Haggis

I know, Burn's Night is over, but we still wanted to eat Haggis.
After all, we are in Scotland.
After all, we did not have a proper Burn's Supper on Burn's Day.
Now there is something we felt compelled to change. How would we be able to look the folks at home in the face, having been here for an entire year and not having tried haggis? It is simply a matter of pride. So, after a fun time at the shops trying to find a haggis in plastic instead of the more natural variety, we discovered an entire shelf of the things at Morrison's.
There were also vegetarian ones. Apparently being a vegetarian does not keep Scots from eating something that at least resembles the original, since there is no better way to celebrate Scottish ness than eating an artificial sheep's stomach stuffed with shredded sheep's lungs and other lovely entrails.
Even the guys in the halls who NEVER cook, who does not know how an oven works, apparently had haggis.
Well, and so had we and are hence initiated a bit more into Scottish culture.

Meet: our Haggis.

Doesn't look exactly yummy, does it?
I am not sure what made us choose the more traditional haggis instead of going for the vegetarian variety.
So, our dumpy little friend gently rotated in a pot for an hour and then was duly inspected, cut and eaten. Well, and assaulted with a camera.

So… Haggis. Yeah.
The good thing was that there was so much pepper in it that we did not really taste any of the stuff we were actually eating, but on the whole, it was not unlike the more traditional means my grandma would cook.
Which means there were a lot of strange little whitish bits you are not eager to identify, and a lot of brown-grey goo you are not keen to know the origin of, either.
The good thing about grandma's cooking is, however, that we knew what we were dealing with and so did the thing one does with scary cooking - add enough mashed potatoes to drown the haggis in.

So on the whole, it was not terrible. It reminded me a lot of a mixture of Leberwurst and black pudding. Not at all horrible, but you do have to remind yourself to eat what is on your plate instead of thinking about what it actually IS what you are eating. Brrr. It definitely does not make me want to write a poem about it.

Literature Crush

One of the good things about Partick is that we have a lot of charity shops close by, and it's great fun to occasionally skim through them and see what treasures we can discover. They really ought to be more common in Germany! It is so much fun browsing through them.

I found something which made me happy on Friday:
The Worst Witch All At Sea.
Ah, the memories of childhood. Well. Teenager-hood. Boy, I must have been the most boring 16-year-old in my entire year.

Does anyone else know and remember the series?
Since I saw the series on TV the first time, I have had a crush on Miss Hardbroom. She is just soooo cool. 
If not, meet: Constance Hardbroom.  Oh dear, I hope Jill Murphy won't sue me for showing this around on the net. 

Sadly, the author is not as good as drawing this wonderful character as she is at drawing the kids.

But this is the coolest female character ev- nah. One of the coolest female characters ever.
She kicks student butt. She can materialise out of thin air. She thinks body-length school dresses with grey and black checks are "too frivolous" for the girls and changes them to plain black. She teaches Potions. She always appears directly behind the students when they are least expecting it, or dematerialises, waits until the students do not suspect her of being there, eavesdropping, and then makes comments on what they're saying in a disembodied voice, catching them off-guard. She favours the meanest girl in the entire form (who does not only get everything always right, but is also the daughter of very rich parents and has won prizes for practically everything). She has a cat named Morgana. She is always neat.
And she wears a bun!!

Kinda scary, the many things which are strangely reminiscent of other schools here. But then, she is allowed to be like that because she is a few years older than Severus Snape or Minerva McGonagall.

Isn't she cool??

Oh, yeah, right.
I am supposed to be a literature student. But against the magic of H.B., other authors battle in vain. No match in the stuff I'm reading at the moment, anyway (not counting the poetry, of course). Apart from this very profound novel for a slightly younger audience, I'm forced to read Jane Eyre. Once more. That is two times too many already. I thought I was through the worst when I got a dose of Emma. Once more. But nooo... Well, it's not all that bad. 

Something funny: our seminar teacher tried to interest us in poetry yesterday. At least that's what she said. Kinda strange, blue-eyed as I am I always assumed that everybody studying literature simply MUST love poetry to bits, but that turned out to be wrong.
In the seminar, about three people told me that they absolutely did not know what to do with a poem. At all. And that they did not like poetry, and that they found it terribly difficult to make sense of them at all, and that they were terrified of writing the essays about them this year.

Our tutor said we were going to do a "poetry workshop" because apparently most of the guys in the class run screaming at the sight of verse, they simply don't know what to do with poems because they never get taught how to go about it, and then get assessed on it. All around very fair, the whole matter - and with important exams looming ahead, everyone thought it best to revise.
She said she wanted to "seduce" us with verse, to get us to see poetry a new way, etc., etc. I wonder if I will say similar things to my wee students when I am forced to confront them with poetry... And I wonder if I will make her kind of choice.
Her weapons for seduction turned out to be the epitaph to Ginsberg's Howl (Diane: "Didn't your head just explode when you first read it?!"), the first part of Whitman's Song of Myself and the lyrics to some song by the Beatles which begins with I dig a pony.

Somehow, the white faces and the apparent terror of the guys in the class suggested that her plan of seduction and reducing their fears through a new confrontation with a new kind of poetry … did not work. Well, and no one new the poems, at all. I missed out on the Beatles lyrics as well, but the others are fairly well-known?

I ask you - you want someone to realise that poetry is wonderful, want to seduce them with verse, want to show them the beauty of language… Ginsberg??? But then, she was into the energy and this feeling of breaking out she wanted us to see. Didn't work on most of them.

So, off to Russian, once again. Sorry for cluttering everybody's Friends page. I hope everyone's alright!

Major hugs!