Ramblings of Naiveté

Since I’m too sleepy to do actually do anything productive (like read articles for my psychology essay), this will be a blog about how things are different here in England than in the US. Plus, Jonathan has been bugging me to post something new… but hopefully he won’t make a comment about it that will upset me later. >:[

This blog may end up sounding like a rant, but I’m going to try my best not to make it so. I have come to realize, yet again, that the process of adjusting to a new place/country takes much longer than a few weeks or even a few months. It’s even more difficult because I do feel the most alone than I have in… ever, I guess. Back in the states, I always had close friends and/or family somewhat nearby and I was in the same time zone as them, so it was easy to have long phone conversations when I needed them. Now, I’m getting my first taste of really being on my own and I feel like I’m failing at it because I’m not always ecstatic about being here. I want to be able to constantly appreciate being here, but it’s kind of difficult sometimes. Talking to Mike just now, I realized that I’ve always been content with where I was living up until now. I was never bored of home or felt stuck in a suburb… and I had no qualms with being in SD. So, it’s very different for me to be somewhat disgruntled about living here… it makes me feel ungrateful. I know that I’m still adjusting to life here, but I honestly don’t know if I’ll have completely adjusted even by the time leave. Hopefully I do come to appreciate Brighton (and England in general) a little bit more by then, though, because it really is a fun and unique place to live in. Anyway, I went on a little tangent and now I’ll list out some differences of living in England versus the US.

The most obvious… the weather

In SD, we get AMAAAZING weather. Sometimes campus will be foggy and cool while everywhere else is sunny or sometimes the day will start off cloudy and end up being really warm, but at least the weather is mild and has a pattern (most of the time). Here, the weather is, for the most part, pretty unpredictable. The forecast may tell me that it’s cloudy in the morning and then gets a bit sunnier for the rest of the day, but it does not tell me that it might rain randomly in the late afternoon and then get really windy at night. Thankfully, it hasn’t rained a whole lot yet, but the rumour (British spelling!) is that it is supposed to snow in a few weeks. We’ll see if that happens… I’m kind of hoping that it will because I like snow. :D I just don’t think I’ll like traveling 2 hours by bus to school in snow… But my commute to school is a different story. Getting back to weather, it’s just colder, windier, and more cloudy here. Apparently, umbrellas are useless because the wind is so strong, so I’m going to have to purchase more hoodies soon…

Fashion

What’s funny, though, is that people are so used to the cold weather that they don’t have to wear that many layers of clothing. Girls are often seen wearing leggings skirts with tights underneath and a sweater or a jacket. I wonder if they’re used to it because they have to wear skirts as part of their uniforms when they’re younger. Guys are a bit different in that they wear really nice jackets here and jeans most of the time. Another thing that I’ve noticed is that people dye their hair a lot more here… at least in Brighton, and it’s not so that the dye looks like natural hair color. People dye their hair pink, purple, black, blue, blonde, etc. A girl in my psychology seminar actually dyed her hair over the weekend from a brown to a black color. I think that the different fashion and hair styles here are evidence to how different people are here. They can be a lot more uninhibited than I initially thought of British people and that’s definitely shown around the city centre at night since people are packed into pubs or walking around carrying beer cans and wine bottles. Speaking of pubs, another small difference that has nothing to do with fashion, is that people drink quite often here. Pubs open in the afternoon and people can be found drinking as early as 3pm and as late as 3am. On night buses (even on a Monday), students can also be found drunken and loud on their way to pubs in the city centre. While it’s a bit unusual and amusing for me to see, locals here are completely used to it and mind their own business. Going out to pubs and public drunkeness is part of the culture here and as long as people don’t get too sick in the streets, everyone else is okay with it. Now, since I mentioned buses…

Transportation

A lot of people use public transportation here- students, working people, and retired citizens. In London, the tube is packed throughout the day and trains are coming and going every couple of minutes. Here in Brighton, we just have a vast bus system but sometimes it’s very unpredictable. The frequency of some buses are pretty good, but others aren’t so great. The ones going to the universities are 24 hour and come every 5-10 minutes, which is really nice.. but unfortunately, I have to take two buses and I’m very restricted with how late I can stay out. Because I live in a homestay that’s approximately 6 miles away from campus, I have to take a bus into the city town centre, and then take another bus to campus. The bus I have to take into town center travels from 6am-11:30pm and doesn’t travel as often as the 24 hour buses. At best, there are about 4 buses that come by within an hour. Also, the buses are known for not coming on time and I’ve waited a half hour for a bus before… it was not fun. It also takes me about 1.5 hours once I’m on the first bus to get to campus, so I travel for a while each day. Because of this, I always leave for campus 2 hours before I have my first class, which means I’ve been waking up at 6 or 7am every day I have class. Having a commute and waking up so early is very different for me because everyone that knows me well, knows that I like to sleep a LOT and that I don’t like waking up early unless I really have to. Now, I really have to wake up early and it’s actually been okay so far. I get tired later during the day, but tea usually helps to wake me up. That, or the icy cold weather will do it. :P

Education and assessments

Now, I’m not exactly sure how the education system works around here, but I do know that they have primary school, secondary school, college, and then university level education here instead of elementary school, middle school, high school, and college. When talking with my aunt that lives in northern England, I found out that kids take at least 10+ classes throughout their educational lives up until college level where they start to pick out which areas they like to study the most. It’s not until then that they have less classes, but once they narrow down which subjects they want to study, they take A-level exams that help them to decide what they want to focus on at university. Once they reach university, they’re only studying one subject and surprisingly, they don’t have that much class at all. Here, it’s normal for a university student to have classes only 2-3 days out of the week for a few hours because a lot of individual study time is expected to occur during the rest of the week. They have a lot of reading here for any subject and students complete those on their own time. A lot of the academics here are self-planned and self-motivated. The first year (out of the 3 years spent at university getting a degree) doesn’t even count towards the degree at the end, but my level 1 class (full of 1st years) is the fullest lecture that I have! They even go to the seminars that we have… If freshman grades didn’t count in college towards the final GPA back at home, I think a lot of people wouldn’t go to lecture at all… In some classes here though, they do take attendance and will email you if you don’t show up to class. I dropped a world cinemas class and when I didn’t go to seminar, my professor emailed me asking why I didn’t show. He hadn’t gotten the notice that I dropped the class yet. But that just goes to show that they really do notice when you don’t go to class or a seminar. Finally, assessments are different. Classes are graded mostly, if not entirely, on one or a few essays for each class. It’s very rare that classes have multiple choice or short answer tests. Luckily though, my cell regulation and cancer class has multiple choice exams. They’re similar to the ones given in SD except for the fact that the exams that I take for my class are only 12  questions wrong. So I either know the answers or I don’t and hopefully I do, because if I miss 3, I get a 75%. O__o But, the grades transfer differently back to the states and a 75% would still be an A. It’s nice that the grades transfer like that because essays are apparently graded pretty strictly here. Almost nobody gets 100 on anything here… the most common scores are in the 50s and 60s. Because of this, I’m not too too worried about grades but I’m still going to probably stress out a bit and work pretty hard towards doing well anyway.

Everything is smaller here…

Grocery stores, cars, washing machines and dryers, kitchens, refrigerators and freezers, desks, etc. I’m lucky because I have my own room and I share a decent sized bathroom with two other people, but my friend Michelle shares a room smaller than mine at Costa and her kitchen is tiny! I guess it saves a lot of space, but gosh… Even chip bags are smaller! The normal size for a bag of chips here is equivalent to the bags that are in packed lunches back at home. It is very difficult to find a bigger bag of chips, too.

There are definitely a lot of other things that are different here than in the US, but those are the major things that I observe the most. :P