Albion Adventures

From Union Jack to Old Glory

2008-09-10T10:16:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 8

When I wrote my last entry, I had visions of being welcomed home to America in style. I would fly over the Capitol and the White House on a glorious sunny afternoon, and there might even be trumpets playing as I went through customs. (Okay, that last bit is an exaggeration.) As I'm sure you've guessed, this idealized vision was not fulfilled.

My flight from Dublin to Amsterdam was delayed by a half an hour. I sat in tense anxiety for the last twenty minutes of the flight, hoping I could make my connecting flight to D.C. I ran through the Amsterdam airport, computer backpack and purse bouncing against my body the whole way. I reached the gate with several minutes to spare. Out of breath but relieved, I passed through security and got in the boarding line. They scanned my ticket but there was a problem and I had to go speak to someone at a nearby desk. Apparently while I had made it to the gate on time, my checked luggage had not. I'd been re-booked for another flight the same day. I was disappointed, but the next flight was just a couple hours later, so I assumed I'd still have a somewhat shortened afternoon/evening with Ann.

No such luck. When I got to the desk to pick up my new ticket, I found out that my flight wasn't direct. I'd have a layover in Newark and arrive in D.C. at 9:50 p.m. I was seriously fighting back tears at this point. My time with Ann was already going to be short, and now it was going to be diminished by a whole day! Plus I was really frustrated about having to transfer yet again and waste more of my life hanging around in airports. (I realized rationally that I was lucky not to have to spend the night in Amsterdam, but I still felt annoyed.)

After a long flight across the Atlantic, I finally made it to Newark. I didn't realize I had to re-check my baggage, but fortunately I figured it out. Even more fortunately, they didn't weigh it so I didn't have to pay the overweight fee (they hadn't weighed it in Dublin either). I waited out my 2-hour layover more or less patiently--or at least resigned. When I found out that this flight had been delayed as well, I was mildly annoyed but too exhausted to put any real passion into it. And I wasn't in the least surprised. It just seemed to be my luck that day.

I finally got on the plane, but it had to taxi around on the runway for a while. The captain announced that we were 25th in the queue to take off and we'd probably be leaving around 10:00 p.m. (That's ten minutes after we were supposed to arrive in D.C. originally.) Again, I was too tired to feel more than a slight twinge of frustration and have the interesting thought that what had started as a half-hour delay had become an eight-hour delay for me. We did end up getting bumped up in the queue, so we got to D.C. around 10:45. Ann and I then spent almost two hours on public transportation (including waiting time) with my massive luggage. We got to her place around 1:00 a.m.

The next day, I realized that the American sunshine I'd been dreaming of was not to be. In fact, I'd chosen to come to D.C. right as a tropical storm was coming up the coast. But I genuinely thought this was hilarious, mostly because I was enjoying being with Ann and was relieved to finally be in D.C. We walked to the Library of Congress (which was really magnificent and fascinating) in the hurricane rain. We were soaked but enjoying ourselves. There was quite a stark contrast between the sites I'd been seeing in the UK and the D.C. sites. For one thing, all the "historical" buildings in D.C. obviously seemed so young! For another, I was a bit amused by their idealized views of America. For instance, the ceiling of the Reading Room in the Library of Congress portrays America as the culmination of western civilization (Greek philosophy, Israeli religion, English literature, French and Italian art or something, etc). The entrance hall was designed to mimic the Italian Renaissance style, and one of the distinguishing features of this style is cherubs lounging on clouds. The designers decided that American cherubs wouldn't just sit on clouds, so they sculpted cherubs that were busy creating, inventing, and working. I thought this was so hilarious, and it was one of my favorite features of the Library.

Later that afternoon, the weather cleared up beautifully and we walked past all the major sites, including the Washington Monument, WWII Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Vietnam War Memorial, the Capitol, and the White House. They were all quite stately and impressive, and I really enjoyed seeing these icons of American government.

The next day, we went to a church that meets in the AMC movie theater in Union Station. It was a fun location, and it was great to go to church again because I hadn't been for probably two months. After that, we went to the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian, which was an exceptionally good museum. We saw a version of the Lunar Module, which neither of us could believe actually made it in space. There was also an exhibit called "Exploring the Planets" from which Pluto had been recently excluded.

That evening, we went to a show called Shear Madness at the Kennedy Center. It's a humorous murder mystery that involves improvisation and audience participation. At one point,, they have the audience vote on which suspect they think committed the crime. "Whichever way you vote, that's the way we play it," they told us at the end. So whoever gets the most votes is portrayed as the guilty party. The actors were all really good, and it was so fun to see such a unique show!

This morning, Ann and I got up early to come to the airport. My suitcase weighed almost 70 pounds! Needless to say, I had to pay the overweight luggage fee, which was $80. I thought it was only going to be $50, but I'm not complaining since I only had to pay the fee once. I'm now on the plane to JFK in New York City, where I have a 2-hour layover. And then it will be on to Minnesota.

Thanks to everyone who joined me on my "Albion adventures." Throughout my trip, I occasionally saw the word "Albion" and I tried to take a picture of it any time I saw it. To conclude this blog, I will post a picture of a pub called The Albion which I saw in Bristol. I hope you're all doing well, and hopefully I can see you all soon!

Facebook Photos--Bristol, Stratford, Glastonbury

2008-09-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

Bumming Around in Bristol
"Mecca" x2

The Land of Eire

2008-09-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

Written 4 September

My second day in Sligo began with breakfast in Molly's Diner. This thoroughly Irish breakfast was served with ambience of the American South. There were bumper stickers that said things like "American By Birth, Southern By the Grace of God" and there were pictures of other typically American things like Harley Davidsons and the cartoon '50s woman. It was all rather amusing.

Then I went to the Sligo County Museum that had rooms devoted to Countess Markievicz (heavily involved in the Easter Uprising of 1916, promoting Irish nationalism), Yeats, and other random Sligo claims to fame (like they had teeth from a whole that was beached on the county's shores). Of course, I thought the most interesting room was the Yeats room, and the most interesting thing in that room was Yeats's Nobel Prize for Literature.

After that, I went on a cruise on Lough Gill past the Isle of Innisfree, immortalized by Yeats:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

While a beautiful poem, I think many of Yeats's other poems are even better. I really like The Second Coming and some of his poems about Maud Gonne (a political revolutionary involved in the Easter Uprising of 1916, like Countess Markievicz). Yeats loved her for years, and he proposed to her twice and was rejected both times. (She apparently preferred men of action to poets.) This poem is called No Second Troy:

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

On the Lough Gill cruise, we also passed Church Island with its ruins of an old Celtic monastery (think Patrick, Brigid, and Brendan). The whole area was absolutely gorgeous, and I'm bummed that none of my pictures do it justice. The lake was peppered with lovely islands and surrounded by rolling mountains, interesting rock features, and foliage in every imaginable shade of green. Because Irish weather frequently involves sun and rain at the same time, the lake reflected many different hues on its mildly choppy waves. The cruise director quoted some of Yeats's poetry and played some Irish music to further set the mood.

Before and after the cruise (for a half-hour each time), I got to visit Parke's Castle. It was rather small but still picturesque with Lough Gill and the mountains in the background. Once back in Sligo town, I visited the ruins of an abbey. They were fun to explore and find "hidden treasures" carved on the crumbling walls. That evening, I ate in a pub and had a half-pint of Guinness. (Ireland is world-renowned for its Guinness beer.) It was really strong, so it wasn't my favorite. But I can see where some people would like it because it had a rich taste and was actually quite refreshing.

The next morning (this morning, actually), I got a train back to Dublin. After checking into my hostel and arranging for a taxi to the airport tomorrow morning, I went to the James Joyce Centre. It had a few interesting artifacts of Joyce's life and it had quite a bit of good infomation on Joyce and his works (especially Ulysses) and on the publication of Ulysses (different editions, the controversy the book caused, etc). The best item the museum had was the actual door from No. 7 Eccles Street, the house where the Blooms lived in Ulysses and where Joyce's friend lived in real life. I touched the door knocker, thinking how Joyce had assured it touched it as well about a century ago.

Next, I went to the Dublin Writers' Museum which had quite a good audio guide and collection of artifacts from a ton of Irish writers, some of whom I hadn't even heard of before. I decided for the second time in my life that I need to learn more about the Irish Literary Revival, connected with Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats, and the Abbey Theatre. Then I went to Merrion Square, which is a nice park surrounded by houses where a lot of writers lived, including Yeats and Oscar Wilde. There was also a clever memorial to Wilde in the park with a lot of his best quotes written on it.

And that, my friends, concludes not only my time in Ireland but also my time in the British Isles (for this trip, at any rate). It's been such a good trip and I can hardly believe it's coming to an end. But I really can't afford to keep travelling, so I better go home and find a paying job. That will be kind of exciting but I'm sure it will feel mundane and boring after a while. (Probably a short while.) But I'm trying to learn to enjoy whatever I'm currently experiencing instead of always dwelling on the future. So for now, it's on to Washington D.C. and a much-anticipated visit with Ann!

Free Internet?!?!

2008-09-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

I'm currently in my hostel in Sligo and you'll never guess what they have! (Well, you probably will, if you've read the title of this post.) That's right; they have free internet! (Of course, they don't include breakfast, so I guess there's always a trade-off.)

So since I have unlimited internet, I will pick up my story where I left off in Edinburgh. The next day was Saturday and, after a huge breakfast, I went to another Festival event. It was the matinee concert of the Beaux Arts Trio (piano, violin, cello) playing Mendelssohn, Kurtag, and Beethoven. I decided that I like listening to small ensembles better than full orchestras, in some ways, because I can listen to all the voices at once, whereas I have to focus on the voice playing the melody in orchestras. I guess I don't think I'm very 'skilled' at listening to classical music and I'm certainly not one of those people who can say things like, 'Ah! Listen to how the composer is echoing his original theme in this countertheme, blah blah blah.' But I really enjoy it nevertheless. In fact, this trio made me think that classical music is the Platonic ideal of music because it's in such a pure form. Of course, it's probably ridiculous to classify one type of music as more 'pure' than another, but that's what I thought in my enraptured state in the middle of the concert.

After that, I went to the Palace of Holyroodhouse and the ruins of the Holyroodhouse Abbey. The palace is the Queen's official residence while in Scotland, so it's still a 'working palace,' which was pretty interesting. (I think I'm becoming one of those weird people who are unduly interested in the royal family.) I also toured the new Scottish Parliament building. The Scots had been ruled solely by the Parliament in Westminster (and Wales still is) from 1707 to 1999. Then some of the powers of the UK Parliament were 'devolved' to Scotland, and their Parliament reconvened. The new building was completed in 2004. It's a prime example of modern architecture, which I always think is interesting.

A lot of people complained about its appearance--and granted, it is quite different from the grand buildings that surround it. But I'm always pleased when people in the 21st century build something that isn't just economical or practical but something that is artistic and will be something people will find interesting in 200 years. The tour explained all the symbolism in the building; it's meant to physically represent the four pillars of the Scottish Parliament--accessibility, accountability, transparency, and equality. Some of the unique features of the building have no fixed meaning because the builders wanted to emphasize the power of the people; each person can decide for him- or herself what these features mean (hence, it's a postmodern building, not just modern!). Just as a sidenote, in the Scottish Parliament, each person who speaks must limit their remarks to four minutes in order to prevent filibustering. This seems like such a simple solution, and I don't understand why we haven't implemented it in America (or England, for that matter).

That evening, I went to a choir concert called 'A Child of Our Time.' It was written during World War II about Kristalnacht, when a Jewish boy shot a German officer for persecuting his family and then the Nazis retaliated by pillaging Jewish homes and businesses and killing a bunch of people. It had some really good ideas in it (Sir Michael Tippett, the writer/composer, drew heavily on Jungian ideas of the shadow, which was interesting), and the music was fabulously performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. He also inserted African American spirituals at key emotional points of he piece, which I thought was really powerful. However, the lyrics themselves were not the greatest, I didn't think. Unbeknownst to me when I chose to go to this event, Tippett was friends with T.S. Eliot and asked him to write the final lyrics for the piece. Eliot originally agreed, but then read Tippett's stuff and thought that his words would be too 'poetical' for what Tippett was trying to do. That might be true, but I think it would have been nice for them to sound a little bit more poetical. Maybe Robert Frost's type of poetry rather than Eliot's, but still. Eliot's ideas definitely influenced the piece a bit though. There was a particularly interesting line that said something like, "Beyond the desert lies the garden." This line further confirms one of the main points I was trying to make in my senior thesis, but I'm not going to go into that now.

On Sunday, I had a rather laidback day. I ate a leisurely breakfast and then went back to my room and slept some more. Then I went to the Balmoral Hotel and asked the concierge in a kilt if that was the hotel where J.K. Rowling had finished writing Harry Potter (as if I didn't already know that it was), and he confirmed that it was. I asked if they still had the bust she had signed which said, "J.K. Rowling completed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (652) on this date (she wrote the actual date)." He said that they did and that it was in a glass case in the room where she stayed. I said, "Oh, so I suppose there's no way for the public to see it?" And he said there wasn't. So that was too bad, but oh well. Then I had a late lunch and then climbed the Walter Scott monument, the tallest memorial ever made for an author. It gave some really good views of the city, so it was worth climbing up another narrow spiral staircase. (This one got even narrower than the one leading up to the top of York Cathedral.)

After that, I just went back to my room, relaxed a little bit, and spent a while packing up. Then I went to the Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert, the concluding event of the Festival. It was really fun because they coordinated the fireworks with classical dances (Brahms's Hungarian dances and Dvorak's Slavonic dances). So when there was an emphatic part of the music, there would be a few big fireworks. And when the music was fast, there would be a bunch of swirling fireworks or something. Best of all, the fireworks were shot off from the castle, which is up on a high promontory. This castle background distinguished these fireworks from any I've ever seen celebrating American Independence Day because, of course, we don't have any castles.

Then I had my awful travel day on Monday. I got up at 5:15 a.m. and was picked up by a taxi at 6:00 a.m. I got to the train station and paid my taxi driver. With the earliness of the hour and the preoccupied state of my mind (because I was ridiculously anxious about something going wrong in this lengthy day of travels), I managed to walk off with my purse and large suitcase, leaving my backpack behind. I hadn't put it on my back before paying the cab driver, but I must have thought I did. I got to my train platform rather early and moved to take my backpack off, only to realize that it wasn't there. Of course, I was freaking out but not letting myself fully freak out until I knew that my laptop and all my essentials had been irretrievably lost. I asked the first train worker I saw where my luggage would have gone if it had been found. He said the "left luggage" office, which I thought was incorrect because "left luggage" means luggage people have purposely left behind to store there for a while, not luggage that was accidentally left behind. Plus the office wasn't open. Of course, I went back to the taxi rank and, sure enough, the backpack wasn't there anymore. I asked someone else who worked there and they said, "Well, no one has turned anything in here, but maybe security..." and as he was talking, a security officer walked in with the bag. Of course, they had checked it to make sure it hadn't been left there with a bomb inside or something. When it was safe, they brought it to reception and I could have it back. So that was terrifying, but thankfully turned out just fine. I had to catch three trains (carting my huge heavy suitcase), each of which were only about an hour so I wasn't able to really relax or try to sleep.

Then I had to wait around for my ferry to Belfast. Once on the boat, it was a lot of fun! It must have been like a mini-cruise ship because it had shopping, restaurants, a place to get your nails done, lounges, coffee shops, video games, places for children to play, etc. Then I got to Belfast and took a taxi from the harbour to the train station. I couldn't believe I had taken two taxis in a day, but I was really glad for both of them. Sometimes it's worth it to pay a little extra money for something like that. I took the two-hour train from Belfast to Dublin. Upon arrival in Dublin (at around 8:30 pm), I had been planning to store my large suitcase in the left luggage facilities. Usually, these facilities are an actual office. In this case, they were just lockers right out in the open that didn't look that difficult to break into. And the large ones cost 6 Euros per day. I thought that was a bit steep for such shady facilities. So I decided to take my luggage to my hostel. I went out of the train station and could not get my bearings from the crappy map I had. A construction worker asked if I was lost and I said I was. I showed him my map and he couldn't figure it out either, but his friend knew the place I was talking about. They said, "Oh yeah, it's not that far, but since it's dark out, you should probably take taxi." I thought that was a little creepy because I'd gotten the same Dublin-is-a-shady-place song and dance from the Irish family I met in Wales. So I ended up taking a third taxi in one day! I was so exhausted, but my splitting headache (from all the stress) kept me up half the night.

Anyways, I was able to leave my large suitcase in that hostel's luggage room for the two nights that I'm in Sligo because I'm staying there again for one more night before flying back to the States. So that was a relief. The train to Sligo takes three hours, which was longer than I was expecting. After checking into my hostel, I ate a wonderful toasted tuna sandwich at a pub. Then I took a train to Drumcliffe and saw Yeats's grave and the famous mountain/plateau Benbulben. (Sligo's main claim to fame is that Yeats was from here.) Benbulben and the Bay of Sligo are really beautiful! I'm glad I came here, but some of my passionate enjoyment of my trip is wearing off due to exhaustion and stress. It's like I can't make the effort to really enjoy something right now, so I just enjoy it halfheartedly. That sounds depressing, but I don't mean it to. I'm still enjoying myself, but travelling solo is rather exhausting because there's just so many things to think about and so many problems to try to prevent. I'm really glad that I did this trip independently because I have gained confidence that I am able to do something like this on my own. But, like any challenge, it is tiring, and I'll be ready to go home when the time comes.

Oxford Pictures

2008-08-30T15:41:00.000-07:00

The Dreaming Spires of Oxford
The Oxford of Tolkien and Lewis

Making Up for Lost Time

2008-08-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

**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!

A Great and Terrible Beauty

2008-08-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

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!

Bristol Overview, Shakespeare’s Stratford, the Legends of Glastonbury, and the Beginning of Wales

2008-08-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Brighton Photos

2008-08-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

I have finally uploaded a few pictures from the backpacking portion of my trip. See Brighton photos here.

I Put the “Backpack” Back in “Backpacking”

2008-08-13T11:13:00.001-07:00

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!

The Dreaming Spires of Oxford

2008-08-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

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! :-)

Brighton Not a Bright Spot

2008-08-09T14:48:00.000-07:00

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.

The End of the Internship Phase (and Pics)

2008-08-07T16:34:00.000-07:00

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...

Facebook Pictures

2008-08-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

London Town
Jane Austen and Anne Boleyn

Hampton Court Palace Pictures

2008-08-02T14:35:00.001-07:00

View Hampton Court Palace pictures here.

Updates

2008-08-02T11:41:00.001-07:00

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!

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood

2008-07-30T05:07:00.000-07:00

I think it’s about time I let my blogging audience in on something I’ve been mulling over for almost my entire time in England. After I’d been here a week, I went to the American Church in London with a couple of friends, and we met a nice woman who was looking for an au pair (nanny). At the time, it seemed so far from my plans for the coming year that I was just kind of smiled and said, “Sure, we’ll let you know if anyone on our program is interested.” Then Brittney said something like, “There has to be someone who has already graduated, who wants to stay in London, and who likes kids.” When it was nicely broken down for me into those three pieces, I realized that the description fit me perfectly! I still doubted if I would accept the position, but I decided that I would email Rima (the mom).

About halfway through the trip, right before the Paris weekend, I received a packet of information about the position. Rima had given it to Kate (one of the pastors at the church) who had given it to Brittney (one of my friends who also goes to the church), who gave it to me. I read through it, and all the tasks and responsibilities sounded interesting and do-able. Plus there were some nice perks, like having my own room with a TV and, oh yes, free room and board plus £65/wk. Of course, that wouldn’t be enough to pay off my student loans, but the information was detailed enough that I saw I would have between 8:00 a.m. and 3:15 p.m. free on weekdays, plus Saturday afternoons and all day on Sundays. This would allow for me to get a second job (though not a full-time job) to pay off my loans. Once I decided that this job could be feasible, I emailed Rima to tell her that I was interested in this position.

I didn’t hear back from her for a while, so I wondered if they had already found an au pair or if my email was somehow getting relegated to her junk mail folder or something. But then, on the same day, I received two interesting emails. The first was from Rima, apologizing for not getting back to me (she had been on holiday in north Scotland with no internet access) and saying that she would love for me to come over to their house and have a look around. The second was from the editor of Coffee House Press (in Minneapolis, MN), saying that he would like to set up an interview for an autumn internship position (which I had applied for before leaving for England). Here is where the Robert Frost title of this blog post comes into play. I began to see two possible futures: one living in England as an au pair, the other living with my parents in MN with a publishing internship.

I had the phone interview with Coffee House last Tuesday, and I think it went really well. They said they would let me know their decision in two weeks. Exactly a week later (yesterday), I went over to Rima’s house and met her husband and three children. The au pair’s room is small, but so are the children’s rooms (with the exception of the eldest’s). It seems comfortable though, and the house, garden, and neighborhood are beautiful. They emailed me today and said that, of the two people they were considering, I was the favorite. They want me to tell them as soon as possible if I would like the job, though they are willing to wait until I’ve heard a final decision from Coffee House. In the meantime, I’m requesting for references to be sent to them.

So now I am at the fork in the road. Like the speaker in Frost’s poem, I want to be able to look back at the choice and say with satisfaction: “And that has made all the difference.”

P.S. I just found out that I have also been offered the Coffee House internship. So I really do have the choice between these two things, and I REALLY don't know what to do! They're both such good opportunities!

Treasures of the British Library

2008-07-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

I am feeling a bit emotional right now because I just got back from seeing the treasures of the British Library. I'll just list what I saw, and anyone who has a love of history, literature, religion, or music will know exactly what I mean. I saw: a First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, the earliest edition of his sonnets, the Beowulf manuscript (I couldn't tear my eyes away from this the first or the second time I looked at it), Milton's commonplace book (i.e. journal), Virginia Woolf's notebook for Mrs Dalloway, Sylvia Plath's notebook for The BellJar, Tess of the D'Urbervilles in Thomas Hardy's handwriting, Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte's handwriting, Persuasion in Jane Austen's handwriting, Austen's third diary/journal from her youth, compositions by Mozart and Haydn (with the notes written in their own handwriting), Beatles lyrics in the handwriting of Lennon and McCartiney (including Help!, Yesterday, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, etc; one was written on the back of an envelope), the Magna Carta (there were four versions created in 1215, but the one on display is quite likely the one actually sent to King John; there is also a version on display written in 1225 which was much easier to read, not that you can really read anything written before 1700 or so), the Codex Sinaiticus (the oldest copy of the entire New Testament, written in Greek), a Gutenburg Bible, a version of the epistle to the Hebrews written in the 200s (yes, the third century A.D.), the Lindisfarne Gospels (unfortunately only a facsimile is on display currently), and several equally old and stunning versions of the Qu'ran and other sacred texts. It was just absolutely incredible! I literally felt a bit weak-kneed and teary-eyed when I saw some of these things. I mean, I was separated by only a small pane of glass from books held and written in by Milton and Austen and Woolf. I can imagine them dipping their pens in ink and scratching away, thoughts and creative passions swirling within them as they wrote those words.

Cotswolds Pictures

2008-07-27T08:16:00.001-07:00

See Cotswolds pictures from last weekend in this album.

Dover and Canterbury Pictures and The Lion King

2008-07-25T14:33:00.000-07:00

Album: White Cliffs and Pilgrimages

FINALLY I got these up! Hopefully I will have Cotswolds pictures up soon because tomorrow I'm going to Hampton Court Palace, and I'm sure I'll take a ton more pictures.

Quick note: Yesterday I went to the Lion King musical, and I really enjoyed it! A few of the new songs felt a bit like filler, but the costumes, puppets, choreography, and dancing were absolutely amazing! Plus it was very nostalgic for the three of us who went because the Lion King was a part of our childhood. I kept thinking about how the Lion King storyline draws on typical mythic structures, such as the death of a mentor, the 'chosen one' who figuratively dies and comes back to life, and even the more modern 'mythic' story of the reluctant ruler. I just have to assert once again that theatre in general but especially musicals are just about my favorite things ever!

Quintessentially English

2008-07-21T11:35:00.000-07:00

Over the past weekend, I saw several icons of England--the white cliffs of Dover, the Canterbury cathedral, and the villages of the Cotswolds. (I'm organising this blog post like a paper with a topic sentence and everything...frightening.) So let me start at the beginning. On Saturday, Kellie, Jessica, and I hopped on a 7:00 a.m. train to Dover and got into the town at about 9:00 a.m. We immediately noticed the peaceful silence, so different from London's constant noise. After eating breakfast, we walked through the pretty town and up to Dover Castle. Up there, all you could hear were seagulls, the water, and the wind.

We took the guided tour through the wartime tunnels, which were used during the Napoleonic Wars and, most notably, during World War II. When the German army was taking over France, they forced a ton of British, French, and Belgium troops to Dunkirk port on France's coast, and they were all evacuated across the Channel and through the tunnels into Dover Castle. This was such an incredible feat that it became known as "the miracle of Dunkirk." Dover Castle also sustained heavy gunfire during WW2 because it became a frontline stronghold. It was known as "Hellfire Corner." But the castle itself wasn't damaged because Hitler planned to use it as his headquarters after invading Britain. We then wandered around the castle itself and went into the keep, which was built by Henry II's men in 1181-1183.

After lunch, Jessica and I went on to Canterbury while Kelly stayed and hiked around on the Dover cliffs. Canterbury is still surrounded by its medieval walls, and it's really interesting to see cars driving along a highway inside! Part of the town still has old buildings that were lived in by monks before Henry VIII expelled Catholicism. One of the houses is even named after St Francis, though I don't think he ever lived there. Sadly, the cathedral itself was closed due to a conference so we didn't get to see the shrine to Thomas Beckett. But because of that, we had time to go into The Canterbury Tales museum, which was fun. It was slightly amusing because it was just a bunch of wax figures with an audio guide, retelling some of the Tales. But it was enjoyable nevertheless. Then we took a boat tour down the Stower River (which comes from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "angry," though the river has been artificially calmed and is quite still) and saw all the buildings of historic Canterbury.

The next day, I took a day trip to the Cotswolds. It was organised by the same people who do the famous London Walks. The Cotswolds are in the middle of nowhere and are very difficult to visit by public transportation, so it was very helpful to go with a group. We took a train to Kingham and then a coach bus through some of the scenic parts of the Cotswolds. But don't worry--we didn't just stay on the bus! (I really think bus tours are ridiculous, even though it was fun to get to see a variety of places in the Cotswolds...including a lavender farm!) We walked around through the village of Chipping Campden and saw a ton of charming thatched cottages with traditional English gardens, etc. Then we had a lunch break, and I ate at a cafe that our guide said was a traditional English place. It was absolutely amazing! I had English tea, a cranberry/chicken/bacon sandwich (and the bacon over here is actually meat instead of just grease tied together by fat), and a fruit scone with strawberry preserves. It was probably the best meal I've had since I've been here. After that, we walked through the village of Lower Slaughter and then to the village of Upper Slaughter. The name "Slaughter" comes from "slough," which is, of course, a marsh/swamp (think Pilgrim's Progress and the Slough of Despond). We walked through fields and by ponds and rivers. We walked through "kissing gates" which are gates that only allow one person to walk through at a time. Apparently they are called kissing gates because boys used to trap girls in there and not let them out until they got a kiss. (I am kind of surprised that a scene like that wasn't in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.)

Anyways, it was another very good weekend! Now I'm just trying to enjoy/get through the work week and then it'll be another wonderful weekend. :-)

T.S. Eliot's London (Facebook Photos)

2008-07-19T14:53:00.001-07:00

Complete with lines from The Waste Land

Album: Unreal City

Taking Initiative

2008-07-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

University of Dreams (yes, that's the name of the program I'm on) would be so pleased to know that their bi-weekly survey inspired me to take initiative. As I mentioned in my post, "Some Days I'm Up and Some Days I'm Down," the survey asked us to give examples of when we'd taken initiative, and it got me to realize that I hadn't taken a lot of initiative. So I decided that I should probably ask my immediate boss, Alex, to go to lunch with me so that we could discuss the internship, etc.

Yesterday I told myself that I had to ask him before I went to lunch that day. For some stupid reason, I felt really awkward about asking him so I waited until the last possible minute. (I always meet my coworker Joanna for lunch in the office kitchen at 12:30 and I have to buy a sandwich before then, so I waited until like 12:25 to ask him.) I sounded as awkward as I felt, I'm sure. I said really quickly, "Hey Alex? Uh, do you think we could maybe go out for lunch sometime this week to talk about how my internship's going since it's half over?" He looked up from his computer and took a second to process what I had blurted out seemingly out of the blue (little did he know that I'd been planning it for like twelve hours). "Yeah, sure," he says. "Okay, cool, what day works for you?" "Uh...tomorrow?" "Okay, sounds good, can I take my lunch break now?" He took another second to process this abrupt shift in topic. "Yeah, sure." "Okay, bye." And I picked up my purse and jetted out of there. (I really don't know why that was so awkward for me; I think I just made it a really big thing in my head for no good reason.)

So today we went to eat and fortunately, our conversation went well. I thought to myself (once again, thinking things over too much) that I should probably start the conversation with something non-work-related so that it could seem friendly and casual. But then I was thinking, "Oh man, what in the world should I say?" Fortunately, as we were walking out of the office, I noticed his copy of Ulysses sitting on his desk and remembered that he was trying to read it again. (The last time he tried to read it, he was nineteen, I found out today.) Of course, talking about books is always a good conversation topic for me (I talked with Ellen, the new intern, about Tess of the D'Urbervilles yesterday, which was also good). Anyways, so Alex and I talked about Ulysses for a little bit before seguing into the internship discussion. For one thing, I wanted to know how he thought I was doing because I was a bit irrationally afraid that I wasn't doing very well. But he told me that he thought I was doing really well. He said that the information I've been finding is good, and the introductory material I've been writing is really good. So that was encouraging.

Then I also asked him if there would be any way for me to learn more about what goes on in the company as a whole. I think I may have unintentionally described the stuff I'm currently doing as "laborious," which I didn't mean to do because I didn't want to sound like I was complaining or unhappy with the internship. But he said that he'd talk to Tej (the top dog) about me possibly doing a few more tasks. He also said that usually interns don't get the full perspective because they're only there for such a short time. Some do a little bit of everything (and never get to know fully about each stage) and some do a lot with just one thing (which is more what I'm doing).

We also talked a little bit about what I might want to do within the field of publishing, which I wasn't really expecting to talk about. But he seemed genuinely interested in helping me figure out a bit of what I would like to do. I told him that, at my last internship at CBE, I really liked getting to pull everything together and organise it according to 'my' vision for the project. He said that then maybe I'd like to do something similar to what he does, which is production. I'd actually thought about production before, but I never really knew much of what it entailed. But apparently, at least Alex's production position at Anthem Press, involves a lot of carrying a project through to its finishing stages, etc. I think his position is a little bit of a hybrid between production and editorial because so much of the copyediting and lower levels of editing are done by freelancers (because Anthem is such a small publishing house). So he would do some of the 'higher' stages of editing, maybe. He also asked me what my 'ideal' publishing job would be, and I didn't really know. But I said I thought I might like academic publishing (though not necessarily textbooks) or else high quality fiction (and not just mass market stuff, though that type of publishing house might be difficult to find).

He also mentioned briefly that, in a lot of jobs, you have to kind of work your way through the boring tasks to get to more interesting ones. Of course that's definitely true, but somehow I never really understood that. I guess it kind of made me realize why working folks always say, "Ah, to be able to go back to school! Those were the days!" I always scoffed at people like that and thought, "Either you don't remember how much work school is, or you didn't bother to work as hard as you probably should have when you were in school." But now I realize that maybe they weren't saying that school is EASY; they might have just been saying that school is more interesting and engaging than work. Because it seems like a lot of people's jobs involve mundane, boring tasks. Of course, school is sometimes boring too, but in college especially you get to think about ideas and creatively express your own ideas all the time. Anyways, I'm not pining for school yet, but I definitely want to go to grad school in a year or so. And that's partly what I hoped would come from this year off: that I would know FOR SURE that I'm going to grad school because I want to and not just because I didn't know what else to do with my life.

But anyways, I thought the conversation was really good. I felt like Alex was genuinely interested in what I had to say, and I thought our conversation about how the internship was going was really a 'genuine' (I don't know why that's the only word I can think of right now) exploration of what would be feasible that would helpful to both me and the company. And because of this conversation, I might get to do a few more tasks than researching for the guidebook. I also gained a new (and better) perspective on what I am doing (It's an important internal project for the publishing house that happens to involve a lot of grunt work), and I got a chance to think about what I might want to do within the field of publishing. And I got to know Alex a little bit better and find out (more than I knew before anyways) that he's a pretty great guy.

Paris Pictures

2008-07-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

Part I
Part II
Part III

Some Days I'm Up and Some Days I'm Down

2008-07-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

Today was not the greatest day at work. Nothing specifically happened to make it bad; I think I was just in kind of a bad mood and some little things started to bother me more than usual. In the middle of the day, I filled out my program's bi-weekly survey, and they asked a couple of questions about when we'd taken initiative in our internships. I was shocked to realize that I couldn't really think of any stories of taking initiative. I feel like I haven't been my normal self in this internship because normally I take initiative all the time to learn more things or to do tasks that I know need to be done but I haven't been asked to do. And that got me thinking more explicitly about what I'd already been vaguely feeling: I'm not doing an amazing job at this internship. I'm certainly not doing a poor job, but I'm probably doing acceptable-to-good, B-level work. Which, as we all know, isn't good enough...or at least it isn't typical.

I started trying to figure out why this is. Am I not trying as hard as I usually would? Are the tasks too difficult or too easy? Maybe it's all of the above. I'm basically doing research for eight hours a day. I've always done adequate research in school, but I've never been extremely efficient at it, and I've usually disliked it at least somewhat. The only time I enjoy researching is when I read about interesting ideas that start sparking more ideas and I can start connecting the dots in my head and get really excited. But in this internship, first of all, I'm not researching ideas; I'm researching facts. Second of all, I don't get to connect any dots because all the pieces of information are pretty discrete. So anyways, I really am trying to make myself work really enthusiastically and efficiently, but it's just so hard to make myself do! At my CBE internship, I got so excited about what I was doing that I got into a "flow" and lost track of time. A lot of days, I felt like I could stay there forever because I enjoyed being in charge of so many things and working to bring them all together. But here, I don't have much "ownership" of the project, at least not in my mind. I'm the only person doing the type of research that I'm doing, but it's not like I have a "vision" for the project. I feel like I'm sort of expendable. If I was unable to go back to the internship, they could find another person to take my place in a heartbeat. And it's not like the people who work there make me feel like I'm unimportant at all! It's just that I know the stuff I'm doing isn't difficult and it doesn't have my personal "stamp" on it.

I think I was pretty spoiled by my CBE internship. It let me have so much responsibility and be so creative and get to coordinate so many things into a cohesive whole. It let me utilize my strengths and get lost in my projects, etc. I guess now I'm experiencing a more typical bottom-of-the-totem-pole intern position. I'm doing grunt work; that's all there is to it. And you know, what I'm doing is really fine. I don't dread going to work at all. It's just that it's frustrating to me to feel like I'm only doing an adequate-to-good level of work. And I don't really know how to do it any better.

But speaking of iniative, possibly I should try to take some. There isn't really a lot of room for initiative in the job I've been assigned. I pretty much show up on time, work on researching parks and gardens all day, and then leave. I don't know anything else about what goes on at the company, so I can't really offer to help out or do different tasks. But maybe I should see if I could go out to lunch with my boss and discuss (a) how he thinks the project is going and what he thinks of my work so far and (b) if I could possibly be a part of a few other aspects of the company, even if just for an hour or so a day. I know that the job I'm doing right now is really helpful to the company, and that they hired me specifically to do this job. So I obviously don't want to seem like I don't want to keep doing it. But it would just be nice to get a feel for the book publishing business while I'm there, instead of just doing one repetitive project for two months.

I hope that the people who work there don't think I'm dumb. Yesterday I had a "brain fart" and said that Portugal was in South America and then got really red because OBVIOUSLY I know where Portugal is! But I felt really stupid, even though it was also kind of funny. Normally I would just laugh it off; it's just when you combine that with my mental complex that is afraid I'm not doing stellar work, then I feel more embarrassed by it. Also, a new intern (who's also a girl from the U.S.) started yesterday. Before I even met her, I had this somewhat irrational fear that we would feel like we were subtly competing. And I thought that solely on the basis of the fact that I knew the new intern was going to be a girl from the States. But I think my predilection is sort of true. I mean, we had lunch together today and we're obviously basically friendly towards each other. But I feel like she purposely was telling me stories to make me understand that even though I've been in England and at Anthem Press longer than she has, she's been to England before and she knows what's going on in the publishing world. Like she's studied at Oxford and she knows that fantasy romances with a lot of sex have a very wide audience even though they're obviously not great art. Plus she's just one of those people who asserts things very confidently, which always bothers me because I always say things as though I'm not sure of what I'm talking about, even if I actually know as much as the people who say things confidently. I don't know...it's slightly humorous and it will remain humorous as long as it doesn't develop into a real rivalry. Which it probably won't because we're doing completely different projects. But I said the idiotic Portugal comment in front of her yesterday after we'd known each other for like a half an hour. Ugh. Oh well, I should just let it go.

Paris Redux

2008-07-14T10:49:00.001-07:00

Last weekend, everyone on my program went to Paris! We left at 6:00 a.m. for the train station and got to Paris around 10:30 local time (9:30 a.m. London time, 3:30 a.m. Central time). We started out with a bus tour, which I was planning on skipping because (a) I'd already been to Paris and had seen all the major tourist attractions from the outside and (b) the London bus tour was not anything to rave about. But we were going to be on the bus for about a half hour and then eating lunch (a group lunch that we paid for as part of our program fee) and then riding the bus for another hour or so and then checking into the hotel, so it didn't really make sense to skip it. And actually, this tour was better than the London one because the bus slowed down when there were prime picture opportunities.

After checking into our hotel (which was really modern and funky and had views of the Eiffel Tower!), Kellie and I went down to the Latin Quarter, which was the number one thing on my list to see this weekend. It's the artsy, intellectual, liberal part of Paris on the Left Bank. We saw Place St Michel, a favorite gathering place of protesters. In 1871 (Les Mis era), WW2, and 1968, students and other passionate idealists set up barricades and fought against the establishment (or in WW2, against the invading Nazis) in that very area. There was a small Iraq War protest going on there when we were there. It seemed fitting to have some sort of political activity going on. We took a worthwhile detour to see Notre Dame from the outside. A gypsy asked me if I spoke English and, without thinking or even realizing that she was a gypsy, I was like, "Yeah." And then she handed me this hand-written piece of paper with some sort of sob story written on it. And then because of the foot-in-the-door phenomenon (I did the small favor of reading her story), I felt compelled to give her a bit of money. I really hate seeing beggars around because I always feel really bad for them and then I feel naive for feeling bad and then I feel coldhearted for telling myself, "As everyone says, they're only out to pickpocket you the minute you stop to talk with them."

Anyways, after Notre Dame, Kellie and I went to the Pantheon (also in the Latin Quarter) and saw the tombs of people like Rousseau, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Emile Zola, and the guy who invented Braille. We wandered around and stopped outside a crepe shop and debated about whether or not to go in. The proprietor came out and was all friendly, handing us menus and ushering us inside. And we were like, "Um...so I guess we're eating here?" I'm actually very glad that we were manipulated into doing so because our nutella-filled crepes were TO DIE FOR. Our waitress was not very nice, probably because neither of us could speak any French except "bonjour" and "merci." But then we accidentally gave her too big of a tip, and her eyes got wide and she said excitedly, "Merci, madamoiselles!" So she liked us after that, though we obviously just supported the stereotype of rich, ignorant Americans.

After that, we went to Shakespeare and Company Bookstore. Of the things to do in the Latin Quarter, this was on the TOP of my list. It's a bookstore that was founded by Sylvia Beach in the 1920s, when there was a huge influx of intellectual artists and writers from America to Paris. This was the "lost generation," a phrase coined by Gertrude Stein. People like Hemingway, Pound, and Fitzgerald hung out in Shakespeare and Company. During WW2, it had to be closed down and then it was reopened at its current location and it upholds many of the same ideals as the "first edition" bookstore. I really wanted to get a book there, but I didn't want to get something you can get just anywhere. A lot of their used books were older editions but not the amazing old editions, just the kind that came out like twenty years ago and went out of print. Much to my shame, I just ended up getting the 4th Harry Potter book in the British kids' version. But still, it has a cool Shakespeare and Company stamp on the title page.

We went shopping in the Latin Quarter, where I bought way more things than I was planning to do. We also went to the Luxembourg Gardens, which were really pretty. It was nice to see a garden of the sort that I'm always researching and writing about for my internship. Then we met up with Rahbi and Jessica, and the four of us had a nice dinner at a lovely French cafe. And it was there, in a Parisian cafe, that I had my first glass of wine. (You can't get a much more romantic setting than that.) I had white wine, and I actually really liked it! It's definitely the best drink I've had so far, though I still like alcoholic cider. After dinner, we went back to Shakespeare and Company because Rahbi and Jessica wanted to see it too. Then we bummed around and did some more shopping. We tried to go up the Eiffel Tower, but the information we had about when it closed was wrong, so we weren't able to. But we got to see it all lit up and take some pictures.

The next day, we tried again to go up the Eiffel Tower but the line was about a thousand miles long so we decided our time would be better spent elsewhere. We saw the French version of the Statue of Liberty (the one that's in National Treasure 2), and we went to the Arc de Triomphe and then walked down the Champs-Elysees. We saw the largest Luis Vuitton store in the world with purses that cost about 2000 euros. We also went into two stores with concept cars. The first one had hybrid cars and the second one had sports cars and racing cars. Normally, I don't care one whit about cars, but these were so interesting! We also stopped in the Disney store just for the heck of it. Another surprising interest for me: We went to Haagen-Dazs and I actually enjoyed ice cream! I got a scoop of raspberry meringue and a scoop of double chocolate chunk, all covered in dark chocolate sauce. When ice cream tastes like that, it's heavenly.

About halfway down the Champs Elysees, barricades were set up to prepare for the Bastille Day Parade (which went on this morning, 14 July). We ended up walking by the river, past the Pont Neuf. Then we finally came to the Louvre and had only about two and a half hours in it. Fortunately, I spent a whole day in there the last time I was there so I could be a little bit more leisurely and see some of the things I hadn't seen the last time. I made sure I saw Cupid & Psyche though because that's probably my absolute favorite piece of art in the Louvre, if it's possible to pick a favorite from among all that amazing art. I also always like Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People."

Then we went to the Sacre Coeur, which I hadn't seen before. It's a beautiful domed cathedral. They had organ music and were singing hymns when we walked through, which was nice. When I visited Westminster Abbey during non-mass times, I felt like it was very commercialized. But this church, while obviously touristy, felt like it was trying to maintain some sense of the sacred. I'm not sure which is better because Westminster felt like it wasn't trying to hide anything. I went there last time I was in London during Holy Communion, which was very meaningful. But it seems to say, "Okay, during tourist hours, we are truly a tourist facility." But then the Sacre Coeur seems to say, "We'll allow tourists, but we want them to know that we are primarily an institution for worship and encountering God."

Then after that, we went back to the Gare du Nord train station, with incredibly sore feet and drooping eyelids. I normally can't sleep on trains, but I actually slept for about half the ride home, which was exciting. So anyways, my overall reaction to a second time in Paris: It's a beautiful city and I had a lot of fun, but it wasn't quite magical, the way my first time there was. I felt like I wanted more than a touristy experience, but I just couldn't get it in such a short time and with my non-existent French skills.

Ghosts of Summer Past, Present, and Future

2008-07-11T14:06:00.001-07:00

The Ghost of Summer Past: Dancing Queen, Young and Sweet

The Ghost of Summer Past is Meryl Streep dancing with a boa and generally looking really whacky. Last night, I saw Mamma Mia the movie, a week before it will hit the theatres in the U.S. I saw it in the Odeon Theatre on Tottenham Court Road. In London movie theatres, you have assigned seats which is really interesting. You can also get "a bag of sweets." You know in grocery stores when you can scoop one kind of candy into a bag and then they weigh it? The "bag of sweets" is like that, except that you can put as many different kinds of candy in as you want. I got a tiny bit of candy for just one pound, which is pretty good considering that I was dealing with movie theatre prices in the most expensive city in the world.

Anyways, it was such a fun movie! As Sarah Fuhr would say, it was one of those musicals where you just have to embrace the cheesiness. I am a sucker for musicals (as you can probably tell if you've read my previous blogs on Chicago and The Lord of the Rings musical). Even though this one was on the silver screen instead of the West End stage, I still enjoyed it immensely! And it was a lot cheaper than a live musical (though it cost ten pounds, which is like twenty dollars!). I definitely recommend seeing it if you like musicals, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Abba (haha), or just having a good time in general. One of my favorite parts of the movie was during the "Dancing Queen" song when all these middle-aged women were ditching their daily mundane lives and dancing crazily through the street, supposedly like when they were seventeen. It was one of those iconic musical moments where a few people start dancing and singing and pretty soon an uncountable number of people are joining in.

The Ghost of Summer Present: Down and Out in Paris and London

The Ghost of Summer Present is a 21-year-old girl who looks remarkably like me carrying a small overflowing bag down the streets of Paris. Everyone on my program is going to Paris this weekend, but it's going to be really inconvenient as far as our bags go. We get to Paris in the morning but don't check into our hotel until the afternoon and then the next day we check out at 10:00 a.m. and don't leave until the evening. I really didn't want to have to take my large computer backpack, so I just stuffed my purse instead. I have an umbrella, a clean shirt, some necessary toiletries, a camera, my cell phone, mints, Purell, money, my Oyster card (for London Underground transportation), the book I'm currently reading (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, fortunately in a small paperback version) my passport and blue card, maps/notes related to Paris, and my train tickets. All crammed into a medium-sized purse. I'm going to look like a hobo because I'm going to look like I'm carrying all my meager possessions with me and because I won't be wearing any make-up and because I'll be dressed fairly casually compared to Parisians. Plus Matt (my chiropractor) would yell at me if he knew I would be carrying all that weight on one side. But too bad, it's better than being bogged down with too much stuff when you have just a few short hours in one of the greatest cities in the world.

And yes, the book is a necessity! I've been reading on the Tube on my way to and from work, and it's amazing how much I've actually read! I thought I would barely read anything because I'm on one train for about 6 minutes and another for about 9 minutes, and of course you always have to move around to let people on and off the train. And I thought I wouldn't be able to focus in the crammed, hot environment. But actually, my powers of concentration while reading something I want to read are as great as they ever were. I kind of thought college had temporarily taken away my reading superpowers of my youth. But I've still got it! :-)

London is great because a ton of people read on the Tube and walk around reading while changing trains or riding the escalators to/from the trains. No one looks at you funny if you do it, which is great. It takes me back to when I was seven and I walked around the library reading because I was unable to wait until past check-out. I remember running into people and my dad told me, "See, that's why you shouldn't read while walking." I remember thinking to myself, "Nope, that's why I need to practice it more!" And now that practice is paying off!

P.S. My roommate's backpack is less than half full, so I get to put some of my stuff in there. But I'll still post the picture of what I was planning to do in my crazy state.

The Ghost of Summer Future: To Caunterbury They Wende

The Ghost of Summer Future is a train of Chaucer's pilgrims heading to Canterbury (but missing and going to Dover first and then backtracking to Canterbury). Kellie (my roommate), Jessica (one of the other girls on the program) and I are going to Dover and Canterbury a week from tomorrow for a day trip. We're planning to see the castle and white cliffs of Dover in the morning and then spend the rest of the day at Canterbury. We'll also end on a more optimistic note since Dover always reminds me of Matthew Arnold's sea of faith going out, while Canterbury is a nice pilgrimage site. As a sidenote, pilgrimage is a great concept because it is so far from cheesy concepts of easy faith. But anyways, since the subtitle of this section refers to Canterbury, I will close with Arnold's "Dover Beach."

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

What I Actually Do at My Internship

2008-07-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

So I realized that I haven't really talked much about my new internship, except for commenting that it's boring but a lot better than my old one. I will attempt to rectify that oversight at this time. Basically, I am in charge of researching a guidebook that Anthem Press is developing. It's a guidebook on the parks and gardens of Europe. I do a lot of internet searches to try to find a bunch of different information, like the opening hours, the contact info, admission fees (including concessions such as students or disabled individuals), guided tours (when they are, what languages they are in, how much they cost, how they can be arranged), facilities (handicap accessibility, restaurants on site or nearby, etc), special events, rules (ex. no dogs, no picnics), how to get there by public transportation and by car, and three key features (ex. largest collection of orchids in Germany). Then I also get to write a 130-150 word description of each garden. I don't know how good my writing has been though because I'm supposed to get 6-8 of these done per day.

It doesn't sound like that difficult of a job, which it isn't in the sense that it doesn't really require much brainpower. But it is really difficult to find all that information because a lot of it just isn't on the internet (in which case I have to email the gardens and feel presumptuous to expect them to speak English to me). Of course, English is the best language to know for this project if you're only going to know one because it's the most common "second language" for Europeans to speak and for the websites to be available in. But many of the websites don't have English-language versions, so I've been relying on Google's automatic translator in conjunction with online language conversion dictionaries. The automatic translator is very helpful and I don't want to belittle it, but it's also good for a lot of laughs. One thing that's really funny is that it tries to translate everything it can, including names. In a list of German names like Dr. Maria Dobner, Bernhard Winzenhörlein, and Renate Hudak, I also saw: "Dr. - goats bacon - Weg 10." I'm not sure what the Weg 10 is for, but Dr. goats bacon is actually Dr. Ziegenspeck. I was seriously trying so hard not to laugh because I didn't want to have to explain myself to my coworkers, who probably wouldn't have found it that funny. But when you're sitting there for hours and hours, trying to decipher Google's ridiculous translations, things like that are just hilarious. Another interesting thing Google translator does is change around special characters from other languages. For example, it translated "Tropengewächshaus" (which I happen to know means "tropical greenhouse" because of my new German vocabulary) into "Tropengew & auml ; chshaus." As though that's any more readable. It's also funny because Google can't determine contexts at all, which is where the German-English and French-English dictionaries come in handy. For example, one of the words in German for "guided tour" is the same as the word for "leadership." So Google translated it "leadership" all over the place and I guessed it was supposed to mean "guided tour," and the dictionary confirmed that for me.

As a sidenote, it's very annoying to copy and paste things that have been automatically translated. (I have to copy and paste all my sources into a Word document to be printed off later.) When it's pasted, it alternates the original language with the translation, so I have to go through and find all the German/French and delete it so that only the English remains. But it's a little complicated because about every tenth word or so of the translated section is still in another language because Google was unable to translate it.

I am also highly amused by the way these botanists talk about their subject. One person was hailed as being one of Europe's greatest plant geographers. (I'm sure that doesn't sound all that funny to all you normal people who don't have to read these things for hours on end.) One of the botanical gardens in Belgium called its trees "champion trees of Belgium." It's just really obscure things that I can't really imagine being excited about, but they are just thrilled by them. It's very funny when you read these things for hours on end in Google's ridiculous automatically translated language.

I insert all the information I can find into an Excel spreadsheet and I email the gardens to find any more information or to ask for clarification, etc. And then I move on to the next garden. As I said, it's a bit boring and I don't feel like I'm getting a great feel for the book publishing industry as a whole. Actually, the press I work for is so small that almost all of their editing and cover design is done by freelancers. But the people I work with are nice and at least I have a book publishing internship to put on my CV (resumé). And THANKFULLY it's not my old horrible internship at Goodlife! So overall, I think it's a valuable experience. And at the end, I will have my name in the book and they'll send me a copy gratis.

New Facebook Album--"I Love This City"

2008-07-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045295&l=25c57&id=63802126

Only 5 pictures so far, but it will probably be close to full by the end of tomorrow (Sunday)

Lord of the Rings Musical

2008-07-05T16:07:00.001-07:00

Tonight I went to the Lord of the Rings musical, which I just had to see because it's closing in the middle of this month, probably never to re-open anywhere in the world. While this musical will never be critically acclaimed--and rightly so, as the song lyrics were definitely below average, the music itself was good but not spectacular, and some of the dialogue felt a little forced--I truly enjoyed it. I was sitting in the middle of the fifth row, which is pretty much a perfect seat!

Like the movies, the musical had its fabulous moments and its flops. However, I was pleasantly surprised that the musical--unlike the movies--was generally very true to the characters as they are portrayed in the book. We had no falling, anguished, foaming at the mouth Frodo. Instead, he managed to keep up his spirits and his courage at all the right points though still maintaining the right amount of struggle with the temptation of the Ring and the burden of carrying it. And, his quintessential failing at Mount Doom (when he claims the Ring for his own) was absolutely brilliant. And I still hail Tolkien's genius with his un-cheesy, un-contrived way of showing that mercy/love triumphs over evil by having Gollum be the cause of the Ring's destruction. Frodo's quintessential success is sparing Gollum's life, and that is the reason that Middle-Earth was saved in the end.

The musical was a little over three hours long (so about the length of one of the films) but it managed to include many of the details that, in my opinion, make the book amazing but unfortunately the films left out in favor of lengthy battle scenes. They had the scouring of the Shire, a mention of Tom Bombadil, Legolas and Gimli's discussion about the various realms they would show each other after the war is over, the fact that 17 years went by between Bilbo's birthday party and Frodo's leaving the Shire (though I guess that detail isn't incredibly important, in my opinion), and many other things. They also managed to include a lot of important details from the Silmarillion, such as the fact that Galadriel was one of the elves to cross over the sea from Valinor and therefore one of the first elves to set foot in Middle-Earth.

Speaking of Galadriel, her character was interesting in the musical. The movies focused on her greatness and mystery whereas the musical focused on her more joyful side (though that's not quite the right word) and, interestingly, her love of Lothlorien (the land she set up for herself and her elves). I wholeheartedly approved of the way the musical emphasized the fact that the destruction of the One Ring meant that Lothlorien and the elves in general would fade away and that the world would never be the same. But I'm not sure that I liked the almost bubbly Galadriel. I mean, they still showed her greatness and there were some great images of her in a golden dress with the golden wood around her and a golden light behind her. And they also included the whole "instead of a dark lord you would have a queen" speech. But the first time we see her, she's coming down from the ceiling on a fancy ribbon in a slightly reclined position, singing about how much she loves Lothlorien. It reminded me more of Guinevere in the movie version of Camelot when she's singing "The Lusty Month of May."

However, the stagecraft was probably the best I've ever seen. I don't even think I can describe it all. But Gandalf with the Balrog, Aragorn when making his speech before the gates of Mordor, the Ring-wraiths, and the first time we see elves were all amazing parts of the musical. But probably my favorite part from a stagecraft perspective was when Frodo was crossing the river into Rivendell because you really got a sense that all sorts of forces that are--at least at this point--incomprehensible to the hobbits are coming out of the woodwork. The lighting and the moving stage made it seem kind of dream-like, and you see and hear a lady elf singing in the background with a light behind her and hear Elrond rebuke the river in a mighty voice. And then the (AMAZING!!) Ring-wraiths are swallowed up by this artistically flowing fabric. (Okay, sorry, I am really doing an awful job of describing this. But it was really great.)

There was also a lot of effort put into making the audience feel like they are a part of the action. The front of the theatre was made to look like branches were growing all over it, including the front rows of the balcony. There was a large ring with a black background in the middle of the stage background (this background could be lifted up as well). About fifteen minutes before the musical started, the hobbits were all on stage hanging out and just living normal lives in the Shire. The main bit of action going on was that they were catching fireflies and putting them in a jar. But there were also hobbits hanging out and talking about Bracecurdles and taters and just living their joyful simple lives. Right when the musical started, they released the fireflies into the black part of the ring on the stage. There was a normal intermission, but there was also a shorter break between the second and third acts, and the audience was supposed to remain in their seats. At this point, the lights were set so that it looked like moonlight coming through the branches, and the orc actors were running around throughout the theatre, hiding and kind of popping out here and there. And when Gandalf was fighting the Balrog, little bits of black paper and smoke were blown right into the audience.

I guess, overall, I was impressed by how much the musical felt like the book at times. It would have felt more like the book if more of the song lyrics and dialogue were taken right from Tolkien instead of using poorly rewritten versions. Even though Denethor seemed more like Theoden and even though his curse was broken by Aragorn instead of Gandalf and even though Rohan and Gondor were combined and even though Pelennor and Helm's Deep were combined, I still thought it was very true to the books. Little plot details are not what I'm concerned with; I understand that it is quite difficult to adapt a 1000+ page book into a film or stage version. I just felt that the people who created the musical had a better sense of what was "essential" to the story than did the people who made the films. Yes, the films were better made from a critical standpoint than this musical (whose only truly outstanding point was its stagecraft/special effects). But from my perspective, character and theme are the most important, and I think that this musical did a good job of keeping those true to the book. Now if only the dance choreography, the dialogue, and the song lyrics (and even some of the song melodies) were better, it could have been absolutely astounding. So...my conclusion is that I am VERY glad I saw it and it was totally worth the forty pounds! :-)

On my way back, I was walking through Covent Garden, and I heard a guy, apparently named Luca (from the business card I grabbed as a souvenir), singing "Hallelujah" (Rufus Wainwright, Shrek, "it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah," etc) and he sounded really good. It was a nice night with a perfect breeze so I decided to join the small crowd that had gathered around this street performer. The next song he sang I hadn't heard before, but I'm assuming it was called "True Colors." It morphed into a medley with "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World." He did a couple medleys like that, including one with "One of Us" (Joan of Arcadia theme song, "what if God was one of us"). At the end he sang that song that goes, "And I don't want the world to see me / 'Cause I don't think that they'd understand / When everything's meant to be broken / I just want you to know who I am." Anyways, he had a really good voice and it was just fun to actually stand and listen to a street performer instead of just rushing past them in the Tube station on my way to/from work.

Earlier today, a group of us went to the London Zoo, which was fun. Pictures are going up on Facebook after I finish this blog post. Then the whole internship program went to Ruby Blue for dinner. And then after that was the evening I've been describing. So yeah...tonight was pretty much perfect. It's why I love this city!

New Facebook Album--"And All That Jazz"

2008-07-04T15:09:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045252&l=75436&id=63802126

Just a reminder to people like my parents...Each photo album will be updated until it contains about 60 photos. So just because you click on the link once doesn't mean that you will see all the pictures. I'll be updating it until it's full. (Sorry if you already knew that. I just realized yesterday, "Hmmm...I wonder if my parents have actually seen all my pictures.") :-)

Literary London, Chicago, and American Independence Day

2008-07-04T13:59:00.001-07:00

The past three nights I've hardly had time to go on the computer and write blog entries or even check email. But they have been great! On Wednesday night, I went on one of the famous London Walks. You just show up at the meeting point at the correct time and then you're off on a guided tour of some of the lesser-known parts of the city. The walking tour I went on was called "The Literary London Pub Walk." We saw Charles Dickens' house (which I actually visited the last time I was here), the house of Dickens' best friend (the only person he ever confided in about his horrible time at the blacking factory as a child), a castle-ish building where lawyers used to reside and have their offices (John Donne worked there and it's said that he heard "the bells tolling" from that building, and Oscar Wilde went there to get legal advice when he was accused of "sodomy," i.e. homosexuality, which was illegal at the time), Bloomsbury Square (of Virginia Woolf and the "bohemian" intellectual artists/writers group called the Bloomsbury Group), the church where Sylvia Plath got married to the guy a lot of people blame for her later depression and suicide, etc. Our tour guide was very knowledgeable and told us about a lot of random things. Like, for example, houses where the windows are in line with the walls instead of set back a little are from before 1700 or so, because after the Great Fire they were declared a fire harzard. And houses with wide doorways and only one step are from a time when women wore really gaudy hats with parasols attached to them, and they couldn't go up or down very many stairs without falling over--which would be most unladylike, of course.

Also on that tour, I met two other women who were there by themselves. (Sounds like the dude ranch, right? Haha.) Doris is younger than her name makes her sound (probably 30-ish). She's an English professor who is originally from Germany but got her Ph.D. in America. She's been working at Auburn and is now taking a better position at a school in Iowa. She is in England for a conference where she'll be presenting a paper on Peter Ackroyd and A.S. Byatt and their use of museums in two of their novels. The other woman, Katie, is a high school English teacher. I can't remember where her school is, maybe South Carolina or something, but she doesn't particularly like the area. One of her biggest dreams is to move to San Francisco because she really loves that city. If she doesn't do that, she might go to Bangladesh to teach English as a second language. She's in London for a few days before going to Cambridge to take a class or two for a few weeks. One of the classes is on Medieval literature and "the gaze" (which is something I talked about a little in my Topics in Literature course). It was really fun for me to get to talk to these women as equals even though people like them were my teachers just a few weeks ago. But I felt like I was equally able to contribute to the discussions on English literature, which was very exciting for me. :-) We even all went out to a pub after the walk to get snacks.

On Thursday night, everyone in my program went to the theatre. We got to choose between Spamalot and Chicago. Obviously (from the title and from my usual interests), I chose Chicago. It was a little bit racy, but I really enjoyed it. There were a few somewhat opposing themes running throughout it. One was the overly optimistic reporter's idea that "there's a little bit of good in everyone." Another was the ironic statement from two charming female murderers who went free based on razzle dazzle in the courtroom that they are "living examples of why America is such a great country." And of course, there was the theme of wanting to be noticed and paid attention to. But anyways, the music was very enjoyable and Roxie Hart was a very enigmatic character. I really liked the choreography and the way the glitz and glamour were portrayed through lighting, costumes, falling silver confetti, whispers of "Roxie" in the background, etc. It really sweeps you into the emotion, like all good musicals do. (I seriously believe that combining the power of story with the power of music is pretty much insane. I always leave musicals feeling such a rush or a high...and all that jazz.)

Tonight is good old American Independence Day. My boss who is British joked to me and the other American intern, "Hey, congrat-
ulations." A few of us from the internship program went to the British Museum tonight because they were having an American-themed festival. There were people playing rugby football, a Cadillac (American car), American dancing (line dancing, the Charleston, etc), a live jazz band, and an American art exhibit called The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Polluck. One of the girls on my program knows a lot about jazz dancing, and she got one of her guy friends to teach me a few basic steps and turns, which was fun. I'm really glad I did something tonight, even though I didn't really expect to care about not celebrating the 4th. I did actually miss having a barbecue and seeing fireworks and whatever else. It's kind of ironic to be missing tradition when I'm in England, the great land of tradition. :-) But there you have it.

My internship is still sort of boring, but it's going well. But at the same time, I am extremely glad it's Friday! I'm looking forward to a whole weekend of enjoying all that London has to offer!

Ay, there's the rub...

2008-07-01T12:49:00.001-07:00

I realized today that lately I've been feeling really stressed. Not the same kind of stress I felt in school with a million terrible papers crawling up on me in the middle of the night like a thousand man-eating spiders. (Wow, that is an overdramatic analogy.) But it's more the stress of feeling like your life is in complete chaos and upheaval and there's nothing you can do to stop it. In fact, the harder you try to fix things, the worse they get.

Since the moment I got here, there were a million things to do that I didn't particularly want to do and that I didn't have the energy for. Right after I checked in, I knew I should unpack and try to make friends but all I really wanted to do was sleep...or maybe do a quick sightseeing activity. The next day, I needed to get a phone and toothpaste (I had been using my roommate's up until that point), etc. But it seemed like so much work to find out where to get those things and then when I finally found the stores, they were closed (of course, everything here opens late and closes early). Anyways, none of these things individually is a big deal, but a whole bunch of them kind of catches up with you.

Today, for example, I needed to do laundry. (Well, I'd been needing to do laundry for like three days.) The laundry room is open from 9:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. I work from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on the weekdays and I'm always sightseeing on the weekends. (I don't believe in sacrificing sightseeing time when I have such a limited amount of it and I'm in London, for crying out loud!) So today I got home from work at 6:00 p.m. and got my laundry in the machine by 6:15. I ate dinner and came back probably right after the load was done. But there are three washers and only two dryers, and I had to wait around for 20 minutes before I could put my clothes in. By the time I finally got to put my clothes in, it was 7:15 or so and the laundry room closes at 8:00. Not only that, but they say you have to be done with your load by 7:45. The dryer lets you pay for 20-minute increments, so I got 24 minutes. Of course, that's not enough time to dry your clothes, especially when the dryer is crappy. So I am now sitting in my tiny dorm room with my half-dry clothes strewn about me, supposedly drying. That kind of thing just makes me feel like my life is out-of-control.

Probably I'm overreacting, but it really is how I feel. And it's starting to affect me. I have been incredibly exhausted, and yesterday I went to bed really early. Consequently, I wasn't horribly tired today, but I still managed to do some pretty dumb things. Like I was transferring trains at Green Park, like I always do after work, and I just started following the "Way Out" signs instead of the signs for the Victoria Line. Now, those of you who know me best are probably thinking, "So what? Jessi gets lost all the time!" Ah, but not on the Tube! I am the queen of navigating the Tube! :-) So it was very weird.

Also, I managed to get out of the shower today without fully washing the shampoo out of my hair. And there's nothing wrong with the water pressure of the showers here. They may get clogged and overflow occasionally and they may be dirty sometimes, but the water pressure is perfect. So that was totally me just not paying attention or something. Actually, I don't even know how it happened. Again, very weird.

So yeah, I feel like my life is in complete upheaval and I am not very good at just accepting that and going with the flow. However, I also feel like I am always complaining on this blog and just writing about the bad things that are happening. (I think it's just because I have pictures of all the good things, so I feel like those stories are already being told. So I hope you are all looking at the Facebook pictures as well.)

Of course I am really enjoying being in England! My internship is somewhat boring, but hey, it's a book publishing internship, which is what I really wanted! I'm very glad that I have four weeks of free travel after the internship is over though. It's hard to switch between "work mode" and "sightseeing mode" rapidly because work mode is all about getting things done and checking things off your list. And sightseeing mode really shouldn't be that way for it to be most enjoyable. It should be like reading poetry...taking it slow, drinking it all in, savoring every moment.

Facebook Photos--Little Gidding

2008-06-30T12:03:00.001-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045032&l=eaf46&id=63802126
Album Title: Where Prayer Has Been Valid

New Facebook Photo Album

2008-06-29T05:05:00.001-07:00

For pictures of Stonehenge, see updates to my last photo album, entitled "The Life and Times of..."
For pictures of Bath, see the album "The Wife of Bath." Or copy and paste this link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044964&l=a4fd3&id=63802126

Thoughts on London Culture

2008-06-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

Bear in mind that I've only been here 2 weeks and that generalizations about whole groups of people are never entirely accurate.

The British Reserve
Also known as "the stiff upper lip" by some. It's a well-known stereotype that British people are difficult to get to know or even grouchy. In contrast, there is also the "merry England" charm idea. Bill Bryson (as quoted on my Facebook wall by Laura Jones) wrote:
"And [London] has more congenial small things -- incidental civilities, you might call them -- than any other city I know: cheery red mailboxes, drivers who actually stop for you at pedestrian crossings, lovely forgotten churches with wonderful names like St. Andrew by the Wardrobe and St. Giles Cripplegate.... What other great city would trouble to put blue plaques on houses to let you know what famous person once lived there, or warn you to look left or right before stepping off the curb? I'll tell you. None."

I think both of these ideas are true to some extent. London truly is a charming city, as big cities go. Its "incidental civilities" like look left/right signs or quaint names truly are endearing (and I mean that in a very NON-condescending way). But those who expect London to have small town charm will be sorely disappointed. Make no mistake about it: London is a large cosmopolitan city with petty crime and stuck-up, hurried individuals, just like New York or Paris or any other big city. It's relatively clean compared to most cities, but one can still find trash and rancid smells. And Bryson is wrong on one point: You WILL get smashed like a bug if you cross the street at the wrong time. Pedestrians do not have the right-of-way. (But then again, jaywalking is completely legal here. You just have to be aware of what's going on around you.)

The idea of the British people being unfriendly, however, I do have a problem with. It's true that you could be standing with a confused expression on your face, looking at a map in every possible direction, and more than likely, no one will stop to offer you any help. However, the minute you ask someone for help, more than likely they will stop and have a conversation with you about where you need to go. They may even say, "Oh, I'm going that way myself. We can get on the Tube together." You just have to break through the cultural reserve. And it's true that it's "every man for himself" getting on the Tube. But I really don't think that makes Londoners mean. It's just the way Tube culture has developed. (It would be pretty impossible to get everyone on the train in time if everyone hesitated, afraid of offending someone by going in front of them...Possibly that's why Minnesota has never developed a similar system, haha.) Anyways, all of this to say that London culture is a far cry from "Minnesota nice," but I think the people are equally good-hearted.

Food

The days of British food being bland are long gone. It's very possible to get any type of food you could want here. At the same time, there are some noticeable differences. For example, sandwiches frequently have rocket on them (funny spinach that looks like dandelion leaves). The sandwich I ate today had "comfy onion marmalade" on it, which was actually incredibly tasty! They are also less squeamish about their seafood. The first night I was here, they served us prawns, which look like large shrimp WITH FACES. I was too jet-lagged to gather up enough energy to try to eat one. Today, however, I decided to be brave and eat some creepy seafood. I ate an appetizer of fish with actual scales on it. I normally love trying new food, but I really was freaked out by this fish! But I put some lemon juice on it and actually ate the whole thing. It was pretty good, especially if you made a point not to look at it. It was a little spongy/rubbery and very fishy, but I liked the taste of it. I think I was like one of five (out of 135) people to actually eat one. England also has a lot of European gourmet cheeses, and my old boss at Goodlife even thought that we don't have much cheese in America, just because we don't have fancy runny cheeses. Call me a Philistine with an unrefined palate, but I still maintain that Wisconsin cheddar cheese is the Platonic ideal of cheese.

Monarchy

In America, we sort of gently laugh at England for clinging to its monarchic system, when the queen is "just a figurehead." However, I think that is a terrible way to look at it. When I toured the Tower of London and went to see the crown jewels, there was a room with little wooden thrones, each one emblazoned with the name of an English monarch from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II (current queen). When I saw this unbroken line (except for the two decade period of Oliver Cromwell's reign), it really hit me: ENGLAND STILL HAS A MONARCH. And because of it, they are connected to their history and the mythology of their nation in a way that America isn't. Yes, we have a chain of presidents but it really isn't the same, just like the prime ministers in England don't have the same associations that the queen does. And another thing that I think is really interesting is that the British can denigrate the policies of the prime minister and Parliament but still sing, "God save the queen!" and really mean it. (Not that everyone does, I'm sure, but I've definitely met people who do still find meaning and patriotism in it.) In America, we don't sing songs about our presidents; we only sing about vague ideals like freedom and justice. And I'm certainly not trying to denigrate ideals, of course! It's just that we have no personification of all that our country is supposed to be, a person whom we can look to and uphold and honor even if we are upset with our government.

Anyways, these are just a few of my random thoughts about all things British. Feel free to disagree because, as I said, these are just my perceptions after a couple weeks here.

The Next Chapter in the Saga

2008-06-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

My broad fan base has requested that I update the blog because they can't sleep at night waiting to hear what happened in this crucial turning point of my story. (Okay, one person, namely Ann Gullman, requested an update and I may have embellished how much she wanted an update.)

But anyways, quitting at Goodlife actually went surprisingly well. I wanted to be both honest and civil, and I think that aim was achieved. Both Brooke and Sara (and, of course, myself) were shocked at how well my boss took it. I stayed until lunchtime and then I practiced taking the Tube down to Anthem Press. It's also an office that looks like a flat, but it is much more organized and up-to-date technologically than Goodlife. Not to mention it has a much nicer staff and much worthier goals (the advancement of ideas and the betterment of people's minds).

The specific job I'll be doing is not INCREDIBLY interesting, but that's completely fine! I am basically in charge of conducting research for a guidebook about the best parks and gardens in Europe. Anthem Press is creating its own series of thematically-oriented guidebooks (they've done operahouses/music venues and art galleries/museums so far). It's a lot of tedious Google searching, but at the end of the day, I will actually be credited in a published book! So that is incredibly exciting! Plus I love researching travel options (though it's a lot more fun when you believe you'll actually be visiting the places).

This morning, I went to a World History conference to help sell and promote Anthem's world history titles. It was really slow, but it was still fun for me to feel like I was on the inside of a publishing convention. :-) I got to check in and say, "I'm Jessi. I'm here with Anthem Press." I also felt at home amongst the book publishing crowd. They are the type of people more interested in books and ideas than clothes or money. Interestingly enough, the conference was run by Americans, so there were quite a few American-speaking individuals there. It was funny because there was supposed to be both tea and coffee, but only the tea came out at first. Everyone flocked to the hot beverages table, but when the Americans found out that only tea was available at that time, they all said disappointedly, "Oh." Truth be told, I was a little disappointed too. I do really like English tea, but coffee is still my first love when it comes to hot caffeinated beverages. I, however, drank a cup of tea despite all my fellow Americans rejecting it. (I drank a cup of coffee later. Two caffeinated beverages are better than one!)

Besides getting a new internship, I have also visited the Tate Modern (just for a short time because it's free and I can go back) and Kellie and I went to Wimbledon! One of her friends (not from our program) is interning there, and she managed to get us free grounds passes. That means that we couldn't go to centre court to see the bigwigs, but we still got to see a really good match between two of the "lesser bigwigs." It was just really fun to be at a world-class event, and I think tennis is really good as far as sports go. It's kind of the chess of sports.

Anyways, I never know how to conclude my blog posts (which is possibly why I just keep going on and on, haha.) So...THE END.

Would You Like Some Cheese With that Whine?

2008-06-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

I just want to register a quick complaint. Not any of my faithful blog readers, of course, but other people in the outside world seem to have difficulty grasping how terrible my internship at Goodlife was/is. Brooke and I both feel that people don't understand what it's like. You can tell all the stories you want and express all the unhappiness and stress you can, but people think you're just whining. Lots of managers are like that, they seem to say. You're not going to have a perfect job when you're just an intern. Yes. Obviously. I have had crappy jobs before that I've hated but I have never in my life quit a job after just a few days simply because I didn't particularly like it. In fact, I've almost always quit jobs after I've worked at them the amount of time I thought I would (the summer, the school year, whatever). And usually whenever I quit, my boss/manager requests multiple times that I stay and tells me that I can come back any time. So I'm not entirely unexperienced with working, and I'm usually considered a very good worker with a very good attitude. (Sorry if I'm sounding prideful; I need to work on that, I guess.) So it's just really frustrating when people here think that I'm just whining and that my job really can't be that bad and that I probably just didn't know what to expect, etc. So as I said, it's none of you, but it does matter to me that you understand because I want SOMEONE to understand and not think I'm crazy. It really is bad enough to get a new placement, I promise. I know what's an acceptable amount of stress and negative work environment and horrible co-workers and mundane jobs and disorganized systems and what is over the line. This place is over the line.

BRILLIANT!

2008-06-24T10:32:00.001-07:00

As the Brits would say, I have BRILLIANT news! I just received word that Anthem Press has decided to hire me as an intern for the remainder of my time in London! I am so unbelievably excited to get out of working at Goodlife and to start working at a wonderful book publishing company!

Work today was particularly horrid. You know how Miranda Priestly (from The Devil Wears Prada) always tells her assistants to do things but they have no idea what she means and she refuses to answer questions but gets really angry if things aren't done properly? Well, my boss at Goodlife is pretty much exactly that way. For example, today she was quite adamant that I find an email from "Thomas C---" and I searched all throughout every folder I could think of on the editor.goodlifemedia email address. Then I told her I couldn't find any emails from Thomas, and she said, "Well, maybe it's on another computer." So I asked Brooke to look on her computer's email, and she couldn't find it. I finally asked Noreen if she knew where I might find the email, and she explained generally what the email was about, and I was like, "Oh, I know that email! I read it this morning!" I went back to the computer I was using, and the email was not from anyone named Thomas C---. It was from a gentleman with an Italian-sounding name who had published two ads in our last issue of Goodlife Magazine, one of which was for a company called Thomas C---. So I was just supposed to know that, apparently. My boss was also in a particularly foul mood, yelling at everyone and even throwing pens. She told me that she's had dogs who are brighter than one of my co-workers and she said that Brooke (and, by extension, all interns) are "not important" while Brooke was in the room.

Two good things did happen at work today though. First of all, Brooke and I decided to take the Tube down one stop to West Fulham and eat lunch there. We ate at a pub with personality called The Slug. They had Wimbledon on in the background, and we got to see a little bit of Venus Williams playing. Our food took way longer to get there than we thought it would. Then we had to wait over 20 minutes for our train back to West Brompton station (where we get out for Goodlife) because, as the announcer kept saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing severe delays on the District line." In England, everyone gets really long lunch breaks (usually an hour minimum). We were gone for an hour and a half or so! Normally, of course this would really stress me out. But my internship is so stressful that I didn't even care. Suffering a little disapproval for being late from lunch is nothing because if we got back on time, we'd be suffering disapproval for something else.

The other good thing that happened today was that I got to meet a real British lord! I know throughout this whole internship I've been like, "I don't care about wealthy or elite people; they're just the same as other people." Which is true, of course. But meeeting a real British lord who is, in Ilana's words, "not just a lord but a really good person," was really fun. When he met me, he did one of those European handshakes and kiss on the cheek things, which I think is great. Just the fact that he is a British lord reminds me of Mr Darcy or Aragorn or something.

But anyways, I am just so glad to be done with that horrible internship and to be starting a new and exciting one! The only thing that's bad is that Brooke hasn't gotten another placement yet because my new one came around really quickly. It would be so awful to go to Goodlife alone, especially when I'm sure she'll have to endure pointed questions about my leaving. So I REALLY hope that she gets a new placement soon too!

Hope on the Horizon

2008-06-23T13:20:00.001-07:00

My meeting with Stefan last night went really well! Brooke and I felt that he really listened and was willing to help. He is currently trying to help both of us get new internship placements. I am in the process of applying for an internship with Anthem Press. They are an academic book publishing house that puts out books on literature, history, politics, travel, etc. In short, it sounds absolutely perfect! I really wanted a book publishing internship this summer so that I could figure out if I'd rather pursue book publishing or magazine publishing (I'd had an online magazine internship last spring). Obviously, the topics are right up my alley.

I'm supposed to take an hour-long "test" before they decide if they're interested in hiring me. They will email me a short project which will show whether I have the ability to gather and communicate information accurately, concisely, and clearly. Hopefully I will do a really good job on this!

This press wasn't one of the options during my initial internship search last spring. They just recently emailed Stefan and asked if there would be any publishing interns who would be interested in working there. Stefan originally told them that the program had already started and that all the interns had already been placed. But at the meeting yesterday, he thought maybe I'd be interested in trying to work there. I don't want to presume to know the mind of God, but it seems like it could be a "God thing."

War and Peace

2008-06-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to the American Church in London. I was a little bit hesitant to go to the "American" Church when I want to experience British-ness to its fullest. But I also want to get to know some more people on this trip, and there were two other young women going to this church this morning. It actually turned out to be really good! I felt at home right away; I couldn't believe how good it felt just to go to church! The songs are pretty traditional, which is interesting because I've never really experienced that before. The message today (preached by a woman, which I was excited about) was really good. It was about Peter's vision of unclean animals coming down on the sheet and how God shakes us out of our comfort zones and teaches us to follow him through uncomfortable changes. The songs we sang were all about God's faithfulness and his changelessness. It was exactly the type of service I needed after this past week.

There aren't a TON of people who go to this church, which is also fun for me because I've never really gone to a small church. Brittney (one of the other girls from my program) and I went out to eat with the pastor who preached, the senior pastor, his wife, and his son. That was really exciting to get to do! (The other girl who had come actually had to leave early to go somewhere else.) While walking to church, Brittney, Jessica (the third girl), and I talked about how it's frustrating to try to have deeper conversations with people on this trip. Most of them want to go to pubs and clubs, and those atmospheres aren't exactly conducive to good conversation. After the service, Brittney and I talked about trying to start a "Religious Discussion Group" where anyone who is interested in spiritual issues, no matter what their belief system (even if they don't have one currently) can come and talk. We're just hoping for open and genuine conversation. We'll see if anyone else is interested.

After lunch, I went to the Cabinet War Rooms and Winston Churchill Museum. They're in Westminster (the neighborhood of Parliament and Westminster Abbey). The war rooms are still furnished exactly as they were in 1940, when they were used as Churchill's secret wartime headquarters during WWII. Recently, I've been very aware of and moved by war. At the dude ranch, I met someone in the Marines who reminded me of the good that has come out of the Iraq War, and her passion for what she does and for protecting the country she loves were very admirable to me. When I came here, I saw a permanent demonstration against the Iraq War that reminded me of the senselessness and anguish of any war and how this war is possibly even more so that way than some others. This group has been camped out near Parliament for years, and their passion and conviction are also admirable to me. When I went to the crypt in St Paul's Cathedral, there were a ton of memorials to people who had died in war. One in particular read: "IN HONOUR OF THE SOUTH ATLANTIC TASK FORCE AND TO THE ABIDING MEMORY OF ALL THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES ~ APRIL - JUNE 1982." Beneath the plaque were flowers placed there by the soldiers' loved ones. This literally made me cry (okay, I wasn't blubbering like an idiot) because there were so many names of people I'd never even heard of. In fact, I don't even know anything about the South Atlantic Task Force. I guess it just makes me so sad that so many nameless (to history) people have died in war, fighting for stupid things that schoolchildren will be bored learning about. But then, these people weren't nameless and faceless; they were beloved by those who placed flowers at the only grave they'll ever have. And then the Churchill Museum reminded me that, as much as I would like to be a gung-ho pacifist, I can't, at least not completely. Churchill was branded a warmonger by some who just wanted to keep appeasing Hitler, but I think almost everyone now agrees that Hitler absolutely had to be stopped--and he had to be stopped by force. Bonhoeffer believed that there was no such thing as just violence, but he was a part of a team that planned to assassinate Hitler. He thought it wasn't right but it was necessary.

Later tonight, I'm meeting with my internship advisor to discuss my terrible internship situation and to see what my options are. Basically, I want a new placement. Never in my life have I quit a job after only a few days just because I didn't like it, but this one is just horrible. I hate it, and I don't think I can handle going back there! Plus, I am going into thousands of dollars of debt for this trip, so it had better be a good experience. Hopefully the meeting will go well, and something will be solved.

More Facebook Pictures 2

2008-06-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044594&l=ad367&id=63802126

More Facebook Pictures

2008-06-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044555&l=a1082&id=63802126

Can Dreams Come True?

2008-06-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

Over the past few months, I've been thinking about the notion of dreams coming true and whether that's even possible. (I promise, this blog is not going to be quite as pessimistic as it's sounding right now.) In a journal entry from my trip to the dude ranch, I wrote about Reading Lolita in Tehran, the book I was reading at the time:

"In the section on The Great Gatsby, Nafisi talks a lot about the loss of dreams and how that relates to Iran and her own experiences. She imagines her current self talking to her younger self about the dreams and ideals that would be shattered when they were seen too closely. In some ways and on a very small scale, this trip [the dude ranch trip] has been like that...If I could have told my younger self that a dude ranch vacation would not be pure magic but that it would involve sore muscles, sunburn, feeling a little patronized by the staff, being out of my element, etc., I highly doubt I could have convinced my younger self...I didn't need to experience going too far physically with a guy, getting drunk, or doing drugs to believe that they weren't worth it. But no one would have been able to tell me that my dreams may not be worth all I thought they were."

The dude ranch trip was a fulfillment of my dearest childhood dream and this current England trip is a fulfillment of my dearest college dream. Well, my dearest save one: to graduate with highest honors and a bunch of other academic/professional accolades. That dream was also fulfilled. And yet...the reality of living these dreams was not what I thought it would be.

I was exhausted all throughout my last week of college. Even though it was filled with awards ceremonies and fun banquets and walking down an aisle with several stupid strips of ribbon that I nearly killed myself to win, reality was always present. And what is reality filled with? The details and dirtiness of life that we forget about in our dreams. Socially awkward moments, feet aching and sweating in high heels, feeling insecure about an outfit or bad hair day, realizing your name is about to be called and then thirty seconds later it's all over.

I read a book last year called Stumbling on Happiness, and the author Daniel Gilbert says exactly that: When people imagine a particularly wonderful future, they are never as happy as they expected to be when the dream is fulfilled. Why? Because when they imagined the fulfillment of the dream, they neglected to imagine all the little annoyances that would also be occurring. But at the same time, when a particularly negative dream (a nightmare) is fulfilled, people end up being a lot less depressed and destroyed than they thought they would be. They can carry on because life also contains little moments of normalcy and joy even in the midst of the worst situations.

The whole of my England trip is, I suspect, a good dream that has been fulfilled with some unexpected problems. The internship portion of my trip, however, is more like a nightmare that has been fulfilled. However, that means that there will also be some "silver linings." I suppose the trick is to purposefully notice and remember those moments. And I don't mean I should naively focus only on those happy moments and ignore the difficulties; I don't believe in that. But in order to do an "unbiased" survey of my own life, I cannot weight the negative moments more heavily than the positive ones.

In any case, I'll move on from the philosophizing of this blog post to discuss my day today. Very briefly, since this post is already a zillion miles long. It was slightly better today, but not much. My boss couldn't believe I didn't know what Ivana Trump looked like and said that I obviously had not been keeping up with my world events. (This was a humorous part of the day, not a difficult or negative part...until a bit later, I guess.) Apparently Ivana is marrying a man about twenty years younger than she is, and apparently this has been all over TV. I would just like to add that yesterday my boss referred to Tony Blair as the current prime minister of England. :-)

Anyways, she wanted me to do this PhotoShop project, which was boring but a lot better than some of the things I was doing yesterday. I just had to do the same mind-numbing sequence to about 80 pictures that were taken at a party she attended yesterday. Ivana Trump was there, so that's why we were discussing her. I did as many as I could in the time I had left at the office (and I even stayed a half hour late!) but I only got about 30 done because the computer was U-N-B-E-L-I-E-V-A-B-L-Y slow. My boss, who was out for the afternoon, called to ask me how the project was going because she needed the pictures by tonight. I told her about the computer problems, and she said, "Oh well, just do the ones with Ivana in them; those are the ones I need." So I repeated that I didn't know what she looked like, and I asked what she had been wearing that day. She said, "A white suit." I said okay and then realized that about half the women had white suits. So I asked my extremely nice co-worker Sara who Ivana was, and we finally figured it out. Unfortunately, there were 10-15 of Ivana and I hadn't done a single one! Sara graciously offered to take care of it for me since it was past time for me to leave. I felt bad, but I agreed because I REALLY wanted to get out of there. I left an apologetic note for my boss (who sometimes gets ridiculously upset if people don't finish things that they were supposed to finish). I'm actually a bit more worried that Sara won't be able to finish it and then my boss will take it out on her (because she always takes things out on her, which I think is so ridiculous).

I was feeling annoyed about my internship, once again. After dinner, however, I decided to enjoy the fact that I'm in London. Even though all the sights close between 4:30 and 6:30, I realized that they can't exactly take down the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge, even if the exhibitions and tours are closed. (They do, however, feel the need to perform some construction/restoration on the Tower of London even though it has withstood battles and hundreds of years.) This visit was a lot of fun, probably the most fun I've had since arriving in London. I was so tired and jet-lagged until about yesterday that I almost didn't want to do anything. Fortunately, I have now gotten over that and I'm ready to do and see everything I can. After going to the Tower Bridge, I went to King's Cross Station to visit the sign for Platform 9 3/4 (of Harry Potter fame, for the poor deprived souls who don't know). I think that's a good picture to include, considering that this is a strangely appropriate blend of fiction (dreams) and reality. Hence, we have come full circle.

Second Round of Facebook Pictures

2008-06-18T12:01:00.001-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044328&l=1cc5a&id=63802126

The Devil (Wearing Prada) is in the Details

2008-06-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

How do I put this delicately? My internship makes me want to run away to Scotland. First of all, it's not even a real publishing internship! The two magazines Goodlife Media produces contain NO content that wasn't paid for by companies who want advertising. The so-called restaurant and cultural event "reviews" aren't real reviews; they're advertising! I knew when I accepted this internship that I'm not really into fashion and elite wealthy culture, but I really thought it was at least a respectable magazine (even if it was in an unrespectable--in my opinion--field of journalism).

Worse yet, I'm not even working on the magazines! Goodlife is also a public relations and events planning group, and right now they are absorbed in planning their two illustrious parties. So Brooke (the other intern) and I spent all day calling and inviting wealthy snobs to these frivolous events. And now we come to the crux of the horror of my internship. I could sink into blissful ignorance of the pointlessness and frivolity of my internship and I could even forget the fact that I am planning events instead of writing and editing...IF and only if the working environment was something I could handle. If things were organized and I felt that I was accomplishing something and things were coming together, I could handle almost anything.

However, I have never in my entire life seen anything as disorganized as Goodlife Media. You would think that a company that enjoys hob-nobbing with the uppercrust would at least have a basic database of contacts with email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers. Believe it or not, they don't. They had a very specific--but impossible to decipher--idea about which patricians should be allowed to come to each event and which VVIPs we simply had to entice to grace us with their presence. This messy, partially handwritten, partially computerized, list had next to no phone numbers or email addresses on it. And yet they kept telling me, "Call these people! We must get these people to come!" To which I would respond, "Which event should I invite them to, or are we inviting them to both?" Alanna: "Uh, I don't remember" or "Don't you see? The pink dot? That means the July 8th event!" And then, "Well, Alanna, I would love to call yet another busy person who thinks he/she is God's gift to humanity just because he/she has money, but sadly there is no phone number here. How shall I get around that obstacle?"

It was awful! Chaos makes me seasick, no joke. And calling snobby people when I don't have any idea of what I'm supposed to say is also terrible. I wouldn't mind doing that if I felt competent and well-informed because then I can act professional and think on my feet, etc. But in an environment in which Alanna comes running, talking loudly, and searching on my computer WHILE I AM ON THE PHONE WITH A VIP, I just about crack.

One person I talked to on the phone (after making me wait for several minutes while finishing up a conversation with another one of his well-endowed acquaintances without even the standard unfelt apology) said, "Well, I'd be interested in coming, but I've received invitations from your office before. They've called and said they would email me an official invitation but they never followed up properly." I said, "Well, we'll be sure to get you an invitation this time." (Even though it's not like I could really be sure of that, since I had witnessed firsthand the upheaval of Goodlife.) And I asked whether he would rather have it by post or by email. He said that he'd asked for emails from us before with less than satisfactory results, so we'd better send him the invitation by post. (I should have been able to enjoy the moment because it came naturally to me to say "post" instead of "mail" or "snail mail," but I could not because of the circumstance.)

I expected my internship to be challenging, and I expected it to be in a fast-paced environment. But I thought the chaos would be organized chaos and I thought the fast pace would be running efficiently towards a goal.

Brooke and I were ranting about our internship while walking back to our Tube stop and we weren't paying very much attention while crossing the street. (Believe me, you CANNOT do that in London if you want to stay alive.) We almost got run over by a van that was NOT slowing down! The best part of my day was going out to lunch with her and getting a very English meal of eggs on toast. (Hence the picture in this post.)

Going Up the Apple and Pears

2008-06-17T13:01:00.001-07:00

Today was my first day interning with Goodlife Media, a publishing company that puts out two magazines (The Goodlife Magazine and London Hotel). It's also a public relations and events planning company, and it has a lot of contacts with the wealthy and elite people of London.

I was, of course, a little nervous for my first day. I really hate first days of anything because everything is so unknown and chaotic. But I felt exhilarated when I was taking the Tube to work because it really hit me that I was going to work at a magazine in London!

My first day was pretty good. The office is really small with only a few employees, which I like because then I'll get to do more things than if I worked for a larger organization. My boss is a little bit quirky and a little bit bi-polar. She's usually really sweet and upbeat, but she got really mad at one of the other workers today for a seemingly ridiculous reason.

I started out the day by editing a letter that they were sending out to high class jewellers, inviting them to participate in an upcoming party hosted by Goodlife. I was surprised at how badly written it was, but that made my changes look really good, I guess. My boss dictated some stuff to me, but her wording was really awkward and unnecessarily lengthy. At first, I thought she might get annoyed if I "fixed" the things she had me write verbatim, but fortunately she liked my changes. I also wrote a few 50-word book review blurbs based off of back covers and publishers' comments. I will be communicating with clients, so I did a little bit with emailing today. And of course, quite a bit of the day was spent in training and orientation.

There's one other intern from my program working at Goodlife Media. Her name is Brooke, and she is also interested in writing and editing. She was a journalism major in college. It's really nice to have someone else to compare notes with.

Goodlife generally seems like a nice, friendly place to work. I had three cups of tea today because my boss kept asking if I wanted one, and I was like, "Sure." There's also a kitchen in the office, and one of my co-workers had made a lot of Indian food, so she shared it with everyone else (which was nice because then I didn't have to spend any money on lunch today). And at the end of the day, my boss let us try on these designer hats that probably cost more than half the clothes I own combined. That was a lot of fun though.

This evening, I officially got my passport and blue card checked out by BUNAC, so I am set to work for up to six months. Even though I knew I had gotten the correct passport stamp at immigration, it was still a relief to have that all settled because otherwise I would have had to leave the UK immediately and re-enter (which is extremely expensive and time-consuming). At this meeting tonight, we also had a "cultural seminar" to explain a few things about British culture that we might not have known. I didn't find it particularly informative, but I did enjoy hearing about Cockney rhyming slang. The title of my post, "going up the apple and pears," means "going up the stairs." I chose it because it reminded me of "moving up in the world," which is how I felt when I was riding the Tube to work this morning.

Cheers!

Facebook Pictures!

2008-06-15T13:43:00.001-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044205&l=0bf16&id=63802126
Click on this link to view my first England photo album on Facebook. I'll be updating it frequently, probably when I update this blog. I'll give the links to new photo albums as I create them.

Fun Activities

2008-06-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

Despite all the busyness of the past day and a half, I have managed to do some fun things. Last night, a few of us went out to a pub near Piccadilly Circus. I had a half-size alcoholic cider, which actually tasted pretty good. It was the first drink I actually managed to finish! (It was only my third drink ever, in case there's anyone who's reading this blog who doesn't already know that I haven't drunk much alcohol before.) It was fun to experience a genuine British pub!

Today, after the big orientation, my roommate Kellie and I went to Regent's Park. It's beautiful and very peaceful, even though it's filled with people. At first, I thought it was just peaceful because everyone's there to have a good time. But places like malls, amusement parks, and state fairs are also filled with people who are generally trying to have a good time. I didn't come to any conclusions, but I also haven't really thought about it very much. Maybe it's just because everyone's there to having a RELAXING good time and not just any type of good time. Or maybe it's just because there are beautiful gardens, ducks, swans, trees, and a lake around.

Tomorrow I'm planning to explore the city some more and probably buy a few more necessities that I haven't found yet. I don't start work until Tuesday morning, so the only thing I have to be sure to do tomorrow is practicing riding the Tube (the Underground, subway) to work.

Welcome to London!

2008-06-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

After months of planning and hours of travelling, I am finally here in London! I got here around 2pm London time on Saturday (yesterday), and I've spent almost the entire time moving in, going to orientations, shopping for necessities (like the proper converter to plug in my computer), and figuring out a bit about how my life will be working for the next eight weeks.

I have actually been a little overwhelmed. I didn't expect to be because I've travelled to Europe before, and England was by far the easiest place to navigate (primarily because everyone speaks English but also because the culture is most similar to American culture). So I thought anyone who talks about having culture shock when going to England must be pretty sheltered. But there actually was a little bit of that for me. For example, I had to throw away my full tube of toothpaste at the Minneapolis airport because my bag was over 50 pounds, and I didn't know where I could find toothpaste here. It's not like England has Target stores! It's a lot more difficult to move to a place like England than it is to just travel around it. And I do feel like I've moved in here; I unpacked all my stuff just like I always did for college.

Even more overwhelming than the "culture shock," however, is meeting a ton of new people at once. When I was at the dude ranch in Colorado, I had a blast getting to know two young women about my age and the rest of the guests at the ranch. It's much easier for me to get to know a few people at a time and to be able to have good conversations with them than it is for me to be thrown into a situation where there are over a hundred people all milling around and meeting one another. Not that I am unable to deal with situations like the latter, obviously; it's not my "cup of tea."

I'm also getting nervous about starting a new job! I'm excited to have such an interesting position, but it's always a bit difficult to start a new job just because everything is so unknown. I'll be doing a publishing/editing/writing internship with Goodlife Media, a company that produces two magazines: London Hotel and Goodlife Magazine. The first magazine is placed in every 4- and 5-star hotel in the London area and is therefore geared toward tourists. The other one is delivered to wealthy West End London residents. I'm really excited to get to learn how a print magazine is produced, but the topic (wealthy, elite culture) would not have been my first choice. However, it should be really fun to get to learn more about the uppercrust's lifestyle that I would probably never get to experience otherwise.

Of course, I don't want to sound like I am complaining or upset in this blog post. Yes, things have been a bit harder than I expected. Dreams, when fulfilled, are always more nitty gritty than they were when they were just whisps of hope. I am so grateful for this opportunity, and I can't wait to drink it all in!

Bij de nieuwe Blogger is voor toegang tot je blogs een Google-account vereist.

2008-06-14T02:46:00.000-07:00

I'm in the Amsterdam airport, on a layover to London!!! (The flight was out of the way, but also cheaper for some odd reason.) I bought 30 minutes of wireless internet time because I'm too exhausted to read for the whole layover without falling asleep. You know how it is on airplanes: No matter how tired you are, it's impossible to find anything resembling a comfortable position. At least for those of us who travel economically with all the rest of the commonfolk.

Well, I will be in touch as more exciting things happen!

About This Blog...

2008-05-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

I will be interning in London this summer at Goodlife Magazine and then travelling around other parts of the UK. Many of you have asked for updates, and this blog will be my primary means of mass communication.

For those of you who don't know, "Albion" is an ancient name for Great Britain.