Sports and School

BA Word of the Day:  tariff. In the US, we understand a tariff as a tax on an imported good. In the UK, tariff also means a plan for a cell phone. I’ve seen both plan and tariff used interchangeably, but I can’t quite put my finger on any difference. If you are British (or just have knowledge on this matter) please comment on this post if there actually is a difference.

First of all, go Giants! I’m not a big fan or anything, I simply root for the team that I think is less likely to win and root for them. I got the other people in my building that watched the game to root for the Giants (except for one girl that wanted to be contradictory), so it was fun getting to root for the winning team. It was also fun to explain to the other students how American Football is played while we watched the game.

This weekend I got to see my very first rugby match (on tv). It was the Scotland v England match, which I guess is supposed to be a big deal. I don’t even remember who won. What I do remember is the crazy hits that those guys took… with little to no padding. Ok, yea it wasn’t always full on contact like American Football is, but still! Those guys were getting hit hard and by multiple guys! And the goal posts that they have to kick the rugby ball through, along with the angles at which players kick the ball through, make American Football special teams look like little kids.

With all of that in mind, I must say that rugby and American Football are two fairly different sports. For instance, the guys in my building that watched the Super Bowl were annoyed at all of the pauses in the game for commercials and time outs. In rugby, it’s two periods, 40 minutes each, of full on rugby. No time outs (unless injury occurs), no commercial breaks, nothing. It’s great. But I still love my American Football.

And onward with my first day of school! I got off the bus and to my surprise, two other study abroad students that live in my building got off the bus in front of me at the stop! To an even bigger surprise, one of them was in my class today! So yay! I wasn’t all alone in class! And I also wasn’t all alone in finding our classroom, which was a royal pain in the butt. Tower main has about 30 floors… and they have color coded sections. Do Rina and I never really knew where we were going. We kinda just went on lucky hunches down the halls, but we made it with plenty of time to go.

So we walk into the classroom. It’s quite a large lecture hall, however, all of the chairs are on the same level. And the desks attached are round and tiny. Both Do Rina and I were shocked at the smallness of the round swivel desk tops. Class was your typical introductory first day of class. Right after class, I went to a building across the street for my seminar class. There were between 10 and 15 people in the seminar. To my shock, not a single person in the seminar is British. There are people from Nigeria, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Ghana, and the US. The professor isn’t even British; she’s from Germany. You would think it is statistically probable that at least one person would be British. Again, typical introduction class.

My other class has been fine. Another HR class. Tomorrow I go in for my first meeting at my internship at Carbon Voyage and I go to my first Theatre in London class. Both should be lots of fun to report on! Until then, cheers!