Enter Siodhbhra

Howdy, y'all.

Greetings from The Other Cambridge, just across the river from the fine city of Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to being named after a much nicer city in England, and having really quite a lot of brick architecture, Other Cambridge is also known as the home of America's oldest and most overrated university, Harvard. Barring some great tragedy on my way to my final exam, I will be graduating from here in a few weeks with a degree in contemporary Chinese studies.

Imagine, if you will, a very pale, very redheaded, very befreckled young woman of Irish descent wandering around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Imagine her being followed by a gaggle of little Chinese children taking pictures. Imagine this very obviously non-Chinese person attempting to address this little flock of children in Mandarin with a heavy American accent, and imagine them laughing hysterically. This, in effect, was my undergraduate experience.

The next obvious step, of course, was to go to London School of Economics and Political Science and get a graduate degree in speaking poorly accented Mandarin and being laughed at by the fine citizens of the People's Republic of China. Since I am something of a glutton for punishment, I hope to go on to make a career of this, most likely by teaching other university students how to do the same thing. Naturally, I look forward to making very little money, but enjoying every minute of it.

This blog is my attempt to adjust to life in London, where I will be moving in September after completing a summer job in Beijing running Harvard Summer School's absolutely insane nine-week language program, followed by a luxurious weeklong vacation in a yurt in Inner Mongolia. It was totally Katie's idea (the blog, that is, not the yurt). I'm honestly just glad she's letting me sleep on the floor of her flat.

In short, stay tuned as this very locationally confused graduate student attempts to find decent Chinese takeout somewhere, anywhere, in the UK. It should be a fun trip.