Rambling Update #1

Despite my honest and good intentions, it's been four weeks and I haven't yet posted a single update.

For which I can only apologise. In my defence, it's been a totally manic yet incredible few weeks, with very little downtime to even begin to take stock. In amongst the introductions, socialising, drinking, partying, orientation, drinking, form-filling, bureaucracy (lots and lots of bureaucracy), drinking, sleeping, exploring, eating, drinking, drinking, and drinking, there's been very little opportunity for extensive blogging.

Essentially, I've had a great start with an interesting and diverse set of friendly classmates. There are are roughly 60 people on my course, of which about 50 are doing the MA and others are on exchange or Erasmus. The entire cohort comes from something like 25 or 30 different countries, so it's a phenomenally interesting set of backgrounds, cultures, languages, etc., united by a common interest in 1) international politics and 2) alcohol. It's a close-knit and happy group which has already established various in-jokes: "Freedom!", "the bat", "white chutney", "TOMISLAAVVV!" You'll have to visit to be welcomed in to understand any of this. I haven't met too many people from outside the IRES programme yet, but there's plenty of time for that!

I'm living on the 7th floor of a relatively new hotel/apartment complex - a slightly bizarre set-up because it's a student dorm with a transient population of conference guests and individual visitors throughout the year. Most universities in the UK seem to keep those two clientèle relatively separate! But I've been pleasantly surprised by everything about the accommodation. The rooms are a decent size, ensuite, well-furnished, warm, comfortable. We have a weekly maid service who cleans, replaces bedding, hoovers, and there's a kitchen and TV lounge on every floor. There's a swimming pool, gym, study room, several computer suites, sauna, sports pitch, all of which are free to use. There's a bar and cafeteria onsite, along with a little shop that sells 15p espressos and 75p beers. It's a leisurely 30 minute journey into the city, but the metro is clean and swift, and it's an unhindered opportunity to chat or read material for class!

Classes have been running for two weeks, after a bizarrely aggressive sign-up process in which options were posted online at 5pm one evening on a first-come-first-served basis. My page crashed and I began to panic, envisaging three months of purgatory on some impenetrable module entitled "Post-rationalist Structuralism and Microeconomic Financial Policy in the Visegrad States". Or something like that. Nevertheless, there were plenty of spaces for everyone, and I was actually successful with all three of my preferred papers, meaning that in the coming months I will be embroiled in the following topics:

1)  Evolution of European Political Order - This class began with a deconstruction of every word in the course title: "we can't really define Evolution, Europe, Political, or even Order, so what are we even doing here?" The professor is an extremely bright and eclectic teacher (despite a heavy twinge of post-modernism), who shoots off at tangents on subjects as diverse as St Paul's letter to the Ephesians via the philological implications of the START/OCB treaties, to Ben Thatcher's elbow-charge on Pedro Mendes via the Concordat of Worms in 1122 AD, and yet somehow makes it perfectly clear why a certain author has questioned the reliance on theoretical paradigms in moment of revolutionary flux. Confused? Yeh, me too. I come out of the lecture understanding everything clear as day, but that soon disappears and I feel a little bit unworthy.

2) International Statebuilding - Essentially my excuse to spout bleeding-heart idealism and liberal internationalism until the West bloody well does something about Rwanda. It's actually a brilliantly interesting class on the underlying principles of international interventionism, R2P, democratisation by force etc. - extremely pertinent set against the ongoing situation Syria.

3) What is Diplomacy? - The history and theory of the practice of "diplomacy". Sounds straightforward, but I have the same professor as #1, so it's actually far more complex and intensive than I expected. This is the course I was least certain about, but it's been fun. I don't really understand it yet though.

Anyway, I need to go. I'm joining some guys for beers in the sauna, so despite having heaps more to say, that can wait for another month. Student life is tough.

Four Headings and Approval

Departure in less than a week, too many important tasks remain incomplete, and there's not enough time to do them. Lack of preparation now reaching chronic and totally inadvisable levels:

1) HEALTH. I'm meant to have a medical so I can opt into the university health insurance plan. Instead of organising this months ago I waited until this week, concomitantly forgetting that I'm still registered with a GP in Oxford, the form is ridiculously complex, and there's a pretty steep cost (£100+) for elective medicals. So I'm going to do this in Budapest, or just throw myself on the mercy of EHIC and hope any accident in my first week is a massive one (fall out of window, hit by car, mauled by boar) rather than a mild but persistent migraine.

2) ORGANISATION. I've been in the process of cleaning my bedroom for a full week now. This has meant binning undergrad offer letters and eye prescriptions that date from 2007, shredding five years worth of bank statements, and trying to cram the books and clothes bought in London into every remaining corner of my room. On the plus side, I have found my National Insurance card, which I thought was lost to the world, and bedroom drawers and cupboards now open without spewing forth a pile of hastily shoved miscellanea.

3) PACKING. A big suitcase is sitting by my bed. It contains a single penny. This is a Thursday night job.

4) LEARNING. Despite telling myself I would use this summer to read, read, read, it has slipped past in holidaying, sleeping, drinking. I'm looking guiltily at an introductory textbook to IR and worrying that reading pages 1-26 does not count as sufficient background knowledge for an MA degree. I can try to sidetrack every lecture into discussing veiled Anglo-German conflicts in interwar Tanzania, but this may not be a failproof plan.

THE GOOD NEWS
I have figuratively smashed the dentist ("hello", 60 second check-up, "see you in a year"), bought a satchel, had a rather brutal and unflattering haircut. And I came second in the tenpin bowling today. And second in quasar. Always the bridesmaid...

Distillation

I'm just back from a week splashing around Cornwall, returning with nothing more than moderate sunburn and five minor surfing-related injuries (caused exclusively by my own incompetence). Despite this, it was a very nice holiday: packed full of swimming, running, sleeping, drinking, reading, surfing, eating, exploring. Tough life.

So now the countdown begins. I'm a student once more. And I'm staring at a roomful of books and clothes accumulated over the past few years, and yet again wondering how to magically sift it down into a 20kg baggage allowance. Obviously this will be impossible, and only partly because I'm totally awful when it comes to packing. I postpone and delay and procrastinate and avoid it entirely, and then finally throw some stuff in a bag about an hour before my flight. I fully expect to arrive in Budapest with three socks, some worthless Latvian coins, and a May 2005 copy of National Geographic.

But it will be fine: wherever I go, things tend to migrate out after me. Various visitors will have some space in their luggage, and packages will arrive in the post, and I'll hopefully have to nip to London once or twice to make some job interviews - (cue military-style logistical operation to rendezvous with my missing winter coat in Watford). Chances are I'll have got most of the things I need by June... and will then start worrying about getting it home again. I guess this problem is magnified for students travelling from further afield, so I won't complain too much.

At some point my bedroom at home will need to be blitzed, and return to its primary function as a pleasant place for sleeping on trips home, rather than its current incarnation as a storage bunker with a bed hidden away in one corner. But hopefully my mum doesn't put her head round the door anytime soon, and that can become a task for 2014... 

I need to get a big flat!

Blog: Return of the Blog

After perusing the world wide web for many weeks, I slowly came to the conclusion it wasn't quite full. No. What the internet really needed was a semi-incoherent study-abroad blog from an angsty twenty-something trying to dodge the onset of real life. Something it has never seen before. But who could be self-aggrandizing enough to assume such a momentous task?

Then, a few days ago, came a moment of realisation...

"Bloody hell!" I bellowed loudly, startling several other shoppers in the Tesco checkout queue. "I fit that description perfectly. If I could get such a thing moving, I'll have completed the internet."*

So here we go again. I'm resurrecting that lucrative "Somewhere Near ... / Ten Months in ...." blogging format, only slightly concerned that I haven't done anything too noteworthy since the I last ran away from the UK. In this time, Louise Mensch has written for every major British newspaper, been on Question Time and HIGNFY, founded a bizarre alternative to Twitter, closed down a bizarre alternative to Twitter, got involved in public spats with both Nadine Dorries AND Luke Bozier, quit a job in Parliament, and run off to New York with the manager of Metallica. 

Meanwhile I spent far too long completing an abstract sketch of an elephant.

But now I'm getting ready to depart for a year-long MA course, to study International Relations at the Central European University in Budapest. It looks like a fascinating and studious year on paper, but could quite plausibly mutate into a surreal phantasmal haze fuelled by bathhouse fumes and cheap beer. (I hope so).
 
I'm not entirely sure how or why I ended up applying there – I vaguely remember stumbling across the website in December and it seemed fairly impressive. The university received a massive endowment when it was established in 1991, so is (hopefully!) well resourced with lecturers and books and facilities. After a few days of day-dreaming I sent off an application and forgot about it for a few months – especially as I started receiving a stack of acknowledgements from other perfectly respectable universities in lovely local cities: I could yet be happily partying in Manchester or punting in Cambridge before the end of August. 

But this option started to grow on me; taking the less predictable track seemed both exciting and suitably unusual, and CEU has a very diverse student body, an interesting course, and a healthy reputation in IR circles. I accepted the place quite quickly, any twinge of hesitation disappearing when the Tab politics faculty sent through a nine-page preparatory reading list. My boat race loyalties remain (impassively) dark blue for now.

So decision made. And the blog is back, for the benefit of friends, family, acquaintances, and myself. I'll try to keep it relatively complete and up-to-date, as I still enjoy reading back and reminiscing through my Maldives scribblings. Keeping a blog is probably the most productive thing I did out there, and it's been nice to have that record, even if it did end quite abruptly. And people were very kind about those efforts, to the extent blogging will soon be listed as a skill/hobby on my CV. The others are making pad thai and trying to forge those rubber loyalty card stamps so I can get free coffee in Caffe Nero…

On to CEU in a few weeks then. I’m hitting the road first, which is why this post has been done so uncharacteristically early. Leaving London this weekend, holidaying in Cornwall, zooming around Shropshire, and then hopping over to Budapest towards the end of August.  


* Didn't actually happen.