Category Archive

I have this half-written post somewhere about how I am not numbering my posts anymore, but clearly I have not gotten around to posting it–or anything else for that matter–in the past month. Perhaps I should have some sort of “at least once a month” guarantee which, if broken, gives you the right to come bang down my door and pummel me with whatever you’ve got to hand. However, it might not translate into practice very well because my door has an uncanny tendency to be on one side of the Atlantic half the time and on the other side for the rest. Odds are that it’s the people who are in America when I’m in the UK who actually want updates and who would likewise want to beat my door down with spatulas.

Well lucky for you, I am in the US right this very minute!

It was a trying process to get here though, and because we all know how fervidly I believe in the power of positivity, I am going to recount it to you. In agonizing detail. So you’ll feel like you were there.

My day started at the sunny hour of 4:30am GMT, when I showered, finished packing, and called a taxi. The taxi picked me up at 7 and dropped me at the delightfully classy St. Margaret’s Coach Station, where I waited until about 8:10 for my coach to deign to arrive. It turned out they actually only had about 10 seats on the coach to Heathrow and about 40 people with tickets, so they had to put most of us on a coach bound for Gatwick. This had to detour to drop us off, much to the delight of the Gatwick-bound passengers I’m sure. Being as parannoid as I am about time I had planned to arrive at the airport very early, so the fact that the coach took an extra hour to arrive wasn’t too bad for me. At about 11am we got to Heathrow and had to get on another coach to go to Terminal 4. Sheesh, I had no idea how far away from Terminals 1, 2 and 3 it was! It took us about 15 minutes! That’s practically in another county!

An hour in the check-in queue, an hour in the security queue (which wrapped around the outside of the terminal), and several vows to never fly at Christmas ever ever again later and I was standing around unbuttoning my fly for the nice security people. While they were touching me rather thoroughly I of course I apologized profusely for causing trouble by setting off their metal detectors for no discernable reason, which I think is proof positive that I wasn’t leaving the UK a minute too soon! I also apologized quite a bit to the woman who came up to me when I was pulling my boots back on to inform me that they were going to perform an explosives test on my toiletries. Apparently I was very suspicious looking yesterday. She took me off to the side where they have this little makeshift lab on a cart, and she squeezed bits of my toiletries out onto some paper strips. I guess they were supposed to change colors if I was packing radioactive material? Or something? I thought bomb components could be quite innocuous things when not combined, so I’m not sure how useful this testing is, but I guess it’s cool that they’re able to do it.

I then proceeded to kill a lot of time in the duty free shops. My flight was supposed to be at 2:45, but at around 2:30 they came out to tell us that it was canceled and we’d better go to the customer service desk to reschedule. We made a mad dash to the desk and when we got there were informed by the alarmed looking lady that our flight was delayed until 4pm, not canceled. Wherever could we have gotten such a silly idea? 3:30 rolls around and we go to board our flight, walk down the gangplank (what do you call the aeronautical equivalent? I don’t know) and into our awaiting…buses.

No one said anything, we were just loaded into buses like little, sheep-like sardines. We were then driven away from Terminal 4 and brought to British Airways shipping and freight area, where we boarded our plane.

And then the plane didn’t have sound on the entertainment system, so half our viewing options were only available in Spanish. Yo amo Hairspray!

And then there were about 10 immigration lines open for non-US citizens and only 4 for US citizens. This is an exact reversal of what it’s like in Europe, where EU people breeze through and non-EU people have to wait forever. Which, if you have to make some people wait forever, is as it should be. WTF America? Of course I got in the line for the VERY slow immigration officer, who wanted to chat with everybody and got nasty when people didn’t want to chat back and just wanted to get the fuck out of there. He moved 4 people in the time it took every other line (all 3 of them) to move 12+ each.

8pm EST (1am GMT) and I was finally home!

I think I might be substitute teaching or something to make a buck while I’m home, but for now I’m just delighting in my new mattress, spending US dollars and eating good food.

I was going to elaborate more, but I have to pack up this computer now and send it off to be fixed.

I’m going to start off by apologizing to any Leicester people who read this, since I’ve set these entries to upload as Facebook notes when I make them. I know I’ve probably complained to you about the vast majority of this already! Also I’m sorry for my gratuitous use of British cussing in the title. Except that I’m not. How could I resist? The title I wanted to opt for, “The Latest Outrage,” is probably my most-used blogging title of all time. It’s time for a change!

So what’s bothering me today? Much like Andy Rooney, I am quite eager to tell you.

I haven’t slept properly in days.

My bedroom is directly next to the toilet for my flat. This has actually been fine as the toilets themselves aren’t particularly noisy. The fans, however, have been a nightmare. On Monday one of them (because as near as I can tell there are two, and one is much louder than the other!) began running non-stop for hours on end. I put in a maintenance request and included an aside that one of my flatmates had put a sign on one of the toilets saying it didn’t work.

The next morning the nature of the fan problem changed. Instead of whirring constantly, which at least provided white noise, it switched to a pattern of whirring for a few seconds and then going silent, then whirring again and so on. I was in my room when the folks from maintenance came in to look at the toilet and it was doing this on and off whirring when they were there. I assumed they would do something, rejoiced and went on my way to class. Of course, Tuesday night was a night of continuous interruption. I sent an email to the Accommodation Office because I figured my problem hadn’t been attended to yet and I didn’t want to file another request form while one was still outstanding. I let them know that the fan was no longer running continuously and was instead going in spurts.

Wednesday I get a note under the door (because that is the way maintenance communicates with you. Heaven forfend we use email or anything so people have a way to respond) saying that no fault had been found. So Wednesday night = again no sleep. And then some clown decided to pull the fire alarm at 3am, causing everyone in Blocks A&B to have to rush outside in the freezing cold. I had just managed to fall asleep at 2. I was Very Unamused.

I sent in another maintenance request today stating that yes, there is a fault!  And could they at least please try to find it? And if they aren’t going to do that at least have the courtesy to tell me as much so I can request a housing transfer? Because they have a policy of “We’ll get to it when we get to it, unless it’s an immediate threat to health and safety” I also mentioned how this was quickly becoming a health issue as I grew more and more sleep deprived.

And lo! Someone responded to me! An actual email, giving the general outline of what they plan to do! It seems that a contractor installed some new fans this summer and they’re faulty. They’ve turned off the fan for the time being because they have to wait until this contractor comes in to replace them. Hey, I’ll take it. I’d rather share my air freshener than listen to that all day and night…

< / pushy American >

Another letter I got under my door last night was the bank letter I’d requested 2 weeks ago from the Graduate Office. They were really backed up because it was the start of term, which is why it took so long. As an international student I need one of these to prove to the bank that I am, in fact, a full-time student and that I really do live where I say I live.

I got to the bank today and the letter was all wrong. It didn’t have the bank name on it, my home (US) address or the dates of my course. I now have to wait for the graduate office to process another letter. Fingers crossed that they put the correct info on it this time!

I promise I’ll try to start doing interesting and blog-worthy (or at least photo-worthy) things very soon! I have a 4-day weekend coming up and I’m trying to recruit people to go someplace fantastic with me.

So, what’s new in your life?

Today I received a packet of information from the University of Leicester, including a 38-pg brochure for international students that I had already received over 2 months ago from all the universities that I am not planning on attending. I had found this brochure online a week ago and was a little perturbed that Leicester didn’t seem to be in the habit of actually mailing things to people, or alerting them to the availability of information. (I had also discovered a bunch of information on applying for your visa. This was not linked through either the Graduate Office or the International Office, my two main points of contact, but via the Student Support and Development Service. I found it by chance after an hour of perusing the vast unconnected wasteland of the University of Leicester’s website. Their offices are so discrete as to not even refer to one another even when their information overlaps. They are desperately in need of a reorganization, and this is not even current bitterness speaking.)

While looking at the website I also discovered the fact that you have to register for classes twice. First you have to pay your tuition, then on 17 September you have to register online. On 1 October you have to register in person.

Nowhere, nowhere on the website was Pre-Registration mentioned. That, however, was the second part of the mailing I got today. It is due to the University by 3 September. I don’t have a blessed idea as to why this mailing reached me at such an absurdly late date. So far I have had to confirm my acceptance of Leicester’s offer of place 3 times. This Pre-Registration amounts to nothing more than a 4th confirmation and an enclosed photo for my ID. I have always returned these superfluous confirmations the day or the day after I received them, so they should have been processed long ago. Yet it somehow appears that I am so low on the mailing-list priority that they figure, heck, America’s not that far. Let’s send it to her really obscenely late and see if she can still get it back to us in two days.

T0 be fair, it might not be the University’s fault. It might be Royal Mail. It might be the US Postal Service. It might be Customs. It might be a combination of all potential culprits. I don’t know yet, because I haven’t had a reply to my email (which is a shorter and more accusatory version of the exceedingly polite letter I enclosed with my forms) and Royal Mail appears to be anti-postmark so I have no idea when my package was sent.

I went to FedEx to overnight it, but apparently US companies take US holidays off even when they’re in other countries. So Monday 3 September? The date Leicester expects to receive my registration by? Labor Day. Even $43.04 will not expedite my package to arrive any earlier than the 4th.

If this impedes my ability to register for classes this year I will scream so loudly that you’ll be able to hear it.

Very exciting business, today; I booked my appointment at the consulate! This appointment constitutes my official visa application. That whole bit where I filled in the visa application online and submitted it? Just a bit of bureaucratic fun. I had to go through all that just so they would tell me the web address, and I’ve had to essentially stalk that web address for the past week, continually refreshing, to see when new appointments were made available. You see, they’re released whenever the consulate gets the whim to do so, so you never know when one will appear on the website. Good thing I don’t start work until tomorrow, huh? Otherwise I might not have the luxury of refreshing every 5 minutes.

What’s even better is that the website, which shows a color-coded calendar of the current month, has been showing that the appointments for this coming Friday (August 31st) were not yet available. This morning I clicked over to September just for fun (since they hadn’t released Friday’s appointment yet, why would there be anything in September?) and saw that Wednesday and Thursday had already filled up. “What madness is this?” thought I.

It seems like the British Consulate in New York is taking a 5-day weekend for Labor Day. Silly me.

Since I discovered this, I’ve been diligently checking the September calendar. And lo! Around 4:58pm I saw that appointments were available for Friday, September 7th. I tried to book one, but my browser wouldn’t let me.

To be fair, the website states that you must use Internet Explorer to book. I don’t have this and hadn’t planned on downloading it, so I inquired around the internet, which never ever misleads information seekers. People told me they had no difficulty booking with either Safari or Firefox, both of which are browsers I use, so I figured myself quite safe. Needless to say, neither worked for me. I had to run into the den to use my mother’s computer, all the while praying Explorer would actually function for once. (It runs rather poorly on Macs.)

Success! I was able to select a date. But wait a moment, what’s my visa application number? I’ve got that in an email from the consulate that they sent to my .mac address. I had to run back into my room to look for it on my computer. OK great. Now what are the last 6 digits of my passport number? Well crap, it’s off to find that now. When I was returning I spotted my mother ascending the stairs towards the den. “Don’t touch the computer!” I yelled. I think I may also have run at the door like a fool, flailing my arms (and the box of visa stuff they were carrying).

In the end, she didn’t touch the computer and I booked the appointment. Now all I have to do is sit through the 5 hour process and hope everything gets approved. My financial information is a shoddy printout from Citibank that looks like I rigged it up in Photoshop (and I am no Photoshop pro), so I am cautiously optimistic, but more cautious than optimistic.