The Dreaming Spires of Oxford
The Oxford of Tolkien and Lewis
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Friday, August 29, 2008
Making Up for Lost Time
**Note: This is the third of three new posts (posted tonight but written at various times). Scroll down if you're interested in reading all three of them in order.
I know it's been forever since I've posted anything and most of my "regulars" have probably stopped checking due to having been disappointed too many times. :-) In Wales, I didn't have any internet access. Since then, I've been staying with my cousin Anna (I believe we are technically second cousins) who lives in Manchester. She has dial-up internet which I could use for a bit of communication but it tended to freeze up after just a few minutes. I'm now in Edinburgh, staying in some university accommodation. I can get a whole day's worth of internet for just 3 pounds, but I haven't used it yet because I've been going to Edinburgh International Arts Festival events in the evenings. Right now, I'm writing this in my journal on a coach bus, going on a day trip to the Highlands of Scotland. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
On my remaining two days in Wales, I visited Caernarfon Castle (which is remarkably well-preserved), the Roman ruins of Segontium Fort, and a picturesque seaside village called Portmeirion. It was rainy for most of those days, but the sun hesitantly peaked o ut for an hour or two when I was at Portmeirion, which was glorious. I also got to hear the Welsh language spoken all over the place, and it was a lot harsher than I was expecting. I guess I thought it would be soft and flowing like Gaelic or like Celtic music, but it had quite a few guttural sounds. It was also interesting because everyone spoke English perfectly (of course), but they also spoke Welsh to other Welshmen. I think most of the people there are truly bilingual instead of just speaking a second language.
I spent half of the next day travelling to Manchester to visit Anna. I was greeted with warm hospitality and lots of wonderful English tea, which can soothe any care-worn traveller. Staying with Anna has definitely been one of the highlights of my trip. We had fun getting to know each other better and discovering that we have quite a bit in common. I was actually supposed to go to Durham halfway through my stay in Manchester, but the people I was supposed to stay with (whom I have never actually met) were being rather uncommunicative, plus I was having such a great time with Anna, and she graciously invited me to stay longer with her.
On our first afternoon together, Anna took me on a tour of Manchester. It was really fun to see a city from the perspective of someone who lives there because I got to see some things that would never have been in a guidebook. For example, we went to a teeny bopper paradise with stores selling quirky clothes and paraphernalia, unique costumes, and Gothic attire. It was quite interesting to see! We also went to a museum that had exhibitions on roof gardens, fashion, and Anime. Perhaps most interesting of all was the food section of Selfridges. In addition to selling every imaginable flavor of sushi, gourmet wedding cakes for 500-1000 pounds ($1000-2000), and candy made from real bugs or parts of rodents, it also had highly overpriced American food that you can't get anywhere else in England. For example, boxes of Lucky Charms were 7.50 pounds ($15), and boxes of Macaroni and Cheese cost 4 pounds ($8)! I was also introduced to British junk food including prawn crackers and bacon crisps. They were both very good, but bacon crisps would become my signature snack if I lived here (much like Cheez-Its in America). During my time in Manchester, I also got to see some British TV shows, including the British version of The Office and Miss Marple.
The next day, we went to the Lake District and it was a gloriously sunny day! We took a train into Windermere and got to see some of that town's lovely scenery from the top of an open-top bus (with the wind in our hair and the sun smiling down on us) on our way to Grasmere to see Wordsworth's home. Dove Cottage, as it was called because it was once a pub named the Dove and Olive, is a cozy white house with only a few rooms, even though it used to have many occupants. At its highest occupancy, it was home to Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, his wife, his wife's sister, a few children, and possibly a long-term guest like Coleridge. The ground floor rooms were rather dark (but they supposedly did their sewing down there!) while the upstairs rooms were fairly light and airy. There are now other buildings surrounding Dove Cottage, but it is easy to imagine how glorious the view of Grasmere Lake (mere=lake, so it is redundant to say Grasmere Lake but it is clearer because it is also the name of the village) and its mountainous border.
After a quick walk through the Wordsworth museum, we made a beeline to get back out into the sunshine. We hiked through the wilderness to Rydal Mount, where Wordsworth moved after his family outgrew Dove Cottage. It's more secluded and wild than Dove Cottage, and I think its surroundings are probably closer to how they would have been in Wordsworth's time. Ann and I enjoyed having tea in the beautiful garden.
The next day, we visited Tatton Park, a mansion with gardens and parkland. It was another gorgeous sunny day (which was a pleasant surprise). On th eway to Tatton Park, we went through Knutsford, which is where Elizabeth Gaskell was from. We saw a triptych tapestry made by the community for the millennium. Anyone could stitch their own house, but the lady in charge of the tapestry stitched the outline from a photograph and supplied the thread to make sure that all the separate pieces would fit seamlessly together in size and color. We ate at a little cafe that was decorated with penny farthings (those bikes with one tiny wheel and one huge one). The mansion itself was beautiful and elegant, the gardens were huge and fun to walk through (you could imagine wearing a nice dress and "taking a turn around the garden"), and the parkland was even larger, filled with sheep, trees, and lakes.
I spent the following afternoon in Liverpool, home of the Beatles. I went to the Beatles museum and the Tate Liverpool, both of which are located on the famous and distinctive Albert Dock. Liverpool is the 2008 European Capital of Culture, and it really feels like it has taken on the role well.
I went to York the next day. This walled medieval city was quite nice (even nicer than Canterbury, I think), and its cathedral was truly fantastic. I feel like I'm becoming a snob, but after seeing so many amazing old buildings, it takes rather a lot to impress me now. Well, I was very impressed by York's cathedral. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the UK, and it has almost half of the country's medieval stained glass windows. Some of the most notable include the Seven Sisters (made by the Cistercians out of silvery glass; they didn't believe in having images in the stained glass so it's just patterns), the Rose Window (created to celebrate the end of the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York), the Jesse Window (depicting the lineage of Christ in the middle pane with the patriarchs on one side and the prophets on the other), and the great East and West windows (one of which was sadly under construction when I visited).
I also saw the Jorvik Vikings Museum. The Vikings conquered the city in the mid-800s and named it Jorvik, which is where the name "York" comes from. Archaeologists discovered part of the old Viking settlement underground and have now restored it using as many original artifacts as possible. They have even created wax figures of the Vikings who lived there based on skeletons that they found. Visitors tour the city in moving compartments, kind of like a slow amusement park ride. It was quite an interesting, unique museum.
I went to the Peak District on my last full day in Manchester. I wandered along a public footpath through the Pennine Mountains to a small trickling waterfall. This area was designated "access land," which means that you are allowed to leave the path and walk freely through it. Well, of course I couldn't resist that! I walked up the mountain next to the stream. It looked like a much easier climb than it was. For one thing, all the plants made it impossible to see the terrain I was actually walking on. For another thing, it was quite muddy in places and I didn't want to get my shoes horribly wet as they are my best walking shoes. Plus it was just a lot steeper than it looked. But I had fun going partway up, crossing the stream, and then coming back down on the other side.
I went a little farther along the trail and saw another mountain I thought I would try to climb. Apparently I had learned nothing from my first experience of discovering that these mountains were a lot more difficult to climb than they appeared. I started up what seemed to be a dry stream bed. Soon enough I started to hear a trickling sound, but I couldn't see anything, no matter how much I tried to look under and around the plants. It sounded like it was coming from right below me, so I thought maybe it was an underground stream. I kept going up the mountain. Eventually I felt my foot slip much farther than it should have. Yes, I had discovered the stream and I was standing knee-deep in a muddy ditch. Fortunately, the water was only at the very bottom. Unfortunately, when I had instinctively grabbed for something as my foot slipped, I had grabbed a sticker plant. I pulled myself out of the stream bed and plucked the stickers off my hand and clothes. I searched for the stream, but really could not see it; that's how dense the foliage was. Everywhere else except right near the stream was too steep to climb down, so I just carefully descended and hoped that I wouldn't slip into the stream again. I did eventually make it back to the path, quite wet and muddy. But it was fun anyways. The mountains are really pretty, and I enjoyed getting to walk through sheep fields as well.
That afternoon, Anna's mom Jan had returned from her trip to America, and it was fun to get to see her. She, Anna, and I had tea and crumpets and then a nice dinner. The next morning, we relaxed and chatted and then had to rush a bit to get me to the train station on time. I arrived in Edinburgh, once more burdened with my over-large, ridiculously heavy suitcase. I was trying to navigate my way to my accommodation based on a crappy map and the incorrect and conflicting directions I had recieved from a police officer and from a person who works at Travelodge. Eventually, I got good directions from a taxi driver who had just accepted a different job and couldn't drive me. After an hour and a half of walking around hilly (compared to London) Edinburgh with a large purse, heavy backpack, and monstrous suitcase with a breaking zipper, I arrived at my hotel, sweaty and exhausted. It's very basic university accommodation, but I have my own room (which covers over a multitude of sins, haha) and there is a lovely view of an extinct volcano called Arthur's Seat.
After taking a shower and organizing my life a bit, I walked the mile and a half or so to the city centre to see my first Arts Festival event, the world premiere of Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray ballet. It was really well-done and had a lot of depth, emotion, and intensity as well as exploring the interesting themes of celebrity and the relation between the surface image and what is underneath. All the costumes were modern, and Basil (the painter in the book) was a photographer of models while Dorian became a highly successful perfume advertisement model. In a lot of ways I really enjoyed it but its graphic sexuality made me a bit uncomfortable.
Yesterday, I saw the Writers' Museum about Scottish authors Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson. It was a really good museum--and it was free! I ate lunch at the Elephant Cafe, which serves good food at a reasonable price and promotes fair trade products. But the real reason I went there is that J.K. Rowling ate at this cafe to start scribbling down her ideas for the first Harry Potter book. After that, I spent hours at the Edinburgh Castle. Needless to say, it was quite a good castle with several interesting exhibitions.
That evening, I went to a staged concert called I went to the house but did not enter. The lyrics were all from different 20th century literary works by T.S. Eliot, Maurice Blanchot, _____, and Samuel Beckett. The only one I knew anything about was, of course, Eliot. The text was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Four men sang for all the pieces, sounding sort of like a modernist barbershop quartet. Each of the works was chosen because the speaker is ambiguous and has multiple voices (so I personally don't know why Prufrock was selected out of all of Eliot's works). For Eliot's section, the four men were all dressed in vests, top hats, and coats. Before any singing, they took a long time carefully wrapping up a tea set and methodically putting away the rest of the things on stage (2 pictures, a table, a rug, curtains, and a half-mannequin). Then halfway through the singing of the poem, they methodically replaced the set in reverse order. There were a few minor changes (black tea set instead of white, mannequin on the other side of the stage) and it came out of a different box so it was clearly supposed to be a different set of items. Obviously they were trying to show that Prufrock is persnickety and overly concerned about seemingly unimportant things. Also, I'm sure they were acting out "decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." But beyond that, I'm not really sure what this musical/theatrical setting added to the text of Prufrock.
Sadly, the things I wasn't really sure about increased exponentially as the piece went on. Imagine encountering three notoriously difficult modernist texts for the first time by hearing them sung barbershop-style and acted out in modernist theatrical style that doesn't add to one's understanding but rather throws more ambiguous and complex ideas into the mix. It was still kind of fun to try to analyze, even though I'm sure I failed miserably. It was also fun to observe the people in the theatre. Some were pretentiously acting as though they understood, but I'm pretty sure most of them didn't because I did not hear anyone make any sort of insightful comment about the productino during intermission or afterwards. (And that's pretty rare because you can usually hear almost everyone discussing the production at those times.) The guy next to me clapped only twice after the first half, I think because he didn't want to pretend to be enjoying something when he didn't know what was going on. He also pointed out that more people than usual seemed to be coming back from intermission with drinks. I definitely wish I could have seen this production with another English major to be able to discuss it with them afterwards.
Today, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I have been on a tour of the Highlands. I have been writing in my journal during the down times. We have seen some beautiful lochs, mountains, and glens but it's been more of a bus tour than I would have liked. I thought we would be out of the bus more often, but I guess that's okay. We've covered a lot of ground this way, and we did get to go on an hour-long boat cruise on Loch Ness (no sign of Nessie though). I'm really glad that I'm getting to see the Highlands, even if I can't experience them fully in the amount of time I have here.
I'll be in Edinburgh until early Monday morning. Then I will spend all day travelling to Dublin. My train leaves Edinburgh at 6:45 a.m. (I'm taking a taxi to get there) and then I have to change trains twice to get to my ferry. The ferry takes me to Belfast and then I take a train to Dublin. I'm going to store my extra-large suitcase in the Dublin train station until I fly out a few days later. I'm spending my first night in Dublin, then two nights in Sligo (Yeats's home town), then one more night in Dublin, and then I fly to Washington, D.C. I'm sure I'll have to pay the $50 fee for overweight luggage, but oh well, I guess.
Before this blog post gets as large as my suitcase, I'm going to sign off. If you made it to the end, congratulations and thanks for reading!
I know it's been forever since I've posted anything and most of my "regulars" have probably stopped checking due to having been disappointed too many times. :-) In Wales, I didn't have any internet access. Since then, I've been staying with my cousin Anna (I believe we are technically second cousins) who lives in Manchester. She has dial-up internet which I could use for a bit of communication but it tended to freeze up after just a few minutes. I'm now in Edinburgh, staying in some university accommodation. I can get a whole day's worth of internet for just 3 pounds, but I haven't used it yet because I've been going to Edinburgh International Arts Festival events in the evenings. Right now, I'm writing this in my journal on a coach bus, going on a day trip to the Highlands of Scotland. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
On my remaining two days in Wales, I visited Caernarfon Castle (which is remarkably well-preserved), the Roman ruins of Segontium Fort, and a picturesque seaside village called Portmeirion. It was rainy for most of those days, but the sun hesitantly peaked o ut for an hour or two when I was at Portmeirion, which was glorious. I also got to hear the Welsh language spoken all over the place, and it was a lot harsher than I was expecting. I guess I thought it would be soft and flowing like Gaelic or like Celtic music, but it had quite a few guttural sounds. It was also interesting because everyone spoke English perfectly (of course), but they also spoke Welsh to other Welshmen. I think most of the people there are truly bilingual instead of just speaking a second language.
I spent half of the next day travelling to Manchester to visit Anna. I was greeted with warm hospitality and lots of wonderful English tea, which can soothe any care-worn traveller. Staying with Anna has definitely been one of the highlights of my trip. We had fun getting to know each other better and discovering that we have quite a bit in common. I was actually supposed to go to Durham halfway through my stay in Manchester, but the people I was supposed to stay with (whom I have never actually met) were being rather uncommunicative, plus I was having such a great time with Anna, and she graciously invited me to stay longer with her.
On our first afternoon together, Anna took me on a tour of Manchester. It was really fun to see a city from the perspective of someone who lives there because I got to see some things that would never have been in a guidebook. For example, we went to a teeny bopper paradise with stores selling quirky clothes and paraphernalia, unique costumes, and Gothic attire. It was quite interesting to see! We also went to a museum that had exhibitions on roof gardens, fashion, and Anime. Perhaps most interesting of all was the food section of Selfridges. In addition to selling every imaginable flavor of sushi, gourmet wedding cakes for 500-1000 pounds ($1000-2000), and candy made from real bugs or parts of rodents, it also had highly overpriced American food that you can't get anywhere else in England. For example, boxes of Lucky Charms were 7.50 pounds ($15), and boxes of Macaroni and Cheese cost 4 pounds ($8)! I was also introduced to British junk food including prawn crackers and bacon crisps. They were both very good, but bacon crisps would become my signature snack if I lived here (much like Cheez-Its in America). During my time in Manchester, I also got to see some British TV shows, including the British version of The Office and Miss Marple.
The next day, we went to the Lake District and it was a gloriously sunny day! We took a train into Windermere and got to see some of that town's lovely scenery from the top of an open-top bus (with the wind in our hair and the sun smiling down on us) on our way to Grasmere to see Wordsworth's home. Dove Cottage, as it was called because it was once a pub named the Dove and Olive, is a cozy white house with only a few rooms, even though it used to have many occupants. At its highest occupancy, it was home to Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, his wife, his wife's sister, a few children, and possibly a long-term guest like Coleridge. The ground floor rooms were rather dark (but they supposedly did their sewing down there!) while the upstairs rooms were fairly light and airy. There are now other buildings surrounding Dove Cottage, but it is easy to imagine how glorious the view of Grasmere Lake (mere=lake, so it is redundant to say Grasmere Lake but it is clearer because it is also the name of the village) and its mountainous border.
After a quick walk through the Wordsworth museum, we made a beeline to get back out into the sunshine. We hiked through the wilderness to Rydal Mount, where Wordsworth moved after his family outgrew Dove Cottage. It's more secluded and wild than Dove Cottage, and I think its surroundings are probably closer to how they would have been in Wordsworth's time. Ann and I enjoyed having tea in the beautiful garden.
The next day, we visited Tatton Park, a mansion with gardens and parkland. It was another gorgeous sunny day (which was a pleasant surprise). On th eway to Tatton Park, we went through Knutsford, which is where Elizabeth Gaskell was from. We saw a triptych tapestry made by the community for the millennium. Anyone could stitch their own house, but the lady in charge of the tapestry stitched the outline from a photograph and supplied the thread to make sure that all the separate pieces would fit seamlessly together in size and color. We ate at a little cafe that was decorated with penny farthings (those bikes with one tiny wheel and one huge one). The mansion itself was beautiful and elegant, the gardens were huge and fun to walk through (you could imagine wearing a nice dress and "taking a turn around the garden"), and the parkland was even larger, filled with sheep, trees, and lakes.
I spent the following afternoon in Liverpool, home of the Beatles. I went to the Beatles museum and the Tate Liverpool, both of which are located on the famous and distinctive Albert Dock. Liverpool is the 2008 European Capital of Culture, and it really feels like it has taken on the role well.
I went to York the next day. This walled medieval city was quite nice (even nicer than Canterbury, I think), and its cathedral was truly fantastic. I feel like I'm becoming a snob, but after seeing so many amazing old buildings, it takes rather a lot to impress me now. Well, I was very impressed by York's cathedral. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the UK, and it has almost half of the country's medieval stained glass windows. Some of the most notable include the Seven Sisters (made by the Cistercians out of silvery glass; they didn't believe in having images in the stained glass so it's just patterns), the Rose Window (created to celebrate the end of the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York), the Jesse Window (depicting the lineage of Christ in the middle pane with the patriarchs on one side and the prophets on the other), and the great East and West windows (one of which was sadly under construction when I visited).
I also saw the Jorvik Vikings Museum. The Vikings conquered the city in the mid-800s and named it Jorvik, which is where the name "York" comes from. Archaeologists discovered part of the old Viking settlement underground and have now restored it using as many original artifacts as possible. They have even created wax figures of the Vikings who lived there based on skeletons that they found. Visitors tour the city in moving compartments, kind of like a slow amusement park ride. It was quite an interesting, unique museum.
I went to the Peak District on my last full day in Manchester. I wandered along a public footpath through the Pennine Mountains to a small trickling waterfall. This area was designated "access land," which means that you are allowed to leave the path and walk freely through it. Well, of course I couldn't resist that! I walked up the mountain next to the stream. It looked like a much easier climb than it was. For one thing, all the plants made it impossible to see the terrain I was actually walking on. For another thing, it was quite muddy in places and I didn't want to get my shoes horribly wet as they are my best walking shoes. Plus it was just a lot steeper than it looked. But I had fun going partway up, crossing the stream, and then coming back down on the other side.
I went a little farther along the trail and saw another mountain I thought I would try to climb. Apparently I had learned nothing from my first experience of discovering that these mountains were a lot more difficult to climb than they appeared. I started up what seemed to be a dry stream bed. Soon enough I started to hear a trickling sound, but I couldn't see anything, no matter how much I tried to look under and around the plants. It sounded like it was coming from right below me, so I thought maybe it was an underground stream. I kept going up the mountain. Eventually I felt my foot slip much farther than it should have. Yes, I had discovered the stream and I was standing knee-deep in a muddy ditch. Fortunately, the water was only at the very bottom. Unfortunately, when I had instinctively grabbed for something as my foot slipped, I had grabbed a sticker plant. I pulled myself out of the stream bed and plucked the stickers off my hand and clothes. I searched for the stream, but really could not see it; that's how dense the foliage was. Everywhere else except right near the stream was too steep to climb down, so I just carefully descended and hoped that I wouldn't slip into the stream again. I did eventually make it back to the path, quite wet and muddy. But it was fun anyways. The mountains are really pretty, and I enjoyed getting to walk through sheep fields as well.
That afternoon, Anna's mom Jan had returned from her trip to America, and it was fun to get to see her. She, Anna, and I had tea and crumpets and then a nice dinner. The next morning, we relaxed and chatted and then had to rush a bit to get me to the train station on time. I arrived in Edinburgh, once more burdened with my over-large, ridiculously heavy suitcase. I was trying to navigate my way to my accommodation based on a crappy map and the incorrect and conflicting directions I had recieved from a police officer and from a person who works at Travelodge. Eventually, I got good directions from a taxi driver who had just accepted a different job and couldn't drive me. After an hour and a half of walking around hilly (compared to London) Edinburgh with a large purse, heavy backpack, and monstrous suitcase with a breaking zipper, I arrived at my hotel, sweaty and exhausted. It's very basic university accommodation, but I have my own room (which covers over a multitude of sins, haha) and there is a lovely view of an extinct volcano called Arthur's Seat.
After taking a shower and organizing my life a bit, I walked the mile and a half or so to the city centre to see my first Arts Festival event, the world premiere of Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray ballet. It was really well-done and had a lot of depth, emotion, and intensity as well as exploring the interesting themes of celebrity and the relation between the surface image and what is underneath. All the costumes were modern, and Basil (the painter in the book) was a photographer of models while Dorian became a highly successful perfume advertisement model. In a lot of ways I really enjoyed it but its graphic sexuality made me a bit uncomfortable.
Yesterday, I saw the Writers' Museum about Scottish authors Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson. It was a really good museum--and it was free! I ate lunch at the Elephant Cafe, which serves good food at a reasonable price and promotes fair trade products. But the real reason I went there is that J.K. Rowling ate at this cafe to start scribbling down her ideas for the first Harry Potter book. After that, I spent hours at the Edinburgh Castle. Needless to say, it was quite a good castle with several interesting exhibitions.
That evening, I went to a staged concert called I went to the house but did not enter. The lyrics were all from different 20th century literary works by T.S. Eliot, Maurice Blanchot, _____, and Samuel Beckett. The only one I knew anything about was, of course, Eliot. The text was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Four men sang for all the pieces, sounding sort of like a modernist barbershop quartet. Each of the works was chosen because the speaker is ambiguous and has multiple voices (so I personally don't know why Prufrock was selected out of all of Eliot's works). For Eliot's section, the four men were all dressed in vests, top hats, and coats. Before any singing, they took a long time carefully wrapping up a tea set and methodically putting away the rest of the things on stage (2 pictures, a table, a rug, curtains, and a half-mannequin). Then halfway through the singing of the poem, they methodically replaced the set in reverse order. There were a few minor changes (black tea set instead of white, mannequin on the other side of the stage) and it came out of a different box so it was clearly supposed to be a different set of items. Obviously they were trying to show that Prufrock is persnickety and overly concerned about seemingly unimportant things. Also, I'm sure they were acting out "decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." But beyond that, I'm not really sure what this musical/theatrical setting added to the text of Prufrock.
Sadly, the things I wasn't really sure about increased exponentially as the piece went on. Imagine encountering three notoriously difficult modernist texts for the first time by hearing them sung barbershop-style and acted out in modernist theatrical style that doesn't add to one's understanding but rather throws more ambiguous and complex ideas into the mix. It was still kind of fun to try to analyze, even though I'm sure I failed miserably. It was also fun to observe the people in the theatre. Some were pretentiously acting as though they understood, but I'm pretty sure most of them didn't because I did not hear anyone make any sort of insightful comment about the productino during intermission or afterwards. (And that's pretty rare because you can usually hear almost everyone discussing the production at those times.) The guy next to me clapped only twice after the first half, I think because he didn't want to pretend to be enjoying something when he didn't know what was going on. He also pointed out that more people than usual seemed to be coming back from intermission with drinks. I definitely wish I could have seen this production with another English major to be able to discuss it with them afterwards.
Today, as I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I have been on a tour of the Highlands. I have been writing in my journal during the down times. We have seen some beautiful lochs, mountains, and glens but it's been more of a bus tour than I would have liked. I thought we would be out of the bus more often, but I guess that's okay. We've covered a lot of ground this way, and we did get to go on an hour-long boat cruise on Loch Ness (no sign of Nessie though). I'm really glad that I'm getting to see the Highlands, even if I can't experience them fully in the amount of time I have here.
I'll be in Edinburgh until early Monday morning. Then I will spend all day travelling to Dublin. My train leaves Edinburgh at 6:45 a.m. (I'm taking a taxi to get there) and then I have to change trains twice to get to my ferry. The ferry takes me to Belfast and then I take a train to Dublin. I'm going to store my extra-large suitcase in the Dublin train station until I fly out a few days later. I'm spending my first night in Dublin, then two nights in Sligo (Yeats's home town), then one more night in Dublin, and then I fly to Washington, D.C. I'm sure I'll have to pay the $50 fee for overweight luggage, but oh well, I guess.
Before this blog post gets as large as my suitcase, I'm going to sign off. If you made it to the end, congratulations and thanks for reading!
A Great and Terrible Beauty
18-8-08
I really like nature, being outside, basking in the beauty of God’s creation...but somehow nature and I do not get along when the unexpected occurs. Even when the unexpected should be expected. Like rain in the UK. Today I planned to take the Snowdon Sherpa bus from my hostel to a little town called Waunfawr (pronounced ‘wine-var’), where there is a nice riding stable. However, I didn’t realize how infrequently the bus comes. I probably should have realized that I’m not in London (or Bristol or any other major city) any more and the public transportation just might be as bad as Minnesota’s! (Just kidding.) So I was like, ‘Well, it’s only four miles to Waunfawr, I can certainly walk that.’ Unfortunately, the only way to get there (that I know of) is by walking alongside a narrow road (typical of small towns and rural areas in the UK). This means you have to pay very close attention so that you can move off the road (or when that’s not possible, just cross the road...or if cars are coming from both directions, just try to make yourself as skinny as possible alongside the stone walls lining the road). I definitely don’t plan on doing this again because it was slightly terrifying. :-) But the drivers are usually pretty nice and aware, so it wasn’t absolutely awful. But anyways, this would have been loads better if it hadn’t been raining. Every time I had to walk on the grassy parts next to the road, my feet got soaked. And every time I had to lean against a stone wall, my pants got soaked.
But I finally got to the Snowdonia Riding Stables and I got to go on a one-hour ride. My guidebook said nothing about pre-booking, but apparently that would have been necessary in order to go on a better ride. The one-hour ride I went on was for beginners only, and because of the weather, we didn’t go very far. I was hoping to take one of the rides that went down to the coast and/or Caernarfon Castle and that included cantering, but as I said, I didn’t pre-book. I probably would have called anyway, except that I can’t top up my cell phone until I get to Manchester (when I can either find some place that can top up Lebara phones or where I can buy a new SIM card) and even if I could, there is almost no cell phone reception here. But it was, of course, fun to get to go horseback riding, even if it wasn’t everything I had hoped it would be. I was reminded once again of how much more I like English than Western riding. You just have so much more direct contact with your horse through the reins and your seat, plus I think the saddles are so much more comfortable. Plus, I like being ‘allowed’ to post while trotting. Not that we did any trotting on this particular trail ride. Oh well.
After the trail ride, I decided to stop and eat lunch at the first pub I saw in Waunfawr. I had already decided that I would not be walking back; I would just hang out in the pub until the next Snowdon Sherpa bus would be coming. Seeing as this is the UK, I assumed I would see a pub very soon. Every third or fourth building is generally a pub. However, I didn’t find one until the very edge of town! This could have been due to the fact that I couldn’t see anything out of my rain-covered glasses, however, since the rain had picked up in intensity. My waterproof jacket got drenched (and somehow even my shirt underneath got wet), and my pants, shoes, and socks were utterly soggy. I’m sure I was quite a sight to cause sore eyes by the time I entered the pub at the end of town. I went to the loo and tried to use the hand dryer to dry whatever I could (but obviously I wasn’t going to remove anything that would make my appearance even more unseemly). I ate lunch and then went out to nearest bus stop. Unfortunately, I didn’t know which stop it was. I’m always a bit bamboozled by buses, even this simple system which has a bus that runs up and down one road between the towns of Beddgelert and Caernarfon. I still think the bus stops should say which stop they are though, even if it is a simple system. Also, there were little dashes through two of the stops which might have been the one I was waiting at, seeming to indicate that the bus would not be stopping there at that particular time. I thought that seemed weird because, as I said, the bus basically goes up and down one road. So I decided to wait and hope that a bus would pass and that it would stop when I flagged it down. Wonder of wonders, that is exactly what happened! And it was a very good thing too because right as I got on the bus, it started pouring again. I was still wet and freezing from my last excursion in the rain, but I didn’t want to add to it by being out in another downpour.
I think I pressed the ‘stop’ button at the correct time to get off at the Snowdon Ranger stop, but the bus driver may have just remembered to stop there anyways (since I had to tell him where I was going when I bought my ticket). But I was, of course, worried that I would not manage to press the button at the right time because, well, that would be just my luck with buses (for more information on a previous bus adventure, see the first several pictures of this Facebook album). But in any case, I got off the bus at the right place...but the hostel was locked up. I had forgotten that this middle-of-nowhere hostel closes in the middle of the day. I knocked and fortunately, one of the workers was around to give me the code to get inside. I struggled with putting the code in correctly too because you had to turn a random lever clockwise and anti-clockwise. Yes, I do sometimes have dyslexic troubles with clockwise and anti-clockwise, but that wasn’t the problem this time. For some ridiculous reason, I kept trying to turn the door handle instead of the lever because I didn’t notice the lever at first! (I was very tired and out of it by this time due to the ‘trauma’ of the day.)
I got back and took a shower (I was afraid that the hot water would be shut off, but fortunately it was fine). And now I’m just sitting in the hostel room because my one pair of shoes are too sopping wet to go anywhere else. Yes, you did read that correctly: I only have one pair of shoes. When I narrowed my stuff down to ‘essentials’ and ‘non-essentials,’ I only included one pair of shoes in the ‘essentials.’ And usually that would be enough. Even on the other days when I’ve been out in the rain, my shoes have mostly been dry the next day. Plus most hostels have hairdryers ‘for hire’ that I planned to use if necessary, but I’m not sure that this hostel has anything of the sort. Maybe it does though. I’ll just have to ask tonight when the reception opens back up again.
So, all in all, it was not the greatest day. It was an interesting day that will make for a good story, but I didn’t enjoy it all that much. But it certainly wasn’t the worst day either...I never experienced Brighton-level despair or anything like that. I am a little sad that I am wasting half a day of my trip, and I’m a little frustrated that the public transportation is so difficult. And I really wish it would just stop raining! I want to be able to experience the great outdoors of Snowdonia National Park, but it’s really hard to have a good time when it’s pouring all day. And I don’t even want to try doing an all-day hike tomorrow if it’s even a bit cloudy because I don’t want to get stuck out in the rain again. So if it’s sunny, my plan is to hike up Snowdon (the tallest mountain in Wales and England, which happens to be right outside my hostel). But if it’s cloudy or rainy, I will take a bus (I know what time it comes to the hostel now) to the town of Caernarfon and see its lovely castle. Being in a town will also ensure that there will be pubs and other places to take shelter from the elements.
I believe I am much more cut out for city life than rural life. I always seem to be caught off-guard or without certain necessities when I’m out in nature. It was like that at the dude ranch too. I had a full suitcase for just a week and I still managed to forget essentials like sunscreen! So in conclusion...nature is wonderful but it is also an unpredictable force. It is, to steal the title of a book I haven’t even read, a great and terrible beauty.
To change the subject, I met a bunch of nice people from Ireland last night. I just randomly sat with them for dinner in the hostel, and then we played Scrabble afterwards (along with an English guy who works in the hostel and is about my age). I ate breakfast with them this morning as well. There were two couples, one of whom had a young daughter (with traditionally Irish red hair), and there was a single woman who was my only roommate in a six-bed room last night (tonight I’m the only person in the room). The mother of the young daughter obviously knew a lot about literature, and we talked a bit about Yeats’s poetry because I told her I was visiting Sligo due to Yeats. The other married woman has two daughters: one aged 23 and the other aged 21. The 21-year-old daughter is apparently very similar to me because she also goes travelling all by herself. This woman lives between Dublin and Sligo, and she gave me her work number and her mobile number and told me to call her if I have any problems in Ireland. I thought that was very nice, and I know it will make my mom happy when I get a chance to tell her.
Well, I guess that’s all for now, folks!
I really like nature, being outside, basking in the beauty of God’s creation...but somehow nature and I do not get along when the unexpected occurs. Even when the unexpected should be expected. Like rain in the UK. Today I planned to take the Snowdon Sherpa bus from my hostel to a little town called Waunfawr (pronounced ‘wine-var’), where there is a nice riding stable. However, I didn’t realize how infrequently the bus comes. I probably should have realized that I’m not in London (or Bristol or any other major city) any more and the public transportation just might be as bad as Minnesota’s! (Just kidding.) So I was like, ‘Well, it’s only four miles to Waunfawr, I can certainly walk that.’ Unfortunately, the only way to get there (that I know of) is by walking alongside a narrow road (typical of small towns and rural areas in the UK). This means you have to pay very close attention so that you can move off the road (or when that’s not possible, just cross the road...or if cars are coming from both directions, just try to make yourself as skinny as possible alongside the stone walls lining the road). I definitely don’t plan on doing this again because it was slightly terrifying. :-) But the drivers are usually pretty nice and aware, so it wasn’t absolutely awful. But anyways, this would have been loads better if it hadn’t been raining. Every time I had to walk on the grassy parts next to the road, my feet got soaked. And every time I had to lean against a stone wall, my pants got soaked.
But I finally got to the Snowdonia Riding Stables and I got to go on a one-hour ride. My guidebook said nothing about pre-booking, but apparently that would have been necessary in order to go on a better ride. The one-hour ride I went on was for beginners only, and because of the weather, we didn’t go very far. I was hoping to take one of the rides that went down to the coast and/or Caernarfon Castle and that included cantering, but as I said, I didn’t pre-book. I probably would have called anyway, except that I can’t top up my cell phone until I get to Manchester (when I can either find some place that can top up Lebara phones or where I can buy a new SIM card) and even if I could, there is almost no cell phone reception here. But it was, of course, fun to get to go horseback riding, even if it wasn’t everything I had hoped it would be. I was reminded once again of how much more I like English than Western riding. You just have so much more direct contact with your horse through the reins and your seat, plus I think the saddles are so much more comfortable. Plus, I like being ‘allowed’ to post while trotting. Not that we did any trotting on this particular trail ride. Oh well.
After the trail ride, I decided to stop and eat lunch at the first pub I saw in Waunfawr. I had already decided that I would not be walking back; I would just hang out in the pub until the next Snowdon Sherpa bus would be coming. Seeing as this is the UK, I assumed I would see a pub very soon. Every third or fourth building is generally a pub. However, I didn’t find one until the very edge of town! This could have been due to the fact that I couldn’t see anything out of my rain-covered glasses, however, since the rain had picked up in intensity. My waterproof jacket got drenched (and somehow even my shirt underneath got wet), and my pants, shoes, and socks were utterly soggy. I’m sure I was quite a sight to cause sore eyes by the time I entered the pub at the end of town. I went to the loo and tried to use the hand dryer to dry whatever I could (but obviously I wasn’t going to remove anything that would make my appearance even more unseemly). I ate lunch and then went out to nearest bus stop. Unfortunately, I didn’t know which stop it was. I’m always a bit bamboozled by buses, even this simple system which has a bus that runs up and down one road between the towns of Beddgelert and Caernarfon. I still think the bus stops should say which stop they are though, even if it is a simple system. Also, there were little dashes through two of the stops which might have been the one I was waiting at, seeming to indicate that the bus would not be stopping there at that particular time. I thought that seemed weird because, as I said, the bus basically goes up and down one road. So I decided to wait and hope that a bus would pass and that it would stop when I flagged it down. Wonder of wonders, that is exactly what happened! And it was a very good thing too because right as I got on the bus, it started pouring again. I was still wet and freezing from my last excursion in the rain, but I didn’t want to add to it by being out in another downpour.
I think I pressed the ‘stop’ button at the correct time to get off at the Snowdon Ranger stop, but the bus driver may have just remembered to stop there anyways (since I had to tell him where I was going when I bought my ticket). But I was, of course, worried that I would not manage to press the button at the right time because, well, that would be just my luck with buses (for more information on a previous bus adventure, see the first several pictures of this Facebook album). But in any case, I got off the bus at the right place...but the hostel was locked up. I had forgotten that this middle-of-nowhere hostel closes in the middle of the day. I knocked and fortunately, one of the workers was around to give me the code to get inside. I struggled with putting the code in correctly too because you had to turn a random lever clockwise and anti-clockwise. Yes, I do sometimes have dyslexic troubles with clockwise and anti-clockwise, but that wasn’t the problem this time. For some ridiculous reason, I kept trying to turn the door handle instead of the lever because I didn’t notice the lever at first! (I was very tired and out of it by this time due to the ‘trauma’ of the day.)
I got back and took a shower (I was afraid that the hot water would be shut off, but fortunately it was fine). And now I’m just sitting in the hostel room because my one pair of shoes are too sopping wet to go anywhere else. Yes, you did read that correctly: I only have one pair of shoes. When I narrowed my stuff down to ‘essentials’ and ‘non-essentials,’ I only included one pair of shoes in the ‘essentials.’ And usually that would be enough. Even on the other days when I’ve been out in the rain, my shoes have mostly been dry the next day. Plus most hostels have hairdryers ‘for hire’ that I planned to use if necessary, but I’m not sure that this hostel has anything of the sort. Maybe it does though. I’ll just have to ask tonight when the reception opens back up again.
So, all in all, it was not the greatest day. It was an interesting day that will make for a good story, but I didn’t enjoy it all that much. But it certainly wasn’t the worst day either...I never experienced Brighton-level despair or anything like that. I am a little sad that I am wasting half a day of my trip, and I’m a little frustrated that the public transportation is so difficult. And I really wish it would just stop raining! I want to be able to experience the great outdoors of Snowdonia National Park, but it’s really hard to have a good time when it’s pouring all day. And I don’t even want to try doing an all-day hike tomorrow if it’s even a bit cloudy because I don’t want to get stuck out in the rain again. So if it’s sunny, my plan is to hike up Snowdon (the tallest mountain in Wales and England, which happens to be right outside my hostel). But if it’s cloudy or rainy, I will take a bus (I know what time it comes to the hostel now) to the town of Caernarfon and see its lovely castle. Being in a town will also ensure that there will be pubs and other places to take shelter from the elements.
I believe I am much more cut out for city life than rural life. I always seem to be caught off-guard or without certain necessities when I’m out in nature. It was like that at the dude ranch too. I had a full suitcase for just a week and I still managed to forget essentials like sunscreen! So in conclusion...nature is wonderful but it is also an unpredictable force. It is, to steal the title of a book I haven’t even read, a great and terrible beauty.
To change the subject, I met a bunch of nice people from Ireland last night. I just randomly sat with them for dinner in the hostel, and then we played Scrabble afterwards (along with an English guy who works in the hostel and is about my age). I ate breakfast with them this morning as well. There were two couples, one of whom had a young daughter (with traditionally Irish red hair), and there was a single woman who was my only roommate in a six-bed room last night (tonight I’m the only person in the room). The mother of the young daughter obviously knew a lot about literature, and we talked a bit about Yeats’s poetry because I told her I was visiting Sligo due to Yeats. The other married woman has two daughters: one aged 23 and the other aged 21. The 21-year-old daughter is apparently very similar to me because she also goes travelling all by herself. This woman lives between Dublin and Sligo, and she gave me her work number and her mobile number and told me to call her if I have any problems in Ireland. I thought that was very nice, and I know it will make my mom happy when I get a chance to tell her.
Well, I guess that’s all for now, folks!
Bristol Overview, Shakespeare’s Stratford, the Legends of Glastonbury, and the Beginning of Wales
Sunday, 17 August 2008
I won’t be able to post this for at least four days because the nearest Wi-Fi is eight miles away in Caernarfon. And if I choose to go into Caernarfon for a day, I won’t be lugging my laptop with me. I am currently in a remote part of Wales in Snowdonia National Park. It’s absolutely beautiful here! There are mountains and a lake and fresh air and wide open spaces...everything that London is not. I even passed the ocean and some beautiful beaches on the train ride here. I had to take three trains and two buses to get to the hostel, which tells you how remote it is. Even more telling is the fact that neither the man at the train information center nor my first bus driver knew where I was supposed to be going. They were able to point me in the right direction, but they both told me to ask the next person in the ‘information chain’ for further directions. (This is absolutely insane because it’s almost impossible to stump these people...and to stump two of them with one question, well, I should win a prize or something.) The only problem with the remoteness of this location is that I told my parents I would call them today because I assumed I’d have access to internet (and hence, Skype) but I definitely won’t be able to make it into Caernarfon tonight. Hopefully there is a pay phone that works for international calls within walking distance, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Since I haven’t written for a while, I may as well take this opportunity to review what I’ve done over the past few days. I think my last blog post left off with my excursion to the Bristol science museum. The following day, I took a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon. It really doesn’t make much sense to go from Bristol to Stratford, but it isn’t that much worse than going from London to Stratford, and those were my only two options for seeing the revered birthplace of the Bard. And by ‘the Bard,’ of course I mean William Shakespeare himself.
I went to a matinee production of The Taming of the Shrew (because I wouldn’t have been able to catch a train back from an evening performance), and it was really well done! (Well, that’s to be expected, as it was the Royal Shakespeare Company.) The entire Taming of the Shrew is a play-within-a-play. The opening scene involves a drunk man who is passed out. Some people decide it would be a funny joke to dress him up as a lord and try to convince him that he had always been a lord, and then see how long it takes him to believe it. They also dressed up another man as a woman who pretended to be ‘the lord’s’ wife. Some players (acting troupe) come to town, and they suggest that they perform a play for ‘the lord.’ This play is the main storyline of The Taming of the Shrew. Though this narrative framework is a very small part of the beginning of the play, it really sets the rest of the storyline in context. Interestingly, it begins with two men who are superficially transformed—one is transformed into a lord and the other into a woman. (Obviously, this is pointing out the societal constructions that go into defining genders and attributing power to one person and not another.) This production kept the story, as I think Shakespeare intended it to be, rather uncomical for a ‘comedy.’ Many adaptations (Kiss Me Kate, Ten Things I Hate about You) transform the story into the typical jovial ‘battle of the sexes’ where, in the end, the two fall in love and live happily ever after. Shakespeare’s version is a lot more uncomfortable because the man is truly cruel. In my Rhetorics of Violence in Medieval Literature class last semester, we talked about torture being a means for destroying the victim’s mindset, beliefs, and personhood and replacing these with the torturer’s. One of my brilliant classmates brought up The Taming of the Shrew as an example of how physical pain and deprivation can be used to transform a person. Through Petruchio’s ‘taming’ methods of depriving Katherine of food, sleep, and decent clothing, she changes from a fiery shrew to the most ‘obedient’ of all the women in the play. The reactions of Shakespeare’s audiences would probably have been more varied than those of modern audiences. Of course, the acting may have been more ambiguous as well. Like the Guthrie’s recent production of The Merchant of Venice (in which the audience is clearly supposed to understand and pity Shylock’s misery), this production of The Taming of the Shrew definitely emphasized the more feministic elements of the play and modern audiences are able to resonate with that in a way that Shakespeare’s audiences probably wouldn’t have.
After the play, I saw Shakespeare’s birthplace (which may or may not have actually been the place where he was born, though the people who work at the house will swear up and down that there’s enough evidence to say he really was born there). Then I was going to walk around the town a bit more and see the outside of the other houses associated with Shakespeare (because it was after 5:00 p.m. and of course everything shuts down at that point in the UK), but it began to rain and I decided to just catch a train back to my hostel. I kind of wish that I would have stayed around longer, but it was really miserable in the rain (and it would have been even more miserable to ride the train home in sopping wet clothes), so I guess it made sense.
The following day I went to Glastonbury, one of the fruitiest places you will ever see. It’s a haven for hippies and New Agers and people who believe in witchcraft. I knew that before going, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. Every single shop on the High Street made me vaguely uncomfortable! But I did the things I had come there to do. I toured the ancient abbey ruins, parts of which date from the 600s! Supposedly (according to Glastonbury’s myth-obsessed culture), Joseph of Arimathea founded a church there in 60 A.D. or something like that. But still, it is impressively old without adding on that bit of uncorroborated evidence. Also, the supposed site of Arthur and Guinevere’s tomb is in that cathedral. (Again, completely unsubstantiated, as is most everything related to Arthur. But it was fun to see anyways.)
I also climbed the Glastonbury Tor, which is this exceedingly tall natural hilltop with a fourteenth-century tower on the top of it. Supposedly (gee, this word is coming up rather frequently in the paragraph on Glastonbury), the Holy Grail is buried at the foot of this hill. Also, it is supposed to be the Isle of Avalon, where Arthur sailed to when he was mortally wounded. (Apparently at that time the water was higher, so it actually was an island instead of just a hill.) At this point, the two myths of Joseph of Arimathea and Arthur converge. Joseph is supposed to be Jesus’ uncle, and he brought the Holy Grail there after Jesus’ ascension. And Arthur sought the Holy Grail his whole life (which I don’t think is actually true according to the Medieval stories because it’s usually Gawain or Perceval who is after the Grail...in fact, I think it’s always one of those two). So yeah, it was definitely a fun place to visit once, but I don’t have a big desire to return.
In the evening, I walked around my hostel in Bristol a little bit. I saw some of the pretty areas nearby, including the harbor (my hostel was actually right on the harbor, but I saw more of it), St Mary Redcliffe Church, the cathedral, and the Silver Jubilee statue of Queen Victoria.
The next day, I went to East Coker, which is the second of the four sites Eliot writes about in The Four Quartets. I took a train to Yeovil, the nearest big town and then I had to take a cab to East Coker. Fortunately, it was only ten pounds each way. It was funny because I actually thought to myself, ‘Wow, it’s fun to ride in a car!’ I have been taking trains, subways, and the occasional bus for the past two and a half months, but I’ve been in a car only three times round trip (including that taxi ride). Once again, it was raining too much to walk around the town a whole lot, but I did get to see the church where Eliot is buried. At first, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do that because there was a wedding going on. But after eating a wonderful lunch at the Helyar Arms pub, I returned and asked someone outside in a tux if the church was empty yet. He was like, ‘Oh, they’re still taking pictures, but they won’t mind at all if you go in.’ And I asked if he was sure, and he said he was. So that was interesting to see. One of Eliot’s strongest themes in East Coker is cyclical time, or human/earthly time. And that was strangely evident in the town as well. It had been around since the 1600s or so (when Eliot’s ancestors lived there), and some things are still the same (like the church building) but obviously some things are vastly different. The church also had a prominent clock on it, which I thought was appropriate.
That evening, I went to see the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol because it’s really famous. As my French roommate in the hostel said, ‘If you visit Bristol and you do not visit the Bristol Bridge, it is like you do not visit Bristol.’ Very true!
And now we’ve come full circle. I was travelling all day today, and I’m now in a hostel in remote Wales. I am REALLY hoping for nice weather because that will make hiking and horseback riding and whatever else a lot more fun. But I’m excited to be surrounded by nature again!
**Note: For everyone who is interested, I was able to call my parents on a payphone that gobbled up ten pence every few seconds.
I won’t be able to post this for at least four days because the nearest Wi-Fi is eight miles away in Caernarfon. And if I choose to go into Caernarfon for a day, I won’t be lugging my laptop with me. I am currently in a remote part of Wales in Snowdonia National Park. It’s absolutely beautiful here! There are mountains and a lake and fresh air and wide open spaces...everything that London is not. I even passed the ocean and some beautiful beaches on the train ride here. I had to take three trains and two buses to get to the hostel, which tells you how remote it is. Even more telling is the fact that neither the man at the train information center nor my first bus driver knew where I was supposed to be going. They were able to point me in the right direction, but they both told me to ask the next person in the ‘information chain’ for further directions. (This is absolutely insane because it’s almost impossible to stump these people...and to stump two of them with one question, well, I should win a prize or something.) The only problem with the remoteness of this location is that I told my parents I would call them today because I assumed I’d have access to internet (and hence, Skype) but I definitely won’t be able to make it into Caernarfon tonight. Hopefully there is a pay phone that works for international calls within walking distance, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Since I haven’t written for a while, I may as well take this opportunity to review what I’ve done over the past few days. I think my last blog post left off with my excursion to the Bristol science museum. The following day, I took a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon. It really doesn’t make much sense to go from Bristol to Stratford, but it isn’t that much worse than going from London to Stratford, and those were my only two options for seeing the revered birthplace of the Bard. And by ‘the Bard,’ of course I mean William Shakespeare himself.
I went to a matinee production of The Taming of the Shrew (because I wouldn’t have been able to catch a train back from an evening performance), and it was really well done! (Well, that’s to be expected, as it was the Royal Shakespeare Company.) The entire Taming of the Shrew is a play-within-a-play. The opening scene involves a drunk man who is passed out. Some people decide it would be a funny joke to dress him up as a lord and try to convince him that he had always been a lord, and then see how long it takes him to believe it. They also dressed up another man as a woman who pretended to be ‘the lord’s’ wife. Some players (acting troupe) come to town, and they suggest that they perform a play for ‘the lord.’ This play is the main storyline of The Taming of the Shrew. Though this narrative framework is a very small part of the beginning of the play, it really sets the rest of the storyline in context. Interestingly, it begins with two men who are superficially transformed—one is transformed into a lord and the other into a woman. (Obviously, this is pointing out the societal constructions that go into defining genders and attributing power to one person and not another.) This production kept the story, as I think Shakespeare intended it to be, rather uncomical for a ‘comedy.’ Many adaptations (Kiss Me Kate, Ten Things I Hate about You) transform the story into the typical jovial ‘battle of the sexes’ where, in the end, the two fall in love and live happily ever after. Shakespeare’s version is a lot more uncomfortable because the man is truly cruel. In my Rhetorics of Violence in Medieval Literature class last semester, we talked about torture being a means for destroying the victim’s mindset, beliefs, and personhood and replacing these with the torturer’s. One of my brilliant classmates brought up The Taming of the Shrew as an example of how physical pain and deprivation can be used to transform a person. Through Petruchio’s ‘taming’ methods of depriving Katherine of food, sleep, and decent clothing, she changes from a fiery shrew to the most ‘obedient’ of all the women in the play. The reactions of Shakespeare’s audiences would probably have been more varied than those of modern audiences. Of course, the acting may have been more ambiguous as well. Like the Guthrie’s recent production of The Merchant of Venice (in which the audience is clearly supposed to understand and pity Shylock’s misery), this production of The Taming of the Shrew definitely emphasized the more feministic elements of the play and modern audiences are able to resonate with that in a way that Shakespeare’s audiences probably wouldn’t have.
After the play, I saw Shakespeare’s birthplace (which may or may not have actually been the place where he was born, though the people who work at the house will swear up and down that there’s enough evidence to say he really was born there). Then I was going to walk around the town a bit more and see the outside of the other houses associated with Shakespeare (because it was after 5:00 p.m. and of course everything shuts down at that point in the UK), but it began to rain and I decided to just catch a train back to my hostel. I kind of wish that I would have stayed around longer, but it was really miserable in the rain (and it would have been even more miserable to ride the train home in sopping wet clothes), so I guess it made sense.
The following day I went to Glastonbury, one of the fruitiest places you will ever see. It’s a haven for hippies and New Agers and people who believe in witchcraft. I knew that before going, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. Every single shop on the High Street made me vaguely uncomfortable! But I did the things I had come there to do. I toured the ancient abbey ruins, parts of which date from the 600s! Supposedly (according to Glastonbury’s myth-obsessed culture), Joseph of Arimathea founded a church there in 60 A.D. or something like that. But still, it is impressively old without adding on that bit of uncorroborated evidence. Also, the supposed site of Arthur and Guinevere’s tomb is in that cathedral. (Again, completely unsubstantiated, as is most everything related to Arthur. But it was fun to see anyways.)
I also climbed the Glastonbury Tor, which is this exceedingly tall natural hilltop with a fourteenth-century tower on the top of it. Supposedly (gee, this word is coming up rather frequently in the paragraph on Glastonbury), the Holy Grail is buried at the foot of this hill. Also, it is supposed to be the Isle of Avalon, where Arthur sailed to when he was mortally wounded. (Apparently at that time the water was higher, so it actually was an island instead of just a hill.) At this point, the two myths of Joseph of Arimathea and Arthur converge. Joseph is supposed to be Jesus’ uncle, and he brought the Holy Grail there after Jesus’ ascension. And Arthur sought the Holy Grail his whole life (which I don’t think is actually true according to the Medieval stories because it’s usually Gawain or Perceval who is after the Grail...in fact, I think it’s always one of those two). So yeah, it was definitely a fun place to visit once, but I don’t have a big desire to return.
In the evening, I walked around my hostel in Bristol a little bit. I saw some of the pretty areas nearby, including the harbor (my hostel was actually right on the harbor, but I saw more of it), St Mary Redcliffe Church, the cathedral, and the Silver Jubilee statue of Queen Victoria.
The next day, I went to East Coker, which is the second of the four sites Eliot writes about in The Four Quartets. I took a train to Yeovil, the nearest big town and then I had to take a cab to East Coker. Fortunately, it was only ten pounds each way. It was funny because I actually thought to myself, ‘Wow, it’s fun to ride in a car!’ I have been taking trains, subways, and the occasional bus for the past two and a half months, but I’ve been in a car only three times round trip (including that taxi ride). Once again, it was raining too much to walk around the town a whole lot, but I did get to see the church where Eliot is buried. At first, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do that because there was a wedding going on. But after eating a wonderful lunch at the Helyar Arms pub, I returned and asked someone outside in a tux if the church was empty yet. He was like, ‘Oh, they’re still taking pictures, but they won’t mind at all if you go in.’ And I asked if he was sure, and he said he was. So that was interesting to see. One of Eliot’s strongest themes in East Coker is cyclical time, or human/earthly time. And that was strangely evident in the town as well. It had been around since the 1600s or so (when Eliot’s ancestors lived there), and some things are still the same (like the church building) but obviously some things are vastly different. The church also had a prominent clock on it, which I thought was appropriate.
That evening, I went to see the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol because it’s really famous. As my French roommate in the hostel said, ‘If you visit Bristol and you do not visit the Bristol Bridge, it is like you do not visit Bristol.’ Very true!
And now we’ve come full circle. I was travelling all day today, and I’m now in a hostel in remote Wales. I am REALLY hoping for nice weather because that will make hiking and horseback riding and whatever else a lot more fun. But I’m excited to be surrounded by nature again!
**Note: For everyone who is interested, I was able to call my parents on a payphone that gobbled up ten pence every few seconds.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Brighton Photos
I have finally uploaded a few pictures from the backpacking portion of my trip. See Brighton photos here.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
I Put the “Backpack” Back in “Backpacking”
Written Tuesday, 12 August
After getting a good night’s sleep in my Brighton hotel, I started to ponder how I could make this trip a lot more fun. Considering that the first day of my trip had been rather nightmarish, I tried to figure out all the factors that I was able to control (since I knew I didn’t have much control over what my hostels would be like). My other biggest frustration was the amount of luggage I had to carry with me. I kept berating myself for not designing a “circle” trip that would both start and finish in London because then I could have stored my excess baggage there. Seeing as I couldn’t change that now, I tried to figure out how if it would be possible to rid myself of some of my luggage without paying a huge fee to ship more stuff home.
That morning in Brighton, I decided to try to fit all my necessary items into my normal-sized backpack. This backpack can fit a lot of things, but it’s not the type of backpack that people normally take on hiking, camping, or backpacking trips. It was a stretch, but I managed to do it. Then if I could just find a sensible place to store my rolling suitcase, I would be all right.
At first, I thought I might take a whole day out of Oxford and go up to Edinburgh, pay to store my stuff until I return there (near the end of my trip), and then go back to Oxford. As I looked at train times, it quickly became evident that this might not even be possible. Instead, I decided to call my second cousin Anna (with whom I will be staying later on in my trip), and she graciously agreed to let me store my suitcase with her. She lives in Manchester, and the train there was only about three hours each way instead of six. It was really fun to get to see her, and we had a nice chat for several hours.
So now, I do not have to deal with a huge, heavy suitcase for the majority of my time in hostels. I’m leaving Oxford tomorrow to stay in a Bristol hostel, and then I’ll be staying in a hostel in Wales. After that, I stay with Anna in Manchester, and then I’ll be staying with a couple who live in Durham (my former boss from CBE knows them). Then I’ll be heading to Edinburgh, where I’m staying in a hotel! After that, I’ll be in a Dublin hostel for a night, a Sligo hostel for two nights, then back to the Dublin hostel. I’ll see if I can store my extra suitcase in the Dublin hostel for the nights I go to Sligo. And then I’ll be flying to Washington, D.C., for a weekend to visit my friend Ann who is interning there in the autumn. And after that, I’ll go back to Minnesota.
I spent all of today wandering around Oxford, which was SO fun! I bought a booklet with a self-guided Tolkien/Lewis walking tour. While on the train yesterday, I inserted some other Oxford attractions in their ‘proper’ locations. So I saw the colleges where Tolkien and Lewis were undergraduates and where they were professors, I saw various churches/chapels that were important to them, and I saw several pubs (including the famous Eagle and Child, where I ate lunch) where they and their friends in ‘the Inklings’ writing/discussion group used to meet. Ann is always asking me if I can sense the presence of the authors when I visit their homes or whatever, and I just have to say that I really could at the Eagle and Child. The pub is a little touristy, with pictures of the Inklings on the walls of the ‘Rabbit Room,’ but it’s not too bad. In general, it’s still a pub that’s probably set up fairly similarly to how it was when the Inklings used to visit it. I sat at a two-person table in the Rabbit Room and kept imagining them reading and arguing over literature and their writing at one of the two 6-person tables in the small room. I also imagined them laughing at me for drinking a pint of strawberry cider instead of beer. :-) Later today, I walked along Addison’s Walk, where Lewis and Tolkien had their famous ‘Christianity as a true myth’ discussion that partially caused Lewis’s conversion.
In addition to these Tolkien/Lewis sights, I took a group guided tour of the Bodleian library, which was interesting although there are a lot of parts that only ‘readers’ (i.e. library-card holders) can go. And we didn’t get to see the underground book tunnels, which would have been amazing! But we saw Duke Humfrey’s Library, which has a ton of old books and has been a filming location in two Harry Potter movies. We also saw the Divinity School, which was where two Protestant martyrs (Latimer and someone else) had a pre-trial. (This was also used in the Harry Potter movies, as the hospital.) We saw a couple legal rooms as well, including one where Oscar Wilde came to plead his case when he was in debt. I tried to go to the Pitt Rivers Museum, but I was really disappointed because it is closed for renovation until the spring. It’s supposed to be a really crazy/weird museum, unlike anything else I’ve seen. And an alternate version of this museum was in The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. So it would have been cool to see. I also saw Christ Church College, which is Oxford’s largest college and has (surprise, surprise) also been featured in Harry Potter movies. I feel like I saw a TON of the city and the university by doing this walking tour. Even though I went to these places because of their connection with various writers/films, I appreciated them for their history and architecture (not that I know a lot about architecture) as well. And of course, I also saw famous buildings like the Radcliffe Camera, the Sheldonian, and the Bridge of Sighs.
I’m planning to finish up the walking tour tomorrow (I just have a little bit left), try to visit the New College (built in the 1300s, haha) cloisters again (they were also a Harry Potter film location), possibly eat lunch in the Turf (another Inklings pub and one that was recommended to me by my fellow intern at Anthem Press who studied at Oxford for a year), and then take a train to Bristol in the early afternoon.
**A note from my present self: I am now in Bristol, and the hostel is also quite nice. I spent the morning in Oxford and the afternoon here. I went to their science museum, and it was really good! There is a planetarium there, which I sadly did not get to go to because it was all sold out for the day. I also didn't know too much about the city of Bristol, but it's very nice. I wish I had more time to explore it, but I'm taking day trips for the rest of my time here. Which I am ridiculously excited about. I'm going to Stratford-upon-Avon tomorrow, Glastonbury on Friday, and East Coker (a T.S. Eliot site) on Saturday. On Sunday morning, I leave for Wales!
After getting a good night’s sleep in my Brighton hotel, I started to ponder how I could make this trip a lot more fun. Considering that the first day of my trip had been rather nightmarish, I tried to figure out all the factors that I was able to control (since I knew I didn’t have much control over what my hostels would be like). My other biggest frustration was the amount of luggage I had to carry with me. I kept berating myself for not designing a “circle” trip that would both start and finish in London because then I could have stored my excess baggage there. Seeing as I couldn’t change that now, I tried to figure out how if it would be possible to rid myself of some of my luggage without paying a huge fee to ship more stuff home.
That morning in Brighton, I decided to try to fit all my necessary items into my normal-sized backpack. This backpack can fit a lot of things, but it’s not the type of backpack that people normally take on hiking, camping, or backpacking trips. It was a stretch, but I managed to do it. Then if I could just find a sensible place to store my rolling suitcase, I would be all right.
At first, I thought I might take a whole day out of Oxford and go up to Edinburgh, pay to store my stuff until I return there (near the end of my trip), and then go back to Oxford. As I looked at train times, it quickly became evident that this might not even be possible. Instead, I decided to call my second cousin Anna (with whom I will be staying later on in my trip), and she graciously agreed to let me store my suitcase with her. She lives in Manchester, and the train there was only about three hours each way instead of six. It was really fun to get to see her, and we had a nice chat for several hours.
So now, I do not have to deal with a huge, heavy suitcase for the majority of my time in hostels. I’m leaving Oxford tomorrow to stay in a Bristol hostel, and then I’ll be staying in a hostel in Wales. After that, I stay with Anna in Manchester, and then I’ll be staying with a couple who live in Durham (my former boss from CBE knows them). Then I’ll be heading to Edinburgh, where I’m staying in a hotel! After that, I’ll be in a Dublin hostel for a night, a Sligo hostel for two nights, then back to the Dublin hostel. I’ll see if I can store my extra suitcase in the Dublin hostel for the nights I go to Sligo. And then I’ll be flying to Washington, D.C., for a weekend to visit my friend Ann who is interning there in the autumn. And after that, I’ll go back to Minnesota.
I spent all of today wandering around Oxford, which was SO fun! I bought a booklet with a self-guided Tolkien/Lewis walking tour. While on the train yesterday, I inserted some other Oxford attractions in their ‘proper’ locations. So I saw the colleges where Tolkien and Lewis were undergraduates and where they were professors, I saw various churches/chapels that were important to them, and I saw several pubs (including the famous Eagle and Child, where I ate lunch) where they and their friends in ‘the Inklings’ writing/discussion group used to meet. Ann is always asking me if I can sense the presence of the authors when I visit their homes or whatever, and I just have to say that I really could at the Eagle and Child. The pub is a little touristy, with pictures of the Inklings on the walls of the ‘Rabbit Room,’ but it’s not too bad. In general, it’s still a pub that’s probably set up fairly similarly to how it was when the Inklings used to visit it. I sat at a two-person table in the Rabbit Room and kept imagining them reading and arguing over literature and their writing at one of the two 6-person tables in the small room. I also imagined them laughing at me for drinking a pint of strawberry cider instead of beer. :-) Later today, I walked along Addison’s Walk, where Lewis and Tolkien had their famous ‘Christianity as a true myth’ discussion that partially caused Lewis’s conversion.
In addition to these Tolkien/Lewis sights, I took a group guided tour of the Bodleian library, which was interesting although there are a lot of parts that only ‘readers’ (i.e. library-card holders) can go. And we didn’t get to see the underground book tunnels, which would have been amazing! But we saw Duke Humfrey’s Library, which has a ton of old books and has been a filming location in two Harry Potter movies. We also saw the Divinity School, which was where two Protestant martyrs (Latimer and someone else) had a pre-trial. (This was also used in the Harry Potter movies, as the hospital.) We saw a couple legal rooms as well, including one where Oscar Wilde came to plead his case when he was in debt. I tried to go to the Pitt Rivers Museum, but I was really disappointed because it is closed for renovation until the spring. It’s supposed to be a really crazy/weird museum, unlike anything else I’ve seen. And an alternate version of this museum was in The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. So it would have been cool to see. I also saw Christ Church College, which is Oxford’s largest college and has (surprise, surprise) also been featured in Harry Potter movies. I feel like I saw a TON of the city and the university by doing this walking tour. Even though I went to these places because of their connection with various writers/films, I appreciated them for their history and architecture (not that I know a lot about architecture) as well. And of course, I also saw famous buildings like the Radcliffe Camera, the Sheldonian, and the Bridge of Sighs.
I’m planning to finish up the walking tour tomorrow (I just have a little bit left), try to visit the New College (built in the 1300s, haha) cloisters again (they were also a Harry Potter film location), possibly eat lunch in the Turf (another Inklings pub and one that was recommended to me by my fellow intern at Anthem Press who studied at Oxford for a year), and then take a train to Bristol in the early afternoon.
**A note from my present self: I am now in Bristol, and the hostel is also quite nice. I spent the morning in Oxford and the afternoon here. I went to their science museum, and it was really good! There is a planetarium there, which I sadly did not get to go to because it was all sold out for the day. I also didn't know too much about the city of Bristol, but it's very nice. I wish I had more time to explore it, but I'm taking day trips for the rest of my time here. Which I am ridiculously excited about. I'm going to Stratford-upon-Avon tomorrow, Glastonbury on Friday, and East Coker (a T.S. Eliot site) on Saturday. On Sunday morning, I leave for Wales!
Sunday, August 10, 2008
The Dreaming Spires of Oxford
Written earlier today in my journal:
I am in Oxford—the Mecca of fantasy literature and definitely one of the literary Meccas of all genres. Tolkien. Lewis. Pullman. Carroll. Shelley. Auden. Hardy. Eliot. Golding. Huxley. Dr Seuss. Wilde. Greene.
I’m sitting next to the river with my back comfort-
ably leaning against an ages-old tree, and I can feel my mind wandering imaginatively. The paths, the ancient buildings, the trees’ dryad/Entish souls whispering in the breeze...This is the perfect setting to foster so many inspiring stories. As I was walking through here, I was overwhelmed by the number of greats who walked here before me and how many brilliant, creative thoughts they must have had while walking those same paths.
As anyone can see, I am enjoying Oxford much more than Brighton. Both the place and the hostel suit me infinitely better. The hostel is cleaner, less rowdy, more accommodating, and oh yeah, my roommates are all females. The hostel is also family-friendly and is filled with people of many ages, not juts college students looking to get drunk. (As I sit here writing, I’m hoping some of the tourists on ‘rowboat’ tours think I’m a student here. Just because I would love to be one!)
I’m going to keep wandering now.
P.S. The tree I’m leaning against fits my back perfectly...it’s destiny! :-)
I am in Oxford—the Mecca of fantasy literature and definitely one of the literary Meccas of all genres. Tolkien. Lewis. Pullman. Carroll. Shelley. Auden. Hardy. Eliot. Golding. Huxley. Dr Seuss. Wilde. Greene.
I’m sitting next to the river with my back comfort-ably leaning against an ages-old tree, and I can feel my mind wandering imaginatively. The paths, the ancient buildings, the trees’ dryad/Entish souls whispering in the breeze...This is the perfect setting to foster so many inspiring stories. As I was walking through here, I was overwhelmed by the number of greats who walked here before me and how many brilliant, creative thoughts they must have had while walking those same paths.
As anyone can see, I am enjoying Oxford much more than Brighton. Both the place and the hostel suit me infinitely better. The hostel is cleaner, less rowdy, more accommodating, and oh yeah, my roommates are all females. The hostel is also family-friendly and is filled with people of many ages, not juts college students looking to get drunk. (As I sit here writing, I’m hoping some of the tourists on ‘rowboat’ tours think I’m a student here. Just because I would love to be one!)
I’m going to keep wandering now.
P.S. The tree I’m leaning against fits my back perfectly...it’s destiny! :-)
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Brighton Not a Bright Spot
Written Earlier Today:
I’m typing this entry while sitting in my first hostel ever, but I won’t post it until tomorrow, when the experience is over just so I don’t give anyone heart attacks. I’m in Brighton for just one day and one night because I wanted to see it. I knew I wouldn’t feel exactly at home here because it’s known for being a party city. But it’s worse than I expected. I saw the things I wanted to see in all of two hours, and I am so ready to leave. It’s raining so I can’t enjoy sitting out on the pebble beach. And the worse of it all is my hostel room. I thought I had managed to book myself into all-female rooms for every hostel, but apparently I wasn’t able to do so for this room.
I am in an co-ed room with eight beds: seven smelly guys who all know each other and myself. Oh and I thought there were lockers in hostels where you can lock up your stuff. Well, these lockers are about three feet by one foot...not nearly enough space to lock up much of anything. So I don’t really want to just leave my stuff here, but I obviously can’t carry it with me (because it’s SO heavy; I have WAY too much stuff because of living and working in London and then carrying most of my stuff with me) and I don’t want to just sit around in this room forever. Although on a rainy day in Brighton, I don’t really care. 
I saw the Brighton Pier, which was amusing. You can play arcade games and I think you can do a little gambling too and you can go on rides like a merry-go-round. There’s a wide variety of unhealthy food, like the kind you’d find at the state fair. And of course there are quite a few bars and clubs which I’m sure will be ‘hopping’ tonight. I also saw the Royal Pavilion (Eastern-inspired ‘party’ palace made by King George IV) from the outside. I didn’t tour it because I’ve toured so many palaces and castles lately, and I just wasn’t in the mood to pay 6.50 pounds for something that would probably be fine but not amazing. I went to the Brighton Museum, which was free. That was enjoyable. They had an exhibit of interior design throughout the ages and another one of fashion. It was a bit different from the ‘typical’ museum, and it was pretty interesting. Earlier in the day, it was nice enough to sit out on the beach, so I did that while I was eating my lunch of Chinese chicken noodles.
Okay, well it looks my seven guy roommates are finally getting out of bed. It’s almost 3:30 in the afternoon. At least they’ll be gone for a while and I can be left in peace. Maybe I should try to take a nap now and then go out later (because I do intend to get a drink tonight because that’s what Brighton is known for), and then if I get very little sleep tonight (due to loud and obnoxious roommates), it won’t be such a big deal. Although I should count my eggs before they’re hatched; the guys aren’t out the door yet.
I just really hope that the next hostel experience is better. I’m pretty sure I should be with all women next, which isn’t any guarantee of anything, of course. But at least it won’t be so weird! Plus being in Oxford instead of Brighton will hopefully mean a better crowd. I wish I would have paid twice as much money to be able to stay in cheap hotels instead. And I really wish someone was with me because this might even be a little bit fun—even if it’s ridiculous—if I had someone else with me. And I also wish I wouldn’t have booked everything ahead of time. In some ways, that was a good idea so thing so that I wouldn’t be freaking out about if I could find a place to stay. But then if I wouldn’t be stuck in stupid situations like this one. I mean, this is only for a night, but what about some of the other hostels? What if I don’t like my Bristol hostel and I’m stuck there for four nights? Oh well, I guess I’ll deal with that when I have to. For now, I just have to survive this. (The guys are now attempting to make themselves smell better by spraying massive amounts of cologne everywhere.)
Well, I guess this trip will be an interesting experience, if nothing else.
Now:
I'm now writing from a hotel room now. I was talking with my parents on the phone and I was saying how I thought I could handle this hostel situation for just one night, etc. At that point, I figured the guys would go out to drink around 9:00 and be out until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. While I was on the phone (around 9:00), I went back to the room to see if it was empty and I could maybe read or something and get a few moments' peace. I didn't even go in because I heard loud music playing. Suddenly it dawned on me that they might not go OUT to drink, but they might drink until the wee hours of the morning in the room. So in addition to the complete awkwardness of rooming with seven guys, I might literally get no sleep. So I decided to try to find a hotel room. I'm now staying in the Queen's Hotel in a family suite because that was all they had available. It's worth it though to not be in a place where I felt completely awful.
I double-checked my bookings at other hostels, and they all specifically say that I will be in all-female dorms, so that should be a lot better. Plus they are all a part of the Youth Hostel Association, so they might be held to a little different standards--although there was really nothing wrong with the hostel itself in Brighton; it was just the people I was with. Although when I came back to get my stuff, they were in the early stages of drunkenness (the friendly stages), so they were suddenly a lot more charming than they had been earlier that afternoon (when they hadn't talked to me at all...not that I made an effort either; I was too shocked). I told them that I had a 'family emergency' and had to leave earlier than expected...not entirely true. But they were really nice, and one guy even offered to carry my bag for me and everything. They may have guessed the true reason why I was leaving. But I had an extra doughnut that I had bought earlier and didn't want to eat in the slightest, so I asked if any of them wanted it. One guy was like, 'Sure, I'm the fatty of the group [he wasn't]; I'll eat anything!'So anyways, I am now going to enjoy my night in peace and quiet. I probably won't get another one of those for a couple of weeks.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
The End of the Internship Phase (and Pics)
Album: Closing Ceremonies
You can feel free to view those Facebook pictures of some of my last activities on the London/internship portion of my Albion Adventures. Starting on Saturday, I will be off on my solo UK journey. I go to Brighton for a day and then to Oxford.
Today (Thursday) was the last day of my internship, and it was a pretty good day. Everyone was really nice. The 'big kahuna' (as no one calls him) took me out for 'coffee' (but we both got juice) this afternoon and we had a nice chat. He told me I should draft a letter of recommendation for him to edit. Apparently this is a somewhat normal practice in the work world today...even more evidence of how bogus the job search process can be at times. But in any case, I will be happy to have the reference from him, even if I helped write it. :-) My immediate boss also said a nice goodbye to me. Both of them were very complimentary about the work I had done and wished me well on my future. I also said goodbye to Ellen, my fellow 'American girl.'
Then I went out with Jessica, her sister Brittney, and Rahbi to celebrate the end of our internships. (Well, Brittney is just visiting Jess, so she didn't have an internship. And the other two were done before today. But still, we were celebrating that we were ALL done with our internships.) We went out to eat at Benito's Hat, which is a restaurant very similar to Chipotle. It was started by a guy who was impressed with the burrito restaurants in the States and wanted to open something comparable in London (because there really isn't anything else like that over here). We were looking at the menu for this restaurant on the Tube about a week ago, when a young, cute guy--of course, with a British accent--comes up to us and is all excited. "Did you have a menu for Benito's Hat? I'm really excited because it's my restaurant, and it's the first time I've seen a menu out and about." So we met the founder of what is basically going to be a phenomenal success throughout the UK (that's my prediction anyhow). Plus we made his day. Jess and Brittney have been to the restaurant three times now, and the owner has talked to them each time. He talked to all of us tonight, which was fun. After Benito's Hat, we went to The George. It's a really fun pub where Dickens used to eat (and apparently Shakespeare ate at an earlier version of the pub before it burned down). We also brought AMAZING cake from Konditor and Cook to eat there. I had a half shanty (beer/Sprite) for the second time. I'd say it's my favorite drink so far. Well, the white wine I had in Paris was really good too. Anyways, after that, we came back and watched a movie called Smart People in Jess's room. It was a pretty fun movie, though we were all falling asleep.
Tomorrow (or should I say today, since it is after midnight) I have to pack, ship some stuff home (at a high cost, I'm sure), call the hostels to confirm my booking, figure out how to validate my Eurail pass, possibly try to get my money back for the pants I got hemmed which came out after wearing them three times, and anything else I may have forgotten.
So I really probably should go to sleep now...
You can feel free to view those Facebook pictures of some of my last activities on the London/internship portion of my Albion Adventures. Starting on Saturday, I will be off on my solo UK journey. I go to Brighton for a day and then to Oxford.
Today (Thursday) was the last day of my internship, and it was a pretty good day. Everyone was really nice. The 'big kahuna' (as no one calls him) took me out for 'coffee' (but we both got juice) this afternoon and we had a nice chat. He told me I should draft a letter of recommendation for him to edit. Apparently this is a somewhat normal practice in the work world today...even more evidence of how bogus the job search process can be at times. But in any case, I will be happy to have the reference from him, even if I helped write it. :-) My immediate boss also said a nice goodbye to me. Both of them were very complimentary about the work I had done and wished me well on my future. I also said goodbye to Ellen, my fellow 'American girl.'
Then I went out with Jessica, her sister Brittney, and Rahbi to celebrate the end of our internships. (Well, Brittney is just visiting Jess, so she didn't have an internship. And the other two were done before today. But still, we were celebrating that we were ALL done with our internships.) We went out to eat at Benito's Hat, which is a restaurant very similar to Chipotle. It was started by a guy who was impressed with the burrito restaurants in the States and wanted to open something comparable in London (because there really isn't anything else like that over here). We were looking at the menu for this restaurant on the Tube about a week ago, when a young, cute guy--of course, with a British accent--comes up to us and is all excited. "Did you have a menu for Benito's Hat? I'm really excited because it's my restaurant, and it's the first time I've seen a menu out and about." So we met the founder of what is basically going to be a phenomenal success throughout the UK (that's my prediction anyhow). Plus we made his day. Jess and Brittney have been to the restaurant three times now, and the owner has talked to them each time. He talked to all of us tonight, which was fun. After Benito's Hat, we went to The George. It's a really fun pub where Dickens used to eat (and apparently Shakespeare ate at an earlier version of the pub before it burned down). We also brought AMAZING cake from Konditor and Cook to eat there. I had a half shanty (beer/Sprite) for the second time. I'd say it's my favorite drink so far. Well, the white wine I had in Paris was really good too. Anyways, after that, we came back and watched a movie called Smart People in Jess's room. It was a pretty fun movie, though we were all falling asleep.
Tomorrow (or should I say today, since it is after midnight) I have to pack, ship some stuff home (at a high cost, I'm sure), call the hostels to confirm my booking, figure out how to validate my Eurail pass, possibly try to get my money back for the pants I got hemmed which came out after wearing them three times, and anything else I may have forgotten.
So I really probably should go to sleep now...
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Updates
I'll start with the most important update: I decided to accept the publishing internship at Coffee House Press in Minnesota instead of the au pair position in England. The internship is fairly prestigious (three out of over a hundred applicants), and it's supposed to be a really good introduction to the publishing field, which I think would be good to have before going off to publishing grad school. Just to make sure I know as much as possible before diving in. Not that I have too many real fears that I won't like publishing, but I guess you never know. Plus having two very different book publishing internships under my belt will help open more career doors. So I definitely think it was the right decision. Plus this particular autumn would be a good time to be in Minnesota from a social perspective because a lot of my college friends are still in town or will be coming back to MN to visit.
But at the same time, I'm still very disappointed to be giving up the au pair position. I really wanted to that particular position in addition to really wanting to stay in England. The children and the whole family seemed so nice and smart, and I would get to be a small part of a British boys' boarding school (because the parents both work at the school and live right next to it). (As a sidenote, this school--Harrow School--was used as one of the filming locations for the first Harry Potter movie!) I would have really liked a "gap year," as the British call it. It's a year where you purposely live in a totally different environment doing something completely different from what you had been doing before. This year generally occurs between college and career/further schooling, and it's become a big part of British culture. I wish it was a part of American culture, but alas, I'm stuck in the workaholic USA. No, but as I said, I think taking the publishing internship was a good idea, but I still feel like I'm missing out a little bit. I would feel that way no matter what I chose though.
Anyways, this decision has been weighing on my mind so much that I've fallen behind in blogging and uploading pictures. So I'll try to rectify that a little bit now. Last weekend...on Saturday, I went to Hampton Court Palace. It's a really interesting palace because it's half-Tudor (Henry VIII's time) and half-baroque (William and Mary's time). William and Mary tried to renovate it completely but ran out of money. There are also some interesting artifacts and rooms from Georgian times. One of my favorite parts about this visit was seeing the current exhibit of costumes from The Other Boleyn Girl movie. I am, for some reason, really obsessed with movie costumes, particularly costumes from historical/fantasy movies. And I'd just like to mention that, after seeing Natalie Portman's costumes, she is even flatter than she looks on screen! (Sorry if that's too much information for some of you.)
On Sunday, I went to the Transport Museum, which was fun. Even though the Tube is hot and completely un-glamorous, I really like it. Probably because it's such a nifty system and we have nothing like in MN. The museum also talked about river transportation, horse transportation and some stuff about cars (which I went fairly quickly through). One interesting thing I found out was that, in World War II, people hunkered down in the Tube stations for shelter. Eventually, so many people were taking shelter there that they had to purchase tickets for that. The museum had tons of Tube-related advertisements (like "Cut your journey across the city in half with the Victoria line"), and the advertisements about taking shelter in the Tube said stuff like, "Be a man. Leave the places for women and children." Kellie and I were talking about how we in America were a part of World War II, but in some ways, we have no idea what it meant to be a part of it. Almost every building (and even every garden I research) in England was damaged or affected by the Blitz. It's really difficult to go anywhere historical in this city without hearing about how WWII affected it.
After the Transport Museum, I went to Hyde Park Speakers' Corner. I was somewhat less than impressed with the particular speakers that day. There just wasn't much originality. There was one person preaching Christianity and another preaching Islam. There was a third saying that those two people were religious nutcases and that he hates religion because there all angels are white, not black. Another person was going on and on about how everyone who wasn't English was not favored by God. She was the most interesting because everyone listening to her was getting really annoyed or at least greatly amused. She told one person in the audience who was clearly a British citizen that she couldn't be English because she had black hair. It would have been disturbing except that it was clear she wouldn't be able to amass an "ethnic cleansing" type of army. After the Speakers' Corner, I went to the British Library (see a previous post to read my effusions on that subject).
Then I participated in a group activity of playing football (aka soccer) in Regent's Park. I didn't want to go, but I had signed up a few days ago on a whim so I felt I had to go. It really wasn't fun. It reminded me of being in middle school and sucking at sports. There was one girl on my team who was very know-it-all-ish about sports, which was annoying. Granted, she did know what she was talking about, but the game was supposed to be just for fun. In the evening, I went to the huge Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square and saw the new Batman movie. It was really good! There was quite a bit of action, of course, which made it a bit difficult to decipher how they were developing the themes that they had begun in the first movie. Fortunately, though, they WERE developing the themes, even if it was a bit subtle to fully grasp after just seeing it once. I think I'll have to wait until I see it again to write more about it. But I just have to say--even though everyone who sees this movie says it--Heath Ledger was AMAZING as the Joker! I really don't think they'll be able to get anyone half as good to replace him in the next film.
On Monday night, Kellie and I went to the Globe and saw Timon of Athens. I didn't know much of anything about it before I went, which was kind of fun. I enjoyed being an "uneducated peasant" standing around and not knowing what was going to happen next. It was quite a disturbing play, actually. The basic plotline is that Timon had a lot of money and gave it all away to his friends without thought for keeping in mind his own expenses. So then he goes broke and none of his friends are willing to help him out. He ends up going out into the wilderness and going mad. He finds gold, but doesn't restore himself to his former position. His friends who had abandoned him hear that he has gold in the wilderness, so they come out to see him. Then he ends up dying in the pile of gold. It's very weird. But there was an interesting people-as-dogs/beasts throughout the whole play, which this interpretation of the play picked up really well. When Timon dies in the gold, his friends all bark and surround him like dogs and they start digging past him to get the gold, and there's all this blood and refuse flying. It's profoundly disturbing. Timon himself was an interesting character, a perfect blend of purity and baseness. In some ways, he seemed like a Christ figure. He was dressed in a white robe for the first half and in a Crucifixion-esque loincloth for the second half. He gives away everything his has without regard for himself. But then at the same time, it's pretty clear that his motives for giving away everything was to receive flattery, attention, and a large following of so-called friends. When his friends aren't as friendly as he expected them to be, his switch flips and he acts very animalistic and goes on and on about how much he hates all people. Eventually I'd like to read more about this play because I feel like there is quite a bit I'm missing.
On Wednesday, I went to yet another play. I saw Twelfth Night in an open-air theatre in Regent's Park. It was good and I enjoyed it, but I was thinking so much about my big au pair vs. internship choice that I don't have much else to say about it. On Thursday, our whole large group went on a Thames River cruise, which was fun. I dressed up in a nice black dress. There was dinner and dancing and drinking. But again, I was so wrapped up in trying to make a decision that I probably had less fun than I would have had otherwise. (I was probably less fun to be around too, haha.)
Yesterday (Friday), I saw Wicked the musical. It was so absolutely incredibly amazing! I absolutely love theatre in general and I've seen quite a bit here, but this show was by far my favorite up until now. I'm listening to the soundtrack right now. The person who played Glinda was extremely good, but the person who played Elphaba was just outstanding...I can't even begin to say how incredible she was! She belted out these extremely powerful lines of music, and I just got chills. I mean, it is really difficult music and she just nailed it. She has the perfect combination of flawless classical training and natural powerhouse voice. The storyline was also really good. One of its purposes is to question how we tell stories and to point out that there can be more than one way of understanding things. It tells the "background" story of the Wizard of Oz, and it turns the Wicked Witch of the West into a character anyone can identify with. She's not perfect, but a lot of her flaws come from being rejected based on her looks (imagine growing up with bright green skin!). She's also a great "strong female" character because she's a brilliant student and a political activist. I enjoyed the friendship between Glinda and Elphaba as well because in a lot of fantasy/fairy tale stories, the strong same-sex friendships are between men. I thought the musical did a good job of portraying the possibilities of female friendships. Another theme is how much importance is placed on superficial things, like labels ("wonderful" or "wicked"), popularity, and appearance.
Today (Saturday), I went to Winchester and Chawton (Jane Austen country). I saw the house where Austen lived when she revised Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and where she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. They had a ton of the family's artifacts, which was really fun to see. They had some letters written by Jane and a bracelet of hers, etc. I really enjoyed seeing Chawton village and imagining how it would have looked with even fewer people and buildings, and imagining Jane and her sister Cassandra strolling around like Jane and Elizabeth or Elinor and Marianne. In Winchester, I saw the cathedral where she's buried and the outside of the house where she died. There was also ruins of a castle in Winchester that I enjoyed tromping around.
So yeah...that's what I've been up to lately. Tomorrow's I'm going to Hever Castle with Jessica and her sister, Brittney. Hopefully I'll get all the pics from the past week up on Facebook soon!
But at the same time, I'm still very disappointed to be giving up the au pair position. I really wanted to that particular position in addition to really wanting to stay in England. The children and the whole family seemed so nice and smart, and I would get to be a small part of a British boys' boarding school (because the parents both work at the school and live right next to it). (As a sidenote, this school--Harrow School--was used as one of the filming locations for the first Harry Potter movie!) I would have really liked a "gap year," as the British call it. It's a year where you purposely live in a totally different environment doing something completely different from what you had been doing before. This year generally occurs between college and career/further schooling, and it's become a big part of British culture. I wish it was a part of American culture, but alas, I'm stuck in the workaholic USA. No, but as I said, I think taking the publishing internship was a good idea, but I still feel like I'm missing out a little bit. I would feel that way no matter what I chose though.
Anyways, this decision has been weighing on my mind so much that I've fallen behind in blogging and uploading pictures. So I'll try to rectify that a little bit now. Last weekend...on Saturday, I went to Hampton Court Palace. It's a really interesting palace because it's half-Tudor (Henry VIII's time) and half-baroque (William and Mary's time). William and Mary tried to renovate it completely but ran out of money. There are also some interesting artifacts and rooms from Georgian times. One of my favorite parts about this visit was seeing the current exhibit of costumes from The Other Boleyn Girl movie. I am, for some reason, really obsessed with movie costumes, particularly costumes from historical/fantasy movies. And I'd just like to mention that, after seeing Natalie Portman's costumes, she is even flatter than she looks on screen! (Sorry if that's too much information for some of you.)
On Sunday, I went to the Transport Museum, which was fun. Even though the Tube is hot and completely un-glamorous, I really like it. Probably because it's such a nifty system and we have nothing like in MN. The museum also talked about river transportation, horse transportation and some stuff about cars (which I went fairly quickly through). One interesting thing I found out was that, in World War II, people hunkered down in the Tube stations for shelter. Eventually, so many people were taking shelter there that they had to purchase tickets for that. The museum had tons of Tube-related advertisements (like "Cut your journey across the city in half with the Victoria line"), and the advertisements about taking shelter in the Tube said stuff like, "Be a man. Leave the places for women and children." Kellie and I were talking about how we in America were a part of World War II, but in some ways, we have no idea what it meant to be a part of it. Almost every building (and even every garden I research) in England was damaged or affected by the Blitz. It's really difficult to go anywhere historical in this city without hearing about how WWII affected it.
After the Transport Museum, I went to Hyde Park Speakers' Corner. I was somewhat less than impressed with the particular speakers that day. There just wasn't much originality. There was one person preaching Christianity and another preaching Islam. There was a third saying that those two people were religious nutcases and that he hates religion because there all angels are white, not black. Another person was going on and on about how everyone who wasn't English was not favored by God. She was the most interesting because everyone listening to her was getting really annoyed or at least greatly amused. She told one person in the audience who was clearly a British citizen that she couldn't be English because she had black hair. It would have been disturbing except that it was clear she wouldn't be able to amass an "ethnic cleansing" type of army. After the Speakers' Corner, I went to the British Library (see a previous post to read my effusions on that subject).
Then I participated in a group activity of playing football (aka soccer) in Regent's Park. I didn't want to go, but I had signed up a few days ago on a whim so I felt I had to go. It really wasn't fun. It reminded me of being in middle school and sucking at sports. There was one girl on my team who was very know-it-all-ish about sports, which was annoying. Granted, she did know what she was talking about, but the game was supposed to be just for fun. In the evening, I went to the huge Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square and saw the new Batman movie. It was really good! There was quite a bit of action, of course, which made it a bit difficult to decipher how they were developing the themes that they had begun in the first movie. Fortunately, though, they WERE developing the themes, even if it was a bit subtle to fully grasp after just seeing it once. I think I'll have to wait until I see it again to write more about it. But I just have to say--even though everyone who sees this movie says it--Heath Ledger was AMAZING as the Joker! I really don't think they'll be able to get anyone half as good to replace him in the next film.
On Monday night, Kellie and I went to the Globe and saw Timon of Athens. I didn't know much of anything about it before I went, which was kind of fun. I enjoyed being an "uneducated peasant" standing around and not knowing what was going to happen next. It was quite a disturbing play, actually. The basic plotline is that Timon had a lot of money and gave it all away to his friends without thought for keeping in mind his own expenses. So then he goes broke and none of his friends are willing to help him out. He ends up going out into the wilderness and going mad. He finds gold, but doesn't restore himself to his former position. His friends who had abandoned him hear that he has gold in the wilderness, so they come out to see him. Then he ends up dying in the pile of gold. It's very weird. But there was an interesting people-as-dogs/beasts throughout the whole play, which this interpretation of the play picked up really well. When Timon dies in the gold, his friends all bark and surround him like dogs and they start digging past him to get the gold, and there's all this blood and refuse flying. It's profoundly disturbing. Timon himself was an interesting character, a perfect blend of purity and baseness. In some ways, he seemed like a Christ figure. He was dressed in a white robe for the first half and in a Crucifixion-esque loincloth for the second half. He gives away everything his has without regard for himself. But then at the same time, it's pretty clear that his motives for giving away everything was to receive flattery, attention, and a large following of so-called friends. When his friends aren't as friendly as he expected them to be, his switch flips and he acts very animalistic and goes on and on about how much he hates all people. Eventually I'd like to read more about this play because I feel like there is quite a bit I'm missing.
On Wednesday, I went to yet another play. I saw Twelfth Night in an open-air theatre in Regent's Park. It was good and I enjoyed it, but I was thinking so much about my big au pair vs. internship choice that I don't have much else to say about it. On Thursday, our whole large group went on a Thames River cruise, which was fun. I dressed up in a nice black dress. There was dinner and dancing and drinking. But again, I was so wrapped up in trying to make a decision that I probably had less fun than I would have had otherwise. (I was probably less fun to be around too, haha.)
Yesterday (Friday), I saw Wicked the musical. It was so absolutely incredibly amazing! I absolutely love theatre in general and I've seen quite a bit here, but this show was by far my favorite up until now. I'm listening to the soundtrack right now. The person who played Glinda was extremely good, but the person who played Elphaba was just outstanding...I can't even begin to say how incredible she was! She belted out these extremely powerful lines of music, and I just got chills. I mean, it is really difficult music and she just nailed it. She has the perfect combination of flawless classical training and natural powerhouse voice. The storyline was also really good. One of its purposes is to question how we tell stories and to point out that there can be more than one way of understanding things. It tells the "background" story of the Wizard of Oz, and it turns the Wicked Witch of the West into a character anyone can identify with. She's not perfect, but a lot of her flaws come from being rejected based on her looks (imagine growing up with bright green skin!). She's also a great "strong female" character because she's a brilliant student and a political activist. I enjoyed the friendship between Glinda and Elphaba as well because in a lot of fantasy/fairy tale stories, the strong same-sex friendships are between men. I thought the musical did a good job of portraying the possibilities of female friendships. Another theme is how much importance is placed on superficial things, like labels ("wonderful" or "wicked"), popularity, and appearance.
Today (Saturday), I went to Winchester and Chawton (Jane Austen country). I saw the house where Austen lived when she revised Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and where she wrote Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. They had a ton of the family's artifacts, which was really fun to see. They had some letters written by Jane and a bracelet of hers, etc. I really enjoyed seeing Chawton village and imagining how it would have looked with even fewer people and buildings, and imagining Jane and her sister Cassandra strolling around like Jane and Elizabeth or Elinor and Marianne. In Winchester, I saw the cathedral where she's buried and the outside of the house where she died. There was also ruins of a castle in Winchester that I enjoyed tromping around.
So yeah...that's what I've been up to lately. Tomorrow's I'm going to Hever Castle with Jessica and her sister, Brittney. Hopefully I'll get all the pics from the past week up on Facebook soon!
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