Sunny Days!

I'm loving this recent March weather-- temperatures with a high of 9C and sun! And some spring crocuses are blooming!


Last Friday I finally made it to the New Forest with Genevieve! We planned on walking a path I found in a guidebook, but I mostly led us astray through the woods. The trail and a animal paths look very similar, and both are hard to follow because there is a ton of mud. Genevieve tried to jump across a stream when the bank collapsed, and she was soaked for the rest of the hike. Wild ponies abound, though, and I got to pet one. I think it just wanted food, though. Regardless, it was nice to get out of the city of Southampton for just a little bit.

We took the bus into Lyndhurst, a town in the middle of the New Forest. It's a beautiful town, with a quaint old church, and a Maserati/Ferrari dealership. Our bus barely got us there, however, because the engine coolant was leaking...the New Forest was very elusive. After our hike (the British call it walking), we weren't sure how far back to the bus stop, so we tried our luck hitchhiking. The 4th car picked us up! It was a really nice BMW wagon, too. The driver offered to take us as far as Totton, only 2 miles from Southampton, but we declined and had him drop us at the bus stop. We should have gone to Totton--the bus was 40 minutes late (Wilts & Dorset--no good!).

Last Monday I had a practical on the RV Callista, and the weather also was beautiful! The lab was mind-numbing (all we did was lower a T/S probe in 3 spots), but it was nice to be on the water and in the sun.

Today Kate was visiting, and I went back to the New Forest with her. This time I brought my GPS to keep a sense of direction, and we had a really nice and relaxing 5-mi hike across some beautiful heathlands. We were going to try to do a hike on the Isle of Wight, but overslept (what's new?).

Tomorrow I'm heading up to northern Wales with the Mountaineering Club to do some climbing near Tryfan!

Yes, I really did get punched by a girl.

So I need to catch up and write a full post about adventures to Bath, and to the New Forest (almost), but I've had enough people ask me what happened last night that I'm sick of repeating myself.

I've never seen anything like it, except on Jersey Shore. In fact, my friend who was with me at the time called the girl a "pikey." Imagine a Jersey shore-whore, but instead of a fake tan, she's a pasty alley-rat.

Coming home from a club last night with Stuart, I was standing on the street corner by Ted's Fish Bar (can you guess why it's my favorite late-night "chips" stop?) counting change to see if I could afford any food. Some girl holding hands with her boyfriend bumps into me--a solid hit that sends the change out of my hand. I just laughed and picked up my change (who's stupid idea was it to make 2-pound coins?)

About 20 feet away from me, this pikey girl with her boyfriend sprints away from him, towards me, screaming "DID YOU JUST HIT MY MATE?!" Apparently "mate" is a unisex term. Me, the naive American, gave her a little benefit of the doubt and sarcastically said "Yes," and turned to keep walking down the street, still trying to count my change (what's the octagonal coin again?).

She took me literally, and WHACKED me in the back of the neck. Stuart said it was full fist, no sissy little slap. I don't remember it hurting, but I was surprised to be hit, and spun around expecting it to be her boyfriend, ready to go at it. When I saw this crazy girl, I made naive American mistake number 2: "FUCK YOU SLUT!"

Oops.

She lost it, and while the first girl and her boyfriend watched, the crazy girl started punching and swinging her purse at me. And while I was swatting her arms away and protecting my eyes, her boyfriend starts coming at me...

Stupid naive American mistake 3: I yell at him to "Keep that bitch under control." I think I said it three times before he actually stepped anywhere near me or the crazy girl. Luckily at that moment, Stuart grabs me and yanks me away from the crazy girl just as her boyfriend puts HER in a chokehold, and drags her off asking, "Why do you keep pulling shit like this?"

Soooo. Lessons learned: coins suck for large denominations, drunk girls don't watch where they're going, drunk girls are more protective of their friends than their boyfriends, drunk girls don't like being called sluts, drunk guys listen when you tell them to control their girls, and drunk girls have recurring anger-management issues. Happy Valentine's Day!

Everything Hurts

Last night I joined Uni Southampton's American football team for their practice--I'm so sore today. First time I've worn shoulder pads and a helmet to play football though. Tackling people hurts a lot less with them on. I trained with their linemen. I've never had formal instruction on how to block or tackle, so I've already learned a lot.

The team, the Stags, was national champion a couple years ago, but last year the league broke the team into two (separating players from another uni, Solent), and they seem to be having dedication problems. Looks like the Stags could be good, except a lot of players didn't show up to practice last night. They're 1-4, but apparently had a tough beginning of the schedule.

Despite sore muscles everywhere, I went out to play with the NOC rugby team this afternoon. The game seems like a lot of fun, but comparisons to American football are hard to make--it's pretty different. I think I'm picking it up, but I had trouble figuring out where to be on the field for much of today. You can't pass forward, so there's little advantage in being in front of the player with the ball, which is something that takes getting used to.

I found a local bus to the New Forest, a national park about 15 miles from Southampton. Hopefully I'll get out there to check it out this weekend.

Boats and Balls

Last Wednesday I got the chance to go out on the RV Callista. We collected water samples in the Test and Itchen Rivers to measure dissolved silicon vs. salinity as a tracer for estuary mixing. The Callista is a 35' catamaran--she's pretty cool, with a huge boom crane on the stern that we used to test a big CTD profiler we'll be using in Falmouth this summer.

That afternoon I took a train to London--I can't wait to go back, because I spent less than 12 hours there, and didn't get to see much. It was exciting pulling into Waterloo Station and seeing the London Eye, though! And after a moment of confusion, even the Underground was pretty simple.

Watched my first Rugby match on Saturday afternoon in Archers--England beat Wales in the Six Nations. Have to admit, rugby looks like a rough game, and they do take a beating. I'm excited to try it out next week.

But, watching the Superbowl last night, you can see why Americans wear pads. Rugby doesn't have anything like the full speed spear tackles in American football. I watched the Superbowl at a club called Wahoo. It was broadcast at 11:30pm on BBC, and announced by a right tackle from London's American football team. He was terrible--he felt the need to describe in full detail a screen play with 11 arrows...one to show where every player went during the play. And I missed the commercials! I ran into some American football players for Southampton Solent (the other uni in the city) walking back, who situated me with a secret 1.99-pound value meal at one of the kebab shops. I think I'm meeting the Southampton team Tuesday, and if I'm lucky I can play in their "match" next Sunday.

Yesterday I also visited the Southampton Maritime Museum. It's housed in an old (600 years!) wool warehouse, turned prison, turned museum, right on the docks. The Mayflower sailed from Southampton, but the main city docks weren't built until about the 1840s. They were knocked down and rebuilt a few times. For a while, it had the worlds largest floating dry docks and the worlds largest cruise ship terminal. The Titanic sailed from Southampton in 1912, and there is a memorial on the water.

RAF and AUVs

Last night I met a couple of Hercules AC-130 "Spectre" gunship pilots in the Royal Air Force at Jesters. Proud to say they are envious of how the American public supports our troops, even if they don't agree with the deployment. Unfortunately, these guys said that British citizens don't give a damn what happens to their military men, and "the whole lot of them can be bombed." Something else that was disappointing-- they said they don't like to fly with American pilots, because they don't always know what they're doing.

Today I had my first SOES 3029: Seafloor Exploration/Surveying lecture. We got a tour of the NOC's warehouse for their submersibles, which was awesome.

The Towed Ocean Bottom Instrument (TOBI, below) is the world's highest-resolution Side Scanning Sonar that is towed behind the boat at up to 6000m below the surface (so it's built like a tank to withstand the pressure). They tow it behind the boat at a great depth so that there is not too much signal absorption for the high frequency (30kHz) required for such good resolution. The TOBI can see the sea floor with a 3m resolution. The yellow bar beneath the orange boxes is the sonar array, and has the ability to send the signal 3km in a 2-degree fan, and then detect the echo, which is 1,000,000 times quieter than the source!

The AUTOSUB III (above) is an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that can be programmed and deployed, and spend long amounts of time underwater untethered, without a pilot, and unattended, performing various sensing tasks without a mother ship nearby. They have inertial sensors like a cruise missile for navigation. One of them, though, crashed somewhere beneath the Antarctic ice, and hasn't been recovered.

We also got to see one of the NOC's remotely operated vehicles (ROV), which is being taken to the Caribbean to look at the subduction zone near Haiti.

I have a class this afternoon up at the Highfield campus, which I visited for the first time yesterday:

Clubbing and Eating

We've gone out every night so far. Oceana the first night was by far the nicest and classiest. The next night was Jesters--voted the "3rd dodgiest club in the UK." It still wasn't as skanky as an American frat party though. In the pub attached to Jesters, called Clowns, we watched somebody throw a full glass at another guy's head; it shattered and he came up bleeding. We snuck into Jesters through the back door after that.

Next night we went to The Cube, a nightclub operated by the University. The party was called "Kinkii," and the DJs were real sketch. At one point they called out people to "do it doggy style for the camera."

Last night was at a place called SoBar. American hip-hop is better. Although they spent waayyy too long playing shitty 90s rock. And the last song the club played was Bad Touch...

Tonight the Pro Bowl is on SkySports-2 at midnight, but I don't know where to find it. At least the Superbowl will be on BBC (at 11pm here) next week.

Food's good here, but it's expensive. The "drunk food" is either a Greek Kebab or fish/chips. Chips (fries) are cheap (about a pound for a huge basket), but everything else will kill you. The Kebab's are really good though--kind of like Pita Pit but bigger. One morning I got a panini and coffee at a cafe. The coffee is really bad--it wasn't bitter or burned, it just tasted like dirty dishwater and smelled like old meat.

Classes start tomorrow, but I don't have anything until 4pm. I'll have to walk up to the Highfield campus to activate my buspass, and then get down to the NOC for my first class. I think a number of the other Americans, and a few people in my residence hall, are in that class.

National Oceanography Center

Had our orientation today at the National Oceanography Center (NOC). The University of Southampton (Soton) won a bid years ago to consolidate all of the UKs marine research at one location. Thus the NOC is a hybrid university/government building, much like Woodshole in the US. It's housed at Soton's Waterfront, where the Solent River meets the waterway between the UK mainland and the Isle of Wight.

The NOC is at Dockgate 4, the secure area for large shipping vessels. Many of them are importing cars to the UK (above). Also, Dockgate 4 is the home berth for the cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth II. When we walked through the dockgate, we missed the turn for the NOC and accidently ended up by the cargo vessels, with gigantic trucks buzzing past us carrying cars, other trucks, trains, and huge pieces of "kit" (equipment).

The NOC is a really cool building, but it's huge and like a maze. There are 6 levels, but 3 of them are for utilities and vent systems. Most students in the School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES) study at the NOC. We had a mostly useless safety orientation and library orientation, and a tour of the building. There's a gym, cafe, lounge, library, and aquarium in addition to the lecture halls, offices, and labspace.

The NOC is home to most of the UK's oceanographic research vessels, including the RSS John Cook. She's apparantly the largest in the UK, but costs 100s of thousands of pounds/day just to berth. If I'm lucky she'll be in port and I'll get to see her while I'm here.

We got our bus passes, but they aren't activated yet. It's about a 35 minute walk from Romero to the NOC.

Mobile Number

I got a mobile phone, which has the number 07757-403907

Southampton

Made it to the UK! Flight was easy, no hang-up, but I was pretty jet-lagged yesterday.

Got settled into a little room. Everything is pretty quiet here because they have exams until Friday. Found my way into Archers, the pub next door. A few people were watching the Man U- Man city match. I think I'll be a bandwagon Man United fan.

We went to a club called Oceana afterwards. Someone said it was the largest in England.

My full address is:

Romero Hall, Flat 14, Room 141

38-44 Archers Road

Southampton

Hampshire

SO15 2LT

UK

Bulky items or items that must be signed for should be labelled to go to the Gateley Hall reception desk.