"Keel to Cambridge"

(Clare Hall Boat Club. I'm #2 from the end of the boat/the top of the photo.)

Everyone in Cambridge rows. It's a cult. And it's fantastic.

Below are the results of our race today- 1.6km, along the part of the river with "corners" (curves! ugh. = bigger chance of hitting the bank). I think this email from our cox (who sits in the boat and doesn't row but tells the other 8 of us what to do) is hilarious...
Honestly though, what kind of smart Cambridge students willingly sit in a cramped boat on a Saturday for hours on end (literally) in the cold for 8:38 minutes of adrenaline?!
Even though it sounds awful, somehow this sport is AMAZING and addictive and oh so much fun, especially when we finish 14th out of 20 teams... I like low-pressure sports situations. :)

* "Keel to Cambridge" is a command the cox gives when we are carrying our boat out of the boathouse. It means "flip the boat sideways with the bottom pointing west," back towards the town. I had a great fundraising idea- that our team could pose naked while holding our boat "keel to Cambridge"! I think the boat is just wide enough to make this photo G-rated...

"Hi Ladies

as promised here are the results of today's race
We didn't quite finished in the time we aimed for
Yet, 8:38mins is a decent time which you can be proud of!!!
With this time we finished 14th out of 20 in our division.

The boat felt pretty stable and well balanced and technically you did a big step forward and improved a lot! :o)

So Ladies, let's get on to the ergs [rowing machines] and SQUEEEEEZE those legs
Task for this week: 30mins at a stroke rate of 20 but with a split time 4 seconds faster than last week!!!
I know you can do it!
What you need is POWER from your legs

GOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooo Ladies

your happy and proud but frosted and tired,
Jenny"

Speak Hogwarts?

Today I rode my bike past the Cambridge linguistics professor who supposedly helped create Parseltongue for JK Rowling.
WHOA!!
He was cycling too, and my friend who studies linguistics pointed him out. He's ancient, cool enough to ride a bike, and an expert in phonetics. I couldn't find out anything about him or Parseltongue online, but I trust my friend, as his student, to be a reliable source.
Next time I'll ask for his autograph... in Parseltongue, of course.

Swingin' UK-style

I turned 23.5 today.
(Those of you with summer birthdays appreciate the significance of half-birthdays, which allow you to not miss out on bringing cupcakes to school...)

In other news, on Monday I went to the Cambridge Swing Dance Society's weekly Speakeasy! Amazing and appropriate name, I guess, considering it happens in a pub (which is called The Man on the Moon and has a giant mural of a guy in a spacesuit playing the saxophone!). It was SO FUN and felt exactly like the swing dance at U of C, where I spent basically every Friday of the past four years... except that the Speakeasy has alcohol, a 5 pound entry fee (yikes), and boys who say "bollocks" when they step on your feet. Otherwise, exactly the same. :)

They played songs about Chicago and jazz and "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing"... songs that transport me back to the sweaty attic of U of C's old student center where we lindy-hopped in Hyde Park. The class before the Speakeasy was taught by two people in ass-hugging wide-leg jeans (the uniform of every swing dancer- so you have lots of room at the knees to Charleston but you also get to show off the big butt you've earned from all the jump steps!) and they taught the steps in the exact same way as every Chicago dancer, even with the same names for the steps! I <3 global culture.

One funny difference was when one of the teachers (who was German! Swing dance is everywhere!) said "You have to dance two songs with each partner and then change partners- it's tradition." I'd never heard of that, and I asked the guy I was dancing with about it and he said, "Yeah, well, this is Cambridge. They have their own traditions." Ha! Cambridge has 800 years' worth of traditions of its own, yet it insists on also having a tradition about an American dance?! I love that!

Wishing you a night of fun and familiarity in a new place!

Obama and Robert Burns

Once again, a major U.S. political event is followed by a goofy, purely British holiday.
Yesterday's earth-shattering inauguration, which was in every news headline and even appeared in one of my lectures today because Obama mentioned the need for more science research, was followed today by my college's celebration of Burns Night, a Scottish holiday in honor of, well, Scotland and named after the Scots' favorite 18th century poet, Robert Burns, who wrote Auld Lang Syne (the New Years Eve song). (And you thought there'd be bonfires, right? Sadly, unlike Guy Fawkes Day (which was the night after Obama's election), Burns Night has nothing to do with burning... except maybe as the effects of Scottish whisky.)
Sometimes it takes bagpipes and incomprehensible traditions to shock me into remembering that I'm not in Kansas (Chicago?) anymore, and that's what I got tonight. First a bagpiper played in the Clare Hall lounge, surrounded by people in tuxedos and formal dresses. The piper had a kilt and a huge furry hat and enormous lungs, and was so cool to hear! Then we sat down in the dining hall and a cook came out carrying The Haggis (sheep's stomach stuffed with its lungs, liver, heart, etc, then baked... looks a lot like a football) on a silver tray, and then paraded it around the whole room with the piper following him. Seriously! The piper was playing in honor of the haggis, a traditional dish that the Scots are very proud of, and to which Robert Burns wrote a poem. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself....
So we all sat and watched the haggis get paraded around with its musical fanfare, reminding me of the part during bar/bat mitzvahs when the kid carries the Torah around the room and everyone oohs and ahhs with reverence, though there is probably much less salivating in the synagogue than there was at Clare Hall tonight.
Then the haggis was placed on a table and a guy stood up with a big knife and recited Burns' poem, Address to the Haggis. He was amazing- very expressive and emotional and passionate, though I have no idea what he said. (Apparently he was actually Scottish, and he said Burns' poem with an authentic Scottish brogue!) At the climax of the poem, he plunged his knife into the haggis! Whoa.
Then the haggis (still with its piper piping!) disappeared into the kitchen, where it was cut up so we could eat it. I looked around my table, checking to see if anyone else's chin was on the floor or just mine. Wow. People think Britain and the rest of Europe have been Americanized into Starbucks that serve tea, and they have, but there are still pockets of foreign culture that we know nothing about and that are an absolute joy to encounter.
After haggis (which is served with nips and tatties- turnips and potatoes!) and steak and Scottish cheese, we had a ceilidh- a dance! An accordion player taught us square-dancing-type steps and then played traditional Scottish folk songs while we hopped around and laughed like maniacs. Imagine- people of all ages, in formalwear, full of food and whisky, clutching each other's arms and spinning to Scottish Reel #4! What fun!!

Thanks for a great time, Robert Burns.

For more info on Burns Night:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/news_and_events/events_burnsnight.shtml

CEASEFIRE

Israel has promised a ceasefire.
Thank whateveryoulike for this end to violence. Even if it turns out to be a pause rather than an end, this is fantastic news.
Sorry for this unusually serious blog post, but the crisis in Gaza has been an everyday subject in Cambridge for 22 days now. There have been mass emails with fiery language, facebook groups with militant calls-to-action, and confrontational discussions in our college common room. There was a film screening of Occupation 101, a documentary about the history of Gaza, filmed by Americans. There was a demonstration in Cambridge's market square today.

All of this has been pro-Palestinian. Anti-Israeli.

As an educated person with many Jewish friends, I thought I knew some things about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After a week in Israel last winter with my best friend, visiting her wonderful, kind, educated, Hebrew-speaking Jewish family and being welcomed into their homes all over Israel, I thought I understood the conflict, as much as an outsider can understand. They told me about Israel's history and the wars that have defined its borders, and they showed me their neighborhood bomb shelters and warned me about riding the buses. They were proud and possessive of their country, as we all are of our homes.
But I didn't understand the conflict, and I definitely still don't. Most Americans don't know what it's like to be afraid of our neighbors. We also don't know both sides of the story in this case, and I'm not sure we ever will, even once Israel allows journalists into Gaza. But the point is that I was hurt and offended this week when my friends from all over Europe were taking me aside and telling me that the United States doesn't know anything, that our press covers only the pro-Israel side of the conflict, that the United States is to blame for arming Israel and making it an unacknowledged nuclear power. That it is our fault that these attacks have continued since 27 December. That Israel planned these attacks for a time when the U.S. has a power vacuum with a lame-duck president. That the United States is the only country that can make Israel stop this violence. That it is our fault that Palestinian children are dying from Israeli/American bombs.

It's been a rough week, for Gazans, and Israelis, more than anyone, but also for those of us who feel inexplicably guilty and shockingly ignorant. First I was angry with my friends and the European press for being so blatantly pro-Palestinian, then I was shocked at evidence showing Israel's attacks as an overreaction to a few Hamas-rocket deaths by killing thousands of civilians and denying humanitarian aid to thousands more. Now I am confused by the evidence of the U.S.'s unquestioning support for Israel's actions. Why do we give so much support to Israel, often in the face of UN sanctions? Who do we think we are, choosing which countries we want to help and which we don't? How can it be that a country would time its attacks to coincide with the change-of-power distraction of a country halfway around the world?

Forgive my ignorance. This is a volatile issue that everyone has an opinion on and everyone cites different sources of information to support their views. Who knows the truth? My struggle with it mirrors many people's, I'm sure, and I'm embarrassed to be so uninformed and to be so confused by all the issues involved. This week of conflict in Gaza and over the dining hall table in Clare Hall ended with peace in Gaza (as of tonight??) and me in Cambridge's market square, surrounded by people yelling "Free Palestine" while I cried in the arms of my Jordanian friend whose uncle was killed in Gaza yesterday.
I can't yell "Free Palestine" but I can desperately want my friend's family, and my adopted Israeli family, to be safe. There are two issues here, a humanitarian one and a political one. Clearly no one has any clue how to fix the political conflict, but the killing-each-other issue I think we can all agree on the solution: STOP.

Here's hoping for a new year where we all fight it out across a table and not across rocket-launchers, tanks, and barbed wire.

A email to my department's listhost

"Dear all:
On Monday, I will present a paper entitled 'Botanizing rulers and their herbal citizens: plants and political power in Greek and Roman literature' in the Faculty of Classics. I would very much like to see familiar HPS [history and philosophy of science] faces in the audience."

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Is this straight out of Harry Potter or what? As my mom pointed out, Neville was an expert on this topic...

I <3 academia.

a brief foray to the U.S. of A.

During my week in Florida with my family for Christmas, my mom told me a story she read in some famous person's speech for a graduation ceremony. It goes something like this, with apologies to whoever it was whose speech it came from:

Two young fish are swimming along and swim past an old fish. The old fish says, "Hello, how's the water?" The young fish say, "Fine, thanks," and swim by. Then one young fish says to the other, "What's water?"

How do we learn about our "water", our context, the way we live? It's so ingrained and unconscious that we have no idea what it is. My week in Florida reminded me of a few things I had forgotten about America. Funny what you aren't aware of until all of a sudden it's different...

Things I Miss about the US
-people with tattoos
-people being out of shape so I can walk faster than them and beat them to get in line at Passport Control, the grocery store, etc. (Those skinny, fast-walking Europeans ALWAYS beat me and I end up last in line.)
-cheap cell phone minutes

Things I Don't Miss
-not having tax included in prices
-coins that are basically worth nothing (Pounds come in 1 pound and 2 pound coins, which are worth $3/4ish dollars! A pocketful of change can buy a pint, no problem, but what can a pocketful of quarters buy you, besides maybe a laundry cycle?)
-having no international stories on the news
-having to drive everywhere
-toilets that use gallons of water to flush. British toilets are empty until you flush, which I imagine saves a LOT of water. It means your pee looks a lot more yellow than it does in the U.S. though (since it's not diluted with toilet water), which can be a little shocking.

Things I Thought I Would Miss and Don't
-Cars driving on the right side. I'm so used to British driving on the left that now I'm just confused and have to look both ways TWICE to make sure.
-American food. Ick. (I do miss Mexican food though, which really doesn't exist in Europe.)
-having so much SPACE everywhere, from in cars to bedroom size to wide staircases. Britain is a little island with a big population so space is limited and everything is cramped, and I love it. I felt a little lonely in giant American rooms.

Things That Are The Same
-bad traffic
-Obama's face being everywhere (awesome!)
-cell phones/"mobiles" that do everything (though American ones are oh so much cheaper to talk on). In my extended family of 7 there are 6 phones that check email and go online, 5 of which also take pictures and play music. (Guess who's the 7th person with the lame make-and-receive-calls cell phone? Whatever, my TWO (crappy) cell phones mean I can make calls all over the U.S. and Europe- beat that, iPhone users! :) )


I'll write about our fantástico trip to Spain soon, with input from my travel buddy and coauthor, Deena. I hope you all had a great holiday season and are pumped up for a fantastic 2009!