Back in Cambridge
Posted by Martin Orr on Thursday, 19 January 2006 at 08:26
Well I'm now back in Cambridge. Lectures start again today, and I have my first supervision (left over from last term). Between leaving Belfast on Wednesday and getting to Cambridge on Saturday, I spent several days staying with my aunt in Hove (near Brighton). During this time I rode up and down the south coast by railway, and visited Stonehenge, Salisbury, Chichester, Bosham, Portsmouth, Brighton and Fishbourne. A few photos are at http://www.martinorr.name/2006/South
On Monday I went to visit our IOI guide, Beata. She and her friend Marzena are working in a cafe in Bracknell. They are both enjoying living in England and clearly it is financially worth coming here: the minimum wage is five times what it is in Poland, rent costs four times as much, food up to twice as much and other things are of comparable price. Marcin, a friend in college with Polish parents, reckons that the difference in prices is greater than that but that it would still be possible to save considerably more in the UK than in Poland.
Full Term started on Tuesday with a college test on last term's work. I came top out of the people who did the test, although one of the three Maths Directors of Studies did not get his students to take the test; and by an alphabetical coincidence that includes five of the seven former IMO team members (four UK, one Ireland, one Greece and one Vietnam) in the year.
-- Martin