/travel/oxford/More Oxford
H'lo Canada!
(I've added a few more people to the list. As always, let me know if you don't like these impersonal mass-emails. :-) )
Stuff continues to go well here. Today, I took _Catch 22_, _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ and _Lolita_ from the liberry here to continue my spate of edification through literature. The tosser (that's british for 'bastard,' don'tchaknow. [well, not literally, but..]) that has _Godel, Escher, Bach_ didn't return it on time.
We went to Cardiff the weekend before last. I saw my very first castle, and we took a tour of these totally extravagantly decorated victorian rooms..Seemed to be a nice city, but we only had about 24 hours there since we had a ride in with my boss and that's all he was staying for. We also went to the welsh national museum, and paid for this star trek exhibit that turned out to be aimed at 12 year olds. Oh well. :-)
In a couple of weeks, we're going to Manchester & Liverpool and taking a day off work to do so. Not sure what other tourism is up our collective sleeves.
I have a new roommate, a chinese chap. Every morning he spends about 3 minutes horking up phlegm in the washroom. It's not really pleasant. He also smokes, and has loud guests over late which is annoying. But my housing is now tolerable enough, so I plan on staying there until the end, probably.
Cycling is going well -- I automatically go to the wrong ("left") side of the road now. They also flip the brakes here, so the front brakes are on the right. I figured that out before it was a big deal, but I still sometimes slam on the wrong brakes. Now I can't decide to flip them back or not. It's been snowing here a bit, which is unusual. Cold and not fun to cycle in, but not a big deal.
I also got paid, and refunded for my flights, so I have money again, which is nice, since I was borrowing money from Caroline to get along (My bank card didn't work when I got here. I think I said that in my last email. My pin was 7 digits, and it's only cool to have 4 digits.)
Food situation is getting better here...They have this stuff called "quorn" that's a delicious (non-vegan) vegetarian fake meat. It's delicious. Best meat-on-a-bun-type-product I've had in two years. It's made from some local fungus thing...mmm..fungus.
Work is goin well. My job is more interesting now. I have nothing further to add to that. :-)
Last but not least, I've been acclaimed as the Math/Co-op representative on Waterloo's student council...which is good, since it's really hard to campaign from here. It's a little too bad I'm not on campus this year for our Federation of Students election, since this is the first year that I really know all the players and have a good sense of what's going on. Well worth it, though. Maybe I'll run for a real position next year...
So, all's quite well and fairly interesting. Hope everything's going well for everybody across the pond!
Cheers, Rob
