V1.A.P2

Time to report from the depths of England.

The Summer School is probably great, but I am stuck at the "school" part and almost nothing to do with the "summer" bit. Spending much less time than expected (from me) in socialising and/or doing the other summer(y) activities such as PUB CRAWLING (According to good old Oxford English Dictionary, "the term -including variations like 'gin crawl' and 'beer crawl'- has been in use since the late 19th century. It's purportedly called a "crawl" because the participants are literally crawling from pub to pub after getting drunk at the first few pubs")!

Some points (too tired to make a story):

Being in England is GREAT! Everybody speaks in English. (Not joking. This is a real issue. Here everybody NORMALLY speaks in English, not because you CANNOT speak a particular language. Hence normality, hence lack of disturbance, hence confidence boost.) They do it naturally. You can understand what the people passing by down your window are talking about. English is good. I love it. It is complex, it is intuitive, and it has very few written rules so you have to be passionate about it (a nice reflection of the society it belongs to now that I am in a mood to oversimplify).

The campus doesn’t provide one with the expected historical atmosphere. The architecture is modern and skyscrapers are black (yes! black! and not one of those fashionable black ones either). Where I stay is nicely college-like, however, made of yellow brick and three-storey blocks around a court, called the Walton Court. Wiki says “Frinton and Walton is a civil parish and town in the Tendring district of Essex, England. It had a population of 19,039 according to the 2001 census. The parish consists of the towns of Frinton-on-Sea and Walton-on-the-Naze.[…] Hamford Water and the town of Walton-on-the-Naze feature as the location of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons book, Secret Water.”

Trivia (for Dutch friends in particular): Due to the visible erosion of the Naze, this has become a popular area for school fieldwork research into the effects of coastal erosion and methods used to protect the coastline. Some of the methods of protection that have been used include a sea wall, rock armour (rip-rap), groynes and a permeable groyne as well as improved drainage. However, the area of cliff where the Naze Tower is situated is being greatly eroded by the sea and weather. This means that the cliff is receding at a very fast rate and within 50 years the Naze Tower will have tumbled into the sea like the pill boxes that can be seen on the beach.
Great to know that engineering ALWAYS works in the Netherlands, while it may disappoint the English every now and then.

The Network Analysis course is confusing at times, mostly due to technical issues. Nice 3D graphs I must say. And good TAs who are nice to chat with out of the class and readily available in lab hours. More on some of their work later.

The other course however, is stunning. It gets you confused without the promise of any easy or difficult ways of circumventing / solving / ignoring / dealing with “the problem”. The course is designed (very craftily) so as to try every blind alley that the educated mind would like to escape to and helps you figure on the way back what might be a different way of looking at your steps. At one point it requires you to stop searching for the answer and enjoy the ride. As one Italian friend of mine said today, "you are only lost if you think there is a way out." So I am more AND less lost every time I am in and out of the class. I must also add that the lecturer (Mark Devenney) makes it admirably easy for me (and I think also most of the others in the class) to go through all the readings and theories and I feel that he even empathises with our confusions at times. Yet, not everyone is as confused as I am one “the problem” of course… Rule of thumb: some people have more structured minds and/or less tortured grey cells than others . But who knows maybe (just maybe) I'm having more fun... ;)

As a result, of course, I have to give a break to reporting now and spend the rest of my night with good old Jürgen. uh oh… Wish me luck (or find/choose a god and pray for me)!

ps. I know... too many bracets...