Archive for November, 2006

Inspiration

Posted in London, school on November 28th, 2006

A seminar discussion today focused on the need for communication between the natural sciences and the social sciences, with an emphasis on environmental policy having to be an amalgamation of the two fields. I think that, more than any other discussion so far, struck a chord with me. Many things were very uncertain to me about the program and LSE when I arrived. Some still remain uncertain. Before arriving, I hoped to be able to use my degree to work in furthering scientific knowledge in nonscientific fields, or to be able to bring closer in some way two communities that rarely make themselves understood to the other. I guess I need to read up on Kuhn’s Paradigms now, and really start thinking of the philosophy of my field in addition to the masses of reading already on the table.

That brings me to another point. I’m horrible at timetabling myself. I know I’m not stupid, at least not to the point of being unable to comprehend material at university level. I just seem to have a problem with concentrating and getting stuff done. That’s what I think, anyway. Somehow everyone else seems to buckle but not break under the course load, and do well on essays in spite of heavy partying. I seem to get nothing done under the pressure.

Am I just really bad at concentrating, leading me to waste time in the library? I’m so used to doing well in school that getting papers back with mid-range grades is disappointing and even disheartening. On the other hand, I’m even more determined to do better now, but I’m afraid my time with these essays is running out. I’m just confused about how I should go about getting back on track. What needs to change, both in the way I work and about my surroundings, to force me to work harder and get into an analytical state of mind when the situation calls for it?

I’m glad the class essays have no bearing on my final grade. However, how I do on them determines what material I have to study from come exam time, and to improve on them will take time and resources I may not have in the spring. Also, in order to form a solid foundation for further work, I should grasp these first-semester topics pretty firmly. It’s the same thing with presentations: The presentations we make for our classmates are supposed to introduce them to the complexities of the issues, and a lacking presentation will not do that, making work harder for everyone else.

In the space of two weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of showing two friends from Finland around the fine city of London. They’ve both been very short visits, but it’s frankly all I could spare even though I would have loved to do more. Good thing then that both were just stopping by. In those few days last week and the week before, I’ve realized that I have learned and do know something about London, after all. I can’t say exactly what that something is, but somehow I feel comfortable here.

This Damp Squat o’ Mine

Posted in London on November 25th, 2006

I’ve grown used to the flat by now. I no longer smell the musty smell of what is very possibly mold. I find the creaking floors funny and the single-paned window that shakes as the wind comes through just a fact of life.

I hadn’t expected it to rain in the bathroom though. There I was, minding my own business, when something began rattling right next to me. I thought bits of the roof were coming down, but instead the noise was caused by water raining down from the light fixture, down the bulb and onto the floor. Scrambling up, I turned off the lights and cursed out loud. There was quite obviously a leak from the upstairs bathroom straight through the floor to our ceiling. I ran up to tell the girl upstairs what was happening and called the landlord.

Now the question is how long I will have to enjoy taking showers in candlelight. I guess they will have to replace the entire ceiling. Where will I shower then?

Much to my surprise, I’m taking all this in stride. Sure, it’s unfortunate that I shouldn’t turn on the lights in my bathroom and the girl upstairs shouldn’t take showers until Monday, but does it really detract from the quality of my life? Not really. Sure, I hope they fix the leak so that the water damage won’t spread further into the structure of the building, and I don’t like the thought of mold in the flat, but life goes on anyway. I really don’t want to be negative about this.

Now it really hit the fan

Posted in school on November 23rd, 2006

I’ve been planning to do an essay for next Friday on pollution, another one for Monday in International Relations (probably on Globalization and why it is so hard to define), and another one for Friday the 7th of December on European integration. That would be the last day of this term. Two weeks.

I was told to do a presentation with a friend on climate change affecting the global hydrological cycle for next Thursday. Great. Not only does that mean another set of work, but it completely messes up the schedule I had going. Long days in the library are ahead, it seems. It wouldn’t be so bad if each of the articles wouldn’t take me over an hour to understand. I don’t know if I’m a slow reader or what.

Gotta love the spam

Posted in Uncategorized on November 22nd, 2006

I had no idea that people would use the following search phrases, which is why I assume spammers want to get them on blogs to raise their google rank. This is just one I stopped to read. I get plenty of these every day.

“pissgolden showerdrinking pisspantie pissingpissing pussypee picpee hergay pissman pissingmop pisspiss publichunter pisspiss sexpissing pantspiss teenfully clothed pissinggirl pee peepantie pissgirls pissinggirl pee in showergirl peeingasian pisscum pisscaught pissingpiss slutmature pisspissing toiletman pissvoyeur pissingfuck piss”
(emphasis mine)

I mean, seriously. Sheesh. Let’s see how many search engine hits I get because of this post now.

Two-month retrospective

Posted in London on November 21st, 2006

The following post is rather long, and ties up some of the entries I’ve posted in the last two months, the time I’ve lived in London. I wanted to wrap some things up and write them down for myself when I still remembered them.

Arrival at Heathrow was a breeze, as was the tube journey to central London. At that point I didn’t really mind the stifling heat and lack of air, I just wanted to be as inconspicuous a tourist as I could with all the bags. The fifty-odd minutes to Green Park were over in what seemed like minutes, as I tried to peer through the windows at the dark stations outside. Much of the journey was overground, but since it was so dark I couldn’t really make out anything. It did fit my expectations, though.

Expectations are strange. You have a set of wild, weird things you expect, usually not based on any kind of rationale but rather on anecdotes, media and even music. Mine were mostly stupid, but only in the details and weird Kai-things like sounds and music that made up the “soundtrack of London” in my head.

When I get tired, I get irritable, and tired I was at the point we changed trains at Green Park. The Victoria line was empty, which was a relief. I was wary of getting out at Brixton because of all the horror stories I had been told about the place. Besides, it was 9 p.m., hardly a time for a tourist with massive bags to hang around the place, right? After waiting for a long while for a lift that was never going to come, we took once again to the stairs, with me cursing and lugging a suitcase marked “extra heavy!” by the airline.

The ticket lounge in Brixton is a large hall, and I waited with my back against the wall next to the newsagents’ watching all the people while waiting for our flatmate to come and pick us up. Upstairs, on the street, heavy rain made looking for a cab difficult. (I had wanted to take one since carrying the bags was getting really, really annoying and I was scared of the whole Brixton thing.) So we walked, turned a corner and I instantly recognized a building sporting a headliner text. It was the Brixton Academy, a place I had wanted to visit – and I’d just run into it by half-mistake. It was events like this that repeated in the following days, coupled with “Oh, so that’s what it looks like in real life” and “That must be X” type reactions. Eventually we just took a bus, crammed inside and took it a few stops to the flat.

The smell in the apartment took some getting used to. I remember pacing from kitchen to bedroom to bathroom trying to make sense of it all. The Finnish language magnetic poetry on the fridge seemed like a message from another world. I took some words and wrote “A humble request: Buy more beer”. Settling to bed in the evening after drinking some Coke and eating some cookies bought from the Off-licence still didn’t feel like this was going to become home. Well, I’m writing this on the same bed, and two months on I’m still confused as to what to call this place.

The first few days went by in a haze of tube journeys, sandwiches, tourist attractions, bus rides and amazement. London was a lot of things, noisy, dirty and busy to start with, and ugly and intimidating pretty soon after. The intimidation faded quite quickly, though, and I don’t even think it’s that ugly anymore either. Negative feelings have faded away at some point, in the same way as thinking that the cars drove on the wrong side of the road.

It wasn’t long before I had visited the LSE campus. In those days it was quiet, standing dignified off the Aldwych. I just wanted to see the place I would be attending, but didn’t really have any business there. It was all just a lot of hanging around, really, taking in the sights and doing the “must-do’s” that didn’t require massive investments. Oh, and spending an entire day going to Ikea, buying basics and coming back stomachs full of Swedish meatballs served by Polish girls.

In some ways, it took me an embarrassingly long time to go to a pub, probably over a week after arriving. More embarrassingly, it wasn’t even a good pub, but a rather large, high-ceilinged hall of a pub in Brixton, the Goose. No matter, though, I’ve had plenty of experience after that. The Goose wasn’t all bad, don’t get me wrong. It just wasn’t very intimate – not that I’d want to get intimate with the clientele there anyway.

A little over a week after I had arrived, I met up with some people I only knew through the web. We went to a pub, then bowling, and then had food at Shish. Wanting to catch the tube home and not risk the night buses (which are great, I just didn’t feel too familiar with the geography yet) we left before the night was really over, but I hope to meet up with them again soon.

I’ve written about how I felt the first days at school. Prior to the start of term, I went to a welcoming party that wasn’t very welcoming. I stood with beer in hand, alone for most of the night. I really felt out of place among the people, most of whom were younger than I was, and who largely knew each other from living in halls of residence. A few good souls talked to me, and I’m still in contact with some of them. A rocky start, maybe, but the way has become easier.

I’ve grown used to the LSE now in many ways. It still doesn’t feel like I’m actually here for three years. For this academic year maybe, as an exchange student, but certainly not for two and a half more years from now. It almost doesn’t feel like the normal state of affairs, but rather some anomaly. This must be some recurring theme in my experience here, as the established state of affairs just doesn’t want to become the norm in my brain. I go to lectures every day, and I’ve talked about my “routine” of spending time in the library, even at the weekend, but in some weird way I’m nowhere near as used to this as I remember being in Helsinki.

It could be because the (re)adjustment to life in Finland came a few years before adjustment to going to university. Here they both came at once, and are both quite different from what I’m used to.

Significantly though, life is really no different here than anywhere else. Life goes on in its own way, and though there are some minor differences, by and large there’s no change. I’ve learned a lot of general life stuff, from not buying a SIM card for a phone from a shop that seems dodgy (I did, and the guy tried to swindle me out of £10) to carrying three full pint glasses at a time to the table.

Thanks for sticking around to the end of this post, as well as through my ramblings so far. I know I have a couple regular readers, and some on-and-off ones as well.

To finish with, here are some things I appreciate about living in London. I intend to compile some sort of “Things I like” list sometime soon and put it up separately.

  • Polite people on buses and on the street. If you want to get past by someone, you say excuse me. If you bump into someone on the street, both parties apologize. It becomes second nature, and the Finnish way seems pretty brutish.
  • Afternoon newspapers that are honestly different in content from the morning newspapers.
  • The labeling on buses as well as traffic information at stops. The night bus network.
  • People are generally very accessible. If you want to talk to someone in a bus or a pub, you can but you don’t have to. No one will think you’re weird though.
  • Rounds in pubs
  • Abbot Ale