I know a good deal of time has passed since the last blog update; things have been quite busy around here with term ending. Consequently, this will be a very long entry in a non-sequential, stream-of-consciousness sort of style.
The baking and cooking in flat 04 03 has greatly progressed in the past couple of months and I'm pleased to say that, thanks to my favorite Indians ever (Avi and Nithya, in case you hadn't figured that out), I am now able to make another version of Indian chicken complete with their own personal masala recipe. It was an awful lot of fun to make, but very, very spicy. When we finally tasted it, I involuntarily cried, my nose began to run immediately, and I'm told that you could watch my face go red from the bottom up like a thermometer in cartoons. It was really good though, and the secret is to eat it with plain yogurt to cut the spiciness. And I'm now in possession of the recipe so I plan to make it for all of you when I get home. I hope we have lots of turmeric powder - I've come to discover that if it's bright yellow/orange, it's got lots of turmeric powder and is probably good.
Speaking of Indian food, a few weeks back we (as in the flat) went to an Indian restaurant that Avi and Nithya swear by - it's called Nawaab's at it was really and truly amazing. It's a huge place, buffet style, with about 60 different dishes to pick from. You can eat as much as you want for about 13 pounds and it's absolutely worth it. The food was fantastic - they had different varieties of chicken, fish, lamb, rice, and vegetable dishes. It's all completely genuine Indian food, and apparently is the place all the Indians go. Family, when you guys come, we are going there. You will not regret it, but if you aren't crazy about Indian food they do have salads and pasta that isn't spicy. It was a great evening and we had a fantastic time.
Returning to the baking, Ada and I decided that we wanted to bake an apple pie but making the crust from scratch this time. We decided to do it on Easter weekend and then watch Fargo while it baked 'cause Ada has always wanted to see Fargo. Due to the lack of proper shortening available in this country we used butter for the crust, but it ended up working out rather nicely. For a rolling pin we used a can of hairspray and instead of a pie dish we used my trusty flan dish. The oven was a small problem as we still haven't really figured out the proper way to do the temperature, but we figured if we just sat there with it while the movie was on it would be okay, and it turned out wonderfully. We took it out at one point but ended up putting it back in and continued the movie marathon with No Country for Old Men. Ada does an awesome Texas accent, in case anyone was wondering. The pie turned out to be delicious and we were very happy with our accomplishment. Ada got creative with an apple crumble which turned out very good, and I ended up making a second pie to bring to Joseph's Royal Wedding party.
My classmate Joseph decided it have a few people round to his house to watch the Royal Wedding (might I add, it was sickening how much time and media coverage was devoted to that event . . . the little convenience store across the street hung British flags from every single shelf). The email he sent around with the invitation was SO British - one sentence read, "If everybody brings something to drink and a little something for the buffet, I think we'll have a spiffing party!" Steph was invited as well so we planned to meet near my dorm and go over together. Joseph suggested that if we wanted to be adventurous and particularly daring we could bring a dish from our home countries, so I opted to make another apple pie (let's face it - what's more American than apple pie?). Steph and I met up as planned and we took the bus over to Chorlton, the district of Manchester where Joseph lives. It's a lovely area - very pretty, old houses, beautiful trees, just a lovely atmosphere. His house is perfect too - it's just the kind of place I'd love to have myself in a city someday. He lives there with three other people, one of whom was there for our party. There were about eight or so other people in attendance and it was a really good time - I'm very glad that I was able to watch the wedding since it was so momentous. And it was even more fun to be watching it with such judgmental, critical people, especially when it came to the royal hats; honestly, it was worth watching just for that, along with the Queen's egg yolk yellow attire. I guess she really wanted to stand out in the aerial shots. All of the food was great too - I ate a spinach and salmon quiche! There were also croquettes (I think), potatoes, other vegetarian dishes, sliced fruit, etc. It was really nice; Joseph and Becky (the other housemate who was there) are fantastic cooks. For dessert, Steph had made a chocolate mousse which was amazing (and which I now have the recipe for), and Becky made an orange and rhubarb meringue pie which was really good too - I didn't even realize that there was rhubarb in it. It was a lovely afternoon, although I realized that American English and British English really are two different languages. We were outside in the little backyard chatting, and Joseph was telling a story about when he was working at a very posh hotel. During the course of the conversation, he uttered the following sentence - "I remember there was a wedding with this group of Pikies and it was a complete disaster: the groom got bottled and then the bride and one of the groomsmen ended up scrapping in the parking lot." I had to raise my hand and ask for clarification on three points - what Pikies were, what "bottled" meant, and what "scrapping" was. It turns out that "Pikies" is slang for the Romany, "bottled" means to get hit over the head with a bottle (you can also use "canned" if it's a can), and "to scrap" means to fight someone violently. We really don't speak the same language.
The flat has had some very spirited games of Monopoly on weekend nights; it ends up being a very spirited and competitive event (all in good fun, of course). We also had a very nice round of Peanut Butter/BS the night before Nithya and Avi went back to India for part of the spring break. Monopoly really seems to be our game, however, and we've taken to using any measures (deals, incentives, credit) to keep the game going as long as possible until people are literally completely destitute. It's a lot of fun though and we've really enjoyed it.
A while ago, in celebration of the warm weather, Ada invited me to go with her to Platt Fields on a walk with Asia, her nice Polish friend. Platt Fields is this big park area that has large fields, little knolls, and a big man-made pond with lots of geese and ducks. It's a really pretty area and we had a nice time wandering around and talking. It's in Rusholme, past Curry Mile, and would be a lovely place to have a picnic or something. Apparently it's dangerous at night though, but I hadn't planned on going there after dark.
A couple weeks back, my shower drain got clogged. It's always been a bit slow, but overnight it really did stop up almost entirely. I had to turn the water off every thirty seconds or so to allow it to drain; showers became a nightmare. I registered a complaint on the maintenance website and a couple days later a guy showed up knocking on the door, announcing that he was from maintenance (by the way, I learned a very important lesson regarding housekeeping when they come knocking on your door to disseminate meningitis information - even if you yell out "Wait! DO NOT come in!" because you are in a state of undress, they will still come in). He confirmed with me that it was a blocked shower drain, but apparently didn't believe me because I guess he decided that in order to test that theory, it would be a good idea to literally throw a huge bucket of water in the shower area. Because the drain was indeed flooded and the shower area is only half an inch deeper than the regular floor, the entire bathroom was flooded and his response was, "Wow, it really IS blocked." What, you think I was lying? Anyway, he fiddled with it, and mopped up my floor, and then turned to me and said, "Your toilet seat is down." I looked at him for a moment, thinking to myself, "Well, that is how most women do it . . ." and then he said that unfortunately he was out of toilet seats at the moment. Somehow the work order said that not only was my drain blocked, but I needed a new toilet seat as well. I told him that it wasn't the case, but he didn't seem to believe me. In the end, I convinced him, and he left me with a very wet bathroom, although my shower is now better than it ever was.
I woke up one Saturday morning and went outside for a little walk. When I came back in, I realized that there was a large bloodstain on the other side of the lobby door . . . apparently someone had either a very very good or a very very bad time the night before. I ignored this for a little while, but I couldn't stop thinking about how disgusting it was, and I knew that it wouldn't get cleaned up until Monday at the earliest because housekeeping isn't here on weekends. So finally I decided that I was going to take care of it myself; I took my Clorox wipes and scrubbed it until the door was blood-free.
Steph had a birthday recently, and she thought that it would be nice to have a few people help her celebrate. She really likes Indian and Thai food so she picked an Indian restaurant in Rusholme called Moughli's. Joseph, Marina, and I from class were there along with a few other of her friends and housemates. It was a really fun evening and the food was great - we each got a small dish, and then as a group we got several pots of different kinds of rice and a bunch of garlic naans, and we shared that stuff around. I had a fish tikka (actually I sent their online menu to Nithya beforehand so she could give me advice on what to get) and it was delicious - it was perfectly spiced and very orange (lots of turmeric!). The whole meal was a lot of fun, and afterwards we went to a cozy bar a little farther up the street for drinks. The crowd had thinned a bit at that point and it was just Steph, Joseph, her housemate Daiga, another friend of hers (Adam), and me. We were there for a few hours and had some lovely conversation. It was a very good night and I'm really glad that I went.
Carlos also had a birthday recently and decided that he wanted to celebrate by going out to a much-storied club called 5th Avenue. Ada and I had heard from some guys that it's like a lovefest in there - tons of drunk British girls waiting to kiss every guy who walks in the door. Because of those lascivious descriptions, we were a little bit hesitant about it but very curious. The group of us that went to the bar consisted of Carlos, Ada, Valerie, Jose, Charles (a classmate of Carlos's from China), and Ronny, and we had free entry passes that Avi had saved but hadn't gotten around to using so we didn't have to pay the cover. We stopped at another bar first while waiting for them to open and we met another friend of Carlos's there, Cinthya. She's very nice but was headed back to Mexico soon to start a new job. We hung out there for a while and then headed over to 5th Avenue at around 10:30 or so. It was a big place, with two floors and a balcony overlooking the dance area on the lower floor. It was certainly an interesting place - people were wearing the most hideous outfits and one girl on the upper balcony right above us decided to forgo undergarments; I found this out when I had the misfortune to look up. There was also an incident in which a pair of guys behind me decided that it would be hilarious to pinch my rearend, which caused me to shriek loudly enough to actually be heard over the music (which is no mean feat - I still have that Bye, Bye Birdie thing going on when needed). After they did it the second time it wasn't nearly so funny, so I decided to solve the problem by grabbing Charles and swapping places with him. I figured they'd be far less likely to pinch his butt than mine, and I was right. Despite one or two near-fights, it was a fun night, and it was also a wonderful measure of how far my asthma has come - I danced for about 4 hours in a room filled to the brim with that fake smoke stuff and my lungs were totally fine.
We continued the celebration the next night - Avi and Nithya bought a cake and we surprised Carlos with a little "Happy Birthday" singing. We decided to watch a movie after our cake and we decided on Very Bad Things. It didn't get quite the reception I was hoping for, but I still enjoy it so it was fine. Avi is quite taken with my movie collection and asked me to lend him my war movies - I've been able to introduce Nithya and him to some real classics, like Gallipoli, The Blue Max, Sink the Bismarck, and Paths of Glory (Nithya really liked that one, which figures since she's studying law). I'm glad that I've been able to bring such iconic films to India :)
George Kenyon has been holding various events in order to promote togetherness and stuff among the residents, and most of the events are pretty lame, but they had a barbeque a few weeks back so Carlos, Ada, and I decided to go (this was on the morning of the day we found out that Osama bin Laden had been killed). Once down there, Valerie and Dennis were there too, and soon enough the RAs and committee heads had set up a rudimentary barbeque apparatus. Since it was being supported by two wooden slats I'm amazed that we managed it without setting too much on fire (the wood was quite charred at the end and we only set the ground on fire once). There were kebabs, burgers, and chicken, but not beef burgers - they had lamburgers! Well they had turkey burgers as well, but the lamburgers were more exciting. One of my original goals while in Manchester was to eat a lamburger and I finally made that dream come true. It was rather spicy, but pretty good. Since there are so many people around who don't eat beef, lamb and chicken are commonly served. Despite the fact that it took ages to cook everything, it ended up being pretty good, although the smoke managed to frizz my hair something awful.
The term has recently ended, and this meant that our mini-colloquium for Methods class was held on Monday of the last week of classes. We were remarking that the titles of our talks made us sound so brilliant and we hoped that we could keep up that image in the actual presentations but I think they went well for all of us. We were all a bit nervous but our topics were so varied and interesting - we covered everything from ghosts in medieval Italian literature to homosexuality laws in current-day Portugal, from what it means to be a public intellectual of Turkish descent in Germany to the sins of Swiss politics as explored in wildly popular detective series. In the spirit of fellowship, we talked amongst ourselves before we got started and each gave everyone a couple of questions they could ask that we knew we could answer, and thus make everybody look good; I think that went pretty well, and it helped keep the embarrassment to a minimum. I was fortunate that when I did a presentation on blood libel, the whole concept and history of it so outlandish that it kept the professors from asking critical questions - everything they asked was more along the lines of 'Are you serious? People actually believed this?" so that worked pretty well in my favor. Something very, very interesting did happen though, and honestly I can't help but laugh about it even though it was rather unfortunate. When I first got here, I got a little clock at Asda that I've been using as my alarm. It only cost about a pound but I'd grown rather attached to it and it's a great traveling clock because it folds up and has a little cover. Because the room we were doing our colloquium didn't have a clock, I decided I would bring mine so that people could keep an eye on the time while presenting, as it always looks bad to be constantly glancing down at your watch while you're giving a speech. So I brought it, set it up, and all was right with the world. When lunch break came and we vacated the room, I left it on the desk, and we all said, "After all, who in their right mind would actually steal that?" Well, after the lunch break, we got back to the room and it turns out that someone actually DID steal it. Honestly, I found the entire thing too funny to actually be mad about it. It was just too bizarre . . . after all, who would want it? It's not exactly a hot black market item or anything. We thought it was hilarious, although I am a little bit sad now because when I went to Asda I couldn't find another one. Oh well . . it made the whole experience just that much more memorable.
That Friday was the deadline for us to hand in our papers so it was definitely a busy week for us all. I had two 4,000 worders to hand in and I'm not sure how happy I am with them, but they're done and that's all I care about. One compared the narrative styles of Primo Levi and Jorge Semprun and discussed how their backgrounds and political affiliations influenced their writing, and the other looked at Art Spiegelman's book The Complete Maus as analyzed in the context of two theories of memory (I picked Jewish memory discourse and trauma theory). This is not the sort of Holocaust stuff I envisioned myself doing, but at least now I can concentrate on my dissertation which is on a topic I really enjoy. My title is "A Persistent Evil: Anti-Semitism in Modern Times."
Steph had suggested that we get together on Friday evening to celebrate handing everything in (she said that it was quite a sight - she'd been sending out various emails all week and people had been slow to reply, but as soon as she asked if people wanted to go out for drinks she got immediate responses from everyone), so she, Sian, Marina, Joseph, and I met at a bar/pub on a side street connecting to Oxford Road called Font Bar. It's incredibly inexpensive - 2 pound cocktails (which are surprisingly good for only being 2 pounds) and inexpensive yet good food. We hung out there for several hours shooting the breeze and enjoying potato wedges, and the topic of conversation turned to Eurovision, which was happening the next night. I was unfamiliar with it but Joseph and Steph explained that it's a really big music concert that basically involves all of Europe. Joseph said that he was having a Eurovision party and that Steph and I should go over to his place and watch the event if we didn't have any other plans. It sounded like a lot of fun so she and I made plans to meet up and head over to his place like we had before. We ended up getting off about 8 stops too soon but it was a nice evening for a stroll so the walk was nice. We got there just about as it was starting - Joseph was cooking German food because Germany was this year's host. Apparently, the country that wins the previous year hosts the competition the next year, which provides a lot of incentive to win because it brings a lot of publicity and tourism dollars.
The Eurovision gathering was quite a bit smaller than the Royal Wedding gathering, and Joseph made excellent German food, including these very flat, flame grilled pizza things that never have tomato sauce! It was like heaven. While we were filling our plates and such, I got a crash course in Eurovision history - apparently the competition has been going on since the 1950s but it's greatly expanded since then (it started with 7 countries but this year's competition had 28). It's gone rather downhill, and apparently now it's kind of a joke - the songs are generally third rate, the costumes are ridiculous, and it was described as something that you can only really enjoy when you're drunk or at least buzzed. The guy announcing it (Graham Norton, I think) was very cynical and judgmental; apparently he's well-known for it, but that definitely made it more fun. Once we got to the second entry, Bosnia and Herzegovina, I began to understand why people make so much fun of this event. We had a great time bashing so many of the entrants, and our vote to win "Most Outlandish Costume" was Moldova. Most of the songs were kind of ridiculous, and one plucky young lad sang the song that gave this post its title. As the guy launched into the song, Joseph shook his head and said, "Oh, the irony of singing 'I Will Be Popular' at Eurovision." Apparently appearing on Eurovision is usually the death of someone's career. A lot of the lyrics were obviously written by people who don't speak English very well (most of the songs were performed in English, and apparently it didn't used to be that way); they had a feature on the TV where you could have the lyrics appear on the bottom of the screen even for the English songs, and it was hysterical to see them. Our personal favorite was from the German entry and the line went, "She's got a knuckle in her eye." Nobody was quite sure what that meant, and I was informed that it definitely is not British slang for anything.
After all 28 countries had performed, it was time for voting. Apparently you can really get a good idea for what current European politics are by looking at the Eurovision scores are (that would actually make a fascinating research project). There's some debate over which countries are actually European because Israel and some Central Asian countries vote as well, and Israel is definitely not Europe. Anyway, the voting goes as follows - you cannot vote for your own country, so you must vote for somebody else. The final score for each country comes from two sources - a panel of official judges accounts for half of it, and then the public vote is the other half. Each country gives points to 10 performers, either 1-7 points or 8, 10, or 12 points. Apparently you can always tell which countries will give other countries the most points, and this is generally based on political ties or geography. For example, the UK and Ireland never give each other any points. The Central Asian countries always give each other points, Portugal always rates Spain highly but Spain never gives Portugal anything. It's just how it goes, with enough variation to keep things slightly unpredictable. The results are announced live as each country in Europe calls in with their results and a running tally is kept. This year the UK got 100 points, which is apparently 100x more than they got last year. The winner for Eurovision 2011 was Azerbaijan (which was misspelled once or twice - apparently to some people it has more than one "j"), and I personally was glad to see that they won because they never have before but it was obvious that they were trying really, really hard. So it was quite an experience, but I'm glad that while I was in Europe I had the Eurovision experience. It was a little bittersweet though, because chances are it's the last time I'll be seeing Steph or Joseph, as they're both leaving the city quite soon. Onto bigger and better things, hopefully . . .
So it's been a very eventful two months or so, but I daresay some other entertaining things will happen soon enough. Stay tuned . . .
