The first days in Bristol

Soon a week ago, on Friday the 28^th of September, I arrived late in the night with my parents at a hotel near Temple Meads, one of the main train stations in Bristol. The journey from Sweden had been alternately stressful – hurrying to make sure we were on time for everything – and calm – during which I was growing increasingly nervous about this big move, this new life that awaited on the other end of the trip.

Up until some weeks earlier, moving to Bristol had been so far away in the future that I did not think much about what it would be like. I was accepted on the programme Paleontology & Evolution (MSci) [the British spell paleontology with an additional “a” before the “e”, one of the few British spellings I just cannot stomach] sometime in March, and as information and instructions for pre-arrival preparations were sent to me, I processed it all a bit at a time, but sort of absent-mindedly: it still felt like some kind of dream– at any time, some problem could surely arise that would ruin everything and prevent me from going – or maybe it was all a practical joke thrown on me by fate.

As the date of moving came closer, however, I realised that this actually was going to happen. When I started packing for the move, it was definite: my life would start over. Yikes.

After that realisation, my stomach made a few somersaults here and there. But, my nervousness was nothing in comparison to my mom’s, whose little boy was leaving her after all these years.

After an internally tumultuous journey, we arrived just in time to get a late meal at the hotel before taking a shower and preparing my bag for the excursion to Somerset Coast.

The thing about the excursion is that the others met in Bristol and departed together around mid-afternoon on the Friday, which was problematic for me as I arrived around 9.30 pm. However, I had planned this out together with the excursion leaders beforehand, and would go to the excursion site myself on Saturday morning. I was to take a train from Bristol Temple Meads to Bridgwater, wherefrom I would ride a bus to Watchet, where I would meet the others.

I made plenty of mistakes in the morning, though. I had been told that breakfast was served at 6.30 am; the train departed from the station (about five minutes away) at 7.18. Thus, if I ate quickly, I could make it to buy the ticket and get on the train. However, I made the false presumption that my phone alarm would adjust to the time zone change automatically (England is one hour behind Sweden)… which it did not. When I came down to the lobby at 5.15, having slept less than four hours, I was told that breakfast was one and a half hour away: breakfast begins at 7.00 am on weekends.

Well… there was not much to do… I knew I would not manage to go back to sleep, so I sat on my room, watching the morning news.

It all sorted out eventually. I made it to the train in good time (dad had gone to the station to buy the ticker while I had my breakfast – a brilliant idea that would not have had crossed my mind at that point). However, here came the next problem: they did not call out the names of the next stop in the speakers, so I had to be alert all the time – on a journey of more than an hour, having had only a few hours of sleep last night – and read the signs at the platforms.

None of this had been foreseen, which is why it made such a mess for me. However, I had looked up the way to the Bridgewater bus station from the train platform very carefully before leaving home, and that trip went perfectly well, despite my inherent talent for getting lost.

When I joined the rest of the excursion group, I was shocked by meeting some good seventy students; I had imagined we would be between ten and twenty only. I was greeted with many strange looks – of course, they had got to know each other the night before and already formed small groups. It would be trickier to get to know people than I had expected. I just don’t function socially in such large groups – naturally, I did not dare approach anyone yet. 

The trip itself was also a disappointment. I had heard there would be Triassic/Jurassic ammonites and fish skeletons here that would be exposed by the shore cliffs as the tide retreats. Indeed, we found some clear ammonite impressions, but that was always when we were moving on to the next spot, so we never stopped to look at them more in detail. What we heard about was about crustal deformation processes that had occurred at the cliffs…

Do not get me wrong, though. The sights were pretty awesome. I have never seen the tide withdraw, and many of those deformation structures were impressive. However, the problem is that I forgot to bring my camera. It might seem strange that that would make the views less impressive, and it is hard to explain why, but a large part of the appreciation of such sights is to be able to capture its splendour on picture or camera. Without any way to immortalise the views, they were pretty soon nothing but dim fragments of a memory.

Also, we had to measure the dip and strike of some rock layers. It is essential to know and understand the method, because it is central to geological mapping, but it is just plainly boring (which is ironic, since the point of measuring strike and dip is to establish how much a rock layer or flat feature is sloped in relation to the horizontal plane). (While I am still making bad puns, I might as well mention that I have made a friend who is studying aeronautics at the University of Bristol.) In essence, the dip of a geological feature is its angle of depression (i.e. incline below the horizontal), and the strike is the bearing (direction relative to North) of the dip. I understand that it may be tricky to explain strike and dip in a pedagogical way, since what you measure first is the strike (direction); the teacher that showed us how to do this never really explained the overall purpose of these measurements, but just went on to describe the method, which I believe is why we were all utterly confused. I was lucky to have done this before (albeit in a simulated situation in a classroom), but I still did not quite get it this time. My first impression of the teaching at the University of Bristol was not impressive…

However, that was forgotten for a moment at lunch, when I casually looked at the ground behind me and found a rock full of tiny trace fossils, possibly worm burrows.

It reminded me of a similar rock I brought home from Ohesaare cliff in Estonia (cf. Stones of Estonia (4)).

But, this was as good as it got today, apart from the one ammonite impression I found that actually was small enough to take as a souvenir.

Lamentably, it does not look much like an ammonite unless you are told it is one, but trust me: I found it right next to a big rock block with another black shale rock with a fossil that was undoubtedly an ammonite. Also, if you do look closely at this rock, you can recognise the curved shape and the septa (the walls that separate the different chambers in the coiled shell tube.

There was also a rather impressive mineral that I had heard of but never seen before: gypsum. I brought to small samples back, but the cliffs were teeming with them in concentrated spots.

It is similar to quartz in its translucency, but it is crazily soft: the white piece broke when I dried it off with a piece of paper after rinsing away some dust; the salmon-coloured one had another piece broken off just as I had it in my pocket. Fun rock, gypsum…

Next, we rode the bus to a different location – a soggy bog by a tiny coastal village. This site is seriously threatened by rising sea levels, and we were supposed to work in groups to evaluate a few official suggestions to how this could be solved. It was an intriguing question in theory, but there my enthusiasm stopped. I wanted to see fossils…

It is not that I am not interested in environmental change and its many hazards, but considering its modern applications does not appeal to me. If we had been told only that there is an environmental issue here, and then set to try to figure out what that problem is, I would have been thrilled! In contrast, human techniques to prevent flooding do not attract my attention at all.

So far, this was the least fascinating field trip I had been to, even though I had gotten to talk to a few other people. However, in the night, all changed. (It feels like that occurs all the time…?) I found a fantastic group of lovely people, about half of them paleontology students, half regular geology students, and we sat and talked and talked and talked for what felt like the whole night. These amazing people were incredibly open and friendly; I felt straight away that this was the group I had dreamed of finding in Bristol – one that equals my best friends back home.

To be honest, I had almost expected such a perfect group to form among us paleontology students, since we would all be nerds with the same interest, but we did not talk much about paleontology at all, apart from trying to remember the succession of geological time periods, and none of them is even half as nerdy as I am (they have not had the advantage of a gap year to cultivate it). They are just wonderful people who can talk about virtually anything.

I know this sounds like an awfully dull description of my newfound friends that have filled the empty space in my heart opened by the previous, socially disastrous year, but anyone who has had such fabulous friends knows that there are no words to describe the feeling.

I went to bed with a lifted heart and some enthusiasm for the next day, when I would meet them again; the field guide also said that we would visit some Carboniferous limestones! This could mean some pretty awesome arthropod impressions.

But, we only went past that place with the bus. We stopped at a forest ridge opening toward hilly fields, which it turned out was the most polluted place in England (or if it even was in all of Great Britain). The problem is lead poisoning of the soil – to an insanely high degree: the soil contains about 2 % lead (in weight). Luckily, the lead is solid, and the chemistry of this environment does not make it very soluble; thus, the lead will not readily enter the vegetation to be transferred to consumers in the food chain. So, it is not a direct problem yet, but it might be in the future, especially if we alter the soil chemistry (e.g. make it more acidic; acids can break down insoluble compounds into compartments that are easily water soluble, and are therefore a significant catalyst factor in ordinary rock erosion, as well as environmental chemistry). 

We had a different teacher talking about this site, one far more pedagogical and interesting that the previous. Unfortunately, I he said to me that I probably will not have him in any lectures, because he does not teach any of the subjects we paleontology students take. This was too bad, because, in hindsight, his talks were somehow the apex of the trip.

In the afternoon, I moved in to Badock Hall, the student accommodation hall that will be my home this first year. So, a few paragraphs on the university halls in Bristol are in order.

The University of Bristol owns a couple of student resident halls, in which they guarantee all first-year undergraduate students a home. There is a large variety of accommodation styles: self-catered vs. catered halls (i.e. make your own food in a provided kitchen, or have meals served in a dining hall); shared or single rooms; en suite or ordinary rooms (I’m not sure of what en suite actually means, but I think that those rooms are more luxurious). The prices for the rooms vary accordingly: for example, self-catered halls have lower accommodation fees (yet, you will need to pay for your own food) than catered ones, and shared rooms are cheaper than single, and en suite are the most expensive.

I live in a shared room in a catered hall, so the price is somewhere in the middle, but, in return, I can use less energy and attention to fixing food every day – and thus focus on other things, like studying and socialising – and I do not mind sharing a room with other people, as long as they are not arseholes. Luckily, I have a lovely room mate! Patrick is very kind, incredibly social, cheery, not afraid to share stuff among us, and knows his way around in this country. He does enjoy night parties, unlike me, but he miraculously never wakes me up when he comes late at night to go to sleep. He takes good care of himself, doesn’t make a mess, and there is no awkwardness between us or anything, so he is indeed an ideal room mate, far better than I could have hoped for!

The food we are served in Badock Hall is rather good. I would not say that my judgement carries much weight, since I am not accustomed to English food – to me, much of it is alien and weird – but I have heard British students praise it as really good. One of the weirdest things the Brits do is to have warm food for breakfast. I am used to eat things that are refreshing, like yoghurt or a sandwich with plenty of fresh vegetables; I could accept a fried egg, a toast and even pancakes for breakfast, but they have (their idea of what is) bacon, boiled, pealed tomatoes (how weird isn’t that?), and probably more crazy things I have not yet faced. They also have much of their vegetables boiling hot on the plate, while I prefer cool vegetables to contrast the warm food – indeed, things such as carrots, cabbage, broccoli and so on should preferably to be boiled prior to eating, but I would not mind letting them cool down a bit before.

It is mainly such tiny details in the everyday life here that I clash on. In a more general aspect, England is not too different from Sweden that I have any problems adapting and feeling comfortable. I can imagine it to be far more difficult for more distant overseas students to fit into the English society, and they would probably not even take note of such minor details, since everything might be unusual. It would surely be even worse if you were not familiar with the language.

Returning to the accommodations (yes, I slid off a bit there), I find the practicals rather tedious, so I think I will skip on to the next week: Fresher’s Week.

Fresher’s Week is what we call the first week at university in the UK. There are no classes during this week; the only mandatory events are various school registrations and induction sessions to give us essential information about how things work here. The rest is totally free, and, with no assignments or studying to do, most students use this to party like crazy. Luckily, my paleontology friends are not fond of late night parties and drinking either, so we spent the free time together having fun in our own ways, getting to know one another even better.  

It is hard to explain why, since it confuses me too, but it really feels like this week has been months, like we have been friends since way back, and not at all like being in a new town with new people. I feel at home here already, so much that I am even beginning to confuse the languages: I have been about to say “excuse me” and similar phrases in Swedish to people on the streets and in school.

I reckon most students think about Fresher’s Week as a week of partying every night, and, indeed, most did. After a few days, they were pretty wrecked – all but the hardier party people. Personally, I preferred to have a relaxing night in my room, chilling out, fixing the practical things that needed to be fixed at an enjoyable pace, and watching some Family Guy. I did not go out a single night in Fresher’s Week, and I can honestly say that I have not regretted it for a second. I am really not a party person: I find it hard to enjoy the company of friends in a dark club packed with random people and playing loud pop music; I’d rather have a quiet evening with only them, chatting away through the night, maybe watching a film or playing a social game. Since I live so far away from everyone (well… at that point I had not realised that some of my friends actually live less than a five minute walk from my Hall), I made the most of a comfortable night alone in my room, which, although slightly dull, is infinitely better than being in a night club!

I was so happy to hear that most of my paleontology friends are of the same opinion! This is fantastic, since I have dreaded that everyone else would be hard drinkers and boisterous bar frequenters, and that I would have to adapt to such a lifestyle when I want to be with my friends, but – thank the heavens! – I won’t need to do that now. They are just so perfect!

Actually, at the time I have finished and published this post, another week has passed. Therefore, I will include a short note on the first week of formal lectures and practicals at the University of Bristol.

To be fair, the teaching has been something of a disappointment. This is probably partly because of the high expectations I had before I came here, and much because of how they were raised by the subtle boasting of the school staff during Fresher’s Week: they praised themselves and their programme structure, which indeed seems fabulous. However, I cannot honestly say that they have lived up to that in practice during this week. The lecturers are not particularly pedagogical and the lecture content is not well-structured. One lecturer declared that he expects us to have looked through his powerpoint presentation prior to the lecture… then, either we already know what he is going to talk about, making his talk redundant, or, since the powerpoint is not exhaustive, we will be confused, not having understood much until he explains it, in which case we will have wasted time looking it up before. If you expect your students to have done some background reading before the lecture, you should not make that information the main content of your lecture – instead, focus on details, implications and applications of the information they already have. 

However, I must emphasise that the teaching and content is not bad per se, only less good than I had anticipated. To be fair, the shock was over after a couple of days, and, as my expectations had been reset, the lectures later in the week were rather enjoyable. Especially the last practical we had – dissection of crayfish, followed by observations of earthworm nervous systems and locomotion – was really fun! I am sure it will be much better once we get started for real!