Three paintings

I. Every portrait a self-portrait
The Scottish university model requires from most students to dedicate their first 2 years of study to more subjects than those they want to focus on. This fact gave me the opportunity to take up a subject I have been interested in for long time: Art History. After 4 months of wonderful lectures about Renaissance in Italy (Giotto to Titian) and Northern Europe (Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel the Elder), I can imagine being committed to this discipline for the following decades. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. II. Word is a painting
The study of arts is, more than anything else, neverending reading and writing. History requires at least 100 pages, anthropology 2 studies, literature 1 book a week. One easily forgets what is fun about reading, and writing 7 pages long essays becomes a routine. What helps me is to find an escape, to remind myself that those two activities also exist outside of academia. Therefore, I signed up for creative writing course, where every Thursday we read and write poems. After 7 weeks, we are to publish our own short collection. III. Blackpool
After 8 years long hiatus, thanks to the university I have an opportunity to competitively dance again. With the university’s ballroom and latin dance society, we spent the last weekend of February in Blackpool, the world’s center of ballroom dancing. After months of intensive trainings we competed against universities from the entire Great Britain, from the southern Bristol to the northern Lancaster. Most of St Andrean couples ended up better than expected, and we are already preparing for the upcoming competition in Manchester. At the end of this entry I have to outline to the reader the current crisis surrounding the planned reforms of university staff pensions, that is resonating throughout the country. This reform would see an average higher education teacher losing up to 10,000 GBP (or 300,000 Czech crowns) a year. No wonder professors from all corners of Britain are striking, refusing to teach. This problematic is a reminder that every university is much more than its name, table ranking, history, architecture. It is, above all, a community of ardent experts.