In a fit of eccentricity I washed up a Mount Everest of month-old filthy dishes that had been lying scattered all over the kitchen. Just felt like doing so.

[ Are the bloody images posted now? >:( ]  Following the example of 

varpho

It's been a whole month since I came to Aber. Here's some random observations I've been able to make so far.

1. In Aberystwyth, Wales, everybody who is autochtonic wears the surname Davies.

2. For the first couple of days after my arrival I was under a strong impression that I landed up in a Harry Potter movie. All these Privet Drives and Dursleys and Weasleys everywhere!  At the first place where I stayed there was even a young Snape occupying the room next door  :b  I  was in shock to discover that actually there IS something like the Islander type of looks. 

3. Another impression I had was that I'm in the Witcher saga world. Plenty of Bronwens and Branwens, Rhiannas and Rhiannons, and there are even one or two Feas.  And of course the Welsh language with all its double 'd's... ( The elf language in the Witcher saga was inspired with Welsh. )  One of the halls of residence is called Caer Leon! Not mine, unfortunately, but none the less I can declare myself a University of Forehell graduate who took up postgraduate studies in Kaer Morhen... ;b

4. The Uni campus is generally nice but the Hugh Owen Building in which my faculty is located happens to be the ugliest eyesore around. It is advertised as award-winning and indeed it looks like an architectural masterpiece of the late Gierek style. You could think it's a piece of the glamorous city of Radom transplanted onto the Welsh soil.

5. You can't go a hundred yards down any street without hearing the Polish speech. There aren't just "many" Poles here. Aber is in fact colonized by flooded with Polish people.

6. You can enter any shop, pub, fast-food etc. and say 'Hello' in Polish, and you will be serviced in Polish and get a big friendly grin thrown in for free. ( It's students like me doing their part-time jobs. )

7. All the basic brands of Polish beer are available in shops. There's also a Polish delicatessen in town where essential foodstuffs like vodka and Wedel chocolate cost twice as much as local products. 

8. You go to St Winefrede's church to Mass and you are offered a Mass program in three versions to choose from: English, Welsh and Polish. ( For a small town like Aberystwyth, there's quite a variety of churches, from Anglican through an Elim place to a branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. St Winnie is Catholic. ) 

9. However, this isn't actually what I had hoped for. I had hoped to meet druids and be shown around a sacred grove or a stone circle, treated to some mistletoe jam, handed a leaflet advertising a Lunar Runes course, something in this style. Instead, I found a Celtic version of the Triple Goddess symbol, neatly tattooed on the ankle of a flatmate of mine. I decided I'd worship that ankle. 

10. Bilingual policy: it can be noticed while eavesdropping on a conversation held by the locals that they switch from English to Welsh and from Welsh to English on average five times within the space of three minutes. The very same phenomenon can be observed during introductory speeches, Masses in various churches, fire talks etc. so you never know whether you can't understand because of the Welsh accents or because it's Welsh as such.

11. Welsh accents: 

[random friend or flatmate]: "Nghblrblt?" 
[me]: "Eh, what?..."
[r. f. o. f.]:  "Nnnghrl-boing-boing-blt?"
[me]: "Uh, come again?"
[r. f. o. f.]: "Nnnghrl-screech-glblt-kof-kof-ngh-boing-boing-blirp?"
[me]: "Sorry, can you repeat it once again? Slowly and with spaces between the words?"
[r. f. o. f.]: "How. Are. You. Doing?" 
[me]: "Ah, fine..."  

Now that I've spent a month in Aber, I don't need to have every sentence repeated three times, but there are also people from the North and from London whom I still hardly understand. My English let me down badly.

12. The abundance of redheads of all shades is absolutely delightful. 

13. A selection of curious questions I was asked:

"What's a Catholic doing in an Anglican church?"

"What is a pagan and heretic doing on a meeting for Christian youth?"

"Have you prayed to God to make you understand that the booklet inviting to the Mormon
faith we had given you is telling the truth?" ( "Yes I have but He told me that..." )

"You believe in  God???"

"The Catchinsky bros.? Who are they? Never heard of."  ( I envy. )

Soon it will have been a whole month since I joined the Polish Invader Army and came to the fair land of polite people and lousy food, and I still haven't posted any of the deep thoughts I wanted to share, such as "The food IS worse indeed, and people ARE generally politer". But I will :)

"O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us
And foolish notion."

I found and memorized this piece about five years ago and I still don't know what to make of the last verse.

The Iroha poem with readings in Korean alphabet han geul written under each syllabogram. I used it as an illustration for my thesis.

Here's something I made a part of my Master's thesis. It's a poem by a Buddhist monk Kūkai who is also said to be the one who invented and designed the hiragana syllabary. ( Though in fact he probably isn't, hiragana evolved from the calligraphic cursive style just out of itself. ) For centuries the poem was used as an alphabet.

いろはにほへと
ちりぬるを
わかよたれそ
つねならむ
うゐのおくやま
けふこえて
あさきゆめみし
ゑひもせす

i ro ha ni ho he to
chi ri nu ru wo
wa ka yo ta re so
tsu ne na ra mu
u wi no o ku ya ma
ke fu ko e te
a sa ki yu me mi shi
we hi mo se su

The text of the poem in kanji and kana, voiced where appropriate, is:

色は匂へど
散りぬるを
我が世誰ぞ
常ならむ
有為の奥山
今日越えて
浅き夢見じ
酔ひもせず

In modern reading it sounds like this:

Iro wa nioedo
Chirinuru wo
Waga yo tare zo
Tsune naran
Ui no okuyama
Kyou koete
Asaki yume miji
Ei mo sezu

As is required in traditional Japanese poetry, each line contains either five or seven moras.

Three versions of English translation I found:

As flowers are brilliant but [inevitably] fall, 
who could remain constant in our world? [No one could] 
Today let us transcend the high mountain of transience, 
and there will be no more shallow dreaming, no more drunkenness. 

Colors are fragrant, but they fade away.
In this world of ours none lasts forever.
Today cross the high mountain of life's illusions [ i.e. rise above the physical world ],
and there will be no more shallow dreaming, no more drunkenness [ i .e. there will be no more uneasiness, no more temptations ].

Youthfulness shines, but scatters 
and who, in this world, is forever? 
Today, I climb the deep mountains of life's vicissitudes, 
and I will not see shallow dreams. Nor will I get drunk. 

And a Polish translation I created myself especially for the thesis:

Krasa zachwyca,
Lecz blednie z upływem czasu;
Na tym łez padole 
Nic nie trwa wiecznie.
Przebądź dziś wysokie góry 
Złudzeń tego życia,
A nie zaznasz więcej płytkich snów 
Ni odurzenia.

How To Help Your Friend’s Brainache   

„ Notice that he’s missing. He hid. Find him.

“Look for him in the cellar, where slugs and hairy black spiders lurk.

„ Avoid sudden movements, flashes of harsh light, slamming the door and making other painful noise. Especially don’t speak too loud. Soften your voice for him.  He is blinded and deafened by the chaos enough already, don’t make it worse.

“Don’t force him to anything. Don’t demand anything from him.

“Don’t give him advice. It’s useless.

“Don’t joke. He won’t laugh.

“Do NOT comfort him.

“Don’t take it lightly. Don’t take it too gravely either.

“Offer concrete help. Do the shopping for him, make something light to eat.

“No coffee. Bring him a cup of tea. Not tepid, not boiling hot, not unsweetened, not oversweetened. With a slice of lemon.

“Don’t expect that he will tell you what hurts him. Don’t believe when he says ‘Nothing’. Turn on your damn empathy if you can.

“Don’t tug him, don’t hurry him up. He WILL move slowly and with effort. Imagine that he’s freshly sunburnt all over his skin and suffers from rheumatic pains in his joints.

“Don’t expect him to think. He should be able to perform simple tasks that don’t require much computing power but you have to tell him what to do – one step, and then the next when he’s finished with the previous one. ‘Get a plate from the cupboard. Spread bread with butter. Done? Put the kettle on.’ It isn’t hard for you to choose which of those stupid little mundane things to do first. For him – it is. So just put them in any feasible order and don’t lose patience.

“Should you suppose he may need something and you can’t guess it yourself, frame questions so as to reduce the number of possible answers to the problem to ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. So, instead of: ‘What else can I do for you?’, ‘What would you like me to bring you?’, say: ‘Shall I bring you a blanket?’ ( You don’t actually need to ask about this. You can assume he is cold. He’s low on energy, physically too. ) If you can’t make it a yes-or-no question, repeat it three times. If you ask once or twice, you’ll only hear ‘No, it’s OK, I don’t need anything’.

“Change the sheets, pick some clean clothes for him to get changed later, prepare a warm bath and take care that he isn’t trying to drown himself.

“If the place is noisy, make it silent – blow up the nearby disco, murder the neighbors, or take him somewhere less polluted with noise. Air the room and darken it completely for night. The thing is: sensory deprivation.

“When there’s nothing more to do, just stay with him. Maybe it’ll keep the slugs and hairy black spiders away.

“Don’t think that if you followed all the above instructions, the problem is solved. It isn’t. It’s just kind of you that you bothered to do it. If you really mean to be helpful, you’ll have to come tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and at least for the next couple of days, until he’s well enough to take care of himself.

“Don’t ask him every five minutes how he is feeling. Don’t ask about it at all. He can’t promise he will get better soon. Your best bet is to get him through it.

„Be aware that WHAT you actually do means less that the fact that you DO it – that you spend your time, energy and attention on him, while you could be doing your own urgent stuff, socializing with more entertaining people, or sitting on the couch watching television.”