I already knew that the Brit's don't do crisps... potato chips... whatever... the way we North Americans do. But some of their ideas don't sound all bad - cheedar and onion flavor... that sort of thing. I still haven't been able to bring myself to try the ever-present "prawn cocktail" flavor that all brands of chips here seem to sell like... I don't know... BBQ or Sour Cream and Onion back home. But I stumbled upon, like, a 'premium' version of Walkers crisps in the grocery store. And this particular flavor is "Oven Roasted Chicken and Thyme". Intriguing. I like chicken. I like roast chicken. I like thyme. I like potato chips. But would I like them all together?

The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is yes. While the flavor is quite salty, it's also ridiculously yummy, and I'm afraid now for my own sanity. I only bought a tiny snack-snized bag, and they're so good I just want more... More! MORE!!!

Yes, that's right folks, I have my life back. The sad, sad life that it is, but it's back. My computer came home yesterday evening, and as a result, I now have my stereo, DVD player, and everything else that I cherish in life, including the ability to download obscure journal articles from online databases without having to pay about 15 cents per page printing/photocopying. Yes, that's right, 15 cents a page is about what it works out to when you figure in the conversion and all that. To print. And photocopy. I'm buying myself a printer/scanner/copier this weekend. It'll hurt in the beginning, but save money in the long run.

That being said, I also managed to upload several of my photos - they're online at the KODAK Gallery... but just to give you a taste, here are a couple of my favorites:

Is very much like Alberta weather, in the sense that if you wait 20 minutes, it's bound to change. Take today for example. At 11 it was sunny. Bright and sunny in fact. Calm, bright and sunny. I would have gone outside and just sat in the sunlight if I could find a patch of grass the ducks and geese hadn't shat on (disadvantage of having lake in the middle of campus, and literally 20 feet from my front door). 11:30. Things are looking grey. The wind has picked up. 12:20 - it begins to pour. Not just kinda, but really. I'm in the computer lab, and I feel drops of rain from the open window behind me. And now it's 12:30, and although it's still quite windy, the downpour seems to have stopped, and there's actually some blue sky out there to the west.

Go figure.

So the lovely Toshiba repair people call today. Yup. That's right. My bloody f*cking keyboard is on bloody f*cking backorder and they have no real idea how bloody f*cking long it's going to take.

F**K!!!! I want my computer back!!!!!!

Ah, the joy of IKEA. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed my IKEA furniture and accessories - cheap, but stylish and damn comfy - until I went to IKEA yesterday. The Overseas Students Association trip to Leeds was fairly well-organized. Well, it would have been, if only most of the overseas students understood instructions in English. There were four busloads of people - 200 people-ish, the vast majority of which were Chinese. I learned later there is a Chinese market in Leeds. Only about 50 of us went to IKEA, but those of us who went had a great time.

There were some things I NEEDED - baskets to organize my room (KASSETT style, and some others), a laundry bag (went with BULLA...), some things I could really use - a coffee pot (one of those fun ones with the plunger that you can use for coffee or tea (KAFFE), an alarm clock (I had one, but it beeped every hour and drove me nuts, and didn't beep loud enough to wake me up), a cutting board, a lamp (SKYAR! Like I had back home! I hate fluorescent lights, and three guesses as to what the light above my desk is), and some stuff that was definitely a splurge - new bedding (TANJA - to get away from the institutional-esque stuff that the university provided me with), a throw (POLARVIDE) to keep me warm, and a stuffed tiger. I needed some company in bed at night.

So. Spent about two hours at IKEA, and then got to spend a couple of hours in Leeds City Centre. Had no idea what to go and see, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, some of the ladies at an online community to which I quasi-belong (it's a fansite, just to warn you all, for the author Diana Gabaldon) were able to provide me with some suggestions. I was told to go see the Corn Exchange, and to see the Royal Armoury, which has recently been moved up from the Tower of London. Unfortunately, I had made the mistake (?) of chatting with an American girl earlier in the day and then felt obligated by politeness to not abandon her in the middle of an unfamiliar city. And she wanted to go shopping, not be a tourist. Fine. Went into a couple of shops with her. Even bought jogging pants (which I _did_ in fact actually use today) and a polar fleece hoodie (ostensibly to go jogging in when it's cold, but I'm wearing it as a regular top today anyway). But towards the end of our time there, I insisted on seeing one or the other. We looked at the tourist signposts, and the Corn Exchange was a little closer.

I really had no idea what to expect. I had been told it had a bunch of quirky shops and that there was a fairly strong goth culture in the area. I assumed it was a street or something. Wrong. It is a building. A HUGE building. It's kind of oval in shape, with three levels, and on each level is a concourse around a middle open area (think... like... middle areas of shopping malls where you can see down to the floor below). But this building is old! It's got these ornate wrought-iron staircases from one level to the next, and ... oh... I wish I could post the picture I took of it. Stupid stupid laptop in the shop. Dammit. But, anyway, around the oval there are TONS of little shops, and she was right, some of them are fairly quirky (an entire shop devoted to condoms?!?!), but there are also some booths with beautiful handmade goods that are fun and funky. And I was actually surprised by the lack of gothyness. I didn't look totally out of place in my jeans and my powder-blue sweatshirt. Yay!

So today, I went to one of York's tourist attractions. I don't have a lot to do besides readings for school, which is nice, so I went on a bit of an excursion into town. Anywho. I went to Jorvik, which is the Viking Centre in York, where you're supposed to be able to meet real, live Vikings in a real historic setting and all that. Fun, right? Good times? Costumed interpreters... Viking history... ya know.

Warning: If you think you might ever go to Jorvik and don't want any potential surprises spoiled, stop here.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Holy crap I am _SO_ unbelievably thankful for what we had at FEP. Should you have attempted to do the conversion, I spent about $14 (Student rate!) to be greeted by a sort of 'mad scientist' figure, who really wasn't all that 'mad' - he was actually quite a nice British chap, an older gentleman, probably retired. We proceeded to go into this 'time machine', (benches in a room with a screen at the front and some fun lighting effects around it) and then to go 'back in time' (think... much tamer version of the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios) and end up in 975 AD. The door opens, and you're herded down a hallway where you're greeted by... a Jorvik employee in their standard 2005 AD-issue red polo shirt, who seats you in a lovely little roller-coaster-car-type-thing, with speakers in the headrest, and basically you're taken on a 'tour' of the Viking village (in your choice of five languages - just choose from the panel in front of you!). Illusion effectively completely ruined.

It was fairly standard - as you go drifting slowly by in your thoroughly modernized mechanized conveyance, you get to see a leather worker's shop, a wood carver, a blacksmith's (although only the outside), a family home... all populated by... yes... Mannequins. Some even with little automated bits. The poor wood carver was condemned to turn a lathe for all eternity, back and forth, back and forth, never quite getting to actually shape anything... Kinda Sisyphus-esque. I did take a couple of pictures, but without my computer, I have no way of getting them onto this post, I'm afraid.

Perhaps the most intriguing bit of historical interpretation was created by attempting to reproduce the smells of a Viking settlement in 975 AD. Much as I LOVE to smell someone shitting on a 10th century toilet, it certainly didn't make me want to come back to Jorvik at any time in the near future. Nor did the stuffed animals posed in various positions of mid-movement fixity - a cat leaping off of a roof, a dog pissing in a corner. And I wasn't a big fan of the animatronic chickens. Nope. Not at all.

About 10 minutes later, your ride is done. You've passed through the tiny village, and there's nothing left to see. I still haven't seen a live Viking by this point, nor have I been able to communicate with anyone about any of the things I've seen. This entire site is supposedly based on an archaeological excavation that took place in the late 70s and early 80s, so good on them for attempting to bring the past 'to life'... if you can call that life... but I digress.

So the ride is over, you get out, and you're back in the present all of a sudden (not even some strobe lights or sound effects to mark the change! I felt gipped!), and you're herded yet again into a room with modern museum-style exhibits - glass cases and all that - showing some of the actual artifacts from the dig. Labeled? Not really. A case would have maybe a dozen or two items in it, and the only real information to go with it would be a general description... like "Bone. Bone was used to make combs, blahblahblahblah". So you didn't actually know what any of the stuff in the cases was. And was there anyone to ask? Nope. Oh, and periodically, the lights would come up in part of the display case, and you'd see 'someone' (yes, more mannequins) at work with the tools displayed in the rest of the case.

In the next room, I saw my first Viking. 3rd person from the moment you walked in - but how could he be in first when he was surrounded by modern amenities? Granted, you were in a room teaching you how to do Viking crafts, and I should have realized by this point that the target age for this attraction is probably 8-10 years old, but nonetheless, the promise that I was going to meet 'real, live Vikings' was looking more an more like an empty promise, nothing but words.

The next room was a 'be an archaeologist' sort of a room. Again, an 8-10 year old would probably have been fascinated. I, on the other hand, can't be bothered sifting through rubble that other boogery 8-year-old hands have sifted through in order to find the piece of 'bone'. They did have one interesting thing in this room, though - a skeleton, and they had labeled all the wounds and medical information that was available by looking at the bones. I once considered going into forensic anthro, so this was actually really interesting. Poor guy went through a lot - wounds all over the flipping place!

I met my 'next' Viking on the way out. But he seemed so sullen and dull and bored and completely uninterested in his job that I couldn't bring myself to ask the one real question that I had - there's lots of archaeological evidence for shoes - they actually found shoes at the site, but what about clothes? Clothes generally don't survive that long, so I was wondering how they figured out how to clothe all those mannequins. My curiosity will never be sated.

Oy.

But, hey, I bought a mobile phone today, and found the La Senza in town, and set up a bank account, so it wasn't an entire waste of a day. But I could really use those 45 minutes back. *sigh*

I don't know if it was random so much, but...

So I got home from school yesterday, and was putting some stuff away in our kitchen. One of the other girls, from China, was in there making something.

Now, for a bit of background, my flatmates are mostly great. When I see/interact with them, that is. It's like a bunch of dorm rooms in Schaffer (sorry, Nicky, can't figure out how to do the umlaut on blogger), whose doors close automatically, with no common lounge area... so really we just share a kitchen. They all seem really nice, but with the exception of 1 other woman (out of 6 of us!), no-one is from an English-speaking country. Well, maybe the Ugandan, but if she's speaking English on the phone, it's with such a heavy accent I can't understand it. As such, they do what all foreign students EVERYWHERE tend to do - hang out with "their own kind". Which is great. Nice to have someone that understands your language and culture, right? But I sometimes feel like my kitchen has been invaded by the Chinese embassy, as my Chinese flatmates tend to cook for ALL their friends at least once a week - I gather they sort of go on rotation.

But back to the story. I'm putting stuff away. I'm coughing. I'm asthmatic - it's what we do, especially after we've just booted it back across campus in the attempt to minimize time away from the phone (I was praying Toshiba would call... still no word from them though - but my phone did ring the other morning - but when I got to it to pick it up, it stopped. Bugger). But Jacquie (Jing is her real name) looks up at me with an expression of concern and asks if I would like to try some pear soup (which turns out to be really sweet - lots of icing sugar in it). This comes out of nowhere, and I must have looked completely flabbergasted, because she goes on to explain, in her cute broken English, that pear soup is a sort of Chinese home remedy for coughs and colds, and it just happens to be what she's making at the moment. Now, the sharing of the soup isn't what touched me. Sharing food is one thing, but she went on with her explanation. Her parents, she said, used to make pear soup whenever anyone was feeling sick. It's a childhood memory for her. I felt extremely privileged to be let into such a private moment, and to share in that particular memory - especially coming from someone from (forgive me for creating/perpetuating stereotypes) that part of the world: they don't tend to be the most emotionally open people I've encountered.

But now I'm off to - get this - the York Colleges Guild of bell ringers. They have a handbell group, and since I used to dabble in ringing when I was in high school (I play a mean four-in-hand!), I figured I'd give it another shot. And it'll get me out at least one night a week... although having to walk into that pre-formed group all by my lonesome scares the hell out of me. And, should I feel the strange desire to do so, I can wander into a centuries-old church on Thursdays and ring the giant bells in the spire there. Cool!

Gotta run!