Daily Digest

Stories from today:

WTNo

So this morning, 9-11am, I went to the Law of the WTO lecture. It was okay, but not great. The subject matter didn't interest me all that much except when we talked about TRIPS, and the professor was actively trying to whittle the class down to about 20 students (out of the 30 or so who were at the introductory lecture), and so was purposely not focusing on the most interesting stuff and making the class seem hard. But it probably worked for me. I think I'll probably get more out of Family Law, so I'm still leaning towards that one. But I'm still going to sit in on Criminal Justice on Monday and (probably) International Environmental Law on Wednesday before I make my final decision. Meanwhile, two of the three other HLS kids were also at the WTO lecture, and one was very excited about it (that's her specialty). So whenever the professor asked a question she was very excited to answer.

This afternoon, I went for a walk downtown because we've had really surprisingly nice weather here, went to the library for about an hour to try to read for IP but was too sleepy to do a good job, and then had my "library tour." The thing that bugged me most about the library was that they had uncomfortable chairs for us to all sit and read in that pretty much looked like this. And because the law library is mostly non-lending, that means I'll be spending a lot of time in those chairs.

International Incidents

Then, after dinner, I headed over to Jesus College to see their woody climbing wall. It is literally in their college gym, which is significantly nicer than either the Exeter college gym or the Darwin college gym, which isn't saying much. But the room has windows and a pullup bar (and a few machines), so it was winning by default. The climbing wall certainly isn't much, but I wasn't expecting much. It is maybe 10 feet high, and overhangs by about 10 or 15 degrees. Holds don't really get moved around or cleaned. The climbing area is only about 5 feet wide, which is too bad because the structure itself is about 7 feet wide -- but the right-hand third of it is composed of two campus boards, which strikes me as a bit of a waste of space. But whatever.

About 10 or so people showed up. Almost all of them were completely new to CUMC and had only done a bit of climbing before. There were two girls who were with CUMC -- one was the "indoor meets sec" but apparently she didn't realize that Jesus Gym was included in "indoor meets," so had only climbed at that wall once before. She said there were other kids who normally came more regularly to the Jesus Gym sessions. Then there was another girl who had also done some climbing with CUMC before, too. They're both going on this Sunday's meet (which I think I'll go on, too), so that's good. When I was meeting people at the entrance to walk over to the wall, there were three others who showed up at the same time as me. I spoke briefly to one, and his accent didn't quite sound 100% English to me, so I asked "Where are you from?" He said "Oh, actually I was born in London." Oops. So to de-awkward things, I quickly asked the other two, who I had hardly spoken to at all, "Oh, are you guys English too?" "No, not quite, I'm Welsh." Double oops. "And I'm French." Triple whoops.

Once we were at the climbing wall, though, it became quite clear that the French guy was French. He wasn't that fantastic a climber (I'm sure I could outdo him on most stuff), but he had fancy French technique. And he was wearing women's Muiras. Dead giveaway. So we spent some time commiserating about how bad English climbing gyms were and about how we had such great ones at home.

So I hung out at the wall for long enough to establish my dominance (the girls there were generally better than the boys, and the Welsh one wanted to be better than me, I think -- so I had to show her I was boss, which led to some "I'm too short" business -- but don't worry, I didn't give a lecture about height complete with diagrams -- although I could have), and then it was back to the house.

Dar Bar

Then me and about half my house got ready to go out to the Darwin Bar, our college's best asset, briefly. The Irish girls were talking, and one started to go on about "I love how informal it is! We can just go out in whatever we're wearing, and-" and then she was interrupted with "Oh, my slippers!!" Turns out the other Irish girl almost walked out of the house towards the bar in her slippers. Not quite that informal.