Arriving in Sheffield

For the ones arriving in Sheffield, this is some advice on where to find the basics (food and home appliances). It's very easy, actually because there's one street where you can find everything you can possibly think of - and very cheap. It's called The Moor. I know for sure that buses 40, 94 and 95 go there, but there are certainly others because it's a very popular street. 

By the way, regarding bus tickets, there are two main bus companies in Sheffield: First and StageCoach. StageCoach is cheaper if you buy single tickets (they have a special student discount - £0.50), but for a bus pass First is better. The cheapest one I found was the week pass (£5). It gives you unlimited rides in the line you choose. The line (named as colours) covers certain regions of the city. Usually one line will be more than enough to get around.

But back to The Moor, you just have to ask the driver to let you know where to get off. The bus stop is just in front of it, and as you go down the street you'll see a big round-shaped sign with "The Moor" written on it. There, in the middle of the street there are vendors selling cheap socks, scarfs, suitcases, etc. If you go down, on your left-hand side you'll see Poundland where everything costs... one pound! And they have a huge variety of things, from food (processed, no groceries) to home appliances, cosmetics, etc. For more home appliances, walk to the end of the street and on your left you'll see Home Bargains. 

As for groceries, there's a big supermarket (Sainsbury). For the ones who are not great chefs (like myself!), a good tip for cheap frozen food is something Fulton Frozen Foods. It's on your right-hand side as you're going down the street, before Home Bargains. There you can find not only frozen food but also meat and great, cheap yoghurt. As for the rest, just look around. There are heaps of shops selling everything!

Finally, if you guys need a new SIM card or mobile phone, the place to go is Carphone Warehouse. It's on High Street, the main street in the city centre. They have their own network, called Mobile World. If you buy a Mobile World SIM card, you can make cheap calls abroad - by cheap I mean cheaper than calls to the UK! The only problem is that their signal is not as strong as other networks', but it's certainly worth it to call home.

I hope this helps. If anyone has any questions about Sheffield, I'll be happy to help! I'll be looking forward to hearing from you guys who spent a semester in the other cities of the consortium.

Perpignan: Quantity Theory of the Self

by Poonam Ganglani

It was around 4pm on December 15 some weeks ago when we got to the Paris IV Sorbonne, in time for Prof. Girard's paper presentation on "Radical No-Saying: Paradoxes of the Will/Self". A group of us from his Decadent Literature class were there to attend an international conference on "Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English", particularly since Will Self, whose collection of short stories we are currently studying in class, was to be there in the evening for a reading and discussion.

It was around 5:15pm when Will Self-- tall, unimposing and quite resembling a vulture-- entered the hall and shortly after, began his reading.

I'm not sure what I expected him to be like. I had, till then, only known him as the creator of a topsy-turvy, bizarre world where the dead reside in a London suburb, where women grow penises, and where Amazonian tribes consider themselves interminably boring.

I have to be honest. The one thing I was quite sure of--from the mental picture I had constructed of Will Self-- was that I wouldn't like him. But when he finally began, he was surprisingly.....normal. Likable even. I must admit that I enjoyed everything--his theatrical excerpt reading from his recent work "The Book of Dave" , his beady-eyed addresses to the audience in his deep baritone voice, his evasive answers to the questions people asked him (including his replies to Prof Girard's particularly cornering questions) and even the way he politely asked me the spelling of my name before signing my copy of his book, "The Quantity Theory of Insanity."

When we stepped out of the Sorbonne a little while later, I asked Soma (a co-Mundus student who was also in Paris to attend the conference), what she thought of the whole thing. She stared at the road ahead of us as we walked looking at nothing in particular, the way she usually does when she's in critical thought. "I was disappointed", she said. "How come?" I asked, rather curious, but not too surprised that she thought differently. "That wasn't the real Will Self", she said, "it was a performance." "And what were you expecting?", I asked. "I was expecting someone who couldn't care two hoots about the reader...here, he wanted to be accepted... he was selling his product".

In retrospect, what she said it is true in a way. We all expected a more-- well--heterological experience, if I may use the word and it wasn't quite what we got. But then again, there has to be an equilibrium between extremes; and a writer who is so unconventional in his fiction has to balance it out by being urbororo-ly normal during a live exchange. That is, I suppose, the Quantity theory of the Self.

General: Merry Christmas!

A very merry Christmas and a 2008 full of discoveries, 

new languages, cultures...!