Carl's Cookies

The other evening, while I was making dinner—a delicious ratatouille, I might add, which shall serve as a dish to expand my ever-growing vegetarian repertoire—Carl, a fellow American from Bowden College, came into the kitchen laden with shopping bags. From the looks of things, he intended to do some baking. As he began to assemble his ingredients for chocolate chip cookies on the counter, I complimented him on his ambition. Gradually, I realized that he was blindly ambitious. Firstly, he informed me—with some incredulity, lessened by our time having lived here—that the largest bags of chocolate chips Tesco had were these. He held up bags of chocolate chips smaller than bags of M&Ms you can find at rest stops on some American turnpikes. Hence, he had bought four.

Before he could even begin, Carl came up with an immediate shortage: no mixing bowl. Granted, we are a communal kitchen, but how many college students bake from scratch? Looking around, I suggested that he use the next largest container: a wok. Thus, he was reduced to grinding away at his sugar and butter by hand—for we certainly lacked electric beaters, if we had no mixing bowl—in a wok. As the butter had no markings, Carl asked me to estimate if I thought it looked like two American sticks worth of butter. It looked a little short, but the hunk looked about the width of two sticks, so I told him so. What a shoddy manner of baking! One piece of information I was able to impart in a confident manner, however, was how to measure brown sugar: Carl was complaining about how white sugar settled so nicely into the measuring cup (we did have one of those in the kitchen by chance), while brown sugar never measured reliably. I came over to him and told him that was because he had to use a spoon and pack it down into the cup.

Finally, after seemingly endless mixing, the cookies were inserted into an oven preheated to an interminable temperature (a 5 on a 1-6 dial oven) and baked for an indeterminable time (until they looked done, apparently). As there was an entire batch, however, the communal kitchen became filled with communal cookies, which did come out rather tasty, if a bit crisp.

Once again, I was reminded why I do not bake away from home: the unknown requires improvisation, and baking is a science—improvisation is not my forte in this realm. Carl succeeded, though, and is now the kitchen favorite.

A catastrophic event

I never intended to see the Super Bowl: the Steelers weren’t in it, and I didn’t have to root against the Cowboys or Patriots, so Colts or Bears—I didn’t really care who won. However, practically every American and even a few Brits and Germans in my house were going to Varsity, a pub near the Pier, in order to watch the game. Apparently the Uni. of Sussex has an American football team, and both it and its cheerleading squad were hosting the event. Therefore, after a day of playing volleyball matches in Reading—my first outing with the Uni. Sussex women’s volleyball team!—I returned, took a shower, sat in on two rounds of Kings (a drinking card game, for those of you who do not know) on the third floor kitchen with practically half of Holland House’s residents, and proceeded to Varsity.

Being at this pub reminded me of when I was in junior high and high school: when I arrived, it turned out that I knew several separate groups of people, yet didn’t really feel like a “part” of any of them. Obviously, I arrived with my fellow Holland House-mates. However, Vikki, a girl on the volleyball team, had told me she had an extra ticket to get in (because she was a member of the cheerleading squad) and would meet me at the door if I called her when I arrived. Yet, the convenience of cell phones has still not been proven to me, because despite my calling AND texting her, she did not respond, and I ended up inside the door with no ticket. Therefore, I put on my sweetest demeanor and asked the football players manning the entrance, Did they know Vikki? The cheerleader? I was supposed to meet her. Could I go find her? One who was missing a tooth ended up taking a liking to my friend Amy and let us both in without hassle. Eventually, after leaving my Holland House-mates in a cluster near the door, I found three of my volleyball friends: Ola, Anika, and Vicky. Ola passed me the ticket Vicky had intended to give me, but I was already inside, so I merely pocketed it in case I needed it later. On the way to finding seats, I passed yet another group of people I knew from Holland house who apparently were already at the pub and usually went out separately from the group I had arrived with. I stopped and said hello and chatted a bit, but in the end, I spent most of my time with the volleyball girls. We found seats cross-legged on the floor in front of one big screen, and watched the game from that spot for virtually the entire first half.

The end of the first half marked the beginning of my unlucky event. It comprised a trip to the bathroom. First I had to find the spot and was nearly run over by the poor waitress who had been sprinting about the bar all night delivering food orders. I believe there was only one food-delivery bar mistress in the entire place, and for the amount of chicken nuggets and chips people were ordering, it was no wonder she was always in a tizzy. Nevertheless, that almost sent me catapulting down the stairs to the ladies and gentlemen’s “toilets.” (I find it so hard to ask to go to the “toilet” here—it feels like I’m saying a dirty word. But if I ask where the “bathroom” is, I always get a blank stare!) Then, once I made it into the bathroom, I was nearly smashed by the door, as I stood behind it in the queue (the British term for “line”). When it was finally my turn, I found myself stepping over the toilet bowl in order to get past the stall door and inside the tiny closet of a stall. I had my camera with me and no idea what to do with it, so I set it on what seemed to be the only flat surface in view: the lid of the waste bin beside the toilet. Then what did I do? I turned around to sit down and promptly bumped into the waste bin. Splash! went my camera.

So now I am in Great Britain, trying to travel and capture my experiences here, and have successfully rendered myself camera-less. Cheapest digital camera worth buying here? £200. That’s four hundred American dollars. Have I complained enough about being broke when I get back to the States? Let me begin again….

Fluf

Since I have not yet done so, let me describe my friend Fluf. I met Fluf the very first day I moved in. I was struggling to haul my suitcases into my closet-sized room, and he passed by on his way back from the shower. Towel around waist, dripping wet hair and mustache, he introduced himself. Half an hour later, he showed up and gave his signature light, almost inaudible tap at my door, bearing a duvet and pillow. Apparently a Canadian girl from the pervious term had left them with him, and he wondered if I might want them.

Fluf is vegan and has been for nine years; vegetarian for fifteen. He left home when he was sixteen years old, and this is his first year to be enrolled at any university, although he is twenty-nine years old. He decided to come to college because he wanted to find people who thought like he did: basically, people who are unhappy with the present state of the world and who want to find answers for how they might change it. He struggles with dyslexia and what he terms alcoholism, although he has quit drinking alcohol for over a year now, all of his own will. He smokes marijuana, but in the most unconventional way I have yet encountered: he usually smokes it in his room, and he sits by the window to blow the smoke outside, because he says he doesn’t like smoking. That is next on his list to quit.

For those of you who know how many movies I have watched with Ben, I am starting out on track to make Fluf my new movie buddy. So far we have watched: 1984, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Closer, Amélie, City of God, a documentary on hip-hop/scratching, and several episodes of Battlestar Gallactica. I am also learning to cook from watching him and sometimes cooking meals with him. I now know that to stir-fry tofu, you must first put the flavoring on the tofu and then add cornstarch, so it will crisp up in the pan. I am also much better acquainted with various vegetables: I know what parsnips are, I actually like cabbage, and my strong dislike of mushrooms has abated.

He probably doesn’t realize, but some things that Fluf says are incredibly important to me. Just the other night, I was relaying an encounter I had had on a bus ride home involving three very immature twelve-year-old girls and some college-age boys (all of whom were at about the same maturity level). When I had concluded my story, Fluf remarked, “You are going to be so good at telling stories to your kids.” I was so shocked that he had been paying attention to me and not the insignificant things I was saying, that I asked him what he meant. “You get so into the characters, you’re so animated, you’ll just be very good at it.” That meant a lot to me.

What may have meant more was when he noticed one night that his computer wasn’t playing music in the background. I asked him why that was significant, and he said he always liked to have it playing because he didn’t like silence—it made him uncomfortable. But that didn’t seem to bother him so much with me. I almost sighed with relief. Finally, I could finally give this over-generous guy something in return.

More Weird Athletic Observations

Despite my ordinarily overactive powers of observation, I failed to notice some very important attributes of British athletics last week. This Friday, as I ran around the gymnasium with the U. Sussex women’s basketball team, I couldn’t stop looking at the floor. Something was very wrong with it. Every time I wanted to make sure I was outside the key—to avoid a three-second call or to line for a shot in case I received the ball—I kept looking down and finding the black line just slightly past my feet. I swear, it was like an optical illusion! Finally, as I stood at the baseline in order to pass the ball inbounds, I realized what the problem was: the key was not rectangular. Instead, the lines forming its sides were slanted outward from the foul line at forty-five (okay, maybe slightly smaller) degree angles until they met with baseline. I was flabbergasted.

My first inclination was that this was a setup for some other sport and that another marking on the court—perhaps one less obvious to they—must have been the key. These courts had so many lines for so many sports—basketball, volleyball, netball, and who knows what else—that it was quite possible I was mistaking the key markings for some sort of bizarre netball goal boundary or other such thing. However, upon asking one girl what those lines were for, she gave me an Are you stupid? look and said, “Those are they key.” I said I knew that, but were they for sure for basketball, and why were they slanted? After a big more back-and-forth, she finally explained that the key is different in America—the lines forming it are straight (i.e. parallel). She also pointed out that our three-point line is different: in America, the three point line meets the half-semicircle crowning the top of the key. However, on the British court, there is a gap between the three-point line and the top of the key. I couldn’t believe I had played an hour-and-a-half of basketball with these girls last week and never noticed.

At 8pm, it was on to volleyball. There, I discovered another deviation from American sports: the net was definitely lower. Last week, I had noticed that my hitting seemed marginally more successful than in that past. However, I attributed that to having taken a break from volleyball and a bit of luck. However, this week my percentage of successful hits remained consistent, and I even managed to block another girl’s hit all by myself. Now, I couldn’t help but be suspicious.

At home, if I stand next to the net and raise my arm extended straight above my head, the tips of my fingers barely reach the top of the net. In fact, if an observer were to stand behind me, he/she may claim that I cannot actually reach the very top of the net. Last night, however, I raised my arm and found my fingers extending almost a knuckle over the net.

So much for miraculously gaining volleyball skills on my flight overseas.

Cell phones, Mayonnaise, and Clubbing

Somehow, I have spent ten quid on a total of two phone calls to the U.S. (Vicky and Ben, feel privileged. Feel very privileged.) Here’s how else I determined the money could have disappeared: 1) Calling the mobile phone companies to sort out my phone number switching between SIM cards (which STILL has not happened); 2) being charged when I check my voicemail (rip-off number one); 3) being charge to find out how much money is left on my plan (rip-off number two). However, calling to find out how much money I had left was useless, because my phone call today was cut off mid-sentence, anyhow. So much for my pence-to-minutes math.

Other random observations:

When I accompanied my friends Michelle and Angela to an Alpha class at the local Church of Christ the King—this is a class for “people seeking God” and I like Michelle and Angela’s company, so I figured attending couldn’t hurt—we were fed a meal before the speaker got up to tell us how Christianity was not “outdated, impersonal, or irrelevant.” The meal consisted of orange juice, lasagne, and salad. These foods seemed pretty unremarkable, and I remained undisturbed until I moved up in line for my portion of salad. The server scooped some greens onto my plate and motioned to a bowl at the edge of the table. “Mayonnaise?” I took a good long look to make sure I had heard her right and was seeing correctly. Yet, there it was: a big bowlful of white gloppy mayo, clearly intended to be spread upon our fresh vegetables. Slowly, I made my way back to my table, trying not to throw up in my mouth. Mayo is just one of those foods, and on salad…?

Another interesting custom here involves dance clubs. Apparently, it is completely normal and acceptable—assuming you are female, that is—to dress up as imaginary characters in order to go clubbing. I walked into Event II, a dance club in Brighton, with another American living with me in Holland House, Amy, and was instantly assaulted by visions of girls prancing about in nurse, bunny, fairy, and cowboy costumes, amongst other interesting apparel. It was quite a show. I plan to go dancing again tonight, so we shall see what sorts of spectacles present themselves this time. Maybe I will take my camera; I wonder if any of these Brits are exhibitionists?