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Showing posts tagged shopping
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…do some more walking! Yeah, that’s it! And dancing!
The past week (I can’t believe it’s only been a week) has been hectic with a side of crazy, but I’ve also been loving every last minute of it — yes, even those minutes when my feet were hurting and I was hungry and the weather was about as consistent as someone both indecisive and bipolar.
Since my last post, I’ve officially moved in at Queen Mary. I live in Pooley House, which is the largest residential dorm in the relatively new student village on campus. I have a single room in a suite of seven. We have our own toilets and showers in our rooms (small, but ours) and we all share a kitchen. I’d post pictures of what my room looks like, but right now it looks a bit like Ground Zero — I’ve been so busy doing things and meeting people (and trying to find push-pins for my corkboard, and finding out that the Brits call them “drawing pins” only after attempting to fruitlessly describe to a salesperson what I was looking for) that I haven’t had time to put up any of the room decorations I brought with me, excepting the large rainbow-striped “PACE” flag I bought this summer in Florence (pace is Italian for peace; when I was in Italy four years ago these things were everywhere, and I really liked them, plus mine packed small and really brightens up an entire wall of my room).
Although I’ve only known them for a week, I feel like I’ve found (best) friends in some of the other University of California students who are studying in London. There’s a core group of about five of us who have been hanging out together a lot (more on this later) and I just feel comfortable with these people. I also really love my flatmates. In Pooley Flat 3 we have four girls and three guys. One of the other girls is actually a UC kid, and one of the aforementioned (best) friends — our singles are literally next door to each other.
Yesterday was the first day since moving into Queen Mary that I ventured back into central London. Me, Jessica (my nextdoor flatmate), Sam (short for Samantha), Reno (yes that is a girl’s name), and Oren (actually, that’s a boy’s name) went shopping on Oxford Street, where I was willingly talked into a beautiful pair of brown ankle boots that make me feel like I waltzed out of a period piece. These would be the aforementioned UC students at Queen Mary that I feel I’ve gotten really close with. I’ve hung out more with Sam and Jessica, but Oren and Reno are both English majors and we’re taking a lot of the same classes. In fact, Oren and I have every single English class together first semester. This should be good times.
After shopping, we ended up searching in vain for a pub near Covent Garden (where our theater was). We actually ate at this Australian bar/grill place that was slightly pricier but had huge portions to make up for it and could actually sit the five of us comfortably. Then it was a quick walk to the Fortune Theatre and The Lady in Black.
The play is billed as the scariest ghost story in London theatre. The first half of the play was not at all frightening. And then the second half was just *shudders*. It does a really great job of building tension and always revealing just a little less than you want to know but a little more than you want to think about. It was in a more gothic tradition of horror, which I appreciated — I have a feeling Edgar Allan Poe would have enjoyed it. We bought the tickets in Leicester Square for a discount rate, paying about 25 pounds for seats that normally go for 45. I wouldn’t have seen the play for full price, but it was definitely a necessary experience (and better than The 39 Steps). I just feel so London-y: I’ve seen two west end shows in the space of a week.
I suppose I’ll round out this update by discussing my classes. I managed to figure out my schedule, and it makes me exceedingly happy. First semester, I only have classes Tuesday through Thursday; I pick up a Monday class second semester, but still have my Fridays off. I could’ve had a Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday schedule, but I would’ve been missing out on one class I really want to take.
In the British school system (or at least at QM) it’s possible to take year-long classes, or “modules” as they’re called here. I am taking two year-long English modules both focused around London: The Dickens City (where we read a bunch of Dickens books about London — seven within the first semester alone! — and supplement that with walking tours of Victorian sights) and Representing London: the 18th Century (aka 1700s, which is the class that meets on Thursdays and which I really wanted to take and almost couldn’t get into, but literally the girl in front of me in line dropped it and I nabbed it up before anyone else could).
First semester, I’m also taking an English course called Fiction and Narrative, which appears to focus on different types of narrative fiction. The first book for the class is Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but the syllabus also contains everything from Jane Eyre to Jane Austen (Persuasion) to Henry James to the graphic novel Maus. The readings span a pretty wide time period, and I’ve never taken a class that does that, so I think it’ll be interesting to compare narrative strategies across centuries. I’m also taking Beginner’s French I because there was nothing else I really wanted to take as an “easy” course, and no way I’d take four English courses in the same semester — that’s like suicide. I have plenty of reading as it is.
Next semester, I keep all the year-long modules, but in place of Fiction and Narrative I’m taking the equivalent of a Senior Seminar course called Race, Gender, and Empire in Women’s Fiction 1790-1900 (for which I am also reading Jane Eyre — excitement!). In fact, my entire rationale for taking the course was that I knew we would be reading Jane Eyre, and that I’m kinda interested in women’s fiction as a distinct entity in the 1780s-1820s (thank you, Professor Goldsmith!). In place of Beginner’s French I, I am taking The Classical Hollywood Musical 1930-1960 in the film department…which should be amazing. I’m really excited.Well, that’s it for now, folks! I have a few books to read before courses officially start on Tuesday, and it would also be nice to finally set up my room and sort through all the admin stuff I have to get done. Expect more in another week or so. Cheers! (See, I’m British already.)
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…study British literature.
Classes have officially started, and I am going to love every single one of them. Well, I don’t know about French yet, since language classes don’t start until the second week, but every single one of my English classes promises to be an adventure. My course schedule for this semester is as follows:
Tuesday: Fiction and Narrative - Lecture 10-11, Seminar 11-12
Wednesday: The Dickens City - Lecture 10-11, Seminar 11-12; Beginner’s French 1 - Class 3-5
Thursday: Representing London: The Eighteenth Century - Lecture 10-11, Seminar 11-12
Yes, folks, that is it. Any other time during the day I am technically free. In reality, I do a LOT more consistent reading here than I did at Berkeley. I would say about 100 pages a night would get me through the required reading, or “set texts” as they call them here. But there is also recommended reading that is much more strongly recommended here than it ever was back home. You basically can’t get an A on a paper unless you demonstrate you’ve done at least half of the recommended reading as well as the required stuff.
Thankfully I’m a fast reader and some of the stuff is really interesting, and/or I’ve read it before. For instance, although I’d never even heard of the book I’m reading currently for Fiction and Narrative (Roxana by Daniel Defoe), the novels for the next two weeks are ones I have already read in a scholarly context: Persuasion by Jane Austen and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
International Baccalaureate has really done well for me; I’ve been somewhat prepared for the way European schools work since high school. The kinds of essays people here want me to produce seem easy in comparison.
Also also, I felt like a fabulous geek when Markman Ellis (the lecturer for my eighteenth century London class) was talking about how very few Queen Mary students would have had any experience with 18th-century texts, since their first-year curriculum is set (you don’t get to pick any classes; all first-years take the exact same ones) and doesn’t really cover the 1700s except for Robinson Crusoe, and this is a second-year course. But thanks to Professor Goldsmith, I know my way around the 18th century already! In fact, one of the books we’re reading is Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, which is a fabulously obscure little ditty that I hadn’t even heard of until I took 45B, but that I wrote a (pretty interesting) paper about and have read large excerpts from. More and more, I realize how lucky I am to have had such great English instruction at Berkeley. I am more than prepared for this.
Also also also (I don’t really need to be eloquent here), I knew nearly every fact that my Dickens lecturer (they don’t really call them professors here) talked about in her first lecture thanks to writing lit guides for DemiDec. I may only have read one of Dickens’s novels (A Tale of Two Cities), but I can tell you all about his life and the impact of serial publication upon his works — which was the content of the first lecture.
I need to think of a better word than “also” to tell you that classes run quite differently here. Well, lectures are mostly the same, at any rate, but seminars are actually led by lecturers/professors — usually junior ones, but definitely they already have their PhD’s before they’re allowed to lead seminars (imagine your professor actually leading a discussion section!). The seminars are also nicely small — about fifteen people. My lectures range in size from thirty to a little over a hundred.I haven’t actually attended a meeting of my French class yet because the Language Learning department doesn’t start their courses till the second week of classes, but I’ll be sure to let you know how that goes.
Don’t think I’ve just been reading books all day — I’ve gotten in a good deal of sight-seeing, including visits to Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Shakespeare’s Globe (where I saw As You Like It), and Oxford Street (famous for shopping!). Plus I’ve gone a couple times to do more mundane shopping in Stratford, one tube stop east of where I currently live, which is within sight of the stadium being constructed for the 2012 Olympics. I have to say, I’m glad I’m not here then — so much is going to be happening in East London during the games that transportation would be a veritable nightmare!
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…make your way to Marrakesh.
Again with the ‘impressionistic’ updates (to borrow a term from my AP US history teacher). I have two essays due in the upcoming week and a friend flying in to visit from Dublin on Wednesday, but I don’t want to forget the things I wanted to say about Marrakesh before then!
It would be a stretch to say that being there was like being in another world (anyplace that has a McDonald’s is obviously Earth — other planets would likely have more sense), but it was definitely like being on another continent. That fact hit home before the airplane even landed; when I looked below me as we began our descent, instead of streets, towns, and city lights, there was red dirt, green fields, sunlight reflecting off thin streams of water used for irrigation, and slate-blue mountains in the hazy distance.
We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel — yes, not a hostel, a legitimate hotel, complete with TVs in the rooms, our own showers that we didn’t have to pay extra for, and continental breakfast each morning. The exchange rate being what it is (roughly 7 Moroccan dirhams to an American dollar), we could afford a little more class than usual. The taxi ride was an entertaining ordeal in itself: there being, apparently, no such thing as traffic police in Marrakesh, the five of us plus our driver managed to fit (along with our hand baggage) inside a car only designed to seat five. I was probably the smallest person there. Four girls shared the back seat — I didn’t even notice if the car was equipped with seatbelts, but I’m inclined to think they didn’t even bother.
Although Marrakesh is pretty touristy in its own right — and the government is doing a lot to promote that aspect of it — it has its rough edges, especially if you’re a white female. We weren’t there during the normal tourist season, so except in the marketplace, we ran into very few tourists on the streets. We weren’t actively hassled (except by vendors trying to sell us things, who referred to one or more of the girls at some time or another as “Hannah Montana” and “the Spice Girls”; we also got asked if we were looking for fish and chips, and whether we were on facebook) but something just seemed different. It wasn’t until one of my friends pointed it out that I saw practically no women (tourists excluded) in the city. There was the odd woman (some in full wrists-to-ankles covering, plus head scarf) doing her shopping at the local market, or speeding along the street on a bicycle/motorcycle hybrid (there are both pedals and a motor; these were surprisingly common), but even they disappeared when the sun went down. Outside the tourist center of the walled city of Morocco, 95% of the people I saw in restaurants were men. I hadn’t realized the kind of inherent menace there is in that until this trip. I was never hassled (and I’m also very good at ignoring what people say and just walking by — the ability to navigate Sproul Plaza at lunchtime without being inundated with flyers and appeals apparently has uses outside of Berkeley), but on the first day especially, something felt a little not right.
This being said, as soon as I had a map in my hand and a general feel for the city’s arrangement (as well as the promise of vigilance from the one male member of our group, God bless him), the feeling went away pretty quickly — and in a way it was something I’d been prepared for, having done enough googling on the subject to get an idea of how conservatively to dress. (Despite approximately 80 degree weather, I spent my time in jeans and t-shirts.)
I am now going to admit to something that, in any other city, would feel like a bit of a cop-out. You know those big red sightseeing buses? Well, there’s one that runs in Marrakesh, and my friends and I took it. It was a great way to figure out where everything was in relation to everything else without having to get lost on the way, and a great way not to walk around in the heat but still get a feel for the place.
My favorite part of being in Marrakesh was visiting the marketplace they’re famous for. I’ve seen its name transliterated in about a billion different ways, but the back of one of the postcards I bought calls it “Jamaa El Fna,” as do the signs in Marrakesh itself, so that’s the one I’m going with. You can get lost in there — in fact, my friends and I almost did. They sell everything imaginable — leather goods, home herbal remedies, ceramics, dried fruit and nuts, scarves, jewelry, live chickens, pig’s heads (freshly removed from the pigs in question) — and you are expected to bargain with them for what you buy. I came home with a hand-made leather purse with an intricate openwork design on the front flap which cost me the equivalent of $25. Other things that came home with my friends included dried apricots, carved and inlaid wooden boxes, and small ornamental daggers.
The market by night is radically different from the market by day. Around the time the sun begins to set, stalls and canopies start appearing in the plaza in front of the market, and soon enough there are a hundred little tent-restaurants ready and willing to serve you everything from traditional Moroccan food to french fries. We ate at one of these restaurants on our last night (ours was #89, I think — the menus are all basically the same, and they use their stall numbers as differentiation). I had kebabs, couscous, really good bread — and, it must be said, really good french fries. Apparently, they’re universal.
The last day of our stay, we took an excursion through some of the Berber villages situated in the High Atlas Mountains. Along with other tourists, we got in a great big van driven by a local tour guide who navigated the windy mountain roads and explained the scenery that rolled past as we gained altitude. In concept the trip was pretty touristy — the van stopped in several locations so that we could get out and snap the obligatory photos — but behind the tourist motivation were vestiges (small, but there) of a more authentic Moroccan experience. To some of the “natives,” we were obviously a way to make money through the sale of traditional arts and crafts. But to some of them we were just a blip on the radar, a small disturbance in a daily routine that (for them) probably hasn’t changed too much over the last few decades. It’s probable that a lot of them had never even been as far from home as Marrakesh.
That day, we ate lunch in a small former hotel, high up in the mountains, which served a very traditional multi-course Marrakeshi meal: bread, salad, vegetable tagine, roasted chicken, finished off with a small glass of mint tea, something Morocco’s known for (and which lives up to the hype — but granted, I was a mint tea fan to begin with).
There are some places that you go to once, just to say that you’ve been there, and to know for yourself what that means. And there are some places you go to and know you’ll come back to. While preparing for this trip, I sort of suspected that Marrakesh would fall under the first category, but after having been, I’m not so sure. There are, of course, plenty of places I plan to go to for a first time before I make a return trip to Marrakesh (or even to Morocco), but in some future where I am obscenely wealthy and can travel wherever and whenever I like, I can see myself ending up back there — even if only to share the experience of the place with a different set of people.
