Vacation part II: Oxford & London

[schneefink]

After leaving Dublin – thankfully I had no problems at the airport, unlike several other people – I flew to England and stayed with frith_in_thorns and her wife Ellie for two nights, which was wonderful. They have the fluffiest bunny, and very impressive full bookshelves, and great stuffed toys :)

The first evening Frith and I caught me up on The Untamed episodes I hadn't seen yet and on the second evening the next two, and because my flatmate DD wanted to see my reactions to certain revelations she watched with us via Skype (modern technology, so convenient.) Then there were only two to go and English subtitles were already available, but for some odd reason Frith decided she didn't want to watch subtitles where a sword's name is translated as "Dustproof"… xD ("Golden Unicorn Tower" for Jinlintai and "Brilliance Overgrowth Lord" for Zewu Jun were also certainly… choices.)

On Wednesday Frith and Ellie showed me around Oxford! They're both alumni, so not only was it easier to get into colleges, they also know all the best stories. For example I now know that there are underground waterways in Oxford that nobody really knows the extent or exact location of, that there is a traditional tortoise race (though some colleges' tortoises died and now as a substitute there are people in tortoise costumes but they have to eat an entire head of salad at the beginning of the race to prove that they really are a tortoise), that Magdalen (pronounced: maudlin, for some reason) college has deer, and that in the 60s students at Merton invented a tradition to save the space-time-continuum which involves all students in full academic dress walking backwards around the square lawn drinking port in the "lost" hour of time changes. (I didn't look any of this up, so if it's wrong I blame them.) (I did see the deer, that one's definitely true. There's a deer park, with a fence that made me immediately go "how often have drunk students climbed across"; the answer is apparently "every now and then," which is not very precise.)
Speaking of square lawns, they're pretty much everywhere, and you're not allowed to step on them, until, in some cases, when you're a professor. Because clearly when you're a professor that has to come with privileges.

We also went punting! Which is shoving a boat along a shallow river with a long metal pole. Frith is very good at it, and I – well, we didn't hit the banks? But we were moving in a distinctly slalom pattern, and I did almost decapitate her. No actual injuries though! Apparently there's a student challenge where people jump from a punt up to a bridge, climb over the bridge, and then into the punt again, that sounds like fun but we didn't try that. Unlike all the tourists, who went downriver and kept crashing into the bridge and each other, we went upriver and there was almost nobody else, it was very nice.

On Thursday I left for London and met cesy there :) We walked around in the Victoria&Albert museum for a bit and especially admired the embroidery on the Chinese imperial robes, wow. European courts had more tapestries than embroidery, at least the exhibitions; there was one very impressive embroidered torah cover, and one waistcoat (but it wasn't as pretty imo.) Then we had waffles, always good, and got to the Serpentine Galleries & Hyde Park via bike taxi, that was fun.

Cesy went to Cambridge, so I got more fun stories. I now know that there's an Assassin's Guild in Cambridge, where you have to "kill" your targets using things like pens that have "knife" written on them, and about the "secret" gay society "the Adonians" (and I haven't been in SGA fandom for years but we immediately started sketching out an SGA AU.)

Then we had excellent typically British food for dinner (pie&mash), and afterwards I felt so heavy that I decided to walk toward the hostel for a few stations. London does have very impressive buildings, and a lot of them. Walking around central London at night, I can almost understand how people who spent most of their time here could get a skewed view about the UK's importance etc.

IF you have a lot of money. I was also told some shocking information about the British rental market, and later did some quick research: "About 80% of tenancies in England and Wales are set at six months or 12 months", and "46% of 25-34-year-olds now live in private rentals" (source: The Guardian, July 2018), and there are short-notice no-fault evictions – apparently the government planned to finally change that a few months ago, but now who knows. (source: The Guardian, April 2019.) 6-12 months! How are you supposed to get a sense of home and security with such short contracts? Austria has a minimum of 3 years and I never properly appreciated that before.
(I also found an 840-page-report on tenant rights in Europe, which sounds fascinating but I don't have the time to read it rn.)

On my last day I went to the Tate Modern gallery, which I'm glad I saw but modern art is hit or miss for me and what I saw didn't really "speak" to me much. Then I walked along the south bank of the Thames for a while, spent some more time in the Museum of Natural History and in the V&A, and then in the evening I went to see a musical!

I saw Wicked, and it was a lot of fun. The costumes were great, and the music, and overall the atmosphere… I haven't read the books (and only very vaguely remember what happens in "The Wizard of Oz"), but I'd heard two of the songs before and was spoiled for the "epilogue" somehow. In the first half I had a seat near the front but at the side, so I couldn't see some parts of the stage, but in the second half I switched to a previously empty seat more in the middle and had a great view. My favorite song was "What is this feeling," followed by "Defying Gravity," and my favorite costume was Elphaba's in the second half. I liked the story too.

And then early the next morning I left for the airport :) With one short anxious moment when the train ticket machine didn't want to take my money, but fortunately there were other travellers there who bought a ticket for me and took Euro, and the rest of the trip had no problems. It was a great vacation and I enjoyed all of it, but I was also very glad to be home again. DD had prepared lunch, then we watched the final episodes of "The Untamed", and then I finally participated in the next session of our D&D campaign. (I found a good solution for "oh no what do I do now that I've become head of a pirate goblin tribe"!, and it felt good to kill monsters with my greatsword again.)

I'm very behind on reading fic and commenting. And there are so many books I want to read… Maybe I can finally take this opportunity to whittle down my many many AO3 subscriptions? (Doubtful tbh.)

In conclusion, vacations are wonderful, conventions are great, meeting friends is fantastic, and I'm a very lucky person.

Comments

[ambyr]

How are you supposed to get a sense of home and security with such short contracts? Austria has a minimum of 3 years and I never properly appreciated that before.

Wow. This is so weird to me, as an American--multi-year contracts are not only basically unheard of here, but are generally looked on with suspicion as being to the advantage of the landlord. The ideal for most tenants I know is month to month, and it's landlords who push for one year for the sake of the security of their income stream.

[extrapenguin]

Ooh, that all sounds very cool!

"About 80% of tenancies in England and Wales are set at six months or 12 months"
AFAIK other capitals have similar problems – acquaintances living in Amsterdam report spending half a year or more hopping from a one-month-rental to another, and apparently student rentals have a 12-month-cap. It all sounds insanely stressful! (Finland doesn't have a minimum contract length, IIRC, but landlords need to give the tenants a 6-month notice for eviction, and it's still possible to own a house, especially outside Helsinki.)

In conclusion, vacations are wonderful, conventions are great, meeting friends is fantastic, and I'm a very lucky person.
Truer words have never been spoken. <3

[naye]

That sounds like a fantastic holiday!

And yeah, tenant's rights in the UK suck. Fun fact: not only are leases very short, but if you're renting through a letting agency (which is very common - they charge both the landlord and the tenant and are generally considered bloodsucking scum) they can charge you a fee for renewing the lease each year. Want to stay where you are? Pay £100 upfront and also accept this rent increase.

[sheron]

It's pretty bad here in Canada too, rental-wise. We have month-to-month leases here too after 1 year. i.e. You sign for 1 year, then you pay month to month after that.

Also: [In 2018, the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO) published a report showing that more than 50 per cent of people in Ontario aged 25 to 34 rent their homes.(Source)]

Mostly because nobody can afford to buy homes :(

[dolorosa_12]

I'm always grimly amused when people from other parts of the world realise how bad tenants' rights are here in the UK. We've been renting the same place since 2012, and until this year, we had to sign a new lease every six months, once a year the rent would be increased, and every new lease also required the payment of an 'administrative' fee of £50. (As far as I can tell, the only 'administration' taking place was changing the dates on the document of the lease and reprinting it.)

The law has changed recently, meaning we've been changed onto a rolling contract - same conditions, but no end-date, no admin fees, and no rent increase - which is, at least, an improvement.

It's worse in big cities, no matter where you live. My sister, who lives in Melbourne in Australia, said that the only way you could secure a lease there was to basically show up at the open house with a wallet full of cash and offer to pay the deposit, first month's rent, and more money than the advertised rate, then and there. I get the impression that it's the same in London, Dublin, and other places like that.

[zdenka]

The subtitles on Viki seem mostly reasonable to me, but I am really facepalming at their decision to translate the characters' personal titles, like Zewu-jun as "Brilliance Overgrowth Lord" (and Jin Guangyao just got the title Lianfang-zun in the last episode I watched -- I think it was "Secret Fragrance Master"?) Argh. I'm still watching The Untamed slowly -- I'm up to episode 20-something.

Echoing what other people have said about rental contracts, I live in the US and I strongly dislike being locked into a 1-year contract. I used to have a month-to-month rental and I liked that much better, because then I had the flexibility to move at any time during the year and not only once a year at the end of August when pretty much everyone in the entire metropolitan area is trying to move (and if I miss that window, it gets much much harder). But the rental market is really tight around here.

[cesy]

It was great to see you!