Saturday 21 September 2013

Of Pickles and Crossbows - Variety and American Superstores

You’ve got to understand: we don’t have anything like Walmart in the UK. We have superstores and supermarkets, sure - huge, square slabs of buildings where you can pick up some food or pencils or toothpaste or whatever else - but we don’t have anything like the sort of variety that you can find a five minutes’ drive away from Utica College. 
I made my first pilgrimage to the store of stores about a day or so after arriving in the US on exchange. Jetlagged, disorientated and in dire need of some coat-hangers, I picked a cart from the entrance and rattled it on inside and, immediately, was distracted by a colorful BACK TO SCHOOL sign that was looming overhead. I started rummagine through all kinds of flashy but entirely unnecessary products. Where, by the way, have rainbow colored pencils been all my life? 

After a few minutes stationary with the stationery my eye was caught by some other aisle, then another, then another - before I knew it, I’d been sucked up in the irresistible materialistic pull of all the weird, wonderful, and often pretty nasty items on display. Craving a quick snack? Ty one of our pickles, sealed in with its juices in a handy ziplock bag! Take a look at out new range of ‘wildlife’ bathmats - step out the shower and onto the stinking beast of your choice today! Feel your firearms are missing the mark? Set your sights on one of our new crossbows, available online!

I couldn’t really buy much of anything, of course. Student budgets don’t usually tend to accommodate croquet mallets or inflatable bounce houses. Even so, it’s not so much my wallet I’ve been fearing for. My wallet has a picture of Batman on it anyway and can probably take care of itself. No, what I’m all too conscious of every time I rumble my cart through the doors of Walmart (and other stores like it) is how much time I could spend exploring in one trip. Truth is, every time I go in I can’t help but get sidetracked and go off exploring. It’s not safe, really - there’s a real danger that one of these days I’ll pop in for some cereal and emerge fifty years later, blinking at the sun, waving a box of fruit loops and apologetically mumbling something about “getting a bit distracted”.

Moral of the story, then. If you ever see me half-submerged in the box of discount DVDs, spending half an hour contemplating what kind of thickness my pillow should be or something else entirely unproductive, do me a favor and drag me out of the store. I pay in pickles and crossbows.
Since my last post I've been reading:
Last of the Mohicans - James Cooper
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Memories of Ice - Steven Erikson

Saturday 14 September 2013

Captain's (B)log, 7th - 13th September

Because every day should be meaningful, except Tuesdays.


Saturday 7th September
Spent my first eight hours playing Dungeons and Dragons with some new friends and, seeing as I slept in until the back of noon, didn’t manage to do much else. I played as Cain - a middle-aged half elf ranger who had spent the majority of his life roaming oriental plains, eliminating varieties of dangers for less experienced explorers. As it turned out, Cain spent most of today messing around in taverns, interrogating locals in his stilted B-movie monotone way of speaking, and staying away from action for the sake of self-preservation.

Overheard a guy having a chat on his phone while sitting in a bathroom stall. “Yeah, I’m doing great, man”, he said down the line as his bowels took off in such a way as to make the Apollo missions hang their heads in shame, “what about you?”

Sunday 8th September
International department hosted an event - ‘Meet and Greet over a Sweet Treat’ - their way to get older, full-time international students meeting those who’ve newly arrived (with sugar as bribery). Thirty or forty people showed up, and each of us were made in turn to stand and tell the sugar-high group their name, nationality and one interesting fact about yourself. I muttered something about enjoying books. It’s quite painful coming to terms with your own banality, though someone suggested later that I should’ve opened with ‘My name is David, I’m from Scotland and I actually quite miss the colonies’.

Speaking of reading - cracked the spine of Moby-Dick today, which I have to read in the next two weeks for class. It’s a monstrosity; I wonder why Captain Ahab didn’t just take the darned whale down by cracking it over the head with a set of Melville’s complete works.

A friend asked me to write a column for the school paper, perhaps about my experience in Utica as an International. I agreed while immediately starting to wonder what kind of stuff I could get away with...

Monday 9th September
Created a new game today, though still needs a name. It goes like this - whenever I take the lift (sorry, elevator) up to my floor, I stand to attention and salute just as the door is about to swing back. Had a couple of strange looks so far, and a few people who’ve laughed at/with me as we walked past each other. Still waiting for the hero to return the salute but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere.

Passed page 100 of Moby Dick. Established so far that we’re to call the protagonist Ishmael and that he needs to sit down and define the relationship with his buddy Queequeg. 

Finished the day by playing some night-time ultimate frisbee on the football field. In other news, recently uncovered a hidden fear for fast, disc-shaped objects.

Tuesday 10th September
A  small part of me died at lunch today when I overheard a girl at the table behind us say through her nose “I’m telling you, calculus is literally a killer”.

Aside from that, studied. I can be wild sometimes.

Wednesday 11th September
Baking hot today. There was a clubs and organisations fair on at the student lounge which I only managed to attend by peeling myself from shadow to shadow and stopping every fifteen paces for a water break. Somebody brought a snake along with her (“She’s from the bio lab, we were going to bring the tarantula but we thought that seemed a bit much”), which got passed around as people signed up for a few different bits and pieces. I put my name down for the Reading Society and the League of Extraordinary Nerds (you know you’ve found a solid group when they name themselves League of Extraordinary Nerds). 

Also, got a new mattress today after I complained that the old one felt as though I were resting on the bones of the previous occupant. This new one feels a bit moist. Might just sleep on the floor for a semester or two...


Thursday 12th September
On a mission to convert the floor to Doctor Who - sat a friend down tonight and made them watch Matt Smith’s entrance episode. I think they enjoyed it, but it was hard to gauge their reactions over my giggles and squeals of delight at every third line of dialogue.

Was informed in a breezy, off-the-cuff sort of way in one of my classes that we have a ten page essay due in a fortnight.

Was a bit late for dinner tonight (meals are fully paid for at the start of each semester)ended up being told the place was closing up ten minutes after I sat down. Smuggled a full loaf of bread out in retaliation. A crime for the ages.

Friday 13th September
Page three-hundred of Moby-Dick has been breached, and I’m proud. Found out that the Flesch-Kincaid test (which measures the readability of a novel, the lower the number meaning the more difficult the text is to read) measures some parts of the book as low as -146.

Got a chance to write up my column for the school paper, a piece about Walmart and how they have to stock everything under the sun and then some solar winds just to show off. I had quite a bit of fun writing it, almost entirely because I got to use the line ‘It’s not my wallet I’ve been fearing for. My wallet has a picture of Batman on it and can probably take care of itself’. My number one fan is pleased, at least.





Since my last post I've been reading:
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Last of the Mohicans by James F. Cooper
Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson

Friday 6 September 2013

The State of the States: My First Fortnight in Utica


The name-badge pinned to the hefty chest of the man at the customs desk told me his name was Krom. Krom, the first man I met in the states, was a heavy guy, probably somewhere in the late thirties; he had a crop of shortish black hair and a horizontal, unsmiling mouth. I strode up to his desk, handed over my passport and papers and, already jet lagged, tried hard not to curl up into a ball right there and then and drift off to sleep. It had been a long flight sandwiched between queues, and, by local time, it was only eleven in the morning. 

Krom began to tick through what I guess was standard procedure for a teenager with a visa. Thumbprints; paper-checking; having a staring contest with a stalked camera with wires buried somewhere into Krom's PC terminal. I started to buzz with a tired satisfaction. Soon, I realised, I’d be through, off to start my student exchange properly. I let my mind slip to a kind of dazed planning area. I’d have to catch a train to New York City first. Grab a coffee, perhaps have a wander through central park. Take another train north and up to-

“Where are you staying?” Krom's sharp New Yorker’s accent, surprisingly high, sliced through my thoughts. “What’s your purpose of coming here to the U.S?”

It was an easy question, needing less mental processing power than what did you read on the plane or David, why were there so many typos in your blog posts anyway to answer. For whatever reason Krom's question took me totally by surprise, and I spent at least three seconds standing silently, staring just below the little ‘tache where the question had come from. Krom wasn’t amused.

“Sir?”

I let my mouth clunk open to allow what felt like the entire universe poured out:

“Sorry just tired I’m an exchange student here I mean an exchange student from the United Kingdom coming here I mean New York for two semesters which starts on wednesday at Utica College and-”

“Where did you say you were studying?”
        “-Sorry I though I said I’m studying at a place called Utica-”
        “Where did you say that was?" Concern in his face.  "New York?”
        “-Yes Utica College New York-”

The man’s eyes burrowed themselves into concerned slits - he'd clearly no idea where I was talking about. Properly awake now, I wondered what happened to persons suspected of making up their destination. A quick google check? A more serious conversation in a darker room? Would Krom just press a hidden eject button and watch the spring-loaded floor launch the liar back across the Atlantic? Probably not, but I thought best to brace and prepare for take-off just in case. There was another few seconds pause, then Krom’s face slackened and his mouth dropped to a small oh. “Oh!” he said. “You don’t mean Ewe-tick-ah. You mean You-deh-ca!” 

It took everything within me not to say “No, you-deh-ca!”

I smiled, relieved and happy that we understood each other now. Krom handed my papers back to me, flashed me an official - but not entirely cold - smile, and beckoned me past into the land of oppurtunity, where, somewhere, the wake for the letter T was being held.

It’s been two weeks since I’ve arrived in the country. I’ve savoured (or savored, depending where you’re reading) the delights of Taco Bell and Dunkin‘ Donuts; I’ve been to Wal-Mart and gotten lost, twice. Since meeting other international students I’ve been partially cured of my geographic ignorance and can successfully locate Finland and Serbia after a minute or six with an atlas. The reason I start right back with Krom and You-deh-ca, though, is that my first conversation with my first American was enough to recognise there are some details to American culture that I’ll never properly get to grips with. Pronunciation, as it turns out, being pretty far down the list. 

For example, the fist bump. In the UK, the knocking together of two fists only ever occurs as a joke. Here, the fist bump is completely interchangeable with a handshake. It’s not hallowed territory, but it’s not taken ironically either. I can’t get used to it. When somebody greets me with their knuckles all I can do consistently is flinch.

Or, take the driving culture. In Utica, nobody walks. No-one. One day, early on, a few internationals ventured out for a snappy five hour stroll and we couldn’t see a single other human being on the pavement (slash sidewalk) that whole time. If Neil Armstrong was so desperate to step on fresh, unexplored ground, he could have saved himself a lot of man-hours by visiting central New York. The lack of pedestrians is so disconcerting, actually, I’ve started referring to off-campus meanderings as going through the graveyard - it’s got that same you’re-doing-something-wrong sense coupled with the eery certainty that somebody, somewhere, is watching you. 

Also, the parties. Well, the party - singular. I’ve only been to the one, a college-organised affair that I assumed would be fairly safe to drop in on. Imagine the look on the face of the almost-entirely inexperienced, bespectacled teenager who still cherishes his childhood toys, therefore, when he walked onto the dance floor and saw a hundred or so Miley-wannabes bent over and gyrating around the middle of some classy gentleman, most of whom looked unsettlingly pleased with themselves. The windows were drenched with sweat, keeping out any light that wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I turned to a friend and tried to calmly explain to her we’d somewhere walked past the dance floor and somewhere into orgy central, but she just laughed. “Oh, that’s just how we do it here!”, she said, moving off into the crowd. I didn’t dance very much that night.
Just three differences between cultures, enough to make the point. Still, the fist-bumping kerb-hating dance-mating qualities of my new home make it all a bit more interesting, I think, and practically every day a new nuance presents itself for inspection, too many to be referenced in a post like this. From now on I’ll try keep a daily diary of my time in the land of the free post chunks of it up between (more sporadic) regular posts. Watch out for the first lot of entries in a week or two. See you then - in the meantime, if you find yourself at a US college party and feel like dancing, bring protection.


Since my last post I’ve been reading
Nineteen-eighty Four - George Orwell
Memories of Ice - Stephen Erikson
Howards End - E.M Forster