Birmingham....
the moment for which we've all been waiting. Or at least, me.
So, this is going to be incoherent because I've been running around and I'll have to go to dinner in a bit--a couple minutes, actually-- and I'm still jet-lagged, but I just wanted to say that I'm in Birmingham, and I love it. It's international student Welcome Week--the real thing doesn't start for another 'fortnight' as they say here -- and, btw, I'm using single quotes because my keyboard doesn't have double quotes. How weird and British! :) They actually do say 'fortnight!' It's not just a Victorian thing! This makes me rather happy.
So, I bet you thought you'd hear some actual news. Well, you were wrong. Oh, all right. My flight went well-- I'd actually planned to have the 8-hr layover in Chicago, and all my flights were on time. I read The Historian in the airport and loved it. It was the perfect book for this kind of thing. I recommend it pretty highly. It's kind of like The DaVinci Code except I actually know a small amount about the scholarship it's based on, and I like it. And I guess it is more like real research than The DaVinci Code, which involved less time in libraries and more time in airplanes. But the pacing is great, particularly towards the end. I had a hard time putting it down to go to sleep on the plane.
And the campus here is gorgeous! It's got a lot of greenspace, which surprised me cause it's in the second-largest city in England, and it's got lots of architectural variety, but the main buildings are red brick, as in the phrase red-brick university, the alternative to Oxford and Cambridge, of which Bham was the first. It was founded in 1900, and has nearly 30,000 students. Several people asked me that before I left, and I didn't know, but I do now.
Pictures will follow; I haven't gotten my digital camera out or my network set up in my room.
More later!
the moment for which we've all been waiting. Or at least, me.
So, this is going to be incoherent because I've been running around and I'll have to go to dinner in a bit--a couple minutes, actually-- and I'm still jet-lagged, but I just wanted to say that I'm in Birmingham, and I love it. It's international student Welcome Week--the real thing doesn't start for another 'fortnight' as they say here -- and, btw, I'm using single quotes because my keyboard doesn't have double quotes. How weird and British! :) They actually do say 'fortnight!' It's not just a Victorian thing! This makes me rather happy.
So, I bet you thought you'd hear some actual news. Well, you were wrong. Oh, all right. My flight went well-- I'd actually planned to have the 8-hr layover in Chicago, and all my flights were on time. I read The Historian in the airport and loved it. It was the perfect book for this kind of thing. I recommend it pretty highly. It's kind of like The DaVinci Code except I actually know a small amount about the scholarship it's based on, and I like it. And I guess it is more like real research than The DaVinci Code, which involved less time in libraries and more time in airplanes. But the pacing is great, particularly towards the end. I had a hard time putting it down to go to sleep on the plane.
And the campus here is gorgeous! It's got a lot of greenspace, which surprised me cause it's in the second-largest city in England, and it's got lots of architectural variety, but the main buildings are red brick, as in the phrase red-brick university, the alternative to Oxford and Cambridge, of which Bham was the first. It was founded in 1900, and has nearly 30,000 students. Several people asked me that before I left, and I didn't know, but I do now.
Pictures will follow; I haven't gotten my digital camera out or my network set up in my room.
More later!
posted by L @ 6:03 PM
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