The Eighties Are Back

There have been some scary sights on the streets and in the stores of Edinburgh lately, and I'm not the only one who's noticed.  Friends have spotted it at parties and on campus, and I caught a segment on BBC news noting it's return.  Yes, it appears to be true.  I'm sorry to say, eighties fashion is making a comeback.

Giant plastic hoop earrings in bright colours or silver or gold and popping up on tv shows like Coronation Street.   While I have nothing against the scrunchie or the occasional hot pink accessory, judging by some of the high street stores geared at the 13-25 market, this trend is going far beyond my comfort level.  Tight, acid washed jeans have been seen in blue and, even scarier, red.   Remember M.C. Hammer?  Well, bright, shiny 'hammer' pants are back, and are definitely a look that I thought would only be remembered when catching "Can't Touch This" on MTV.

There's also oversized off-the-shoulder T-shirts with large neon print for sale.  And what does one wear with these large t-shirts?  Leggings!  Over the past couple months the trend of wearing coloured or patterned tights under a short denim skirt has been giving way to black tights under a long shirt (no bottoms required apparently).  Now leggings of every length, colour and material you can think of have popped up at Topshop and H&M.  There's ankle length, crop length and extra long leggings.  There's shiny black or grey polyester leggings.  There's leggings that look like denim, and there's neon ones (yellow and pink) which can be seen a mile away.  My particular favourite were Topshop's silver leggings, which would have been perfect for my halloween costume last year, when I went as a robot.

To be honest, my friend and I were so overwhelmed by the amount of choice when it came to rediculous leggings that we gathered up several examples for a quick photo before tossing them back onto the rack, staggering outside onto the street and doubling over laughing.  Maybe its because we remember seeing all the cool kids at school and on tv wearing these items, and how silly they looked in retrospect.  It has taken years just to get our guy friends to stop wearing pleated pants with tapered legs.  And now its all threatening to come back.  I think I'll stick with the seventies, myself.

My Six Month Review

Six months ago Derek and I arrived in a foreign land with four suitcases and Google Map directions to the university’s accommodation desk.  We had no idea what our place would look like or contain, where any grocery stores were, or where to find internet access.  Thanks to Google Map’s satellite images, I knew we’d be living in a row of houses or tenements with a large square down the street and the national museum at the other end.  What they didn’t show us of course was what our place actually looked like, even from the street, or the fact that we’d be moving into a construction zone.

 After our cab found a place to stop around the corner outside of the construction zone, we rolled our suitcases to the front door and tried the keys.  Inside we found a dark hallway with a curving staircase that went up 3 floors.  Derek dragged the cases up, and we investigated our new place with some apprehension.  Initial impressions were that it was much larger than expected, spotless, and had a little washer/dryer and a bathtub plus shower.  The colours were odd: cream walls with white trim, navy patterned carpet, blue chairs and jade green doors.  The windows were huge and the ceilings very high, and there seemed to be a good number of heaters (which would take a few days to learn to operate).

 We found our way to a small Sainsbury’s to get some pre-made sandwiches and  juice.  With lunch and supper solved, we went through the accommodation guide and read about other stuff we had to do right away: set up phone and internet access, contact the electricity supplier (which we didn’t know) and give them our readings, and complete the inventory within 24 hours.  We found an internet café a couple blocks away, and after a couple quick emails to parents, we looked up phone, internet and tv packages from a couple companies, city bus information and directions to Ikea.

 Following dad’s advice for conquering jetlag, in the evening we went for a walk along the Royal Mile and forced ourselves to stay up until 9pm before crawling into a bed made of one sheet, one small polarfleece blanket and two pillowcases filled with clothes.  Needless to say, it was a very rough night, for me anyway.  It was cold and uncomfortable, and of course my emotions were getting the best of me.  There was also the problem of street noise, which we eventually conquered two months later by moving the bed.  After a good cry, two Gravols and a lot of hugs, I fell back to sleep.

 Over the next couple days we started to make the place our own.  At Ikea we found the perfect bedding and bathroom linens.  We found the Tescos grocery store with some familiar food as well as simple white dishes and cutlery like my old Ikea set that I loved.  We called BT from a payphone and arranged to get our place wired up, although we were disappointed that it would take almost 3 weeks.  And a letter arrived for the old tenants from Scottish Power, so we now knew who supplied our power.  We went to the Bank of Scotland across the street to start the long process of applying for a bank account as an international student, and headed up to Princes Street to find the right cell phone. 

 Meeting our neighbours helped immensely.   Suddenly there were friends here to talk to, share experiences with and get advice from.  International Day helped too, as it brought the thousands of international students together into one room to meet and connect with.  I met one of my closest friends that day.  Derek’s cousin also stopped by for a couple days as part of his backpacking trip, so we had a familiar face around, and his visit inspired us to go out and explore the city.

 Six months on, when I look back at those few days they seem worlds away from the home we’ve created.  My studies are going really well, and Derek’s are wrapping up quickly.  I’m sure I shared the stress of setting up bank accounts and getting internet access with you all.  Now I have my favourite spots in the library, I’m watching all the British television I can, and I regularly see my family via Skype and our webcams.  I’ve made friends with students from Canada, the US, Germany, the UK, Norway and Japan.  We enjoyed the mildest winter we’ve ever experienced.  And Edinburgh is truly a beautiful, amazing city.  I’m very lucky to live here, and I try to remind myself of that regularly so that I don’t start taking it for granted.  I'm also very lucky that I didn't need to go on this adventure alone.  We've faced it side by side.

 The next few months should be very interesting.  I’ll stay here to work while Derek heads back to Waterloo for a couple weeks to finish his degree.  We’ll be flat-hunting soon and moving in June to a place with double-glazing (I’m tired of the curtains blowing in the wind when the windows are closed!).  And I have to hit the British Library in London this summer to look at some primary sources, particularly anti-abolition pamphlets from the 1790s and early 1800s.  I’m glad so many of you have enjoyed these updates.  Stay tuned!  Who knows what the next six months will bring?  

Honest Ads

When you watch as much British tv as we've been lately, you start to notice some interesting differences from what we're used to seeing on Canadian and American ads.  There seems to be a great amount of effort put into making advertisements as transparent and honest as possible, and this leads to some pretty amusing statements.  The key is to read the fine print.

We're used to ads for products claiming "More people prefer..."  Well, one of our favourite ones here is for Flora butter.  The ad states that more people prefer Flora butter in a taste test, but when we read the not-so-small print along the bottom of the screen, it tells us something along the lines of "in a survey of 60 people, 47% preferred Flora butter and 42% preferred the leading brand."  Therefore not even half of the people surveyed actually would have chosen that brand of butter!  

I like the cosmetic ads that have to declare when the model's appearance has been enhanced.  In shampoo and hair colour ads, the advertisers state when the model/actress is wearing hair extensions, and whether or not they're real human hair.  My favourite examples of honest advertising has to be in the mascara ads, where they state every time the model had false eyelashes.  It's as if they are admitting up front that your own eyelashes will never look that good without some extra help.

The funniest ones are probably movie trailers, which are ridiculously honest.  In an effort to give a detailed explanation of the rating a movie has received, at the end of each ad there will be a sentence about the film's scenes or content that affected the rating, whether it be "scenes of bloody violence" or "scenes of sexuality."  Our favourite so far is from the new Renee Zellweger movie, which according to its rating "contains one use of strong language."  Can you imagine being the person who had the watch the entire movie (which looks awful, by the way) and count the amount of times "strong language" was used?  

To be honest, details like these would make movie watching for someone like me, who does not like to see blood or violence, much easier, as I would know exactly what I'm walking into.  And it's also nice to know whether your hair could actually look that full, or your eyelashes that long, because you bought a certain product.  And the claims made in the butter ad make me question all those similar claims I've seen through the years on tv back home.  It really makes you think.  

The Week in Review

Enough of these epic posts about major events or themes.  I think I'll take a couple minutes and let everyone in on our daily lives.  Might be terribly interesting, might be terribly boring.  I don't know...

Monday started off like usual, with me running 3 British History One tutorials in a row.  I've been looking forward to them these past few weeks because we're into the student-run tutorials.  At the start of the semester I assigned teams of students to run one of five specific tutorials.  In the 10am tutorial, two international students had created a board game using a world map showing the many colonies of Britain, and the other students travelled around and answered questions on the various colonies they were in.  Excellent stuff, and creative -- I was very proud.

That afternoon I had my monthly supervisory meeting.  I always get quite nervous, and try to counteract this by making a list of stuff I've done and questions for my supervisors.  The major thing I've accomplished in the past month was to develop a system of organization for my primary source research.  My first major source is Cobbett's Parliamentary Papers, which go up to 1803.  I'm stuck in the early 1790s at the moment, but am slowly reading through every time the West Indies and slavery is discussed, then recording important quotations and their location and date.  This had become an 18 page, 10 000 word Word document that was too big to be useful.  To fix the problem, I took a half day course on the database software FileMaker Pro, wrote out a point form outline of my thesis and numbered/lettered each segment, and went through every quotation coding it to match a segment in the thesis.  Ta da!  My professors seemed happy with the results, too, and I'll be meeting them again in April to give them an update.  It's quite likely I'll still be working away at the papers, although hopefully I'll have moved onto the Hansard (post-1803).

Tuesday morning I was back to the papers until I heard a knock on the door.  It was our neighbour from downstairs asking if I'd like to join her for a trip to Ikea.  As if she had to ask!  We took the bus to the southern outskirts of Edinburgh and after a nice cheap lunch, spent a good part of the afternoon wandering through the showrooms wishing we had houses to decorate with all that amazing streamlined furniture.  Plus I pointed out the couch, chair and ottoman that we once had in our living room back on the other side of the ocean.  I miss that chair.  The furniture we have here is awful and uncomfortable.  I long to have a 3 person couch again.  I was good -- all I bought was a set of steak knives for £2.95.

Wednesday wasn't terribly exciting.  I think I spent most of the day inputing data.  Oh, I did find a new argument regarding the slave trade because I had moved onto 1793, and the French Revolution has the MPs terrified of change in the name of liberty and freedom.  I should have anticipated that.

Thursday was a great day.  Derek woke up to some excellent feedback about the second draft of his thesis, so that put both of us in a great mood.  A friend of mine came over in the afternoon and brought some excellent chocolate chip cookies, and the three of us sat and chatted for over an hour about school and traveling and homesickness (she's an international student doing a PhD as well, but in economics).  We both continue to struggle with school bureaucracy, as we're both tutoring scholarship recipients and are therefore treated by some as award winners and others as employees, very different classifications when it comes to payroll, human resources and the government.  Have I mentioned that I still haven't been paid for marking 90 essays, beginning last October?  And I'm supposed to mark 30 more next week?

Friday I woke up ill.  I'd been fighting off a bug for a couple days, but it won yesterday's battle.  So I turned down an invitation to karaoke, miss the weekly drink with the upper year PhDs that I've only recently started to go to (because I only found out about it 2 weeks ago), and just stayed inside on the couch with comfy pants (trousers) and some ginger ale.  I'm feeling better now, thanks to the rest, my inhalers, some LemSip Max (just like NeoCitron) and excellent care by Derek.