian Snowtrip mantra of ‘Must … make the most … of this ridiculously priced venture. Must … get up at six … and come home at six.’ I decided to take it a bit easier, ’cause the only two times I’d been to the snow before, I’d had trouble with my knee and leg cramps, and the longest of those was three days. I lasted fine, but Til burned herself out a bit and had to ease off towards the end. Anyway, that morning while we were all floating around in the half-consciousness of hangovers, still in bed, a girl appeared at our window (two storeys up, but there’s a roof between it and the next building) and started talking in French. We were like, ‘Sorry … Anglais?’ and then she just jumped through our window and out our door. It was pretty surreal, but she did it again a few mornings later. We figured she was from next door and went out onto the roof to smoke and got locked out by her friends, but I guess we’ll never really know … *wist*
The window (doubling as a fridge).
At some point we went to a trivia night held in French, which was challenging, but we came in like third or fourth place with the help of Chrissy’s translations. Apparently the hotel decides based on the turnout at the trivia night whether or not all the ski and snowboard instructors put on a sketch show, and since it was so packed, they did. It was mostly really physical humour that we didn’t need to speak French to get, so it was great. There was one sketch, though, where a guy walked out onto the stage with a rope trailing behind him. He turned around and began talking offstage, as if he had an animal tied to it. The animal turned out to be a dead, skinned hare which he proceeded to swing around the stage by the rope, occasionally hurling it out towards the audience, chunks of gristle flying everywhere. French humour.
Awkward but entertaining audience participation.
Another night Chrissy arranged for us to get discounts going night time snowmobiling. I decided I wasn’t going to tell this story here … for the shame. But I guess I am, so oh well. We walked up to these skimobiles and this French friend of Chrissy’s, named some Gallicised version of David like Davide or something, who runs the skimobile thing told us how to make it go and how to make it stop and to lean when we’re turning and that was about it. He asked if any of us had any experience with quadbikes, which I had, and said that we should be the ones driving up the mountain ’cause it’s more difficult, and our partners should drive back down.
So off we went. About five minutes in, mine and Til’s skimobile went right off track. I couldn’t see a thing because I didn’t realise there were two layers of visor on the helmet and I had both down, one being a sun shade, and also we were at the back of the convoy getting everyone else’s dust. So the French dude came down and set us back on course.
The track wound up the mountain Mt Ousley-style, and we’d been driving for about twenty or thirty minutes and still hadn’t reached snow – there were sparks flying off the bottom of our skimobiles. At each of the bends in the run one of the leaders would stop and wave us past to make sure we didn’t go careering off the mountain. So when we came to yet another turn in the anfractuous track and the French dude had stopped, I just assumed that’s what he was doing. It then became apparent he was telling me to stop, which I did. He stormed over and told me off a bit for not listening and then started telling us about how dangerous the next part was. He made it sound so dangerous that we started to wonder whether we should be doing it at all. When I said I had quadbike experience I meant in a field or a bush track, five years ago, not a fricking mountain! A mountain with no snow on it, no less.
We did end up just going back down. Pretty embarrassing. Chrissy said she’d never had anyone not be able to do it before. I didn’t think I was that hopeless, so I wondered if it had something to do with driving a skimobile for the first time without any snow, and Chrissy confirmed that the snow had never been as dried up as it was at the moment and usually the whole track was covered in it, so that could’ve contributed. Anyway, I’d rather be embarrassed than dead so there you go, haha.
On our last day in Les Deux Alpes, we were going up for one last snowboard. We were waiting for the bus when I looked down and noticed a gaping hole in the snowpants I’d borrowed from Rob Perry, a friend from UEA. It was right in the crotch, and all the insulation was exposed. There was no way I could snowboard like that, so my last day was ruined by a wardrobe malfunction. I felt really bad ruining Rob’s pants, so I went around Les Deux Alpes asking various ski shop employees if they did repairs and if they could fix it. I kept having to ask sheepishly ‘… Pardon, Anglais?’ to which they would reluctantly reply ‘Oui’ or ‘A little’ before spreading their hands and shaking their heads in reply to my question. Finally I thought to ask if they had any idea where I could get it fixed and they said to ask at the tourist centre. By some amazing stroke of luck, the woman at the counter was a seamstress herself, and said she’d fix it for five euro and I could pick it up at four. So that was lucky, but it still meant I had to sit around waiting instead of snowboarding on my last day in the French Alps. But at least the bus back to the airport had a window ledge!
And so ended our very productive study week. I hope everyone else got as much reading done as we did!
Luke Bagnall again, writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom about mine and my girlfriend Matilda’s visit to our friend Gilly’s and our daytrip to Oxford. It was a while ago, so I can’t actually really remember the order in which we did a lot of things, so I’m just gonna spew them out.
Typically (since I love food so much) I remember having a lot of good dinners – a massive roast and some spaghetti bolognese in particular. So good!
We also went around town on a pub crawl where Gilly’s frequent proclamation of the superiority of English pubs to Australian pubs was finally and resoundingly proven to us. The first thing about English pubs: there are so many of them. Every tiny little town has them. A couple of posts ago, I mentioned Alnmouth, a tiiiny one-road village on a tiiiiny peninsula. Even it had at least three.
Winchester has so many that Gilly has a different pub for every mood. Another thing is that a lot of them have charming, vaguely racist names that I assume must be relics from an earlier time, like the Saracen’s/Arab’s Head or, the best one we went to, the Black Boy. It was absolutely crazy in there – junk everywhere. In retrospect, we should’ve taken some photos. And the third English pub fact is that they’re really tolerant of dogs. Welcoming, even. We saw at least two or three, and the Bishop on the Bridge (I think) even had snacks for them.
Another night we went to see The King’s Speech at the cool Winchester cinema, which is an old barn or church or something. Obviously the movie was fantastic, and it had sold out the previous night, apparently due to the posh Winchester viewing public (the conservative old folk behind us took indignant exception to the lesbian scenes in the preview of Black Swan).
We also did a day trip to Oxford with Gilly as our fearless guide. First stop was Alice’s shop, a shop where the supposed real-life inspiration for Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland bought sweets.
We then continued on to the Church of St Mary the Virgin to go up its tower and see Oxford from above. Having just seen The King’s Speech, we were obliged to practice our royal waves as well.
We also had lunch in The White Horse pub where we were entrusted with a talkative Englishman’s electronic goods, and spent a bit too long in a cavernous bookshop.
One of the things I’m loving about England is the historical/architectural/artistic sites just scattered casually about the cities:
The Bodleian Library was one of the highlights of the day. We went there early on and went to a free exhibition about the Shelley family featuring information, letters, first editions and diaries relating to Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, which was fascinating. We came back later for a short tour.
The other two places we visited were the museum, where I saw a couple of familiar faces from my days of Year 12 Ancient History:
and Magdalen college with its mythical statues which supposedly inspired the stone garden scene in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Tilly and I were so jealous of the students riding around the city on their bikes. We felt like we were missing out on something – this community of academic supremacy and aristocratic wealth that we were sitting outside of. Gilly wasn’t jealous, though, she said it would probably be so snobbish, which is probably true. At one point we saw this couple walking down the street and the street and they just looked SO RICH. And aryan. They were blonde and brown and dressed from head to toe in cashmere haha.
During our stay at Gilly’s we had been watching episodes of Gilly’s favourite, the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. On the night before we left, she and I stayed up to some ridiculous hour watching all of them, despite having to travel to uni the next day. Worked out for the best though, ’cause I was to study P&P this semester and I hadn’t read it by the first week when we were discussing it, so I at least had the adaptation to fall back on.
That’s all for now. My next posts will be about university life in Norwich this semester, and then a detailing of my further adventures in Ireland!
“VICTORIA (CUP) – Every Wednesday at 4:20 p.m., dozens of University of Victoria students gather near the campus fountain to show support for sick people who struggle to treat their conditions with medicinal marijuana.
While nearly all the students are healthy, the university’s Hempology 101 club attracts attention by supporting the use of illegal drugs. During meetings, members of the Cannabis Buyers’ Club provide updates on current events involving medicinal marijuana while dozens of students pass joints around a circle.” here is the full story: http://media.www.thestrand.ca/media/storage/paper404/news/2004/10/20/News/Uvic-Pot.Trial.Delayed-778710.shtml
So I got out of class today and happened to walk past the front of the library (It was at 4:20 on wednesday) and there is a big circle of students with a guy with a mic in the middle talking about pot. I have heard about this time and this day being pot time but i had no idea it was this big, i just thought it would be some sneaky swapping of pot and cash. Pretty much everyone has smoking and passing a joint, IN PUBLIC!! and in the middle of the day! Then they had a BONG COMPETITION of who had the best looking bong; there was: ‘puff the magic dragon’ ‘willy bonka’ ‘alfonzo’. I am not used to seeing them in pubic let alone a contest at a uni in the day…. crazyyyy. Next week is a joint rolling competition, BYO hash… I really wanted a newsletter (yes they even have a news letter!) to send it to my friends, so i went up at the end to get one but everyone was coming to the middle so i couldn’t it so i stood back and they all huddled together and put their hands in the centre and said “The 4:20 CLUB!!” – it felt a bit like a cult… There were about…100 people there? but i am bad a guestimating. And there was a guy filming it all aswell, i am trying to find it to show you.
So that was an interesting afternoon! I am so ignorant to these things, and i know that they are popular in BC especially as i can smell it walking around the campus (i now know what it smells like). But seeing it openly displayed with heaps of people around blew my mind!
“The UVSS Hempology 101 Club and the International Hempology 101 Society will be hosting its 11th Annual Cannabis Convention Sunday February 28, 2010 at the University of Victoria.”
a facebook page says this:
“Does anyone care about the UVSS elections?
Are you sick of self-righteous students trying to change the world?
Tired of college-level election ‘parties’ competing with each other with identical platforms?
Do you see any benefit to voting for one person as opposed to the other?
Are you of the opinion that the UVic 4:20 Club holds more political sway than the UVSS student society, and has higher attendance?
This might not look like your typical medical centre or hospital, but if you need a prescription for marijuana, you’d be most successful in getting one on the streets of Venice Beach.
Ok you may find this amusing but one thing that shocked me the other day is i walk passed a porn shop, which had a shop window, which contained things that would be considered an outrage in Australia, if displayed. Ill post one pic just so you can get an idea.
Window shop front for porn shop, couldnt not see this in Australia
Ok soo i couldnt just leave you with that picture alone because its a beautiful place here so here is a shot of a hill not to far from where i live.
I’m finally in Chicago, my 2nd last stop before I’m where I need to be for the year! It’s freezing cold, snowing and soooo much different to home. Through all of my excitement I didn’t really stop and think about what it’d feel like being here with absolutely nobody to talk to or to rely on. You have to make all of your own decisions, you can’t pick up the phone and just call someone and ask their opinion, it’s here, it’s now, it’s fast paced and it’s freakin’ scary!
My flights and stops went pretty smoothly for the most part. Each stop was scary because I had no idea where to go and what to pay and what to do, but after asking about a million questions I finally got my way. I’ve been on a plane for 32 out of the last 48 hours and I’m now laying in my Chicago hotel room, excited that I made it here and I can sleep now. When I got to JFK airport in New York, I expected the transition to be as smooth as the others, but because of the snowstorm my flight was canceled. Delta airlines gave me a cab voucher and told me where to go to wait for this specific cab to take me to another New York airport where they had a flight available, but when the cab never showed I had to get into a (cliche) yellow New York City taxi and go through New York City! (not that I’m complaining). Anyway, so after going through even more security checks and bag check ins I had to wait for a flight one last time. I must say though, after seeing the way that the staff of Delta Airlines handles their customers (not me specifically, but others around me), I don’t think I’ll be flying with them again. It’s like they just don’t care, but what can you do?
Apologies for the lack of post. I have been in the US (specifically UMass Amherst) for about 2months now and I have noticed a lot about America, laughed a lot at American things and ranted A LOT over American short-comings. I do try to stop my self if I notice that I’ve been ranting/complaining for the last five minutes straight, I tend to do this to my American friends and I wonder if they even understand why I’m annoyed. I think, just for therapeutic reasons, I will list the irritating things that I so much love to rant about:
Whenever an American finds out I’m Australian I get – American: “Put another shrimp on the barbie! *elbow jab*” me: “uhm you know we don’t call them shrimp in Australia, we call them prawns” OR American: “Oooh do you have a pet kangaroo!?!?” me: “No…do you have a pet squirrel?”
Peanuts…specifically peanut butter is in everything. EVERYTHING!
4 out of 5 times I will get “Cool accent, I’ve always wanted to go to England” or something of that nature. I don’t know what that says about my accent but it’s making me paranoid, I always thought I my accent/speech was a tad on the bogan side but evidently not!
The work here is different, vastly different then how it is structured back home and it took a while to get used to. Although I have noticed that the grading is on the easy side and I don’t really mind that at all!
Bros/Barbies…oh lord they are annoying! but fun to bag out I suppose.
Okay I’m done. forgive. I’m sure there are a lot of things that my American friends would love to rant about me…I think number one on the list would be that every time I see a squirrel I can’t suppress the urge to yell SQUIRREL! and point. I think that probably stopped being cute about 20 squirrels ago. I think this is what is great about exchange, being immersed in a culture that sometimes irritates you so much you just wish so bad for someone to offer you a cheeseybite scroll instead of PB&J but loving it so much all the same…
Hat’s off you to American, damn do you make my eye twitch sometimes but I will concede you sure are good for a laugh.
I couldn’t help but add my photo of a squirrel that sat long enough for me 🙂 *points* SQUIRREL!
Before beginning my student exchange I participated in a working holiday in Okinawa, which was an absolutely unforgettable experience. I learnt so much not only about the Japanese and work culture but myself. Being in Tokyo I actually miss the breathtaking place and the amazing people who I met down there.
Despite having no prior experience working in a restaurant or a bar, I was placed working behind a bar, pouring beers and mixing cocktails for the Japanese customers. What surprised me is that anyone who wants to can work behind a bar. During my two months working at that restaurant we also had numerous high school work experience students who worked with us behind the bar, not only serving drinks but also making them. The legal age to consume alcohol in Japan is 20, so these students were definitely underage. This contrasts the strict RSA laws that exist in Australia.
Furthermore, marine staff and lifeguards are not required to hold any formal qualifications; they do not even need to know how to swim! Being a qualified pool lifeguard, holding numerous mandatory first aid certificates myself this shocked me, particularly to think what would happen if there was an emergency. Frequently the marine staff would be asleep at their post despite being the only lifeguard on duty and people being in the water.
Another thing that I found strange was that despite living on a beautiful island the Okinawan people do not swim and if they do they go in the water fully clothed (shoes included) and almost always wear a floaty. Very different to the Aussie beach lifestyle that I am used to!
Last night I stumbled onto something I hadn’t come across in Korea before. Private Karoke rooms where you order food and alcohol over the phone thats brought to your room. Cheap good service as well. Cost my party of 4 80 dollars for 4 hours of karoke, 2 main courses followed by 6 side dishes, and bottles and bottles of soju(vodka) and beer. This leads to my post. Going out in Korea for anyone young or old means drinking soju. Its very rare to see a table without the shotglasses and empty bottles or the cheering of “chan” or “geombae” or “one shot”.
(A common sight each one of these bottles is about 7 standard drinks)
But when you hang out with young people they like to drink somaek. Somaek is when you get a middie of beer (maekju) and pour in a shot of soju and mix it with a chopstick to make sure the soju doesnt stay at the top. Then you play drinking games where you have to have your somaek in a full or half shot. Drinking in korea starts off by a “one shot”, then repeated full or half shots of soju after. After the first or second bottle of soju has been consumed someone will decide that somaek is a good idea and a jug of beer is ordered.
Drinking in korea leads to two options. One you have to get home at midnight/2 am as you have class/work the next. Usually you will stay at the one bar and maybe go to a karoke afterwards before stumbling home. Many businessmen are passed out on the streets because of this. The second option is going to one bar for dinner and drinks. Followed by another bar for snacks and drinks. Followed by karoke or another bar for drinks and snacks. Then a club. Somaek is something I wont be drinking when I return home. That is if my liver survives this deadly cocktail.
Being too drunk in Korea is not a problem. You friends will politely forget about what happened. As it could be them next.
It is October 14, not even the middle of Autumn yet, and it’s snowing! Only in Sweden, folks. Only in the north too, they probably won’t see snow for weeks in Stockholm (which is 1000km south of my cheery little village here).
This is early snowfall even for north Sweden, no one expected it!
Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day, and I was wearing shorts the day before. In fact, some friends and I had planned a trip to Nordkapp in Norway tomorrow, which is the northern most point in Europe – as far north as one can possibly get by car (and foot for the last little bit). We expected nice weather and clear skies, even hoping to see Aurora Borealis while we were up there….
Then all of a sudden, things changed.
I woke up this morning to find my window ajar and thought rain was coming in. I ran to the window and closed it, but noticed that it was not rain at all, but snow! Everything outside was covered, and my mood switched from annoyance to giddy excitement in an instant. That was when I took this photo.
The windows to the common kitchen and covered balcony of my dorm were also open this morning, so there was a lot of cleaning to do….. But I was cleaning up snow! SNOW! It was awesome. I’m having snowball fights, catching the falling snow, sliding around in it (it’s so much slipperier than I expected). Oh, and the shoes I bought SPECIFICALLY for the winter? Drenched.
I have been to perisher in mid-winter, and there is more snow here ON THE VERY FIRST DAY! (okay, so this is not really my first snow, but snow in Australia doesn’t count, it cannot hope to compare to this)
So, we’re still going on the trip to Nordkapp, but it will be an entirely different experience now. My friends here are all complaining that the roads will be so slippery, while I sit giggling in anticipation.
I recently went to a traditional Japanese festival in Ikebukuro, Tokyo which was naturally outdoors, displaying lots of Japanese cultural and religious history and background. I’ve been to a Japanese festival before and wasn’t surprised to see the big parade, nor the tonnes of delicious Japanese food, nor the traditional Japanese dancing and drumming.
However, I really didn’t expect to see a full bar with servers dressed up in tuxedos, especially since the event was outdoors and so casual. But of course anything is possible in this country!!!
I like how the Australian expression is the big one in the centre.
Les Deux Alpes featured on the board in the English snow shop.
Random fox! Babelfish says: Hey!!! Made as me … Smile!!! But our French-speaking friend Caroline says: Hey!!! Do what I do … Smile!!!
Til and Jean-Paul being led by Chrissy
Our accommodation.
Getting foggy.
=
Franglish?
‘Fingers in the middle!’
The window (doubling as a fridge).
Awkward but entertaining audience participation.
Oz Students Abroad 