Shiver me timbers!

I am now well into my third term, with a new complement of classes to keep me busy. The first two, "Micropalaeontology" and "Dinosaurs" pretty well speak for themselves. The third is "Taphonomy & Palaeoecology." Paleoecology is fairly self-explanatory, but for those of you not familiar with taphonomy, it's the study of decay and preservation of organisms. As such, it's probably the grisliest class I'll ever take. The main illustration in today's lecture, for example, was a picture of a field of skeletized horses taken during the Russian Revolution. Other visual aids have included a river full of dead salmon and a bloated cow; it should be an interesting term...
As usual, there's more than just classes going on. Today I attended tea with a group of people that Mike ominously referred to as "the Council" - apparently they're the governing body of the university. It was actually something of an honor, as only three of us from the MSc program were asked to attend (the others were Ben and Emma). In the end, it turned out to be really very boring, as our main job was to chat these people up and make the department sound as good as possible. On the plus side, we did get free tea!
In the interim between classes and tea today, I wandered down to the Saint Nicholas Market, which is a nice area architecturally, as well as being a place where it appears you can buy pretty much anything you could ever possibly need (akin to the "Down Under" section of Pike Place Market, for those of you that know it). Even better, you can just sit back and take in the Bristol accent. I don't think I've had cause to mention the local dialect yet. It's a remarkably simple accent to imitate: just talk like a pirate and refer to any woman as "my lover," regardless of whether or not you actually know her, and you've pretty much got it. Delightful folks, these Bristolians.