current life at Sussex

Life at Sussex has been chaotic for all students for most of the current term. As the term is coming to an end next week, the chaos has only escalated. The English government and the country in general is going through a recession much like that of most countries. Unlike the states, most universities here are public (possibly all, I'm not really sure) so the funding comes from the government. As a result of the economic situation, they have cut a portion of the funding towards higher education. This is all understandable and universities are each dealing with the situation individually. At most universities the necessary cuts are being handled fairly but here at Sussex the management has decided to make a big mess. The are cutting somewhere around 150 professors but only from specific departments such as history and languages and putting more money into the departments that make money for the university like business and psychology. While they are making all of these cuts, they are building new buildings and residence halls which to many students and faculty seems a bit odd.

Needless to say, students and faculty are pissed. The frustration and anger has been escalating since I arrived two months ago but in the past two weeks things have gone through the roof. There are students protesting almost every week and they are currently in the middle of an occupation of one of the lecture halls that will end essentially when they get kicked out. Last week students occupied Sussex house, the administration on campus. This was a planned protest and students went in to Sussex house, told faculty what was happening and most of them evacuated the building. Since it was known that the protest would happen, the police were at the ready, complete with batons, dogs, pepper spray and the funny hats they wear here. Here are some clips of the actions the police decided to take.




After one protest last week six students were picked out of photographs and chosen by the university to be the alleged ringleaders. They were suspended indefinitely literally for no reason. Apparently the uni can suspend people "for no reason". This week most of the protests have been to reinstate those students. Students have been passing out stickers that say "Support the Sussex Six", a similar campaign to that of the Little Rock 9 during the civil rights movement. Students have also been taking pictures of themselves, friends, pets and stuffed animals holding signs saying "I occupied Sussex House", essentially showing the management that it's unfair to only suspend six students when there were tons of others there too.

Just the other day the professors voted and decided to go on strike starting next Thursday, the day before everyone goes home for spring break. They are planning on having picket lines and all that jazz that comes with a real strike. No one is sure how long the strike will last or what will happen so I could potentially come back from break and not have professors to teach my lectures.

I'm in this state of confusion with the whole situation. I think if I were a real student here I would get a bit involved with what's going on because issues like this are important to me. But since none of what happens here really affects me and I face deportation if I get arrested, I'm choosing not to participate on a large scale. I've signed a few petitions and such but besides that I'm going to lay low.

It does however, make me feel better about the whole uni culture here in England to see students standing up for their education and their professors. University is only three years here and the first year marks don't even count. As long as you pass, you can move on to second year. As a result, no one does anything during their first year. They don't go to lectures, they don't participate in seminars, and don't put their full effort into any work they do. Recently the government also announced that they have set a goal of having 50% of the population go to uni. I was talking with a few English people and they were upset that the government would want that. They were saying that going to uni is a privilege and that not everyone should get to go, only the smart ones. This made no sense to me. From what I've seen, the people at uni don't even put the effort in to their "privilege" and I would think that if they have been so graciously given the opportunity to be here then they would show their appreciation by going to class and doing the teeny tiny amount of work required to get a good mark. Now that I've seen people standing up for their education however, my opinion has changed. Granted, most people still don't do anything, but there are a lot who have really been standing up for their right to a quality education.

That is my rant for the day, enjoy!

Bristol

In an effort to avoid homework I will share with you all the thrill of the past week.

On Friday Gwen, Riley and I ventured to Bristol to spend the weekend with Gwen's grandparents. To go anywhere in the country we basically always have to go through London so we took the train to London and a bus to Bristol. It was a long journey and the bus was 45 minutes late getting in to Bristol but the sunset was amazing and there were lots of big fields and sheep to look at along the way.

Once there we scarfed down some delicious home cooked food and headed over to the Tobacco Theater to see A Midsummer Night's Dream. I had never seen it before but I vaguely remember reading it in high school. The show was really really good and super funny. It was a small theater so everyone had a good view which was nice. After the play we went back and did some hardxcore sleeping.

Saturday morning brought us to the S.S. Great Britain museum! They had the actual ship and the museum was inside, around and on the deck. We experienced ship life and learned a bit of history about the ship's own life.
They had a bunch of fake people all over the ship doing many different activities such as arguing over the small cabin space provided to lower class passengers.
This was one of my favorite's. The women on the left is puking in a bucket and there's a rat scurrying over the pillow on the top right.


Later that evening, once our bellies were full to the brim, we played cards and hung out until cuddling up in our warm beds (Gwen's g-ma provided us with an electric blanket!).

After a rejuvenating slumber we awoke to a gorgeous day to play. We ate a big lunch (GrandMary made us all gain 10 pounds over the course of the weekend) and then packed up our things and headed out to explore the Downs.
We slid down this part of the rock that has been word away by people's bums to create a slide.
This is a view of Bristol.
The first suspension bridge.


Once back on campus I did the last of my ticket buying and organizing for spring break and have been laying low and doing some work since the weekend. I'm staying on campus this weekend and am actually pretty excited to just relax and enjoy being here. I leave for break a week from Friday and couldn't be more excited to get out and explore Europe! Oh, and see Mom. That'll be fun too I guess.

This one time I went to Madrid for a weekend...

This past weekend I went to Madrid!! In case you didn't know, Madrid is in Spain and they speak Spanish there, which is a language that I don't know. Luckily some of my friends do and everyone speaks English anyways. It was a little ridiculous, people would start speaking to us in English before we even opened our mouths. I guess we all look really American. But I digress...

Friday:
Me, Jen, Gwen, Carey, Riley and Greg caught a taxi at 4:30am from campus to the bus stop in Brighton and took a bus to Gatwick airport. It only takes about 40 minutes to get there by bus which is very convenient. We got through to the gate and then took another bus to the airplane. We got to walk up stairs to get on to the airplane, very cool. We flew EasyJet and they don't do assigned seat so it was pretty much a free for all once we got on the plane. Luckily we all got to sit next to each other and didn't have to sit next to some weirdos. There definitely were some on the plane. Once on the plane we taxied for over an hour and finally took off! I basically just slept the entire time until landing in Madrid. To get to the hostel we had to take the metro so we bought 3-day passes and eventually made it to the hostel. Since there were 6 of us we got our own hostel room and didn't have to deal with strangers. NICE. Once settled we decided to go exploring around the city for a bit.

We chilled in a pretty park that had FLOWERS. In FEBRUARY.
Then we continued walking around and got some lunch at this pretty nice but overly expensive restaurant. Greg was pretty adventurous and got some goose liver. Ew. We spent the rest of the day napping back at the hostel, getting dinner and getting good use out of our metro passes. We looked on our metro maps and chose a couple of stops to go and explore. Some were cool but others... not so much. A bit sketchy.

Saturday:
Our hostel conveniently provided breakfast every morning but only from 8am-10am. This food served as motivation for us to get up early. It seemed to work pretty well. After breakfast we ventured to the Prado Museum to look at some cool art.

They had lots of art from all over Europe but most of the museum was dedicated to Spanish art. This was one of the first times that I actually spent a long time looked at and appreciating art. I think my art history class is proving to be quite useful. Some of the paintings were amazing, they looked like photographs. My favorite painting was called El Jardín de las Delicias by El Bosco:

I could have stared at it for hours. The left side is supposed to be heaven, the middle is what happens when humans give in to temptations and the right is hell.

After the museum we met up with Pat, Olivia and Juliet, other Clarkies studying in Madrid for the semester. Gwen and I went to walk around a park with them while Carey, Greg and Riley went to a bull fight. I contemplated going and I'm glad I didn't because I didn't know that the point of a bull fight is to kill the bull. That would have been a shocker. Even the pictures made me nauseous. Anyways, the park was really beautiful and the sun finally decided to make an appearance. It was much appreciated because we had a rainy week in England last week. Big surprise.

They had these benches with little stationary bike pedals so I snapped a shot of some ladies pedaling away.




There was also a really cool glass building that serves as an art museum during the day.

After our playtime in the park Gwen and I went back to our hostel to nap and a few hours later we all got ready for our traditional Spanish night out. We met up with Juliet, Pat and Olivia and went out to a bar where we got yummy mojitos. We waited until midnight to order drinks because happy hour didn't start until then. Then we made our way over to a club and got our groove on. It was nice to have some different music than what I've been hearing in the clubs here in England. After the club we went over to this churro restaurant. We got churros with chocolate which was literally melted chocolate in a cup. This is their version of hot chocolate and you can buy it just plain and drink it straight.

Once our bellies were full we made it over to the Plaza Mayor to bounce around a bit.

Here's a picture of a bunch of us Clarkies in the plaza!

Eventually we made it back to our hostel and crawled into bed at around 6am, typical Madrid style.

Sunday
Untypical of Madrid style we woke up a few hours later to make it to breakfast by 10am. We walked over to the Reina Sophia art museum and got in for free! Maybe because it was a Sunday? This was the first art museum that I've been able to take pictures in so I took full advantage of that. The museum had a lot of more modern/cubist/surrealist work, a nice contrast to the art we had seen the day before in the Prado. The most famous artists with work in Raina Sophia were Spanish painters Picasso and Dali. Here are some pictures of some of their work and some others that I liked.





Our next stop was a really big flea market called the Rastro. Juliet lives right next to the market so we met her there and looked around for a bit. They had everything from old books and magazines to scarves (of which I bought a few) to chastity belts and even some second hand clothes and antique furniture. Juliet told us that the whole city comes out for the market every Sunday and we could tell, it was really crowded. Afterward we sat out in the sun and ate some tapas.

The one closest to the camera is smoked salmon, the one with the pepper on top is chicken, the pink one is shrimp and the gray spaghetti looking one is eel.

The weather was beautiful in Madrid so we took our afternoon naps in the sun and I even got a bit of color!

After the market we said goodbye to Juliet and headed over to the Sol metro station which is the center of the touristy part of Madrid. We walked around, bought some postcards, listened to street performers and enjoyed the magic of the city.

Joey's Spanish cousin?!



Next we made our way to the Royal Palace which was gorgeous. So much more breathtaking than Buckingham Palace.



That night Gwen, Riley and Greg went to a soccer game but Carey and I didn't want to go so we spent the evening hanging out and then going to this food market for dinner. It was an indoor market that we had stopped at earlier in the day for a fruity snack and they had all these different stands with different kinds of food. We went to the cheese stand and got a bunch of different kinds of tasty cheeses and we got some yummy bread. Then delicious chocolate mousse. It was really tasty and fun to walk around to all the different stands looking at the food and the people. That night we all just hung out in the hostel and enjoyed our last few hours in Madrid. The next morning we left the hostel early and ventured back to the airport where our flight was very delayed and finally made it back to Brighton by a bit past 4 in the afternoon. Overall it was an amazing trip and a great way to kick off my travels around Europe.

Here are some things I noticed about Spain and Spaniards:
-Boys do not have good haircuts. ATTENTION ALL SPANISH MEN: Mullets went out of style a very long time ago and it is not attractive to have one clump of dreads in the back of your head. It's just wrong.
-Spaniards are, in general very short. I fit right in.
-They don't eat fruit or veggies in Spain. If they do serve them, they are covered in oil.
-The two main food groups are ham and seafood. This is a popular restaurant in Madrid with a few different locations around the city. It's called the museum of ham.

-Unlike England, smoking is allowed indoors in Spain. And the Spaniards take full advantage of this, smoking in restaurants, the airport, clubs and bars.
-The metro in Madrid is amazing. It's clean, fast, runs frequently and goes everywhere.

Since the weekend I've been doing homework and relaxing, catching up on a bit of much needed sleep. Tomorrow I'm going with Gwen and Riley to Bristol to spend the weekend with Gwen's grandparents and eat some home cooked food. Should be a relaxing and tasty weekend!