When in Wales

When in Wales you must wear your wellies while walking down the incredbily narrow corridors desperately seacrching for the loo, repeatdely saying 'what' when given rambling, heavily accented directions. My two mainstay sentences since I have gotten here have been 'what?' and 'I am Canadian' (not American). It just so happens I have been put in a flat with several Americans and naturally they have thus far become my good friends. Understandably everyone now assumes my nationality and its been a repeated struggle to set them straight. That's not the worst of things though. Besides rudely yelling 'what' in peoples faces I am also having a hard time turning on the lights, opening doors, flushing the toilet and taking a shower. Crossing the road is downright dangerous! It doesn't help that Carmarthen is quite fond of their roundabouts - apparently the most common tourist death is being hit by cars. (Hmm) The lights are at head level and flip the wrong way, the doors often push in the opposite directions ( I thought I was locked out of a gas station the other night and the girl finally came to the door to tell me it was open - you hardly want to open your North American mouth when that happens) The doors also seem to lock in the other direction and apparently you can double lock them, which I have not figured out. The toilets in the flats work 30 to 70% of the time and my shower is leaking into the kitchen of the flat below me. I regularly get stuck in narrow corridors with no lights and locked doors, although as soon as a Welsh student comes through them they are magicaly easy to open.

Forget the desparingly simple woes though. Wales is a phenomenal country. Although I have had a student or two ask why in the world I would want to come here. Which is rather ironic because the Welsh students are notorious homebirds and all the students live within a 40 km radius of the school. It's not nearly as common for a Welsh student to travel abroad as it is for us kids back home. So even though they aren't so fond of it here they don't want to leave.

There are many things to do when in Wales but the priority is partying. In september they have what is called Freshers Fortnight and literally (that is my favorite accented word here) they all party every single night for two weeks. Apparently it's quite common for the ambulance to make flat calls during Freshers. Thankfully they don't officially do this in January, but the party week starts on Wednesday and ends, well, sometimes it doesn't seem to end. Most of us international students were relieved to start classes because boredom does not contribute well to twiddling your thumbs at home, and with a huge club and pub right on campus it's nearly impossible to sit silently in your flat. Now we have classes though and that should take up some of our time. I say some because the adademic system here is bewildering. You need about 60 credits a semester and most classes are 30 (first year classes, or level 4 modules as they call them are usually 15) so you have two classes a week and often you don't even have your classes every week. The running motto here is challenge by choice so you are expected to work on your own for 90% of the time. Basically you get, depending on your module, two to three assignments and usually you can just hand them in any time from now to before you leave the school. They think that we are spoon fed in North America and that students should take total responsibility for their learning. At least there will be a minimum of lengthy boring lectures.
It's been an absolute whirlwind since I got here and jetlag is hell, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the world right now, even if they had proper showers and wider corridors.