"Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar ..."

Anybody else remember that song? "Pepper, pepper, pepper, salt!"

Today I had my first real British fish and chips. It was tasty, although a little greasy. They still wrap it in paper (although not newspaper, most places; that is, it's newspaper-like paper that has not been printed on yet), and they generally use haddock for the fish. They put all the little chips (and I do mean little) in the bottom and then put the fish on top of that, which makes the chips get soggier. I think that's supposed to be a good thing...

I also chose my classes today. I'm taking stylistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics this term (translated: semester). I'm SO excited for them! Along with these, I also have two required courses. Research Issues in Applied Linguisitics (RIAL) is kind of like a colloquium or senior seminar. That is, there is one particular person in charge of the class, but every week (or few weeks) the person actually teaching class changes. We talk about all kinds of issues in contemporary lingusitics. For the first (or Michaelmas) term, we only really take notes and such. I suppose they want to think too. ... Anyway, in second (or Lent) term, we have to write a paper for the class, but we also only have to attend class four times, or something. They have six or eight different topics going on and we just choose the ones that are of most interest to us personally. The other required class is Academic Discourse Practices. It's run by somebody from the Department of Student Support Services (or something like that), and they just give us help in knowing how to do good research and write well, etc. That one extends over all three terms (that is, Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter), but it's not exactly required. We can skip some classes if we don't feel they're especially relevant, and I don't think we have to do any assessment (read: test). It's also the only class we have during Easter term, as we are supposed to be mainly writing our dissertations (read: theses) by that time.

I'm hoping to do some writing today. Maybe a more detailed account of my arrival here in England, maybe some criticism and thoughts on A Tale of Two Cities, maybe something completely different. Who knows!