Reflections for 2012

2012. A new year. I haven't posted on my blog since August and I don't really have any excuses. I submitted my dissertation mid-September and am officially a master in the Anthropology of Food. Yay!  Incredible knowledge gained, experiences had and friends made?  Check.  Incredible sense of accomplishment, satisfaction and inspiration?  Check!  So what now? After transitioning into student life and life in a new country in 2010 and 2011, I am now trying to figure out the next transition.

What happens now? Most of my fellow students have returned to their home countries. My coveted cache of London library cards are expired. I now pay council taxes.  I am no longer a student.  So what am I?  I'm still in London. I am currently working at a posh food shop, gaining experience in retail and artisan food products, which has proven educational and delicious. I'm also in the process of applying for a work visa to enable me to stay in the UK beyond my student visa while Ryan finishes his PhD. Both the job search and work visa processes have been tests of patience and fortitude.  Job applications and the UK Border agency's paperwork have left me feeling very small in a big world of bureaucracy and shrinking economic opportunities.  So I have felt very uninspired the last several months, feeling unsure about how everything will fit together.

Life slows down when the path ahead is unknown.  But this allows time to think, time to reflect--something we unknowlingly need to do in order to go forward.  I volunteer once a week on the heart ward of a children's hospital in London. This past week I went into the ward itching to get down to work and ready to have a profound experience.  I paced up and down the ward several times.  Many patients had been discharged, some were getting ready to go for some scans, others were sleeping.  "Ugh," I thought, "it's slow, they don't need me, I should just go home."  But then I reminded myself to not be so impatient.  So what did I do?  I went to the staff room and made a nice cup of tea and waited.  The most important lesson I've learned in England is that there's nothing a cuppa doesn't sort out.  Waiting for the kettle to boil, waiting for the teabag to steep, the conversations shared over the hot beverage, all enables you to slow down.  And by the time my tea cup was empty, several needs on the ward became apparent, little things--helping with lunch service, sitting with some new admits--but things that were needed.

As the end of my day on the ward neared, I had a little girl waiting for a heart transplant sit on my lap while the nurses changed her sheets.  We pretended to eat cookies and fed her dollies cookies.  Her blue eyes melted me.  En route to work afterwards, I walked slow, even though I was running late.  I wasn't in a hurry.  In sharing pretend cookies with dollies, I was reminded that I needn't be in such a rush to accomplish things or to know what the next step leads to.  As I go forward in pursuit of a career dedicated to food, I cannot lose focus of what has inspired me to pursue food: the everyday.  It is the everyday meaning of food, the centrality of food in our lives that reminds us that life is about the living and not the planning.  Life is about the meaningful relationships and connections we make in the process of being in this messy, unsure and bureaucratic world.  Food, even pretend cookies, is often the mode of that connection.  What 2012 will hold remains unknown to me but I look forward to the meaningful exchanges and meals that will punctuate the transitional and unknown spaces.  And the many cuppas to boot!  Cheers!

Enjoying haggis in Edinburgh

School is in!

Walking down the hallway, I pass groups of people speaking different languages I do not recognize. In class, the professor tells us not to take notes; he'd prefer we digest what he says, rather than focusing on scribbling it down: "6 months from now, you won't be able to make sense of your notes anyway." I spend four hours in the library looking for one week's reading for one class (there are no readers or textbooks for post-grads, you have to find all the original books and photocopy them yourself). The academic calendar is a mystery, with three terms, a month break in April, and things like "reading week" and "revision week." I still can't write the date correctly (7/10/10). And between noon and one, a line of people bisects the plaza as students wait patiently for a heaping plate full of steaming vegetables and rice, scooped out of ice chests stacked on a wagon, served up with a hunk of blueberry cake--provided free by the Hare Krishnas.

Welcome to graduate school in London.

It's been a bit of an adjustment to return to academia after being in the real world for four years, but it's been an even bigger adjustment to enter the academic world of a different country. The basic structure of lecture and tutorials (discussion sections) is the same, but the reading lists, the assessment methods, and administrative basics are foreign to me. The reading list for one of my classes has about 30 different articles and books listed for each week! The Miss Industrious in me started hyperventilating: "there is no way I can read all this for each of my three classes every week!" Luckily, it turns out you aren't expected to read everything. Phew! But you are expected to read most of it, as well as research additional pertinent sources. Should be good preparation for researching the dissertation (thesis). But with all the students competing for copies of books at the library, long queues at computers to access the electronic databases, and even longer queues for the copier, it takes a solid 4 hours just to acquire the reading material. And since the SOAS library doesn't have everything on my list, I have to trek all over London looking for sources. It takes ages just to acquire all the reading, which seems a bit archaic to me--though the British would say traditional (that's a compliment!). It's certainly more of an adventure and I like having a wallet full of library cards! Let's just hope it's still fun half way through the year.

What I'm taking this term: Food, Body, and Society (one of the core classes for my MA in Anthropology of Food), Therapy and Culture (looking at relationships of medicine, therapy, and the body with culture), Ethnographic Research Methods, and a Directed Practical Study that will consist of me doing an internship somewhere and writing a research paper. Term 2 will consist of Famine and Food Security, Food Development and the Global Economy, and the Anthropology of Urban Place and Space. Assessment seems to be based upon a combination of one or two papers/projects and a 2 hour examination at the end of term 2 for each class (including the classes from term 1). And then the big push to write a 10,000 word dissertation!

I've had two classes so far and I'm very pleased with the engagement, enthusiasm, and approachability of the professors. I think the program will be challenging, rigorous, and involve many hours in the library! The multi-cultural, liberal, ethnically and linguistically diverse student body makes SOAS feel like a smaller version of Berkeley but with a bit of the United Nations mixed in. It is exciting to be in a place not only rich in history but also rich in the diversity of cultures and peoples, especially for what I'll be studying.

At the end of my Therapy and Culture class, the professor had us introduce ourselves by saying our name and what food we dislike. "My name is Emily and I don't like tripe." Identity by name and food preference...I think I'm in the right place.

Beginning of a new chapter: LONDON!

It has been quite a long time since my last post and my life has gone in a new direction. I have left the world of restaurant cooking and have enrolled in a Master's degree program in the UK to study the Anthropology of Food!! And so the purpose of this blog has slightly changed from simply musing about pastries and food, to sharing with my loved ones back home the adventures, challenges, and discoveries I experience in this metropolis called London! Read as little or as much as you want, but mostly, look at the pictures, because if there's one thing more satisfying than eating a warm, gooey berry cobbler with homemade vanilla bean ice cream, it is looking at a picture of it!

So here goes: the next chapter in my love affair with food! Cheers!