Cork/Canterbury

Two days ago in Cork, after going to the Cork Municipal Gallery and the Cork City Gaol (I guess that's how they spell 'jail' here, or how they did when that thing was built), I went to a pub with the UCC women's soccer team. The pub allows you to order pizza from a specific place into the pub, and then the pizza's half-price. So we got three large pizzas for like 20 euro, which was cool because a) the pizza wasn't worth more than that and b) I didn't pay anyway.

Anyway. We were talking a lot about the education system in Ireland, which bases college admission exclusively on one test. Nothing else -- grades, extra-currics, etc. -- matters besides this one test, which covers seven subjects (English, Irish, I think math, and then four others of your choosing). Before taking the test, you make a list of your top 10 choices of schools and majors (except they call majors 'courses'), and you get into them based on your score. You have to go to the top choice that you get into, and from there you're locked into studying that area. Each course has a certain number of points out of 600 you have to get, so things like medicine and dentistry are the highest, and things like a certificate in fish farming are on the low end.

What's interesting is the girls I was talking to all felt like it's a good system (of course they all got into UCC, which is one of the top three schools in the country), and that our system is weird. I asked about the class issue, and if they have a problem here with the test being catered to the upper-middle class (like the controversy with standardized tests in the U.S.), and they said they don't have that issue at all.

OK I've got eight more minutes on this pre-paid computer, so I'll talk about Canterbury before I get booted off (but I still think this college stuff is fascinating.. there's a lot more I didn't go into).

The Canterbury Cathedral is amazing. The oldest part dates back to the 1100s, but about 300 years later the rest had to be rebuilt because of a fire. That's about the time they figured out that Gothic arches (the kind that come to a point at the top) can hold more weight than rounded ones, so they were able to build it much higher the second time around. Since some of the earlier cathedral survived the fire, you get this mix of Norman and Anglo architecture under the same roof, which creates a pretty amazing dynamic.

The cathedral also has two stained-glass windows that were designed by a Hungarian Jew right after WWII, and if you look really closely you can see a tiny swastika on a padlock of a prison door on one of them. The guy who made it is buried in the cathedral's memorial garden.

Well I got distracted by a dog and now my time's almost up. I'll write more from London.