You busy this weekend?

My previous plan for the weekend was to do nothing and just hang around Edinburgh recovering from last weekend.  (Obviously this is very different from what I do most normal days...)  But then I had a class today with one of the WashU guys (actually, now I have one WU guy in both of my philosophy classes - different guy in each class), and in the middle of a terrible, terrible lecture (more on that in a minute) he asked if I was doing anything this weekend.  I said no.  He asked if I wanted to join a group trip to England somewhere.  I said sure. 

The initial plan was the Lake District (although after I told him my mud story, he expressed concern at me falling off a cliff.  Ha ha.  Unfortunately, he's probably right...).  I got super super excited about it...but then he found out that Liverpool is holding John Lennon's 70th birthday celebration.  1) It's terribly depressing to think that Saturday would be John Lennon's 70th birthday.  2) It's going to be MADNESS.  But really, it's still England, it's still going to be awesome, Liverpool is a place I should really visit, and when it boils down to it it's probably more about the people than the place, anyway.  Sooo Liverpool it is, with two of my WashU cohorts.  I'm kind of excited.  :)

This means my time to locate a new camera/fix my old one (not likely) is now reduced to tomorrow.  Sigh.

Okay, so back to the lecture thing.  I could have just completely forgotten, but I don't think I've really talked about my classes/lecturers (teachers at the university level here aren't all professors, so we're not allowed to automatically call them that.  So when I say 'lecturer' it means approximately the equivalent of professor but just not quite.).  My Philosophy of Time class is really and truly awesome.  If I've told you my lecturers are awesome, it's this guy I'm thinking of.  He's absolutely the most real-person-like philosophy person I've ever met.  In class he actually cares that we all know what's going on, he explains things in terms that make sense, and he doesn't ramble about things that don't matter.  It's wonderful.  I'm learning a lot and I'm loving it.  Example: part of Tuesday's lecture was on predestination - yes, in the Christian sense.  I'm pretty sure neither he nor half the class was Christian, but it really helped me solidify my views on the subject.  Anyway, that's off topic. 

My other philosophy class, unfortunately, is borderline horrid, a fact that has slowly been dawning on me and only just solidified today.  It's taught jointly by two very different guys.  Let e describe my first impressions of these men.  The first was a rather angry Greek man.  I spent the entire class trying to figure out who he reminded me of.  I finally figured it out: a long-haired cross between my brother and Jeff Goldblum.  Win.  Anyway, despite his intensity I think we'll get along.  He hasn't lectured yet.  The other guy is short, out of shape, has the most difficult British accent ever (The letter 't' does not exist unless it's actually the first letter of a word, and 'th' = 'f'.  So, for example, the number that I would pronounce 'thirteen' becomes 'fir-heen'.), doesn't really know how to operate PowerPoint and/or the computer in general, and I'm pretty certain has never actually seen his own slides before.  So he's constantly flicking randomly through them, stopping for a maddening two seconds to peer at the screen before switching to a different one, and then spending a maximum of ten seconds on any slide, not even beginning to sufficiently explain whatever he's talking about.  Half the lines in my notebook end in '???', and toward the end of today's lecture I pretty much just gave up and started drawing cube formations in the margins.  Whatever.

And Scottish Studies is just fine.  It's very much like the intro International Studies class I took freshman year, except instead of random Asian countries as examples, it's all Scotland.  I'm pretty sure he even cited a book I read for that class.  So that's kind of cool.  It's not the approach I was expecting, but I really like it.

That's all, friends!  Hopefully I will have photo evidence of this weekend.  If not, I'll steal some from the other two.  Woot.