Socks

So I was talking to my mother the other day, (she IMs me on Skype every few days, mostly to ask what I've been eating lately, I'm not sure why) and I mentioned that I keep having to do laundry because I run out of socks. My mother promptly responded, "When I was in grad school, I knew a girl who had 50 pairs of underwear so that she wouldn't have to do laundry as often," which, in her own special language, means, "Go buy some socks, you stupid girl!" (In retrospect, I really hope the 50 pairs of underwear girl wasn't my mother.)

Therefore, yesterday I went out to buy socks.

If I were in America, and I needed socks, I would go directly to Target, buy two packs of white cushioned ankle socks, and be on my merry way. Therefore, it seemed logical to go to Woolworth's, which was the only Target-equivalent store I could think of.

No socks. Maybe, I thought, British people just don't wear socks?

I wandered bewilderedly about for a while, and then had a thought. Maybe they keep their socks in shoe stores! I wouldn't buy socks in a shoe store in America, but what the heck. And they did have socks, but they were only in children's sizes. I have big feet, so that wasn't going to work. It wasn't a children's shoe store, so I really don't know what that was about. Okay, I thought, maybe only British children wear socks?

I had another thought, and went to an athletic store. They had socks! In packages! But I picked one up, and the price made my jaw drop. Okay, only British children and very rich people wear socks.

I still don't have any more socks. And, as though they sense my predicament, all the socks I brought from America are developing holes. It's kind of shameful. I'll go back tomorrow and try once more for socks. Any suggestions?

Things That Still Unsettle Me

Dumping out my change purse this afternoon to see if I had enough money in it to do laundry tomorrow and get ice cream this evening without going to the bank. I do. In fact, going by the current exchange rate, I have about $30 in there. I'm not used to coins actually being worth so much.

Laundry. Back home I do laundry with reckless extravagance. In the summers, when I was staying at the coast house and it was hot and there was no air conditioning, I would change my clothes 4 times a day - go running, shower, put on pajamas, sleep, get up, get dressed, go for a walk, change out of sweaty clothes, shower again, put on another set of clothes, lounge around, put on running clothes again. I did a lot of laundry. Here, it costs $4 to run each washing machine, and $2 to run the dryer. The machines are tiny. I blow about $12 every wash day. (Currency converted for your convenience.) Needless to say, I have begun to resort to the dreaded sniff test for items such as sweatshirts, instead of just throwing them in like I would at home.

The peanut butter. I do not have the words, but I'll try. It's oily. It's bitter. It has mysterious flecks of wrongness in it. When you try to scoop it out of the jar, it oozes back off the knife. I have already Skyped home and begged my mother for Skippy.

I have, for the most part, gotten used to the way British people speak. I've never been one of those people that could imitate accents, so I have resigned myself to getting more and more annoyed with the nasalness of my own voice and the way I don't pronounce my t's. However, I am never going to get used to the way they spell artifact as "artefact." As you can imagine, I have to look at this spelling a lot, too. I complained about it to one of my British acquaintances and even she admitted that "artefact" looks completely wrong. Seriously, I can kind of understand your shoving extra vowels in anywhere, and I can ignore your "aluminium" weirdness, but why change the spelling of "artifact?"

The weather. I used to try to check the weather on the BBC site every morning, but it lies through its lying little teeth. Really, I'm not sure anyone could predict the weather here anyway. It rains out of sunny skies. Or the weather site will say "heavy rain" for the day, and there will be 5 minutes of drizzle and then sunshine all day. Or the site will say "sunny intervals" and it will begin to hail, as it has been doing this entire afternoon. I just don't know. I have at least learned to always carry an umbrella (you can buy them in the vending machines, too.)

Dear Mr. Book Man,

Please, for the love of all that is good and right in this world, stop setting up your book sale in the building I have to pass through to get to the rest of campus. I realize that this is shrewd marketing on your part, but I'm begging you to stop. You see, strange things happen to me around books. The first week I was here, I was walking into town in search of a power strip and a working alarm clock, and WH Smith sucked me in and I bought seven books all at once. (There is actually a reason why this is not as insane and irresponsible as it seemed, but I'm not going to share it here.) That same week, I went to the Free Stuff giveaway for international students in the hopes of scoring some shampoo or something, and I got two books instead. (They were free, but this is not the point.) Last week, I had my birthday, and I experienced that peculiar gravitational warp I always seem to get around large amounts of books. I got sucked into a Waterstone's and ended up with three more books (two of them were just terrible, too. I struggled along for about a hundred pages, and then, once the author had described the heroine's eyes as "flashing" for the third time on a single page, I quit in disgust and fled back to my battered copy of Fire Watch that I brought from home. "Chick Lit for the thinking woman," my ass.) And I have shamelessly used the "textbook" excuse to score four more books from the campus Blackwell's. And, just last week, I walked past your shameful display, and the gravitational warp set in again. A book on William the Conqueror leapt off your shelf and into my hands, and a banknote soared out of my bag in your direction. It was all over before I even knew what was happening, and I don't think it's quite fair.

All told, I have acquired seventeen books since I got here. I didn't mean to do that. It's perfectly fine to acquire books when I'm at home; my parents grumble a bit, but they only own four bookcases between them and leave books strewn over every vertical surface in the house, including the kitchen counter, so they don't have any real grounds for complaint. I still have room in my bookshelves. BUT THESE BOOKSHELVES ARE BACK IN NEW JERSEY. You know, that place way the heck over there? That it costs me $1 to mail postcards to? And I'm only allowed two pieces of luggage when I go back there, and the two I brought over were already nearly twice the permitted weight? Yeah. I only meant to buy textbooks if it was absolutely necessary, and to get the rest of my reading material from one of the two libraries I have finagled access to. See how well that worked out for me? And it's only been three and a half weeks. AND YOU ARE NOT HELPING.

In conclusion: stop it. Stop it immediately. Go away and take your books with you. You are not welcome here.

Love,

Antares.

PS - I realize it's been a while since I've posted here. I've had some problems with my Blogger account. I was having problems with some of my university accounts, and these obviously took precedence. So, I'm sorry for leaving you hanging, but not all that sorry. I'll try to be back more regularly.

Weather

So, I'm being a little slow to learn about British weather. Yesterday it drizzled on and off all day. Whatever, New Jersey is like that a lot. Today? Wow. There was sun in the morning. There was sun when I got out of my first seminar. There was sun all the way up to the point where I sat down on a bench, extracted my sandwich and a book from my bag, and started to eat, and then suddenly, from out of nowhere, there was a downpour. What the hell?

Then it happened again this evening. I said to myself, "It's nice out there. I'll take another walk to the library and poke around some more." I spent a pleasant 10 minutes wandering through all my favorite sections (I made a note to come back for that book on Aging in Ancient Egypt) and then I walked out again straight into a downpour. Of course, I didn't have an umbrella. Why would I have an umbrella? I was only warned to always carry an umbrella about nine million times.

Apparently this is perfectly normal for England. During my second seminar, the woman talking to us said "We've already had sun, clouds and rain today. We even had sun and rain at the same time. We haven't had snow yet, but it's only 2:00 pm, so there's plenty of time." Okay. Never forget the umbrella. I get it already.

Another thing I'm having problems with is walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk. If I'm walking, and someone is walking towards me in the opposite direction, my first instinct is to move over to my right-hand side. Unfortunately, the British move to their left-hand side. It's the same thing with doors - entrance is usually to the left, and the exit is to the right, when my instinct is to go the other way. My dad also warned me a couple of hundred times to look the opposite way when crossing the street - cars come at you first from the right, not the left - and this is a huge problem for me. I have obviously not been run over yet, but I always forget.

I'm working on it. Still no signs of real culture shock, though, just little irritating things like this. I keep waiting to see if it's all going to drop down on my head right when I have to start classes. So far, I've had less trouble than I did adjusting to California. How sad is that?