my social life part 2

i still have no big updates. i have spent the past 2 weeks locked in the library, when i am not shelving books of course.
i have been trying to finish a paper before i leave on monday, but that is not going to happen. i got to 7,000 words and suddenly ran out of inspiration. i hope that if i leave it and let it sit for awhile, i will get some more ideas...we shall see.
my big excitement every day is having lunch and coffee with various people i run into in the library.....sad, aye?
i have also tried, with limited success to befriend the photocopy ladies. it was all so much easier in moscow. i took the fotobaba there chocolat, and smiled nicely. she loved me. but it doesnt work here. here the fotoladies just growl everytime i hold the books incorrectly.
oh, the difficulties of life.

my social life

it my seem rather sad, but a large part of my social life centres around the national library. it has turned into a social club for me. today i arrived at about 10:30. at 1, connar texted to see if i wanted a lunch break. so for 45 minutes we chatted in the cafe and ate. he is writing the great novelof the 21st century and was stressed about some details. then i headed back to work. at about 3, uillieam tapped my shoulder and we went out to the hall for a brief consultation: he has dinner with some old, important, retired professor, and needed advice on what to say and so on. then i headed back to work again. then at 5, just as i was packing up to head out, i run into kristen in the queue to return books. and, of course we headed for a drink, she is stressed about the film she has to shoot for her MA project, in particular as she is having trouble finding a crypt to film in within central london. i am stressed as i am trying to finish writing a monster project. so it seems we are all stressed, and living in the library. what a strange world.

but i like the library here. it doesnt look as nice from the outside as, for example, the françois mitterand in paris, but it is definately more comfortable and better organised inside. i wont even bother to compare it to the lenin library. i especially like the cafes. they are soooo conveniently located....as i know well, having spent a fair amount of time in them! they are also the only library run cafes i have ever seen that serve alcohol. i am not sure if that is a good thing or not....

more visas

this week i did another round of visa gathering with max. we headed off tuesday to the omani embassy to get multi entry omani visas. the place couldnt have been more different from the indian one: we were the first and last people in the queue and it was totally disorganised. but the people were really nice. they gave us free booklets about oman, and let us look at the tons of pictures that were all over the walls. they wished us a pleasant trip, and the one year multi entry visa cost us all of 20 pounds. i am not complaining.
my day got even more exciting when our bookshop had to be evacuated of customers do to an "unacompanied package" on a nearby street. actually our shop was not really in the supposed danger zone, but our fire escape exit was, and if that is closed we are not supposed to have anyone inside, so we chucked the customers out and sat and watched the show. there is a certain personality type (often in positions of semi authority, like school administrators, or police men) who really thrive on these moments. there is also, it seems, a kind of person who finds them fascinating, although i am not sure why. a huge crowd of pedestrians formed behind the barriers to watch the operation unfolding. we had a front row seat from the shop, but i find these things quite boring. my collegues and i had no choice but to be there, as we were still on our shift officially, but i couldnt really understand why people would stop in the middle of a cold evening to watch cops surround and detonate a suitcase.....is it that interesting?

st patricks day

lucky me. i happened to be working sunday during the st patricks day parade, which went right past my bookshop. i have never liked this holiday, and like it now even less having spent 6 hours being yelled at by drunken irish men. they shouted about everything. they wanted a toilet, they wanted a place to sit (IN A BOOK SHOP) and they got offended when we told them that no, they couldnt walk around the shop with their beer. when the day finished and we took of the tills, my boss said at least we now have 364 days of peace until they come back again. thanks god.

ashamed in my ignorance

i have been put in my place by one of my collegues. i am doing a PhD in history, and i am already in my second year and have passed my exams. yet, i still dont know much at all about the life and deeds of haile selassi, former emperor of eithiopia. further more, i know appaullingly little about african history. this all emerged in a conversation between one of my collegues (who is african) and some customers (from ghana). my collegue pointed out that, as a phd student who hopes to be a historian, i have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing the basics of african history. and he is completely correct.
of course i have taken courses in world history. i am fairly knowledgeable on europea history and south american (i somehow along the way even managed to get a degree in latin american studies). i have a tolerable knowledge of asian, in particular indian history. but africa is a black hole in my knowledge. too often in universities it is ignored, unless you are in a programme that specilises in it. you cant get a history degree in europe without taking, for example, american history or british history, but you can easily get by without african, which is especially absurd given that just over a generation ago, when my father was growing up, much of africa was controlled from london or paris. so it is not like we can say this is a part of the world that is irrelevant or unconnected to us. i told the story to some of my friends at the university who felt that i shouldnt feel badly: africa is unrelated completely to my thesis, and knowledge of it is in no way required for me to write a good dissertation. but is that a good enough excuse? can we really, as historians, afford to be so specialised that we excuse ourselves from knowing even the basic facts about the rest of the world. i think not. and so, my collegue trotted me over to the mini warehouse in the basement of our shop and picked out some books on african history for me to read. so now i am well into Martin Meredith's The State of Africa: a history of fifty years of independance, and several of my african collegues are joking that they will give me a test when i am done, to see what i have learned. but i can see i clearly have a long long way to go before i can call myself a historian!

embassys

masyamba claims she wants a passport where she doesnt need visas. these dont exist i am afraid. i cant complain about my passport, it is a fairly good one, but i still sometimes need visas. so i foudn myself with max standing outside the indian embassy the other day. i was prepared for the worst. most of my embassy queueing experience comes from russian embassies, since it has been with them i have had the most experience. russian embassys are corrupt and ineffiecient. and corrupt. let me emphasise that one more time.....so i have come to view the whole thing as a painful and expensive undertaking.
the indian embassy was a joy compared to that. i arrived an hour before it opened to get my place in the queue (number 81). by the time i left they were at 500 or something like that. but despite the scary numbers the whole thing went smoothly and efficiently. we turned in our documents and came back one hour later to get our visas. the whole thing was done by 10:30 am. and it was 30 pounds, which isnt bad for a 6 month multi entry document.
it was all certainly less painful than the 5 injections i had to get in my upper arm in preparation for the trip. but then, i am now protected against hep A, polio, typhoid, tetanus, and diptheria....for a while anyway.

oi

a good reason not to drink and ride.

the law

all countries and cities have strange laws on their books. they get added for anicdotal reasons, and people never bother to remove them, so they just sit there and seem odder and odder as the centuries pass. so in the staff room some collegues and i had a good chuckle over some of englands. these are my favourites:
in london it is illegal to:
1 fly a kite
2 die in parliament
3 take a flock of sheep accross london bridge
4 wash your clothes in the fountains at trafalgar square
5 jump the queue in the tube ticket hall
6 sign your name falsly in the register of a hotel for the purpose of having an affair.
7 have sexual intercourse in a park, park, train, church; churchyard, or a bus.
8 gamble on the tube
9 wear a shocking hat
10 (my favourite) " the severest penalties will be suffered by any commoner who doth permit his animal to have carnal knowledge of a pet of the royal house."

so there, keep your muts away from the queens corgies, or face the wrath of the law!!!!

cambridge

i really like cambridge. i had to go up there yesterday briefly as i am still registered with a GP there (and have found it next to immpossible to register with one here....which is just as well as i think the ones in cambridge are better anyway) and i needed shots for going to india, lots of them as it turned out.
i had lunch with paul, he is still hacking through his dissertation, a long process and not one i am looking forward to.
iain meanwhile was a bit tramatised. the vicar's wife is 4.5 months pregnant, which means it is not his, and she was actualyl already pregnant when they were together. ouch. but life goes on.
i miss cambridge sometimes, i have spent some of the best times of my life there.