Guy Fawkes Day/Bonfire Night

Ah, Guy Fawkes Day.

Considering that this English holiday celebrates the 1605 plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament in protest to the Catholic king, I'm not surprised by any of what I saw, in retrospect. Rather than try to explain it all again, though, I'll just paste in my journal entry from the night and tack on a handful of videos from the night.

Turn your speakers up as loud as they'll go and you'll maybe experience half of the ridiculous amount and level of noise present in the streets that night. It was absolutely deafening. Crazy.

OGGIE OGGIE OGGIE!

OY! OY! OY!

“Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.”

Coolest English experience I've had to date. Surplus of videos to come. Here's my explanation of the night that I has with Megs over AIM.

how was Guy Fawkes celebrating?!

Fun!
COMPLETELY MENTAL.
The whole sky's rumbling right now still.
It's their fireworks night.
And literally bonfire.
HUGE BONFIRES.
They burn effigies of people.
And denounce Catholics.
And shout things like BURN THE POPE!
And BURN IT! BURN IT ALL!
It's really amusing.
And... confusing.
I don't think I'll ever get it more than I do now.
They have groups that go in costume...
All different Bonfire Societies, usually with a theme.
There are the Mongols, and pirates. Brass bands, a Trojan horse, Moorish dancers, Jedis with lightsabres. People in blackface, and people in blackface as African tribes, and people in Catholic pope/priest/holy wear, and Native Americans they a-a-a-a-a at, and WWII uniforms.
It's like the least Politically Correct event of all time.
They burn giant crosses, and big effigies of Guy Fawkes, as well as whomever they're malcontent with including Gordon Brown this year and the meter maids, George Bush the last.
OH. The most bizarre costume, in my opinion: UNION SOLDIERS from the American Civil War.
It was... yeah... I don't even know.
Really fun.
CRAZY FUN.
Barbarian fun!

First Few Days Catch-Up

First day as US. The light is pretty intensely bright here. It's cold and blinding, actually, as far as color and intensity, but it's lovely.


The first morning I was here I looked out my window and saw a big bunny hopping across that pad of pavement outside my dorm window. I caught him just as he jumped into the bushes here.

Anyhow, a quick update on what I've been up to the last few days.

I first arrived here on Friday morning and have basically just been getting set up for the term. Friday was spent putting my room together and reading; Saturday was spent shopping for a few homeware items I forgot to bring with me, attending a welcome meeting, attending an awkward alcohol-involved mixer between our professors, US staff, and all of us in the Sussex in September (SiS) program, and reading; and Sunday was spent doing the same. Lots of time spent navigating the bus system, lots of time spent reading because the internet wasn't made available until yesterday evening.

Monday was a completely different experience, though. We went to the grocery at the Marina in Brighton, right at the edge of the sea, and we found out it was a two-story store that still used shopping carts. Intrigued, my friend and I grabbed a cart and ran around trying to find the lift area. Failing that, we had to ask and the woman working there informed us the escalators were right around the corner of the entrance. We looked at our cart and asked if we had to do separate transactions between floors and the returned look was a quizzical one until she realized it was our first time in such a store. She assured us we'd be fine once we got over there so we trusted her. When we got there we sure were surprised -- the British are surely mechanical geniuses! And okay, don't ruin the magic for me… another friend told me that they have these type of escalators in the States, but I've never seen one, so it was really cool! Behold the genius of a shopping cart escalator:



It just locks the wheels right in there, the cart's can't move, and it takes you right up. Convenient and cool! I was impressed, obviously.

We ended up getting all of our grocery shopping done by noon and that left me the perfect amount of time to run to IT services to enable my internet, which would have been perfect except I was drawn into a battle with a Seagull From Hell.

Ok, ok, it wasn’t that interesting, I guess, but I was eating a granola bar on my way across the campus, walking on the paved path and minding my own business when all of a sudden I hear one loud woosh and a nanosecond later I feel wings hitting the back and crown of my head, then a sharp, hot cratch down my face, then it's gone. This seagull apparently decided he wanted my granola bar but instead of grabbing that, which was somewhere between my mouth and my waist, he decided he'd try to affix himself to my head. I turned around to look at the damned bird and he had landed not 20 feet away and was watching me, and as I walked away, glaring at him, he followed me, for a good 50 feet until I made a sweeping motion at him.

I came back and documented my assault:



The important thing here, though, is that the bird didn't get my granola bar.

Also, I am epicly brave and a heroic seagull battler. Just so you know.

A battle against a pen, though? That didn't go so well. I have effectively lost a pair of pants and a thermal shirt now because a pen I just bought broke and spilled all over them. Ugh. That's how my dad started today.

But today was also my first day of class, which went well enough. It was pretty dull, nothing I haven't already heard since it was an introduction to YA Lit., but I really like the instructor. I have tons more reading to do tonight, especially because I have a presentation tomorrow morning at 9AM on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, so I guess this it from me for now. Until next time!