First week of "studying" .. aka Leicester trip

This past week was my first week since classes ended. Since there is still a few weeks until exams begin I took it a bit easier and didn't stress out too much with studying. But I did manage to study a bit, as I studied with two of my friends and over the course of the week we went through two of our courses, which isn't too bad for a "light" week of studying.

Although we did a fair bit of studying we still managed to take some breaks.

On thursday we took some time off studying and went to vote. Even though we are international students, we were still given the ability to vote for the Birmingham member of parliament (Birmingham Council Election) and also for the UK General Election. The night before I managed to take some time out and read up on all of the parties and their varioius policies, since I feel that it's pointless to vote unless you are somewhat informed. I went through the various policies and I found that there was one party in which I agreed with almost all of their policies, well except for one, they wanted to try and crack down on the apparent ease of getting an UK student visa (which they felt had some holes in it .. but after going through the process myself I saw no holes and thought it was quite fair). This issue of student visas is one of the few policies that would effect me directly (other policies being their funding plans for higher education and they're national health service - NHS) and I wasn't really happy with what this party wanted to do with student visas, so I looked at the other parties I ended narrowing it down to two different parties to vote for; the one I agreed with completely except for their crack down on student immigration and another party in which I agreed with about 75% of their policies, and the ones i didn't agree on were ones that didn't affect me directly. On Thursday I ultimately made the decision and voted for the party which I felt would be best for the UK. To actually cast our ballots we went in to the polling station (which was right on campus) and gave them the polling cards and voted. I was kind of surprised that I didn't have to show any proof that I was the person on the polling card, since every time I have voted in the past I have had to show ID. Afterwards I thought that maybe in Canada I always had to show my ID because they didn't think I looked over 18, but then they really should have done the same here, especially since I'm always getting ID'd here every time I go to a pub, even when all I want to order is food and no alcohol. Regardless they gave me the two ballots and I placed my vote on each of the ballots. Apparently there was a lot of problems with the voting this year, although I didn't experience any, and so they didn't end up having the final counts done until 6am Friday morning (even though  the polls closed at 10pm)! Ultimately the election resulted in a hung/minority Conservative government (just like in Canada) with the Labour party a close second and the LibDems' a distant 3rd. No one here was happy about having a minority and so there has been alot of talk in the past few days but recently the Conservatives had decided to form a coalition with the LibDems. It sounds like a lot of people I know are happy with this coalition and so I just hope they can make it work. Personally I don't think it could have gone any better for me, since two good parties got in, and before they decided on the coalition the UK pound dropped some more, so I managed to convert some dollars into British pounds at a good rate. 

On Friday since we had been doing so well studying and one of my friends in another program just finished the last few major essays, then we decided to go on a road trip to Leicester to visit another friend. We ended up taking the train where we got a decent small group same day off peak ticket rate; I still have no idea what all that means, but just knew that it was cheaper than we expected. We left around 10ish and it took only about an hour and when we got there we were met by our friend who lives near Leicester. We ended up going to the mall in downtown Leicester and then walked around the town.

The town seemed fairly confusing, since it was like every square had like six different streets to choose from, and then you go down one street to the next square and there was six more options, but aside from me loosing my bearings I found that Leicester has quite a nice looking downtown core.

Afterwards we drove out of Leicester and to the small canal side town of Foxton.

We went down to the Foxton locks and had lunch at a really nice resturant which had an out door covered patio which was right on the water. It was a really great place and the owners were really nice and friendly and the food was fantastic.

After lunch we took a stroll part way up the locks, but then it started to sprinkle a bit, so we headed back to the car.

We then drove around the area and our friend took us next to a village called Market Harborough, which has a really nice small town atmosphere. We wandered around a bit and saw it's old school house which was on stilts and next to it was this nice old church.

I looked at the church to see what time it was and was shocked to see it was just one thirty, but I could have sworn that it must have been at least 3 or 4. I then looked closer at the clock and noticed it was really a sundial.

This was the first time I had ever seen a large sundial on the side of a building before! Unfortunately it wasn't sunny, so I couldn't try to figure out the time, but it looked like it would have been fairly confusing to figure out, just judging by where all the numbers on the sundial were located. Our next stop was our friend's home town of Kibworth. When we got back to his place we hung out and chatted with his parents for a bit, before having dinner. They had heard that we hadn't had any good fish and chips yet, so they ended up getting some from their local chipper who has award winning fish and chips. The fish and chips turned out to be by far the best I have had so far while in the UK, or well actually best ever! After the amazing english dinner, we then headed back to the train station and caught the train back to Birmingham.

On Saturday we then started studying again, but managed to take a nice lunch break and went for a walk into town to a pub called the Square Peg, where we met up with another friend and had a nice relaxing lunch break. After lunch we continued studying and by Sunday night we had basically completed the review of the two courses, so to celebrate a few of us ended up going out to cinema, where we had ice cream and watched Iron Man 2. I ended up having chunck monkey ice cream, which I didn't realize until after purchasing that it had banana in it, which I don't usually like, but it turned out to be way better than I expected since I could barely taste the banana. The film turned out to be pretty good, but the theatre was quite empty, as there was maybe 10 people in total that showed up. The small turnout actually worked in our favour, as not only did it mean that it would be quieter, but also if anyone had sat in front of us as we wouldn't have been able to see since the theater was old and the seats are not sloped very well, so if anyone had sat in front of us then it would be hard to see over their head.

It turned out to be a good week with more studying than expected getting done, and with some great adventures too.

Cheers,
Jeff


*Word of the Week: in the UK when people talk about "beaver tails" then are generally referring to truck trailers where the back end folds down to create a ramp.

Last Week 1st Year Classes

This past week was me last week of classes and I still can't believe that first year lectures are all done already! Since the classes were finishing up this week, then my lectures mainly consisted of several review lectures. Aside from all the review lectures, in a two of my classes the professors tried to squeeze in a bit more material, and actually presented new material. In my Optics and Medical Imaging (OMI) course we learned a fair bit about MRIs and how they work and how they can be used to assess various structures of the eye. The other course where we learned new material was in Ophthalmic Lenses (OL) where we learned about many of the British/EU standards/tolerances for lenses and frames, as well as some of the more obscure techniques that are used to make sure frame and lenses meet these tolerances. In my labs, unlike my lectures, it was very much business as usual. In OMI lab we did an interference experiment to measure the thickness of some aluminium foil, while in OL we learned and played with many of the various frame materials from the past and ones that are currently being used. In my other lab, Clinical Optometry, we had an assessment on retinoscopy and subjective refraction, and so I'm not sure how well I did, but I think I did pretty good since my retinoscopy results weren't too far off, and I ultimately got  my patient down to the 6/5 (about 20/15) line. With this assessment we had to put a "dummy" lens in a trial frame to simulate a prescription in our patient, which isn't too big of a deal, but the dummy lens that my patient was wearing created a large prescription (specifically a high cylinder power) so they were very sensitive to the orientation of the lenses. Unfortunately with the dummy lens can easily move in the trial frame when the patient moves, so I just hoped that my patient didn't move before the professor was able to mark my refraction.

Aside from classes this week I have been a bit more active than last week...

On Wednesday I had a meeting with several of my peers and some of the executives of my schools optics society. In total there were 8 of us from my class that showed up to the meeting, all of whom were interested in taking on various positions on next years optics society executive team. Surprisingly we managed to figure out all of our roles in a very fair and efficient manner, since it turned out that there were very few roles in which more than one person wanted. Basically it was just the Vice President (VP) position which had about 4 or 5 of us who were interested in taking on this role. Ultimately we discussed it and 3 of the 5 were willing to take on other roles, so we decided as a group to just have two VPs, since we could not see a downside to having two VPs instead of just one. I had originally thought of president or VP, but ultimately I didn't think I could do either of those roles any justice, since there is a lot of phone calls and meetings in the summer that those people will have to do, and I just wouldn't be able to do that from Canada, with the cost to call the UK and the time difference. I believe that the group of executives we have for next year are a great group of people, and I think that we will manage to make next year's optics society the best ever!

On friday after our last first year class a group of about 14 of us ended up going out for lunch to Sac of Potatoes (an on campus pub that I commonly refer to as Sac's). Unfortunately Sac's has recently changed there menu (for the 3rd or 4th time in the last 7 months), and in the past it was always a good thing when they changed the menu, but this last change was very dissappointing as they have increased many of the costs and decreased the portion sizes, but so hopefully they will change the menu again soon. But even with the disappointing new menu we still managed to have a great time, especially since it was great that we were able to hang out all together once last time before our exams. Our exams begin on May 24th, so many UK students have gone home for a week or so, and afterwards when ever they do get back I think we'll all be a bit busy studying :P.

Friday night one of my friends and I were ended up going out to an Irish pub in hopes that they would have some traditional Irish/Celtic music. On our way we ended up hearing some fairly loud music coming from Victoria Square (which is where the German Market was held back in December). So we ended up walking towards it and found out that there was some sort of huge out door dance performance going on. We ended up watching about the last 20min of the show, which was taking place on a two tiered stage that they had set up on top of the big fountain. It was a really neat show to watch, as the dancing seemed to be more Eastern European, with all the swords and some of the Russian style moves they were preforming. But once the show ended we continued on to O'Neill's Irish pub on Broad street. We choose to go to this pub since we had read somewhere that they have music on Friday nights, plus broad street is much more heavily travelled at night than the streets around the Digbeth (the Irish quarter). After having to show my ID to get in (because I apparently look like I'm under 18, while my younger friend didn't have to show their ID :P ), we went in to find it was fairly busy. We found a quieter area closer to the back and ordered some pints of Guinness Red, which as it turns out tastes just like normal Guinness, but just not as heavy, plus it had a cool deep red colour to it. Shortly after getting our pints the music began, which turned out to be a DJ who was playing a mix of music from songs from the 70s to some modern songs, but unfortunately nothing that was remotely Irish, so we didn't stay too long.

On Saturday one of my UK friends invited me and another one of my friends to a Birmingham City (Blues) football match.

I had heard of many football matches that get out of hand, but Birmingham City was playing Burnley and well neither of the teams had anything to gain (or loose) from this game, so emotions were a bit more calm.

When we got there I ended up grabbing a burger outside (since they don't really sell food in the stadium). I was hoping to grab a drink in the stadium, but once I got in I quickly realized that unlike North American sporting matches, here they don't serve any alcohol; which probably is a good thing, as it likely helps to minimize the number of riots at the matches. We ended up getting to our seats which were in the 3rd row right about centre field (across from the TV cameras); we were basically eye level with the pitch and so close we could practically touch the players.

Unfortunately being down so low also meant that we weren't covered by the roof so if it rained (which it threatened all afternoon, but only ended up spitting a few drops), and also we had to watch out for the football coming into the crowd. The game turned out to be fairly good, as play was moving quickly with lots of great chances by both teams. Luckily Birmingham City scored first (around the 25min mark) and then just before the first half ended they scored again. Birmingham held the lead until around the 75min mark when Burnley scored to make it 2-1. As the rest of the match progressed it was much more exciting since the crowd really started to get into it and began singing, cheering and chanting. Fortunately Birmingham ended up winning. After the match we filed out and slowly made our way from St. Andrew's stadium and headed back to the downtown core and Aston (which was only about a 20min walk from the stadium).

It turned out to be a great non violent match, and so I hope to next year go to see a Manchester United match (provided I can get tickets, since their much harder to get).

Now that classes are over it's time to start studying for finals :S

Cheers,
Jeff

*word of the week: in North America we have "aluminum" but in the UK they call it "aluminium", which yes they look very similar, but trust me it sounds very different. Since Aluminium it sounds like they are saying something like al-i-min-e-um instead of al-u-min-um.