english / welsh accents

I was at a dinner part at some friends' house a while back tried to catch some accents on video. What I ended up getting was mainly a bunch of people eating, but in between the bites of food I picked up a few accents, and it was nevertheless entertaining.

And even though Im sure they're gonna kill me for putting this on the blog, here it is... (sorry guys!)

quiet in the village

The semesters over! and all's quiet in the student village right now. Most of my American friends have left for good (miss you guys already) and everyone else has gone home - well except for my asian homies (its too far for most of them to make the trip), and one Canadian girl. But thats pretty much it.

So, Im using this time to catch up a bit on the blog. I've been kind of ambivalent about the whole blogging thing in general, but I've gotten comments from a few people on the lack of updates, and by the looks of the counter at the bottom of the page, at least a few people have been checking it out (or accidentally clicking on it, which I guess is entirely possible), so I guess I'll keep at it for a while. I'm planning to put a few postings up here pretty quickly, if not tonight then tomorrow. There's lots to blog about, here's a glimps of what's to come...

- there's the trip to Mallorca, Spain a few weeks ago
- the pictures from the 3 London trips I've taken so far
- the dinner party video that I took to try and capture some of the different accents
- the story about the Londoner and the African that we went clubbing with in Picadilly Circus
- and the picture of my flat mates that I've been meaning to throw up on here, so you can see who I'm living with - actually why don't I just throw that up now...

Here's me with Ben and Stacey (aka my little welsh sister) on the first night we all moved in back in September...

study abroad election interview

A few weeks ago, before the election, one of the exchange students from Ohio interviewed a few of us about whether or not we felt disconnected from the election coverage, and i got my 15 seconds of pseudo-fame - hehe. Check it out...
http://www.palestra.net/videos/play/17986)

beach / gower

I sleep with my blinds open at night in the hopes that the sun will come out in the morning and wake me with a wave of light. As you can imagine, it doesn't happen too often here, but it did this morning, and since the sun is out, im heading to the beach. So here's some recent beach pics of the bay here in swansea and some of the gower that i took when Tim came out and visited this last week, so you can appreciate what ill be appreciating here in a bit...

swansea - city center - pics

in case you might be wondering what swansea looks like, i took a few random pics when i was downtown yesterday...

barefoot running

There's something about barefoot running that really appeals to me. It's the simplicity of the whole thing. I've always enjoyed running in general, over biking and what not, for that reason, and getting out there with (literally) nothing but a pair of shorts on adds more of a kind of primitive and connected element to what you're doing.

I've been working in barefoot runs for a few months now mostly on trails, and on the beach out her in swansea, and I'm convinced that it's been helping my running + it just kind of feels good to do, I worked in 5 barefoot miles of the 16 I ran today along the beach and it felt great! I've been, or I should should say "had" been, keeping up with Tony Krupicka's blog (an avid 180mi a week or so runner and ultramarathon winner who's a big proponent of barefoot running) until he stopped running back in June, and subsequently stopped blogging for the most part, due to having a couple of neuroma's in one of his feet.

With that said, I still think that running barefoot can be good for you if it's done in moderation. If you've never run barefoot before I suggest you give it a shot, just the act of doing it will force you to run in a different way that you might be used to. You end up running mainly on the balls of your feet because, for lack of a better explanation, it just hurts to much to do the standard "land on the heel and roll with it" kind of approach - it's way too jaring on the body to do it that way, so instead you end up treading with quick and light steps which creates less impact on the body and increases leg turnover. Here's a good article on it if you're interested in more about it... http://www.marathonandbeyond.com/choices/clift.htm.

the beach - swansea

So im admittedly spoiled here, Swansea is the closest university in the world to the beach, and the weather's been unheardofly sunny for the last week or so. I've been heading down for runs about every other day sans camera, but I did get a few pictures the other day when I walked down with a friend. There was some guy out there with a shovel and a bucket, so we stopped him to ask what he was doing and took a few pics. Apparently he was digging for fishing worms...





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freshers week

So here I am right in the middle of freshers week, mildly-overwhelmed and extremely under-rested.

"Freshers" week is apparently a big deal in the UK. It's the week before classes begin and the time to meet other first year and exchange students, get registered for classes (which I did today), party a lot, and sign up for different societies [ i joined 4 of them... radio society (where i'll get to have my own radio show!), the triathlon society, the english ale society, and the windsurfing society!].

Each night out has a different theme. I think tonight is the "safer sex party"? I'm not sure, i just know that there are a lot of condoms being handed out, which brings up the subject of the sort of free spiritedness of the british culture that I've noticed, at least when it comes to sexuality. Another thing i noticed is the fact that the british aren't quite as religious as in the US. I haven't actually met a religious british person yet (and I've met a ton of them), and most people in the student village use the bible in their room as a door stop. Only about half of the population in britian believes in any sort of religion, with close to 50% being athiest or agnostic, as opposed the only around 10% in the US (i googled it). But enough about that.

I signed up for some uber interesting classes today, one of which is an american studies class that talks about american politics and the current election. Which reminds me - i registered to vote absentee balot online yesterday! It's really easy if you need to do it, just click here to go to the site. The british are really into american politics by the way, and are all about Barak of course! It will be interesting to get a european perspective on american politics.

Registration's kind of weird here though - instead of just registering online, you have to physically go to each department with a piece of paper and have the professors sign off on the classes you want to take, its beyond inefficient and it took 5 hours to register for my classes this morning, but i'm all done so it's all good.