Abingdon
After Canada was the 2 weeks of the summer school in Abingdon, just south of Oxford. I thought it was going to be awful - 2 weeks of lectures, classes, tutorials and question sheets. What could be fun about that?! It's a compulsory summer school for first year particle physics grad students, so all the first years in the country came. They were (mostly) great fun, and we had a laugh. The work was (again mostly) stuff that those of us at oxford had done before (due to all our lecture courses in our first year - most graduates don't get those) so we finished off the question sheets fairly quickly (big group effort there) and had quite a bit of free time in the afternoons. This was spent playing crazy golf (it was only really crazy coz it was a badly looked after course, and the concrete was pitted, so the ball wnet everywhere!), pitch and putt (strangely fun - i may have to change my opinion of golf) or in the adventure playground!
The playground was lots of fun. There was a bucket-type-thing which was cool - one person gets in, and curls themselves round inside it, and then someone else spins it. It goes v fast, so it's mad! Ben did it first and Florian spun him, then Ben tried to make Florian take a go, but he wouldn't, so i went. Funfun! The freakiest part was watching the head of the person spinning you. If you just kept your eyes on something within the bucket, it was amazing how quickly you got used to the spinning, and barely noticed, but watching the head made you realise how fast you were going. And then, to stop, Florian and Ben grabbed it and stopped it practically instantaneously - yikes, mad deceleration! I was quite dizzy for a while...
It was a residential course, and i was lucky enough to get a room to myself, which was fab. Unusually for me though, I didn't retreat to it at all, except one day when i was feeling pretty ill and went to have a nap after lunch, and ended up sleeping through the free time, the afternoon tutorial and the final lecture of the day... oops! The food was gorgeous - 3 big meals a day, plus snacks at morning and afternoon tea. What with dessert at lunch & dinner (they had a choice of 2 each time, so it was rare that there wasn't something totally irresistible...), biscuits in the morning and cakes in the afternoon, I'm surprised i didn't come back 3 times my normal size!
In the evenings, there wasn't much to do. Generally we went to the pub and chatted / played pool. One evening at the pub the table with my friends on was full, so i went to join another, and the tutors were there and said "we're waiting for someone brave enough to join us" so I sat with them. That was a great evening actually - they bought me all my remaining drinks (of which there may have been slightly too many, since someone else was buying!) and the gossip was v interesting... they talked about a student who came on to one of them in the bathroom, and another student that they find really annoying (and that part was especially interesting, coz that student was an irritatingly pretty girl who i thought all the guys would like, but maybe not all of them) and other things that i probably shouldn't share! Anyway, they were really nice - i like that by this point, there is so much less of a distinction between students and teachers, so you can be friendly rather than just formal.
Ooh, we also played bridge. Not me and the tutors that is - just a random group of people a couple of evenings after getting back from the pub. Turns out that Greg (an oxford grad) plays at the junior international level. Scary. Anyway, it was lots of fun and i realised i'd quite like to learn more - i know how to play, but nothing about the communication that goes on between partners about what they have in their hands, both during bidding and play. Interesting.
The playground was lots of fun. There was a bucket-type-thing which was cool - one person gets in, and curls themselves round inside it, and then someone else spins it. It goes v fast, so it's mad! Ben did it first and Florian spun him, then Ben tried to make Florian take a go, but he wouldn't, so i went. Funfun! The freakiest part was watching the head of the person spinning you. If you just kept your eyes on something within the bucket, it was amazing how quickly you got used to the spinning, and barely noticed, but watching the head made you realise how fast you were going. And then, to stop, Florian and Ben grabbed it and stopped it practically instantaneously - yikes, mad deceleration! I was quite dizzy for a while...
It was a residential course, and i was lucky enough to get a room to myself, which was fab. Unusually for me though, I didn't retreat to it at all, except one day when i was feeling pretty ill and went to have a nap after lunch, and ended up sleeping through the free time, the afternoon tutorial and the final lecture of the day... oops! The food was gorgeous - 3 big meals a day, plus snacks at morning and afternoon tea. What with dessert at lunch & dinner (they had a choice of 2 each time, so it was rare that there wasn't something totally irresistible...), biscuits in the morning and cakes in the afternoon, I'm surprised i didn't come back 3 times my normal size!
In the evenings, there wasn't much to do. Generally we went to the pub and chatted / played pool. One evening at the pub the table with my friends on was full, so i went to join another, and the tutors were there and said "we're waiting for someone brave enough to join us" so I sat with them. That was a great evening actually - they bought me all my remaining drinks (of which there may have been slightly too many, since someone else was buying!) and the gossip was v interesting... they talked about a student who came on to one of them in the bathroom, and another student that they find really annoying (and that part was especially interesting, coz that student was an irritatingly pretty girl who i thought all the guys would like, but maybe not all of them) and other things that i probably shouldn't share! Anyway, they were really nice - i like that by this point, there is so much less of a distinction between students and teachers, so you can be friendly rather than just formal.
Ooh, we also played bridge. Not me and the tutors that is - just a random group of people a couple of evenings after getting back from the pub. Turns out that Greg (an oxford grad) plays at the junior international level. Scary. Anyway, it was lots of fun and i realised i'd quite like to learn more - i know how to play, but nothing about the communication that goes on between partners about what they have in their hands, both during bidding and play. Interesting.