Strikes and Chinese Food

There was a strike today at my uni. I don't actually know too much about it, but the leaflet that was shoved into my hands reads (briefly) as follows:

"Academic and academic-related staff who are members of UCU will be striking... to demand the right to a fair pension. As a part of the wider destructive measures being taken against Higher Education, university staff are under attack on all fronts: from cuts to jobs, pay, and now an attack on our pensions... We were left with no option but to go on strike."

Obviously, instructors need things like salaries and pensions and things like that, and I completely understand that they felt the need to strike. But the problem today was that they were picketing outside the front of the school- a prime spot for picketing, but it's also where the entrance to the Arts building is, and that's where my class is held.

So I was walking up the ramp into the building around 8:50 this morning when one of the teachers (I assume) jumped in front of me. "Where are you going?" he demanded. "Uh... to class," I responded, thinking that it was pretty obvious. "Which class?" he asked. I answered, "Adaptations." "Oh." It was clear that he had no idea what class this was, so I added (nicely), "It's a theatre class." A look of complete disgust came over his face as he said, "Well, o-kay." He then handed me a stack of leaflets and cards to give out to anyone I saw.

I didn't really know what the strike was about at that point, but I later learned that the disgusted look on his face probably (hopefully) did not come from a dislike of the art form, but from disappointment that my teacher was teaching. But I got off easy. One of my groupmates came into class and said that she got almost yelled at for trying to go to class. The person who stopped her said, "If you go in there, you don't care about your teachers.You're supporting this." She answered that no, she didn't support what they were fighting against, she just had a show to perform in a week and she was going to class.

This was the problem: obviously, if the teachers are striking, they're not teaching. They're also encouraging students to boycott classes. This is a fine thing to do if you're, well, any other kind of student except for a drama student. It wouldn't really hurt me to miss the next two sessions of my history or RT classes because they're just lectures, and if the teachers aren't teaching, of course, I wouldn't miss anything. But at least 80%, maybe 100%, of the drama students have very important performances to do next week, which means that this week is imperative. There cannot be any skipping of class. We were teching today, and it's hard enough to get the theatre space as it is; even if we wanted to skip class, there's no way we could if we cared about our marks.
I understand that the teachers want us to support them, but they also need to realise that, literally, the show must go on for some students. I suppose they were more disappointed that our teacher was teaching instead of picketing than they were at the idea of us going to class, but this was also them making an assumption. Our teacher didn't teach us today. She did come in and say hi and tell us some good news, but we didn't require her help today, as our projects are completely student-run. So she was out there picketing with her fellows- they just didn't bother to find that out.

Anyway, tech went well- I think our piece is going to be really good. I also got out of being on the crew of the other group's performance using a combination of self-deprecation and gaze aversion. We got out of class at two, starving because we hadn't had a tea break, and four out of the five of us hopped on the tube to Camden Markets. Heidi wanted to show us this Chinese buffet that she said was really good, and she was right (they have a chocolate fountain and don't cover their chicken in sauce. WINNER.) We had a lovely afternoon of overeating and ducking into the many cool shops on the street. It's been nice to hang out with some different friends- most of the people I generally hang out with are on different schedules (I haven't seen Laura in weeks, though we've chatted on Facebook), and right now we're all barricaded in our rooms except for classes, so it's cool that there are some nice people on the same schedule as I am to spend some time with.

A funny thing about accents- I hardly notice the accents around me anymore. Sometimes it dawns on me again that the person I'm listening to has an accent that I love, but it's really become quite normal to my ears now. This means that I also forget that I sound different to them, and even more so. While I don't notice their accents mostly because I'm surrounded by them all the time, they notice mine more because I'm the minority. I re-realised how funny my pronunciation must sound to them this afternoon when the same group was browsing in a shop. The four of us were looking at some clothes, and I pulled one out and said, "Oh, is this a romper?" "Haha, romperrrr," Heidi laughed, exaggerating my rhotic 'r.' At first, I thought she was amused because I had used an American term (she caught my use of "sweater" the other week instead of "jumper"), but then I realised that it was just the way I said it. It's weird but very interesting when these kinds of things happen. Sometimes it's easy to forget how different things like that must seem until they're pointed out.

"If You're in a Tragedy, Don't Drink Anything!"

So I realised that even though I told you about my birthday, I didn't show you! So here are some pictures from the day of my twenty-first:

The package my family sent.

The cool thing about the package (besides all the yummy food and the ostrich) was that it came while I was Skyping with my mom, so she got to see me open it! (She also got to see me go to sit down at my desk, miss my chair, and fall on the floor :p) My friend Laura also made me some delicious chocolate chip cookies!

Outside the gift shop at the Titanic exhibit

My delicious replacement for alcohol! (I've got much less than that left now!)

The best garlic bread in the entire world.

And now for some random pictures I took yesterday:

An ad on the tube that makes me laugh every time I see it.

Poetry on the tube!

Don't you just hate it when your cough is all tickly? :p

I'm almost done with my second week of classes- one more in two parts tomorrow. I had Adaptations today and while really love it, four hours is just a really long time to have a class. But I did have fun today- it was a smaller than usual group, as some sort of sickness seems to be going around and other people had to drop the class, so we had a really good discussion about the play we were reading, starting with dissecting the title and the different connotations it would have today and then going through definitions of words we had to do for homework and finding moments in scenes from the play that matched it. Then after tea we discussed the articles we were supposed to read. As it happens, because our teacher skipped around a bit, I read a few articles too many, but it taught me a lesson, anyway. I had underestimated the amount of reading that needed to be done, thinking it could all be done in one short shot... but as you can see from this list, it was a little too extensive to sanely do in that timeframe.

So while I did get it all read in time, my procrastination meant that I was up until the wee hours of the morning reading and then got up an hour early to finish.. after not being able to fall asleep for a long time and having to be in class at nine. So never again!

I thought the booklets we got for some classes were a little weird, but after using mine, I actually quite like it. Instead of handing us articles to read each week, they're all in the booklet. Not only is it very neatly put together, but this way it's easy to refer to past articles. I found it a very good resource- not to mention that all of the articles we had to read for class today were really interesting (well... save for one.) Here's what my booklet for Adaptations looks like:

And on the inside:

So I'm really finding that handy. I also felt like I could hold my own in the discussion today. I think our orienters kind of exaggerated the differences between the English students and us; they made it sound like our English counterparts would eat us alive in class and we'd feel dumb all the time. But I contributed a good amount to the conversation, got some "that's a really good point"s from my teacher, and made more Shakespeare references than I even knew that I knew (my class loves to reference Shakespeare.) The quote in the title was said in our discussion; since so many people are poisoned in tragedies, we feel it's a good rule to follow in general. So so far, I think I'm doing all right in my classes.

Random fact of the day: here, you don't just call your teacher "professor" because they teach you. In the UK (and perhaps all of Europe), professor is actually the highest rank, and you have to work up to it. So while it's not an insult if you accidentally call your instructor "professor," they like to be called by their proper title (I suppose much like addressing an American professor as "doctor"- they usually correct you and say that they're not a doctor.) So while some of my teacher may be professors, others will fall into the following categories: Lecturer, Technicaly Director, Senior Lecturer, Reader, or Performance Supervisor. Now if I could only figure out which of my teachers fall into which category...

Oh, also... apparently, the weight of another year of life is too much for my body to handle. Halfway through my birthday festivities yesterday, the muscles of my right knee decided to completely spaz out, leaving me hobbling around and unable to climb stairs like I was 121 instead of barely 21. Now they're still quite painful and I don't know what's wrong with me. Getting older is FUN! :p