Oxford and Super Bowl

The first week of lectures is already over and I have done a lot. Fortunately, I have Mondays off, so my week starts a bit later than for others.

The lectures at the university are very different than at home. Here you can really see how enthusiastic and interested the professors are in teaching the students something. The relationship with the students is much more personal, as everyone addresses each other by first name. At home, the relationship with the students is very distant and often you can tell that the lecturers have no desire to teach us anything. The lectures are very interactive and no class has more than 50 people. Before attending the first lecture, I expected huge rooms with 150-200 people, since the university has 40,000 students. Apparently, only a fraction of them are studying fashion management.

This is one of the buildings where I have lectures. You can see very well that Manchester used to be very industrial. On my campus, almost all the buildings look like this and they remind me a lot of Mönchengladbach.

When I have a lecture at 9 am, I have to get up at 7 am, which is almost unbearable for me. The campus is only about 4 km away from my house, but it still takes me almost 40 minutes to get there. That makes the whole thing a bit more exhausting than I had hoped.

Nevertheless, I do a lot outside of uni with the people I met in the first week. Since we don't have many courses, we often meet in the pub or go bowling or eat out.

I have planned my first excursion on Saturday. It should go to Oxford. Originally, I wanted to go together with my German friend Noémi, whom I met here and who is also from Cologne and studying fashion management in Hamburg. But unfortunately, she overslept on the day of departure, so I was alone after all. The trip was organized by the International Society at the university. They plan weekend trips throughout the UK and usually it's only international students who join. I was lucky to know some people from previous events, so I didn't have to walk through Oxford alone. On the bus, I met an Australian and a Danish guy whom I simply followed.

Oxford is a very beautiful city with many historical buildings. These buildings all belong to the University of Oxford, one of the most famous universities in the world.

It may look like it was nice and warm there, but appearances can be deceiving. It was supposedly around 3°C, but it felt like -10°C. Part of the excursion was a walking tour through the city with a local woman who knew a lot about each building and its history. Oxford is very touristy and I couldn't imagine studying there. Many of the buildings were also used for scenes in the Harry Potter movies, which attracts even more tourists to the city.

The dining hall of one of the buildings, for example, is the same one where Harry and the other wizards had their meals. In reality, the students really eat there, and if I imagine that every day tourists from all over the world come to see the place where I have breakfast, I would be more annoyed by people than I already am.

Additionally, of course, the fun also costs something, because nothing in life is free. The admission fee just to enter this one room is 7 GBP, which I would rather spend on food than looking at empty plates. I have to say, I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan, so this place didn't really appeal to me.

Seeing the building from the outside, however, was very impressive.

Because we are all so 'international', of course, we had to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday evening/night. Originally, I planned to watch the game with a very neutral attitude and experience the evening, but life doesn't go as planned. I had never seen a football game before, and since yesterday I also know why. It didn't start until 11 pm, which would have been a good time for me to go to sleep. Fortunately, there was an offer on this evening, in one of the student dormitories, that there would be free pizza before the game. Since the English eat dinner at 6 pm, you can't expect them to not eat anything for the whole evening. The most amazing thing, however, was that when they started handing out the pizza, everyone lined up and took their pizza one by one. Additionally, there was a rule that everyone could only have one piece first, so that everyone would get something. Sounds very fair and reasonable to me. Even though many people in Germany would say the same thing at first, the situation would look like this for us:

As soon as a person with pizza boxes entered the room, everyone would rush to that person and impatiently wait until they finally got their food. Following the motto 'First come, first served!' If you're not bold and rude enough, you won't get any food. And everyone would ignore the rule that you can only take one piece. When it comes to behavior and manners, we should all learn more than just a thing or two from the English.

For the Italians, it was torture to get only one piece of pizza per person. They almost felt insulted how one could treat pizza like that. But they survived as well.

When the game finally started, I had to think about which team I wanted to support. Once again, an unfortunate sport to judge by appearance, as all the players wear helmets. In the end, I decided on the team from Los Angeles. A good sports event wouldn't be complete without the national anthem. However, for a brief moment, I forgot that we were in the USA at that moment, and they don't do anything just like that. An oversized flag was carried into the stadium while an unknown person sang the anthem. Shortly before the end of the anthem, fighter jets flew over the stadium, so that they were right above the stadium at the last word of the anthem. It didn't make much sense to me, because you could only see the spectacle from the outside. I couldn't watch this little show without laughing. If you imagine that someone would do something like this at the FIFA World Cup or the Handball World Cup, no one would take us seriously anymore. After a good 10 minutes, all the officers, drums and planes were gone, and the game began. Nothing happened in the first 20 minutes. No team managed to score any points, and when I found out that such a game lasts for about 3-4 hours, it was finally over for me. We left after the first quarter. Some of the Italians were already asleep, and I wouldn't have made it until halftime. An interesting experience that, in my opinion, is made way too much of a fuss about.

Maybe I'll just watch the best moments of the game so that I at least know what the Americans will be talking about next week.

Unfortunately, tomorrow I have to get up at 7 am again!