alba!

so here we are in scotland!
what a big surprise, it rains a lot here!!!
the house we are staying in is great, and there is even a beautiful cat named ginny. she clearly thinks she is empress...well i guess such is the nature of the beast...
the train ride up was uneventful. we went threw a number of cities which i know of only from the map, but which seemed larger than i would have imagined. the last hour of the train ride was magnificent with the view of the coast.....
we we had time to take in a few sites: the national gallery and the castle among others, i hadnt been to the castle in at least 6 years....too long no doubt.
we then found a great restaurant with (of course) haggis! what else could one ask for?

that damn cat

so she has done it again. my polish neighbour has diagnosed it as a phsycological problem. the french specialist said she was deraciné....all i know is i keep having to pay out money to vets to tell me the obvious: my cat scratches too much!!!!
this latest round was started by a tiny scratch on the back of her neck, which over a period of about 3 days she managed to turn into a bleeding angry wound, thanks to the constant harrassment of her back flipper claws. so we took her to the vet, who did the same thing the last vet did: he gave her an injection to protect against infection, gave me pills to drop down her throat, and this time gave her a funny funnel like thing to wear around her neck to physically prevent her from scratching. i will definately hold on to that for future scratches. all of this wisdom for 56£!!!!!
naturally the beast hates the funnel like collar and keeps trying to pull it off. when she gets tired of that, she then looks at me with sad big eyes and emits pathetic meaowling sounds. last night she kept me awake, or rather she kept waking me, by hitting my face with the funnel like collar thing...grrr.....that bloody cat:::!!!

joj

this one is courtesy of aida!

cans and cans

fetched my father from victoria station this morning. he arrived with endless cans of baked goods. he is some equivelent of the russian babushka who shows up for a visit with endless pots of varenia and pickles and so on. he brought over a kilo of biscuits alone, plus cakes and all sorts of other things. i will be fed of this for weeks!he even brought mice for the cat, what more could one ask for? of course the cat thinks he came to see/worship HER

odd library encounters

i finnally have made the tour of all of the university's big libraries. the main library is like i imagined and english academic library would be...and a bit more. the place is incredibly disorganised, there are endless badly lit corridors, with floor to ceiling books (with cob webs up near the ceiling)yhou have to walk up and down ladders and stairs. sometimes a marble statue appears for no reason in the middle of the narrow corridor you want to walk down...it is like a labyrinth of endless corridors of books...it is a bit creepy. the odd thing is, there is wifi access throughout, which seems a bit surprising since otherwise the place appears to have changed little since the 19th century.
but somehow i managed to find the things i was looking for...and then i met gabor for dinner at a pizza place. we sat in the restaurant for nearly 3 hours and the waiter looked like he wanted to kill us. i guess 3 hour meals are not very english. the english at the other tables seemed to want to just eat and run...probably to the pub. i have reached the conclusion that the unique reason these people eat is to help them digest alcohol. i cant see any other purpose. but the pizza was ok, so i guess i cant complain. we had some good laughs.

klaus

Big excitement: president klaus gave a talk at my school. I guess he likens himself the masaryk of today, as he choose to speak on the same topic masaryk did when he gave a talk at my school some 90 years ago! Specifically, he spoke on the role of small nations in europe, which i guess easily includes the czech republic....although i am not to sure where england fits in....as many have pointed out before me, klaus styles himself a great intellectual, in addition to a great politician, if such a combination is possible, which i am not sure it is the case in the czech republic. He also seems concerned with his appearence. My czech (and slovak) students claim that he has a fondness for young blondes, and was caught having an affair with some secretary. Needless to say, that didnt come out in his speech.
I have about 100 books i urgently need to read, but i have been spending the evening in bed with sandor marai’s embers, which is excellent. It is also making me want to go back to hungary...

!

masha told me last night that mr cho died. he was in his early 40s. i am in shock.

an effort at seriousness

i finally hauled myself to the university yesterday and even managed to go to a class! amazing, isn't it? i would like to be able to do such things more often, but given my work shedule it is almost impossible....and i do have to eat after all...
the professor was really nice...although i was not overly impressed with the other students in the class. there seemed to be more regurgitation that analysis coming from them.
afterwards i met justin for some food and shopping, and i owe him a big thanks for introducing me to UNIQLO. so i now have some very basic, but i imagine useful, items so that i can look at least somewhat decent for work.
afterwards i met gabor in the phd lab. we had a gossip and then went to the departments postgrad welcome party. what a nightmare that was....well gabor and i decided to at least exploit the moment to the fullest and proceeded to (over)indulge on the free wine and crisps....actually we left when the free wine finished, which we realised was tacky....but there was really no other reason to stay in an overpriced pub with people we didnt really want to be talking to. the other postgrads are boring and overly serious. they all saw me and gabor as exotics who had fallen in front of them. we retreated to a corner...then some professor who clearly adhered to the roksandic approach of professor-student relations came over and started to talk to me and the girl who was next to me, ignoring gabor. when we left the party we saw the same professor chatting up a tall blond, i guess he was trying to seduce her with the mysteries of....medieval poland?the programme director wandered over to talk to us as well. when he established that i was in fact the daughter of his old leningrad state university dorm mate, he started to ask questions about my dad. i said that he had retired, to which my illustrious programme director respond "gosh i didnt realise he was so much older than i am" i dont think my father would b terribly happy to hear such news, especially as i dont think the age difference is in fact so great....so the wine finished and gabor and i beat a quick retreat....

the weekend, finally

Thank god it is the end of the week. It was a long one. I did overtime to get extra cash and look good in front of my new boss. I am sure i will be grateful when i get the pay at the end of the month, but i am exhausted and i have been neglecting my studies, which are the reason why i came to this country in the first place. I have learned about various world cultures and nationalities. I have reached the conclusions that:
Korean girls all act like they are 11 years old, regardless of their real age.
Korean men are lazy and a bit arrogant
Japanese girls are either over conscientous or insane
Italians fall into 2 categories: hyper intellectual or joker
The rumours about swedes are true: they have no sense of humour
The spanish are cliqueish and speak their own language, regardless of whether the person they are speaking to understands or not.
The german girls look awful
The turkish men are funny and clever but unbelieveably lazy. Their main interests seem to be whisky and cigarettes....good muslim boys that they are! Turkish girls are more serious, but less gifted, or at least not as well prepared
The taiwanese rarely open their mouths, unless forced to
The french all speak atrocious english. Despite the fact that 40 percent of vocabulary in english are derived from french, they are hopeless.
The czech/slovak/polish girls are nice and ambitous...the men are sad lumps of pudgy flesh
Hungarian girls are funny party types...there are no hungarian men
The saudi men are spoilt and incredibly wealthy...there are no saudi women
The south american men go out of their way to appear to make no effort, although i think they do work at home, but just are embaressed to admit it in front of the others.
The russians are without exception rich...and they want to be richer
The danes and the chinese are colourless
And the english....well they are english...

This Friday’s staff meeting topic: who can do the best Tomoko imitation. Tomoko is a student from osaka. She is completely insane. If she so much as trips she goes running up to the administrators “go gp..i go gp, see gp” she drives us all crazy. We have contests to see how we can avoid teaching her...the other japanese students scatter whenever she appears...people like that shouldnt be allowed to leave their home country.....

aghhhhhh

the japanese students are driving me crazy!!!!i cant wait for the weekend!!!!!
i got glasses today. the doctor has told me i have to wear them for the next month non stop. no one knows what the problem is, but my contacts are killing my eyes and have caused all kinds of little cuts on my eyeballs....yuck

mercredi encore

Il y les gens qui déteste les lundi, mais moi je déteste les mercredis. Tout le monde est grognon et fatigué. Une étudiante (qui s’appelle jessica, mais qui vient de marie de montreuil!) a éclaté en larmes après le cours. Elle est malheureuse, elle déteste l’Angleterre, elle veut rentrer….dans leneuftrois ! Je n’avais aucune idée quoi lui dire….je crois que les français ne sont pas fait pour habiter à l’étrangère

eggplant adventures

A certain well known writer, whom some of us call “eggplant,” came to speak at my faculty. So, naturally i went to hear the talk, even though kati had warned me on Sunday exactly what would be said and in what way, since the same writer had spoken in budapest last year. As it turned, kati was completely on target. One would think that if you travelled and gave lectures all around the world, you would learn to look up from you sheet of paper from time to time, but such was not the case with this writer....she seemed to be bored, to be repeating some lines she had said 300 times before. The points she made lacked much conviction. Some of the questions were interesting, but some of the most probing, she deflected. She has made much of her career being displaced, “an exile.” But she is an exile more or less by choice. Or even if she had legitimate reasons to leave her country, which is plausible, the situation which would have made her life unpleasant has been gone for years and today there is absolutely no reason to live abroad “in exile.” There is nothing for her to be exiled from. Yet, it is still the topic of essays and lectures. I guess it would be stupid to kill the golden goose.
After the talk i spent some time in the library establishing that nothing i really wanted was there...then i decided to go home....and thats when things got complicated....
Things on the train were normal until we got to some place calling itself a “garden city” then the train stopped. And the minutes passed. After 30 minutes the drive informer us we would be there “a while” after one hour they decided to evacuate the train. After 90 minutes we were finnally informed that there had been a suicide....the they said that buses would be brought to take us the rest of the distance...but after an hour they annouced that the busses were delayed.....to cut the story short, i left the library at 7:30 and i got home at midnight, starving, exhausted, and wet, since of course it had been raining...

hungarian sunday

J’ai passé la journée avec Kati et Gabor à cambridge. On a fait le tour de la ville : les vaches, la rivière avec ces gondoles, le musée….et tout le reste….un mec nous avons donnés un tour gratuite de Queen’s et Corpus Christi collèges, ce qui était excellent, parce que normalement ça coûte cher d’entrer dans le domaine d’un collège. Le mec était très bizarre. Il est apparu comme par enchantement, passé une demi-heure à nous montrer les domaines, et puis il a dit simplement « je ne me sens pas très sociable, donc je vais vous laisser ici ; au revoir. » et il est parti juste comme ça, brusquement. Après notre promenade, nous avons pris un verre chez Granta…il faisait froid et les anglais étaient en shorts….nous avons parlé de Budapest, l’université et les amis….

deep thoughts

Attended my first friday staff meeting yesterday. We sat around and had a competition to see who could do the best immitation of a korean student. We then went through essays one of the teachers collected from her class. The assignment was to compare the students home city and london. My favourite went: “there are many differences between shanghai and london. The first is a bicycle.” Hmmm, we wondered, is this a mistake, or a thought so deep we all missed it?

parrrttyyy

Comment on fait la fête à paris
Voilà mon équipe dans un bar à 10 mètres de Place Vendôme.

meaow

La chatte adore la femme de ménage, elle l’attend chaque matin avec impatience. Elle se sent chez elle maintenant dans l’appart, et se comporte de nouveau comme une dictatrice !
Les tchèques ont parlé entre elles pendant mon cours. J’ai compris presque tout, et finalement je les ai demandées d’arrêter de parler de leurs petits amis pendant mon cours. Elles ne savent pas que je suis slavophone, donc elles étaient étonnées et horrifiées que j’aie compris leur conversation. Maintenant elles ont peur de moi et parlent plus pendant mon cours !!

mercredi

J’ai rendez-vous avec ma directrice de recherche...il semble que je dois commencer à me concentrer ! Je crois que je comprends ce qu’on attend de moi, mais j’ai peur de que je ne sois pas à l’hauteur des espérances ! La directrice m’a invité dans un resto chinois qui n’était pas mal pour Angleterre. (Je suis rarement d’accord avec Jacques Chirac, mais je trouve qu’il y avait complètement raison quand il a dit que seulement au Finlande on peut trouver la nourriture de pire qualité que en Angleterre.)
Et maintenant j’ai une liste de trucs à faire…..

retarded student quote of the day

I taught them the term “small talk.” i reminded them that different cultures have different ways of greeting acquaintances and making small talk. I asked for the students to give examples, so the japanese described how he would bow and discuss traffic or the the weather in tokyo. The german would shake hands. Then the squad of french and italians said they would kiss. I said that this showed how, yes, different cultures have different ways, and while it is perfectly acceptable for two guys to kiss each other in, say, avignon, it would not be considered normal behaviour a british city, such as cambridge.
Aurore, one of the franco-italian squad, couldnt accept this. “but cambridge is a university town!” she protested. “and?” i asked, not following her train of thought. “so the people should be more educated and cultured!”
Agh! Of course! Now i see the light: to be cultured is to behave french!
Funny how such comments come from french, or germans, or americans.....but not from poles or taiwanese. My last class had only two boys in it: carlos the prematurely overdevelopped sneering macho from caracas (complete in tight jeans, tight black t-shirt, greesed back hair, and gold chains) and ahmed, painfully shy, pudgy, underdevelopped saudi hiding in super baggy clothing. Sévérine (of toulouse) kept falling over carlos. Tomiko (of kyoto) would have liked to as well, but she is both plump and plain, so every time she approached carlos, he sneered her into retreat. Finnally, the bell rang. Carlos winked at me at me as he left the room (who the hell winks at their teacher????) and ahmed tip toed up and asked me in a near whisper if i knew i had a saudi name. I answered yes, my name is arabic. Ahmed leaned over conspiratorially “my sister has the same name” he announced. He then bolted from the room, as though he had just confessed a grisly murder. Teenagers are strange!

le week-end

J’ai pas fait grand chose ce week-end, malheureusement.....au cause d’un manque d’argent. J’ai voulu savoir pour combien de temps je peut vivre avec 20 livres. Maintenant je sais : trois jours maximum. 2 jours est plus réaliste…..c’est la vie…en Angleterre en tout cas ! J’ai commencé de travailler vendredi. Je travaille comme prof d’anglais dans une école préparatoire pour les enfants étrangères de 16-18 ans qui veulent étudier en Angleterre l’année suivante. Il y beaucoup de garçons d’Arabie saoudite…..les filles viennent de partout. Dans mes groupes, j’ai des japonais, taiwanais, chinois, mexicains, venezuelains, hongrois, turques, pakistanais, italiens…c’est drôle, mais probablement pas pour longtemps ! Je crois que dans 5 mois je serai prête à frapper quel qu’un.
J’ai commencé lire pour mes études…j’ai trois livres énorme devant moi….j’ai envoyé des textos à masha pour changer mes idées, mais elle était en train de lire ses propres livres dans son appart à budapest…hmmm….