Cambridgeshire

I made it to Cambridge, although I'm knackered.

Friday night in Oxford was fun but tiring. We had a formal style dinner where the RAs had to serve the students and dress up all nice. They recognized each of the individual staff members and I think I pretty much got the loudest cheers when they called my name (not to mention the standing ovation from my floor and a bunch of others). That made me happy, of course. At least the kids thought I was a good RA. I had to set up all the equipment for the final dance and then make sure it all went down smoothly which was fine, except I needed to pack. After everything was over we got upstairs and I spent the night just hanging out with my floor since it was my last night. After chilling for a long while, I finally started packing and then after finshing, only managed to get an hour or so of sleep since I needed to be up at the ass crack of dawn so I could go to the airport and pickup up the Cambridge group flight on my way to Cambridge. So I had to leave Oxford early, not being able to properly say goodbye to anybody, and then had to rush over to a city I know nothing about and try to answer lots of questions I didn't know the answer to since I missed orientation.

On a side note, I'm gonna miss the kids on my floor. They were really decent people and gave me very little trouble. I'm hoping to keep in touch with all of them to some extent. It sucked to say goodbye to them, but you always gotta move onward, so...

Cambridge is great. It's a gorgeous, albeit small, city. I think I like it better than Oxford (minus that it's noticeably more expensive), and the college they put us in, Corpus Christi, is much nicer than the one we were in in Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall). I think Corpus Christi is one of the 3 most well known colleges in Cambridge instead of being one of the little podunk ones we were in before (yeah, I just called an Oxford college "podunk." hahaha). As a result we're housed on the main tourist drag (I do have a great view of King's College at least), and everything in the immediate area is ridiculously expensive. It's really loud outside my window at night, but it's sorta nice to be back where there is city din to fall asleep too. I started getting used to absolute silence during bedtime which I don't like as much.

Being the first time this program has ever run, things are pretty much figure-it-out-as-you-go. We are really just making things up all the time and there is so little organization to what we're doing I'm praying the kids don't figure out how much we don't have it all together. The program director has started other ASA programs before from scratch but I'm having trouble figuring out how. In any case, there still seems to be plenty of money to go around so we're not sparing many expenses making sure things get off the ground. There's only 30 kids so we're keeping things flexible and all of the rules are much more lenient. Also hoping this doesn't bite us in the ass. The few kids we took with us from the Oxford program are happy that they can go into hookah bars without fear of being hunted down. I'm also happy that I'm going to have 3 to 4 days off (!!!). I have better access to the internet here so I might even get all my pictures up eventually when I have some free time.

So that's first impressions. I'm still exhausted despite a solid night's sleep. Hopefully after today I will be feeling recharged. I'm sorta sad staff is so small since there are less people to hang out with and bitch to, but the ones we have are good people, so I'm not too worried. Plus, I'm only here for 3 weeks, so even if something sucks, it'll all be over soon. I don't think it will suck though. While I'm exhausted at the idea of staffing another ASA program, the leniency in the rules definitely extends to the staff. I should be able to get off the floor and out of the building after the kids are checked in at night, and grabbing a beer here and there when it isn't my day off won't be so taboo.

OK, sorry if this and my last post have been a little on the dry side, but honestly all of my life and creativity gets used in trying to hold the students' attention while I'm "working." It seems like I always have some excuse why my blog isn't too interesting to read. Too bad.