My classes have mostly gone ok but one of the profs. seems to like picking on international students to read aloud in her class. And it was 'Song of Myself' by Walt Whitman. I have a cold and I hate reading aloud at the best of times. Being even more self conscious because I know that my accent is weird to them made it even worse. And then she criticised my reading of it! But, as Nick Selby showed us back in first year during lit. identities, T.S. Eliot was appalling at reading his own poetry, so I feel that I'm allowed to not be in an 'euphoric state' when I read Whitman. Anyway, one of the guys I was sat with had a copy of the Norton. So I was all like 'Hey! Norton!' and he was like 'Yeah, I got it at a used book thing for $1!' and I was like 'WTF?! I paid £65!'
One of my other courses has a bit of a problem. The lecturer has been signed off work for 6 weeks with a broken foot. They are trying to find a replacement for her but we definitely have no classes for that one until at least Wednesday.
The bookstore ( though it feels wrong to describe it as such, it's selling the iPad for God's sake!) has stolen my money. One book I don't mind as I will be using it all term, one they said we had to get this specific edition, and the other one I need to read for Tuesday and the library copies are gone. Hmm. For other books that I will be using a lot, I'm going to turn to my trusty friend, Amazon.ca (something tells me they won't be delivered by Ramona V. Flowers.) I also now have writing paper so I can send people letters. Isn't that nice? Priority will most likely go to people who do not have the internet.
Now onto the social side of things. On Tuesday I got invited to hang out in the lounge and the words 'free' and 'rum' were mentioned. I was also invited to a frat party (methinks this is due to me actually being female.) I declined both as I felt like crap. Wednesday night I tried to find The Pit for the fresher's party thing and ended up in The Gallery. So I thought ok, I'll have a drink here and see if I can find someone to tell me where The Pit is. Here I met Kris who is an older student doing some sort of ecology degree with a view to going to vet school afterwards. We sat talking for ages and I had my first experience of the two pieces of ID system that operates here. I also found cider from British Columbia. It is 7% and reminded me of scrumpy. I then had to explain scrumpy which is apparently a very cool word. Kris had a Smirnoff Ice which over here is also 7% (I believe it's about 5% back home) but it didn't taste any different. After The Gallery I went home and starting hanging out with the guy in the room next door (Martin) who is also a legal drinker. And he gave me a shot of vodka and this is where it went wrong. Let's just say I have christened my bin and leave it at that.
Last night was UBC Improv (my shiny wristband got me in for free) and I was sat with Frances. My mind spun a little at that. She also loves Stephen Fry! And we had a lot in common so at some point I will try to find her room and go and say 'hi' and I stayed behind after the show to talk to the Improv guys. I'm thinking of joining them when we have club day in two weeks time. They said it was $10 to join and then you auditioned and if you didn't make the Imrpov team, you got to go to all their shows for free. I feel this is win all around. The I chatted to Sarah for a while and then we visited Ivan, who only moved in yesterday.
Tomorrow is Shinerama (which is you know the slang round my home town, you will know that this isn't so great a name) which is where students are gonna go into the city and perform their skills on the street and the money they get will go to a cystic fibrosis charity. I think Henry will be doing some magic stuff. He said I could probably earn money being English but IDK. On a side note, he said something to me yesterday (two things actually) that rather amused me. Firstly he said that everytime he sees me I look more jetlagged. The second thing he said was that he thought that I must've gone to quite a high end possibly public/grammar school in London. Lol. When I told him that he was way off the mark, he was like 'You don't have the accent!' which is very true but at the same time, we don't all sound like we're on Eastenders. Makes you wonder how anyone else can understand me when my accent confuses English people. Ah well.
Tomorrow morning is ultimate frisbee. I'll also try to record a video tour so you can get a better idea of where I am.
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