Sunday, 19 February 2012

To Hugo, With Love

Valentine's Day. Usually, it is pretty depressing. You feel like you are caught in a catch 22 position...feeling depressed on the day, but then hating that you feel depressed because you shouldn't (as a supposedly independent woman!)  so then feeling even more depressed! However, this year felt a little different. There is something about the sun-shining and being nice and warm, compared to the dreary, cold, rainy February in England, that takes the edge off of it for sure! Coupled with my amazing roommate leaving a bunch of 'Happy Valentine's Day' notes around the apartment for me to find, aannddd a big bowl of homemade chocolates and biscuits and chocolate covered strawberries by my bed! (I was allowed to eat them now after the day before her subtly hinting that I couldn't) Needless to say, for the next 2 days I didn't eat any real food and just snacked on peanut butter cups! Not the healthiest thing to do but you gotta do it on Valentine's Day! A movie night with the girls was also pretty fun...Matt Damon, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, i'll let you decide what movie we watched.


It was another one of my friend's birthdays this week so off to sushi we went! God I love sushi. I'm going to miss how easy it is to get it and the relative cheapness of it compared to Yo Shushi! where you can easily spend 30quid (can't find the pounds sign on my new computer!) at lunch time. Believe me, me and my best friend have done this before. This restaurant we went to is very well known among students as it is the closest to campus and very eclectically decorated! There are polaroids of past customers plastering the walls, surfboards and random butterflies and flowers hanging from the ceiling and do such wraps like the As$hole. We also made a bbiigg chocolate cake for her which I managed to spatter with my blood when I was grating chocolate on the top and managed to grate my fingers instead. Oh well, extra iron I guess.

 On Wednesday me and some friends from my spanish class went to a Tango class downtown! Our teacher said that if we went 3 times then she would give us extra credit, a lot of extra credit, and seeing how i'm hovering in the C+/B- category at the moment I thought I should better get my dancing shoes on and show up! Don't you love the American system of 'extra credit'! This class was pretty funny, me and my friend were pared up and both as bad as each other so just stomped round the room while other couples glided passionately around us. We were stopped a number of times by the teachers to give us some tips, but in the end they just let us do our thing! At one point though the guy teacher grabbed each of us individually and twirled us around which was much better, I felt like I was born with a right and left foot this time. He even said that I was very sensitive to his 'touch' and would make a great dancer. I'm still deciding how much sarcasm was in that statement. I guess I will find out on Wednesday. And the Wednesday after that until I get this extra credit grade!

Last night a big group of us went and saw Hugo in 3D at the cinema. A really sweet film, even if the story line was a bit weak and took a long time to get into it. One thing I will just say is I like how Jude Law is one of the top stars credited and yet in a 2hr film he appears for all of 3 minutes! Not a fan.
Ok well, now I have to go work on my Disney 'Imagineering' project which involves designing a ride/attraction and all the details and costumes and merchandise for this said ride. I am back in Year 7 obviously. But this time, it is actually worth something aaannnddd I think my creative levels since then have plummeted, and they were hardly there to start with. I'm picturing tears and tantrums in my future when my Grandmother Willow tree won't stay upright.
I will leave you with my favourite accordion man downtown in his new costume.... and a small plug for my other blog if anyone is interested in food/exercise; http://justsogoodateating.blogspot.com/

Sunday, 12 February 2012

Half full or half empty?

I am officially half way through this year abroad! I have completed one term and a half, and I have one and a half more to go! That is so scary. It is going way too quickly. There is still so much more that I want to do here and now I feel like I am running out of time, like a year isn't long enough. Half full....I can't wait to see my friends and family. Half empty.....leaving is going to suck. I love it here! If only there was a way of combining the two. If I had infinite amounts of money, or won the lottery, I would happily pay for people to come out here! What is the going tuition for international students at UCSC? About $40,000 a year. Hmmm, maybe I will need to win the lottery and marry rich.Speaking of needing to be rich, you have to be to get the everyday items that you would do in England. Look what I found at a deli in San Jose:

Had a lovely day yesterday with one of my friends. It was her birthday on Friday and so yesterday we decided to go on a BBBIIIGGG shopping trip to San Jose, which is the nearest city to Santa Cruz that has decent malls. We shopped till we dropped. Quite literally. When we arrived we went and had a gorgeous lunch at this New York/Italian restaurant where we gorged ourselves on calamari, soup and complimentary fried, cheese stuffed ravioli! Yum. Then when our stomachs were bursting we hit 3 different malls. One was the really uber posh one where every single shop was completely over our price limit; Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Swarowski etc etc. Then the other two were where we stocked up. I am normally a really bad shopper. I bargain hunt and buy things because they are cheap, not necessarily because I like them. But this time I was so desperate for new clothes that I didn't hesitate to flash the credit card (my British one though because that way I can forget about it for now and it looks like a smaller amount of money in pounds!) and pick up jeans, trousers, multiple tops, jackets etc. The only thing I didn't find were boots. Though we did find a transvestite doing a make-up show in the middle of the mall:

Stupidly we decided to go grocery shopping afterwards which meant that trying to lug many many bags up the hill from the car back home was a near impossible task and took forever. And to make things worse the salad left over from the restaurant which I had stuffed inside another bag, leaked all over my new clothes. I was not impressed.

It was another one of my friends birthdays' this week, my roommates boyfriend, and as he grew up in Germany for a number of years, we went to this really cute German tavern place for dinner the other night. It was this little wooden cabin with all German statues and memorabilia plastering the walls. Even the waitresses were dressed in traditional German clothes and the waiters in laderhousen. (Spell check doesn't like this word...it want's to change it to 'slanderous' or 'slaughterhouse', sorry Germany). Again we feasted on traditional food, from weinerschnitzel to goulash to apple strudel. The guys enjoyed the beer and various flavours of schnapps including honey and raspberry!

Well I think that is it for this week. I have a Disney paper to write today, all about the representation of women in Disney films! Any excuse to watch 101 Dalmations aye? Oh I shall leave you with something that cracked me up. The other night the guys who we share a kitchen and bathroom with had a party, which of course involved beer pong. I got up in the morning to find that although they like to party, they are still UCSC students and therefore are concerned for the environment and recycling etc!

Sunday, 5 February 2012

Finally a Banana Slug!!

It has taken almost 5 months but I have finally spied my first banana slug!!
Walking back in the afternoon to return some stupid Spanish movie to the library I saw something long and yellow from the corner of my eye and low and behold, this time it was not a small banana, it was a banana slug, the mascot of UCSC! I got very snap happy so here are a few photos that I took:


As you can see, they are pretty cute, well cuter than a regular grey slimy slug. However I did not partake in the tradition of kissing a banana slug...that just seemed wrong on so many levels.
It has been a week of wildlife actually. It is not everyday that you have to keep a look out for mountain lions as you walk to and from the library or around campus! I proper freaked myself out when walking back from the library at about 9pm, in the dark, down a uninhabited path. I definitely saw some eyes stalking me. And then a friend told me she saw a mountain lion cub not too far away! Half of me wants to see one and the other half of me doesn't! Apparently some more were spotted near my apartment and another one who was 'stalking some hikers'. Perhaps I will buy myself some pepper spray or something. I also know EXACTLY what to do if I do come across one...we got sent an information sheet just in case!

Friday night, me and some friends went down to the Boardwalk where there is this big arcade, bowling and laser quest (they call it laser tag here). I have not played laser quest in like 8 years and my competitive side certainly got the better of me, which it has been doing all week.! I love that adrenaline rush of stalking someone with a gun in a smoky, dimly lit, obstacle filled arena...maybe I should join the army?
After a few games of DDR (Dance, Dance Revolution) which we epically failed on after being cocky and choosing a higher level than our co-ordination abilities allowed, we headed out with our winnings- some plastic heart rings, shot glasses for the guys and a plastic frog.
Not much else to report on. I hear England, and indeed the rest of Europe is experiencing some chilly weather?;) Once again, I love California.

Ok, off to prepare for the SUPERBOWL! I think some chicken wings may be in order....

Sunday, 29 January 2012

Get a Clue.

Sundays seem to come around a lot faster this quarter. Half of me is pleased as it means that it isn't long before one of my friends comes to visit me, and my trip to Nashville, Tennessee for Spring Break:D The other half is divided into 'Mid-terms are coming', 'I need to start thinking about my dissertation', 'I need to organise my life after this year abroad', all things that I have quite happily pushed to the back of my mind. Time to face the music...nearly. Perhaps next week.

Work wise this week has been a massive fail. I could not motivate myself to go to my Disney lectures, or start work on any essays I have got. The only thing I have managed to do solidly all week is  spanish. I had this sort of epiphany this week. I really really really want to know this language. Like that is my aim for this year. By Christmas 2012 I want to be comfortable speaking it, listening to it, reading it, you name it. Now I know that I will definitely not be fluent by then, at all. But I have noticed that my ability to read and write in spanish has really improved over these last few months, not necessarily my speaking though which is the useful part! Well, we shall see.

Haven't done much throughout the week. We had a college night that was Fairytale themed on Tuesday where they served things like 'Jack and the bean-casserole', gingerbread men, 'Three little pigs in a blanket' (which I hasten to add were not traditional english pigs-in-blankets!) etc etc. These nights are always fun; the acapella group performs, videos are watched, faces painted. We left pretty sharpish when two people came onto the stage dressed as Tinkerbell and Peter Pan and started performing the most cringy-est skit ever. Eugh my skin is still crawling thinking about that!

Last night me and my roommate went to a midnight showing of Clue at the cinema while actors from the Slugs in Fishnets group acted it out in front of the movie but just mouthed the words along to the movie in the background. I'm still not sure what I made to this. The movie itself was very funny, I had never seen it before and it definitely made me laugh from start to finish. The acting was entertaining most of the time, though I failed to see the point of it. I was too engrossed in the actual movie that I didn't watch them all that much. Another thing that I just couldn't get my head round was the audience and cast members standing in the back shouting out comments at the movie! Tim Curry would say "Look what we all have in common" and two dick-heads in the row in front would should out "HERPES!" But no-one else seemed to mind at all. In fact a lot of them joined in. I just couldn't get over it! My British sense of 'what are you doing? you are breaking the code of the cinema!' just took over!  It took so much will-power to not tell them to shut-the-hell-up (actually I would never have done that but if there was a time for me to start doing this...this would have been it). Eventually I think I relaxed and started to appreciate audience participation a bit more, but it was still weird! You know the one thing that cinema's and library's have in common...they demand silence! But all in all it was a good night. I just had to get over the initial shock at it all. Slugs in Fishnets are doing the same thing to the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a couple of weeks. I think I will go now I know what it is all about, and i'll probably enjoy it, if I leave my Britishness back at the apartment.

Sunday, 22 January 2012

Raining cats, dogs and elephant seals

First things first: you see that little box labelled Study Abroad Blog Roll on the right? Well, exciting stuff, my blog is now featured on this website! It is a great site where you can get lots of information about a year abroad so if you are thinking of taking one, or have one coming up, then go check it out!

I think I jinxed the weather with my last post. I said that I felt I was suffering from seasonal jet-lag due to the sunny, warm weather in California compared to Seattle. The winter gods apparently read this and decided to show me that it does indeed rain in California from time to time. Or for days on end in fact.
It has not stopped raining. And not the pathetic drizzle kind but actual full on rain! It is sooo loud. It isn't just rain; it is cold. Not freezing but around 12 degrees which I still think is cold! It has been very amusing watching people's reaction to this weather:
You have the people who fully embrace the precipitation with rain coats, waterproof ponchos, wellies, even waterproof trousers. This may be going a bit too far...if you want to stay dry that badly, just stay inside!
Then you have the people who are completely in denial. It is like they cannot feel this liquid sunshine. The number of people I have seen sidestepping around gigantic puddles or trying to avoid the small rivers flowing down the paths wearing shorts and flip-flops is quite astounding!
I have been asked a number of times if this weather makes me feel more at home. What a strange question! That is like me asking them if they feel at home when the sun shines! I nod and smile and mutter something about the English weather system or how my wellies were one item that I did not pack.

This week hasn't been very exciting. Just more work, watching endless episodes of Castle (did you check it out?) and watching Disney movies in my Disney class! Thursday was a proper full on Disney day where we watched Snow White in a lecture, multiple Mickey Mouse cartoons in a seminar, and then me and 2 friends went to the cinema to see Beauty and the Beast in 3D! They did not stop singing all the way through! I  joined in on the classic "Tale as ooolldd as time.." and "be our guest" but they were proper going for it! I am obviously not well versed in the soundtrack and will have to brush up on my disney songs. It has been a week of watching a screen actually. We had to watch this really really sexually explicit movie for Spanish called 'Y tu mama tambien' which was like porn. We have to discuss it in class tomorrow which will be weird. I am not interested in knowing the spanish words for 'communally masturbating into a swimming pool on diving boards'. Yes. That did happen.

Today I went on a trip to Ano Nuevo State Reserve to hang out with the Elephant Seals. The trip was fun, don't get me wrong, but again, it was raining, and windy, and cold! There were hundreds and hundreds of seals though. Some weighing in at 5000lbs!! It is the middle of the birthing season so there were lots of newborns around, trying very hard not to get squished by the fighting males. Before a confrontation, the males lift up their heads and make a deep, loud sound, a bit like a foghorn. Then if the other does no back down then they slam their bodies into each other and try to bite each other's neck! It was quite awing to watch. Huge beasts of nature showing their full force. I definitely felt like a weak, tiny human next to them. We weren't very far away from them, about 25yards. You just had to make sure you didn't get in between two males as it could get messy...
So these photos show some of the Elephant Seals, one has been bitten by a Great White Shark and survived!  There is also a video of one section of a beach just littered with seals.









Going to make a shameless plug for my other blog which you can check out by going to my profile. It is about health and fitness but I am not sure quite what I am going to do with it yet!

Monday, 16 January 2012

'Her'story

First week back of the winter quarter (though I'm not sure why they are calling this winter when it was 22 degrees the other day!). Oh and Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day! (Day off...yes please.)
All new classes to find around campus, all the ridiculously expensive books to buy, all new people to meet. Again, the week has just flown by but also my time in Seattle seems a very long time ago!
I shall give you a brief rundown of my classes....

  • Spanish 3- or more appropriately named, the retard class. That is me feeling retarded, not that the other people are! This teacher, who is nice but a bit intimidating, insists that you are not aloud to speak a word of english in her classroom. You have a question, she won't answer you if you can't ask it in spanish! Needless to say, I am not expecting a good grade from this woman. I am dreading presentation week where each of us has to give a presentation to the class, entirely in Spanish and with not notecards. I'm cringing all ready at just how awful it is going to be.
  • Race, Gender and Islam in America. I can't decide whether this is a sociology/feminism studies class or a history class. We spent the best part of an hour the other day trying to answer the questions 'What is race?' and 'What is gender?' which lead to a heated debate as to why it is called HIStory and not HERstory and what it means to be a feminist. I sighed and rolled my eyes at the appropriate places. I have little patience for things like that. 
  • Now, the best class- WALT DISNEY! All I have to say is that in one or our lectures last week we watched youtube clips of early Disney animation and next week we are watching Snow White! Also, due at the end of the quarter is our 'Imagineering Project' where in groups you have to design and create an attraction for Disneyland. I love college.
Aside from that, not much has happened otherwise. The weather has been so gorgeous this last week that me and some friends decided to go to the beach yesterday but of course, that would be the day where it was windy and freezing! Needless to say we spent all morning getting ready to go, spent an hour in Safeway buying picnic stuff, got to the beach, stayed 30mins, got in the car and came home! Though we did end up having a good day by just sitting on the sofa watching episode after episode of Castle...check it out, it is amazing. Hoepfully a longer and more exciting post next week as I am going on a trip to see some elephant seals at a state park! Random I know, but when in America...

I shall leave you with a weird accordion player that I saw downtown a few days ago. I wasn't sure whether he was a serial killer disguised as a musician or the other way round.....

Sunday, 8 January 2012

2012 and we are all still here....awkeward!

and a Happy New Year to all of you! Many thought we were not going to make it past midnight of the 1st as the apocalypse was supposedly upon us...apparently not. So I guess this means we can all go about our normal lives until next December which I believe is now the more up to date predicted date of the annihilation of the world? A few more blog posts to go until then so no need to panic;)

I am now back in Santa Cruz after hitching another ride with a randomer, something I said I wasn't going to do again but when faced with lugging 2 suitcases on a train, a tram and 2 buses, personal safety seems to be pushed into the back of your mind. This time it was a woman who turned out to be lovely and she gave rides to 2 other UCSC students so we all had a nice chat on the way from the airport to Santa Cruz. One of the guys would not shut up about accounting, the financial crisis, his job offer in a big firm, and being a downright arrogant prick the whole way, saying patronising things to our driver like "Wow Tammy, that is just so awesome that you managed to keep a job and family going through 2 hard financial times in the Silicon Valley". I think the car let out a huge sigh of relief when he was dropped off.

I feel almost jet lagged at the moment, even though I have not crossed over into a different timezone. I think it is seasonal jet lag. Taking off from cold, rainy, gloomy Seattle and arriving 2 hours later in sun drenched, not-a-cloud-in-the-sky California where the temperature was 18 degrees (65 for my American readers) really messed with my system! I am not complaining, don't get me wrong, but there is something very confusing about it being January 8th and it is not beyond the realm of reason to be wearing shorts!

Since my last post more family things have been going on; restaurants, walks, endless netflix watching etc etc. We did all travel down to Portland for my brother-in-law's sisters wedding (if you follow that) which was nice. It was held at the Kennedy School (a hotel made from a converted school) which is where we all stayed for my sisters wedding 4 years ago! It is such a great place where the bars are named 'The Detention Room' and 'The Boiler Room' and all the bedrooms have a different theme and a massive blackboard along one wall which you can write on in chalk. My brother and I had the Thumbalina room:) The wedding itself was beautiful and we all ended up getting up to dance at the end. I think my brother and brother-in-law were waiting for this moment.

Apart from that, not much else has really happened. I was ill over New Year so spent the night in front of the TV, that was after attaching wire coat hangers to my sister's head so she can be Pip pi-longstocking. It was a lovely Christmas, nice and relaxing and lots of family time. I definitely did not want to leave! Though after sleeping in the lounge on a rather thin futon mattress thing for 3 weeks, I jumped into my bed at UCSC and slept like a baby for 11hours. I will miss being able to do that when classes start. Oh well, roll on 8.45am tomorrow morning when I have to be at the pool. Joy.