Happy Halloween!

Halloween has at last arrived, after days of partying (not by me, I actually want to pass my degree) All Hallows Eve is finally here. I had presumed that it was purely a night thing, but I clearly was forgetting that I'm in America, and here it is taken very seriously. It seemed like a day like any other as I rushed late to my class, however when I entered I suddenly saw one of my class mates was about 7 months pregnant, which I hoped I would have noticed, however it was a Halloween costume. Great practical joke, should I play on Oz? Would be very funny, but also very cruel, I can almost see the look of pure panic across his eyes before he realises that I can't be seven months pregnant from him. In Arabic we had a giant penguin and two renaissance ladies (they are room mates - it wasn't a costume clash). Apparently I was very brave to walk up to one of the renaissance ladies and say, "Oh, you've dressed up for Halloween!," I didn't realise how easily it could have backfired, although she did say that she sometimes wears the costume at the weekends. I'm very glad I survived unscathed.

When I went to the supermarket this afternoon I was surprised to see lots of the workers in fancy dress, I couldn't really see the point to it, but I did have one of the T-birds as my cashier, and a hippy pack my bags, so I guess I should be grateful, was certainly more interesting than their usual boring attire.

When I was at the supermarket I actually brought some sweets for any trick or treaters, there are quite a few families near by, however none have come to the door yet and I've got to leave soon, so looks unlikely that I'll give any out. When I was cycling back from the supermarket I think I saw an organised trick or treat by the elementary school. There were tiny children being led around in long rows to nearby residence halls. I would have thought that the residence halls would have been safe from trick or treaters, but apparently not.

I have to admit it is all quite fun, if rather pointless, its a bit like children in need, without the children in need (besides being in need of some sweets that is!).

I think some Americans are going to have Halloween withdrawal, so many shops have been decorated Halloween style for over the past month it will be strange seeing them taken down. Even my landlords office was at it. In a few hours I shall be donning my cave girl outfit again ready to go to a few parties and ignore (for a few hours at least) how much work I've got to do.

Racism

My own dear sister has accused me of being racist and I would like to protest that accusation. Whilst I admit my comments about America can be scathing they are generally sweeping statements made because it is more interesting than going on about my everyday experiences I have and the Americans I get on well with. In my Arabic class, for instance, I have made many nice American friends, although it is difficult to continue that friendship outside of the classroom because they already have existing friendship groups and this is a problem that I have encountered everywhere, not just America, it is not because I'm racist.

Looking back over my first Halloween blog when I mentioned the party my English neighbour held it may have sounded like there were no Americans there, on the contrary, my host and I were the only English people there and besides Oz all the rest were American. I got on with them better because neighbour has nicer, more intelligent, friends.

If I was writing this blog about England I would just as quickly mention similar things as I have here, if anyone is doing anything strange, interesting, stupid, whatever, I feel quite right in mentioning it. It is not because they are American.

If I have sounded racist I apologise, that was never my intention, I get on with some Americans very well, and others not so well, but I have similar experiences in England with the English.

I have been here over two months now and on the whole have found Americans to be very nice, when visiting their houses I have found them to be most gracious hosts and whenever I have needed help they have been more than kind. My impression of America is constantly improving, but that is not to say that I will be applying for citizenship at the end of this year.

Having said that, however, if you ever feel I'm being racist do put it in a comment and tell me. I love getting comments and was quite excited that someone had slagged off my blog.

Halloween night 2

Last night I went out again, but this time it wasn't as good. For a start Oz wasn't with me and secondly I ended up in a big group, big groups make it difficult to get into parties or make decisions. We failed to get into any parties, they had all ended before we even got there, and we were everywhere before 11pm (American parties seem to start early and end early). It got really frustrating, particularly when our friend joined us doing a great impression of a very drunk monk.

As you can see from the photo (I've finally worked out how to add them!)I went as an American girl last night, I appreciated the irony even if not many other people understood the joke.

After several hours of wondering around and getting v.cold I got a call from some other friends and went to join them on DP. Unlike Friday DP was crazily busy, it was necessary to weave our way through everyone and we had to hold hands so as not to get separated. On the sides of the road there were lots of people being arrested and I even saw some paramedics running with a stretcher. Thankfully I experienced neither service first hand.

I was freezing and had several layers on, I don't know how the girls who were literally in their underwear managed it. For your delectation I include a photo, just to prove what it was really like, any guesses as to what she may be dressed as? My vote goes for hooker. By contrast I was dowdy.


It was good fun walking past all the interesting costumes, there were guys dressed as giant penises (there were drunken girls almost queueing up to have their photo taken with them), kissing booths, DUIs (Driving Under the Influence notices), as well as the raft of girls wearing very little. I never knew until last night that Snow White's skirt was very, very short, which explains why the Seven Dwarfs and Prince Charming were quite so enamoured with her.

I ran into an Australian girl and was surprised to see she'd really gotten in to the spirit of things, her bra was poking above her mafia outfit and the skirt was minuscule. I am amazed she managed to really get into the spirit of things, I really can't understand why Americans are so prudish for most of the year and then for Halloween it all goes out of the window and they feel they can legitimately walk around in their underwear. For example I have been sharing a room for almost six weeks now but have never once seen my room mate get changed, she always goes to the bathroom. It wasn't until Friday night when she was dressed as an army girl that I discovered she had her belly button pierced. She goes from usually wearing baggy t-shirts and shorts to having it all hang out. I find it hard to understand why they suddenly want to. I don't particularly want to be perved on by a bunch of salivating American youths, thank you very much. This seems to be a very American thing that does not make any sense to me or most other international students.

In the end I did have a good time, and I'm looking forward to Halloween itself, even if I have got classes the next day.

Halloween, night one.

It's Saturday morning and I'm writing this from the library, I am not, however, a swot, I'm just forced out of my apartment by Halloween. By pure chance I have ended up in one of the most famous party universities in the whole of the US and IV is particularly known for Halloween. Most normal people think that Halloween is a one day "holiday" (I hate that American term - if its a holiday then give us a day off!), however IV residents know better, why have a single day of drunken debauchery when you can have at least a week? And this year Halloween falls on a Wednesday and so instead of having just one weekend to party we get two (+ midweek of course).

Halloween in IV is so famous that people come from a long way around to experience it. My room mate has 4 guests who refuse to let me get a moments peace. From the moment they entered the apartment yesterday afternoon loud music went on which magnified my slight headache, they then proceeded to take over the main living area and my bedroom. I had no where to go and not enough time to go and do my homework anywhere else. To say I was pissed off is an understatement. Eventually I was able to escape to Oz's.

Halloween was certainly a big event. When Oz and I returned to my apartment to put our costumes on (he had completely failed to come up with a costume - thankfully there was a spare male costume lying around) I was astonished to see loads of people (around 15) squashed around the kitchen table playing some drinking game that involved hitting hands on the table and yelling. By the time I had got changed (evolutionary regression into a cave girl takes a while) a full blown party had started. Having only had a beer I felt far too sober for all this and gladly went to our fridge and a few jello shots that had been made earlier. I don't like my room mates friends at the best of times, particularly not when they are plastered and I am only mildly pissed. Her male friends tend to be stoner idiots with whom it is impossible to to have a conversation with on anything other that alcohol, drugs or sex. Her female friends tend to be high pitched, and most importantly, American. Thankfully my English next door neighbour was hosting her own Halloween party and I was only to grateful to escape next door, her friends were much easier to get on with.

Eventually Oz and I made our not entirely sober way down to where the party really happens, Del Playa Drive, affectionately known as DP. Its the road right next to the ocean and once we had made our way past the police barricades we got onto the floodlit road. All around us were women wearing very little (some were literally just wearing their underwear), there were people dressed as bongs, sailors, naked men (with fake penis), a variety of furry animals (wear a pair of knickers, a basque and a pair of said animal ears et voila - sexy mouse/cat/bunny/whatever), police men, guys dressed as gifts from God (a present with a label reading: To Women, from God), army girls and whatever other skimpy costume you can think of. I was fairly unimpressed by DP, it wasn't nearly as busy as I had been told it could be and there was no music playing.

Oz was getting really tired so we went back to my place and he almost begged to stay over to avoid the five minute walk to his place, but I kicked him out saying it wasn't fair for my room mate to have a strange man in the same room as her. Unfortunately my room mate didn't extend the same courtesy to me and I awoke at 4.30am to the sounds of her boyfriend snoring loudly. I was unable to get back to sleep and had to leave the room and sleep on the living room floor so I awoke fairly earlier and got out as soon as I could to avoid the American girls.

I haven't represented the true extent of IV Halloweens, I think that only a bit of history and some crime statistics will suffice. IV has held a damn good Halloween since at least the mid 1960s, but in the 70s there were riots and people burnt down a bank and the police actually shot and killed some students. That was how IV gained its Halloween notoriety and huge police presence (including police on horseback). This year there will somewhere in the region of 150-200 police officers on the street every night ready to arrest people for a raft of offences - Driving Under the Influence (they were doing spot checks for this one), Drug use, Public Intoxication (only if someone is acting v.drunk, they don't have enough cells for everyone who was intoxicated), Minor in Possession (Under 21 with alcohol), Sexual Offences (People have been raped, I was v.glad to be there with Oz) and possessing open containers of alcohol. This week our student paper has been full of advice about how to avoid getting arrested and dire warnings about the penalties (usually at least a years driving ban, which seeing as I can't drive doesn't bother me at all). Last years Halloween Weekend there were 290 citations, 291 arrests and 40 hospital visits. The police had set up at least one emergency medical tent complete with at least 5 stretchers. Its all a little bit scary. But I survived last night without getting arrested or injured. Hope I succeed tonight...

I fell in to a burning ring of fire....

Well, not quite a burning ring of fire, more a burning state, and the falling in is more flying in, but large parts of Southern California (or SoCal as they like to call it) are on fire. Santa Barbara county is the northern most county with wild fires, but they thankfully haven't come anywhere near me, although they've still affected me in strange ways.

On Saturday morning I looked out and saw beautiful blue sky's and a big pile of work and being an inventive person I combined the two by taking my work down to the beach. I quickly realised that it was v.windy, but being a stubborn person I continued on regardless, bravely holding my miniskirt down as I walked. By the time I got down to the beach my hair was everywhere, but I was mollified by the fact that the wind had created good surf for once and I was able to watch hot surfers whilst pretending to study. Oz soon joined me so I was able to check someone out even closer by.

I realised that the Channel Islands weren't very visible, and with them being only 40 miles away and mountainous they are usually visible. I wasn't shocked by this until at about 4 pm I looked up from my books (in between the perving some studying actually happened) and realised I couldn't see them at all, and the oil rig that is about a mile or so away wasn't particularly visible either. I assumed that the air was just dusty and that the dirt covering my shirt was just the dust that they call soil. When I got home I covered the bath with a thin layer of grime and forgot all about the dust.

On Sunday I awoke and cleaned of a fairly thick layer of dust off my bike seat, but I still failed to realise that what I thought was dust was in fact ash. Although the fires only started on Sunday the wind had swept up the ash from a previous fire and deposited it in the atmosphere. Very kind of it. This combined with the fires that were just starting and made my week very dirty.

UCSB have been so concerned about the fires that they sent everyone an email telling us to remain inside if at all possible along with a lot of other suggestions (for example, avoiding highways so the emergency services can use them) and everyday our student newspaper has printed more information.

There was so much ash in the atmosphere that I saw someone walking around campus wearing a dust mask, she was either trying to avoid getting dust in her lungs or trying to avoid the bad cold that was everywhere on campus and made the ash even more fun.

After a day of walking around in flip flops, which due to it being an overly warm week anyway (even by SoCal standards) were necessary, my feet were black, it was horrible, I had to wash not only my feet but also my flip flops. The ash was everywhere.

On the slightly positive side the weather was lovely and warm (not that we could leave the house unless necessary...) and on Wednesday night there was a beautiful orange moon as a result of the pollution.

It wasn't until yesterday evening that the ash began to lift and I could see the beautiful mountains that are only five miles away again.

The actuality of the fires hasn't really hit home, the news stations generally aren't very good and I've been too busy to watch TV anyway. It hasn't seemed real. I'm just glad that the fires came no closer to us.

MEGAchurches

One of my classes required me to go to a Megachurch (a church with 2,000+ regular worshippers) and write a paper on the experience. Here is the first draft that I would love to hand in because it gives a true account of my feelings on the subject, but is I fear, slightly too sarcastic. The final draft will be much, much more dull.

Apologies for American spellings and vocabulary, I have to use them in papers.

Feel free to grade me in the comments:

I knew that Calvary Chapel was going to be a posh church because whilst cycling there I was on the receiving end of many a catcall. Remembering that I was going to church I resisted retaliating lest I have to wash in holy water before being able to enter.

When I stepped into Calvary Chapel I felt as though I was on the set for a TV chat show instead of in a church, the converted warehouse was decorated to look like the sea side, offices were disguised as beach huts, there was a sea and beach hut mural on the walls and the “stage” had many beach related props from surf boards to barbecues. Even the seats were beach themed, instead of pews or seats they were benches painted white with a stripy cushion. There was even a camera pointing towards the stage. It couldn’t have looked less like a church if it had tried. The only thing that reassured me that I had not stepped into the wrong room was the worship music playing and people embracing each other and praying together. If it was designed to relax people it was not working for me, but then I was not there out of my own volition.

I arrived early due to bus times and sat in the back and kept myself to myself. The benches (not nearly as many as I was expecting) slowly began to fill up, but it was only when the lights dimmed, and a man sat down at a grand piano and a woman stood behind a microphone that people really began to fill up the benches and they quickly filled.

The opening sequence was carefully orchestrated, at first the man and the woman sang duets and praised the Lord by themselves and bit by bit we were encouraged to join in with them. The pianist was very good, it would almost be worth going to the service just to hear him play and the time quickly passed. Lots of people were clapping and raising their hands. Just before they finished the pianist gave a short sermon and got the stewards to come and collect the tithes and offerings. He prayed that the Lord would encourage people to put in lots of money and effectively guilted people into putting lots of money in. There was no exemption for visitors and from looking around it was clear to see that they made a lot of money from these collections, the women’s restroom was nicer than I have seen in hotels, it was spacious, had a couch, had a tiled floor and was very tastefully decorated and was a world away from the restrooms I’ve seen in other churches.

Following the offering there were several announcements, after which everyone clapped. They contained two other requests for money, one for Operation Christmas Child, where people fill shoeboxes full of Christmas presents and they get sound to children living in extreme poverty all over the world. They were very proud to have made it easy for everyone this year by having a stall at K-mart where you could get absolutely everything necessary for the shoeboxes. They also asked people to buy a big bag of candy for $5 for Halloween, although I failed to understand exactly what that benefited besides rotting children’s teeth and encouraging obesity.

The sermon followed next and it was part of their sermon series on successful marriages and happy families, they even had a banner hanging up saying “I want a better marriage” and there were various pictures of happy families hanging from the rafters. It centered on good parenting, and in particular being a good father, it began with some facts and figures about evangelical children today that the preacher interpreted in a very black light, but I thought was in fact very good, for example only 4% of evangelical young people believe the Bible to be the inspired and infallible word of God, I would say that it was good that they were thinking for themselves and realized that the Epistles were letters, not divine inspiration, as is a considerable part of the Bible. Clearly they are fundamental in their view of Christianity and I don’t get on well with fundamentalists. After he had finished scaremongering and talking about how evangelical parents can prevent the horrors of a morally relativistic child he moved on to reinforcing the sexism present in some parts of the Bible. He argued that most advice that the Bible gives about how to raise children was aimed at the father and therefore fathers should play a more active role in the upbringing of children. Now I agree wholeheartedly that fathers should play a larger role than a lot do, but I would disagree strongly that they should play the main role, parenting should be an equal partnership. He used lots of Bible verses to prove his point and topped it all off with a video of a happy family from the congregation talking about good parenting and how women should play the main role during childhood and the father take the leading role during adolescence, so basically they were encouraging that throughout their upbringing the children are alienated from one parent. Sounds like sound advice to me.

The service finished with some more music and an encouragement for struggling fathers to come forward and be prayed over. They also had a communal prayer during which the preacher asked all parents having a difficult time raising their children to put their hands up and be prayed for, a lot of hands immediately shot up and so the preacher resorted to “and I pray Lord that you be with those at the back, you know who they are,” etc. Then abruptly as it had started the service ended, exactly one hour after it had begun.

During that time I had only had contact with other people once, when the preacher instructed us all to greet one another. So I think I got off lightly, I really didn’t want to explain my religious beliefs to a stranger and even less wanted them to try and convert me. I left as quickly as possible, after a quick trip to the ridiculously posh restroom.

Bloody American desks and enforced immaturity

I know this is a very strange subject to write a blog on but the bloody American desks are really beginning to annoy me. They use those silly desk-chair combination things that you see on American TV shows that feature schools. The desk is more like a square tray that isn't quite as big as an A3 bit of paper and it is impossible to fit everything on the damn thing. I admit that I can be fairly clumsy and yesterday I most certainly was, in a single class I dropped about things about 5 times, pens, lids, screw top caps from water bottles, you name it and it tried to escape from my desk. They are slightly at an angle so things can easily roll off too. It restricts your movement so much that you have to ask your neighbours to pick things up for you.

They also jam as many desks in as possible, my Arabic teacher finds it difficult to walk between the rows because her bottom is too big, and shes not even fat. They also have them rammed up against each other to such a degree that the person sitting in front of me yesterday managed to knock my water bottle off my desk (thank God I'd put the lid on - I almost hadn't) by pushing her elbow back an inch. This also means that leg room is a a minimum and my legs frequently begin to cramp, I end up feeling like a squirming child.

I think that it may all be a government conspiracy to keep people slim, because you can't get that fat and still be able to sit in them, one (particularly obese) older woman has to sit on the floor in one of my classes. Seriously, she had to pay ridiculous tuition but has to sit on the floor.

At my home university they rent all the seminar rooms out as conference facilities, so it is all very posh and spacious, you get a proper, normal desk and a comfy chair, you can decide how close to the desk you sit and most importantly you get about 4 times the amount of space you do here. Heaven. Although I still do drop things, just not as frequently.

It makes me feel like a child sitting in those chairs/desk things, but its a feeling that I'm fast growing accustomed to. If you're under 21 you're treated like a second class citizen, and even Oz, who is 24, says he feels a lot younger here than in Australia. When people ask how old you are you get a look of pity when you admit "19" and I'm generally treated as though I'm less responsible. I don't quite know how to describe it, but there is just a general attitude that if you're under about 25/30 your still a child. I'm used to being treated like an adult in England, and it is a big annoyance to be treated as a child. Next month is my 20th birthday and instead of having a minor breakdown and suddenly feeling really old as one of my friends did ("My teenage years have passed me by and I never got to enjoy them - its only responsibility from here on in!") I find myself longing to be 20, being 20 is not nearly so bad as being 19, I will be closer to being 21 and people will respect me more for that, they'll probably still look down on me, but hopefully not as much.

If they continue to treat me like a child I may begin acting like one, which I'd really hate to do and hopefully will not happen. However, I have noticed that young Americans, particularly men, are a lot more immature than their European counterparts, but then if they are used to being treated like children what else is going to happen?