St Andrews Things

• 'Matric’ card. We call them student ID’s in the United States, but here they are called “Matric” cards, for “Matriculation”. Matriculation just means that you are fully registered as a student, have paid all your fees, turned in all your forms, and are enrolled in classes. I ‘matriculated’ last Friday in the final portion of orientation.
• Wednesdays without classes. This does not apply to me; however, many classes only meet on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, so a lot of students find their Wednesdays unhindered by petty lectures. Consequently:
• Pubs and flat parties instead of frat parties, which tend to occur on Tuesday and Friday nights. Let me tell you, partying in Europe is partying on a whole new scale. Without being self-contained in a college campus, crazy things happen. I’ve seen some sketchy stuff.
• Fire alarms going off every Wednesday morning at 9am (probably at least partially in an attempt to counter the laziness of hung-over students after all their alcohol consumption the previous night)
• May Dip. Someone’s really, really stupid idea of “fun” in which the entire school wakes up at dawn on May first (which by then is at, like, 4:30am), and takes a lovely sprint into the North Sea. Different from pier-jumping on three counts: It only occurs once a year, rather than at various times throughout a semester; it happens on the beach sands, rather than asan instantaneous jump of death off the side of the harbor; and it happens “in various states of undress”. Well, maybe the third one isn’t unique to the May dip, after all.