I will have been back in America for two weeks tomorrow, which, really, has been a whole jumble of exciting and strange and nice and sad and all sorts of things.
When I got off the plane (gosh I hate planes, especially planes I am stuck on for seven and a half hours) and saw my parents waiting for me at the gate, I was thrilled to pieces. And I'm not just saying that because I know my mom reads this blog. (Hi Mom.) I was really happy to see them. At that point, I'd been staying in hostels for two weeks by myself and I was tired of either being alone or being forced to talk to strangers all the time - something I am getting better at, but certainly don't like very much. I was so excited to see my family again and get to talk to people I knew rather than people I'd just met. I of course tacklehugged both my cat when I got home and my sister when she got back from the high school band trip the next day. I was very, very glad to sleep in my own bed, with more than one pillow (oh hostels, you make me appreciate pillows so much), and with no strangers sharing the room and loudly entering and exiting at obscene hours of the morning.
Walking back into my house was kind of surreal. I couldn't really believe that I was home - it had been five months, after all. It didn't help that there were a lot of things that were different; the kitchen is blue now, instead of the yellow it's been for as long as I can remember, and there's a new counter-top, for instance. I felt a little bit like I was floating around my house, halfway outside of my own head (which sounds a lot crazier than I mean it to sound, but that's the best way I can think to describe it). I half expected that I would wake up the next morning and be back in London, but when I didn't, I wasn't disappointed. I was glad to be home. I was glad to sleep in my own bed and have my cat and my family, to eat food that my dad made rather than £3+ triangle sandwiches, to not have to talk to strangers anymore.
That first week back was great. I attempted to sleep a lot, although jet lag really set some odd hours for me. I lounged about. I didn't have to eat dinner by myself anymore. I started my new internship at a literary agency in New York City, which basically amounts to the best job ever: everyone in the office is so nice, and I read ALL DAY LONG. It's awesome. (I'll be putting together a list of some query do's and don'ts in future, because I am reading your queries now, haha! *maniacal laughter* ... *cough*)
And then, last Saturday, it hit me. I'd sort of vaguely missed London before, chatting about things I'd done with people, but I was still caught up in how nice and comfortable it was to be home. Last Saturday, though, I was engrossed in a really amazing book (The Night Circus. Read it. Now.), parts of which take place in London, and I was at a family gathering, recounting some of my abroad adventures. I realized that it had been exactly one week since I'd left London, and all of a sudden I missed it so much. It was as though I'd thought, initially, that coming home was like being on vacation for a week, in typical college student fashion where I don't do much of anything and enjoy home cooked food and my mom doing my laundry. But then the week was up, I was still in New Jersey and I wouldn't be going back to London in the foreseeable future. I dreamt that I was back in London before I woke up the next morning, and this time, I was sad when I woke up and it wasn't real.
Now, I'm not horribly depressed, don't get me wrong. I am honestly enjoying being home - I like my family a lot. I like my internship a lot (my mom was joking with me yesterday that I'm supposed to come home after commuting to work in the city and be all grumpy and tired and unhappy about life, but I always come home really happy, because my job is just that awesome). I'm finally catching up to my friends from high school.
But I miss London. I am probably stating the obvious, but Manhattan is incredibly different. Every time I walk down the street, either in my tiny suburban town or in New York, I'm reminded of how different, how new, everything here is. The sense of history is gone. There isn't anything comparable to the beautiful Kensington row houses. If I went into a cafe and ordered a cup of tea, I'd get a cup, rather than my own teapot. All the French and Italians are still in London, not in New York. I can't hop on the tube after a five-minute walk from my doorstep. There are no Caffe Neros or Victoria and Albert Museums. The flat in Nevern Place is very, very far away, and I don't get to see my flatmates much at all.
I miss London. I miss the atmosphere. I miss the feeling that I belonged in that city. I've lived near New York all my life, so I do get a similar tourist/not tourist feeling, but New York does not feel like it's mine the way London did.
So far, though, being back in America isn't bad (other than the fact that going from 50 degrees Fahrenheit to 80 is really unpleasant). I learned a lot in London - a lot about myself, about being a confident human being, about talking to strangers, about trying new things, on and on and on. I was afraid that that sense of confidence would relapse as soon as I got home, and I'd go back to being even more obviously painfully shy, the way I was pre-London. So far, though, I don't think it has. I've successfully managed to find myself a part-time job waitressing. I'm not completely hopeless when it comes to talking to my new coworkers. So, I think it's all working out for the best. I'll just have to figure out when I can get back to my second home sometime fairly soon (although not too soon, because have I mentioned how much I hate planes?).
Now. That cat I tacklehugged when I got home is very desirous of my attention. Until next time, fair blog readers!
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Totally unrelated to just about everything, but if you haven't seen Neil Gaiman's commencement speech for the University of Arts in Philadelphia, you should go watch it right now. He tells you all sorts of important things regarding the making of art, in that wise and witty way that only Neil Gaiman can.
Showing posts with label study abroad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label study abroad. Show all posts
Friday, June 1, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
Some Lists on Leaving
So. I'm going home tomorrow.
Things I Am Looking Forward To:
1. Seeing
my family
2. Seeing
my friends
3. CAT
4. Sleeping
in my own bed
5. Having
that bed be in my own room (so sick of hostels…)
6. My
summer internship at a literary agency in NYC
7. My
summer sewing project
8. My
summer reading list (SO MANY BOOKS, GUYS)
9. Normal
ketchup
10. Knowing
which side of the street I’m supposed to walk on
11. My
dad’s cooking
12. Having
my athletically inclined friend teach me to run (eep)
13. My
iTunes library
Things I Definitely Will Not Miss
1. The
“stupid American” look
2. This:
3. “Due
to planned engineering works, there is no service on [whatever line it was you
actually needed]”
4. London
traffic. Which way am I supposed to look? Why do I never have the right of
way?!
5. Airplanes
6. Hostels
(not that the hostels I’ve stayed in have been bad – I just miss personal
space!)
7. Mushy
peas
8. The
exchange rate
Things I Will Miss More Than I Care to Admit:
1. The
London Centre
2. My
professors and the staff at the ICLC
3. My
flat in Earl’s Court
4. Having
my walk to class every day look like this:
5. The
row houses in Kensington
6. Cadbury
chocolate
7. Pub
food
8. The
Tyburn
9. Eating
dinner in a pub older than my country (the Cheshire Cheese is made of win)
11. The
Tube
12. The
District and Piccadilly Lines
13. Hyde
Park
14. Free
museums!!
15. The
Wallace Collection
16. The
Victoria and Albert Museum
17. Having
people think that I’m French (I think I’m flattered? Mostly I just find it
hilarious)
18. So.
Much. History.
19. My
internship here
20. The
maps at the Barclay bike stations
21. British
accents (and the zillion other languages one hears in London)
22. Cheap
live theatre
23. The
South Bank walk along the Thames
24. Ceilidhs
25.
I'm sure that there is a lot more I can add to that last list especially, but you get the gist. See you back in America, blog!
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Mind the Gap: Tourist vs. Townie
Once again, the crowd in front of me had come to an inexplicable standstill encompassing the whole of the sidewalk. "God, I hate tourists," I would mutter to myself as I wove my way through or dodged around or shoved past whatever people had decided to stop directly in front of me.
While it is true that no one in London knows how to walk, I'm not really sure that it's fair for me to be so incredibly frustrated with the people unknowingly blocking my way. Especially considering that I encountered these people while trying to do the same touristy things they were doing - exiting the Tube at Westminster, and later watching the Changing of the Guard.
I seem to be in the middle of a weird dichotomy. I both am and am not a Londoner - I have been here since January, and this city feels more like home to me than the town where I have gone to college for the past three years. I've learned a lot in the past five months, enough to feel incredibly comfortable navigating these old streets on my own, enough to be able to give directions when asked, but not enough to keep from turned around coming out of the Tube and having to backtrack. I certainly haven't got encyclopedic knowledge of all of London's many streets and corners, and there's still quite a lot I haven't seen, but there are certain areas that I consider to be mine. The street where I lived, the journey from the flat to school, the South Bank walk - all these are places that feel like they belong, at least in some part, to me. I know them well, and they have seen me come and go many a time.
I live here. Or rather, I will be living here for another few days. And yet, at the same time, I'm doing many touristy things this week - the Changing of the Guards, for one. Camden Market, the parks, the museums... all of these are places that the locals might visit, of course, but certainly not as often as the tourists do. And I should think that a Londoner going to the Changing of the Guards happens with the same frequency that New Yorkers visit the Empire State Building - only when they have guests from out of town!
So where does that leave me? Am I a Londoner, or am I a tourist? Am I both? Neither? Does it really matter? Probably not. I've just been struck by this strange mixture of belonging and not belonging over the past few days. I've had a very strange reception here - just about everyone I meet seems to think I'm French until I start to talk, and then my accent automatically pegs me as an American (and then, sometimes, the automatic exasperation will start to appear by degrees).
I think I'm simply wrestling with the dualities of my last week here. Am I a Londoner or am I a foreigner? How much am I looking forward to going home, versus how much do I wish I could stay? And perhaps the biggest question - how do I go about leaving one home in favor of another?
But those questions don't need to be answered just yet. So for the time being, I will simply enjoy this city that I have come to think of as home, and I will make the most of those tourist attractions, even if I will curse the crowds and the queues like the most savvy of locals.
While it is true that no one in London knows how to walk, I'm not really sure that it's fair for me to be so incredibly frustrated with the people unknowingly blocking my way. Especially considering that I encountered these people while trying to do the same touristy things they were doing - exiting the Tube at Westminster, and later watching the Changing of the Guard.
I seem to be in the middle of a weird dichotomy. I both am and am not a Londoner - I have been here since January, and this city feels more like home to me than the town where I have gone to college for the past three years. I've learned a lot in the past five months, enough to feel incredibly comfortable navigating these old streets on my own, enough to be able to give directions when asked, but not enough to keep from turned around coming out of the Tube and having to backtrack. I certainly haven't got encyclopedic knowledge of all of London's many streets and corners, and there's still quite a lot I haven't seen, but there are certain areas that I consider to be mine. The street where I lived, the journey from the flat to school, the South Bank walk - all these are places that feel like they belong, at least in some part, to me. I know them well, and they have seen me come and go many a time.
I live here. Or rather, I will be living here for another few days. And yet, at the same time, I'm doing many touristy things this week - the Changing of the Guards, for one. Camden Market, the parks, the museums... all of these are places that the locals might visit, of course, but certainly not as often as the tourists do. And I should think that a Londoner going to the Changing of the Guards happens with the same frequency that New Yorkers visit the Empire State Building - only when they have guests from out of town!
So where does that leave me? Am I a Londoner, or am I a tourist? Am I both? Neither? Does it really matter? Probably not. I've just been struck by this strange mixture of belonging and not belonging over the past few days. I've had a very strange reception here - just about everyone I meet seems to think I'm French until I start to talk, and then my accent automatically pegs me as an American (and then, sometimes, the automatic exasperation will start to appear by degrees).
I think I'm simply wrestling with the dualities of my last week here. Am I a Londoner or am I a foreigner? How much am I looking forward to going home, versus how much do I wish I could stay? And perhaps the biggest question - how do I go about leaving one home in favor of another?
But those questions don't need to be answered just yet. So for the time being, I will simply enjoy this city that I have come to think of as home, and I will make the most of those tourist attractions, even if I will curse the crowds and the queues like the most savvy of locals.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Gosh it's been a while...
Hello, blogosphere! I'm sorry I've been so silent for so long; first there was the debacle that was my computer, and then my family came to visit me and finals happened, so... yeah. I've been away so long that Blogger has completely changed its posting format without me noticing! Weird!
Well, I am back, and I should have internet access for the duration of my last two weeks in Europe. (Trying not to think too much about that: two weeks from today, I will be getting on a plane and going back to America. Hopefully this will be a plane that I don't get sick on, at least.) Currently, I'm mooching off the wifi in a cafe (I should probably buy something else, actually, I've been sitting here long enough...) in London; I'm here for the night before I set off on an adventure to Dingle, Ireland (the setting of The Long Road Home) and then one last week in good old London town.
The last two weeks have been kind of strange and awesome and sad, all at once. My family came to visit me (during the world's easiest finals week) and it was so much fun getting to show them around the place that has become my home over the last four months, in spite of the fact that it rained and was miserably cold almost the entire time they were here. Oh, England. You're in drought for months, and then the skies open the one week I don't want them to? Gee, thanks. On the one nice day, I took them on the South Bank walk that was my introduction to the city - it's the walk along the Thames from Westminster to Tower Hill, and it's a really great way to see just about every London landmark all in one go.
But by the end of the week, it turned into a festival of leaving. My mom and my sister left on Friday to go back to work and school (my dad stuck around; more on that in a bit), and then one by one my flatmates started to leave. Lisa moved out first, although she was still in London until yesterday; even though I still got to see her until it was my turn to leave, it was really strange to be in our room without her things there, or not see her huddling next to the heater in the kitchen. Matt left next, and with him most of my other friends, as the London Center's group flight was on Monday, and then Tory left the next morning, off for some adventures in Morocco with her sister. Then it was my turn to do the leaving - I had my last day of work and my last London pub dinner with Lisa. The next morning, it was time for my dad and I to set off on some adventures. I was really excited to go see Florence with him, but at the same time I was really quite sad to hand over my keys to my landlady, shut the door on my flat, and walk down my dimly lit three flights of stairs for the last time. It really punctuated the fact that this amazing experience that I am having is really coming to an end... and I don't want it to!
I just arrived back in London after a few days in Florence with my dad. It was a lot of fun! We climbed up an awful lot of things (the terraces in the Boboli Gardens, the Cupola of the Santa Maria Del Fiore cathedral (aka the Duomo), the Bell Tower of the Duomo...), saw some pretty stunning views from the top of those things, learned a lot about the Medicis, and, of course, ate a lot of really good food and lots of fantastic gelato! It was great to spend some time with my dad and to see some sunshine for a change!
I'm here on my own for another two weeks. Navigating European travel alone (granted, it's just to Ireland and then back to London, so I'll be in English-speaking places the whole time, not too bad) is both a scary and daunting prospect and... kind of liberating. I intend to stay in this cafe until the internet kicks me off (can it do that?) or until the place closes and they kick me out, and then I'm going back to my hostel and I'm going to bed. It's pretty early in the day to be thinking that, but I'm exhausted and currently, I have no one to please but myself, no plans but my own, no place to be but the airport in the morning. It's nice - I suspect that by the time the two weeks are up, I'll really want some friendly faces around me and I'll actually be ready to go home, but for now I'm quite ready for another adventure.
The last two weeks have been kind of strange and awesome and sad, all at once. My family came to visit me (during the world's easiest finals week) and it was so much fun getting to show them around the place that has become my home over the last four months, in spite of the fact that it rained and was miserably cold almost the entire time they were here. Oh, England. You're in drought for months, and then the skies open the one week I don't want them to? Gee, thanks. On the one nice day, I took them on the South Bank walk that was my introduction to the city - it's the walk along the Thames from Westminster to Tower Hill, and it's a really great way to see just about every London landmark all in one go.
But by the end of the week, it turned into a festival of leaving. My mom and my sister left on Friday to go back to work and school (my dad stuck around; more on that in a bit), and then one by one my flatmates started to leave. Lisa moved out first, although she was still in London until yesterday; even though I still got to see her until it was my turn to leave, it was really strange to be in our room without her things there, or not see her huddling next to the heater in the kitchen. Matt left next, and with him most of my other friends, as the London Center's group flight was on Monday, and then Tory left the next morning, off for some adventures in Morocco with her sister. Then it was my turn to do the leaving - I had my last day of work and my last London pub dinner with Lisa. The next morning, it was time for my dad and I to set off on some adventures. I was really excited to go see Florence with him, but at the same time I was really quite sad to hand over my keys to my landlady, shut the door on my flat, and walk down my dimly lit three flights of stairs for the last time. It really punctuated the fact that this amazing experience that I am having is really coming to an end... and I don't want it to!
I just arrived back in London after a few days in Florence with my dad. It was a lot of fun! We climbed up an awful lot of things (the terraces in the Boboli Gardens, the Cupola of the Santa Maria Del Fiore cathedral (aka the Duomo), the Bell Tower of the Duomo...), saw some pretty stunning views from the top of those things, learned a lot about the Medicis, and, of course, ate a lot of really good food and lots of fantastic gelato! It was great to spend some time with my dad and to see some sunshine for a change!
I'm here on my own for another two weeks. Navigating European travel alone (granted, it's just to Ireland and then back to London, so I'll be in English-speaking places the whole time, not too bad) is both a scary and daunting prospect and... kind of liberating. I intend to stay in this cafe until the internet kicks me off (can it do that?) or until the place closes and they kick me out, and then I'm going back to my hostel and I'm going to bed. It's pretty early in the day to be thinking that, but I'm exhausted and currently, I have no one to please but myself, no plans but my own, no place to be but the airport in the morning. It's nice - I suspect that by the time the two weeks are up, I'll really want some friendly faces around me and I'll actually be ready to go home, but for now I'm quite ready for another adventure.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Thoughts from Places: A Pilgrimage to Stratford
I'm taking a Shakespeare class here at the ICLC, and there are two other theatre classes offered here, Drama in the London Theatre and Interrelationships. These classes are fantastic for us because we get to go see all kinds of different performances (obviously mostly Shakespeare, for me) and what's not to love about live theatre? But of course, a theatre class (especially a Shakespeare class) in England would not be complete without taking a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of the Bard.
Our trip last weekend started at actually a fairly decent hour of the morning. We walked over to school and hopped on the coaches (which is what long-distance buses seem to be called here) and headed off to the first stop on our trip, Warwick.
Although Matt and Lisa and I headed into the town itself in search of some lunch a bit later on, the main reason we were in Warwick was to look around Warwick Castle. William the Conqueror ordered a castle built in Warwick in 1068; I'm not entirely sure when the castle was finished, but even so, it was very cool to be clambering around in a building that old. I'm also not sure if it's been restored at any point, because it is quite intact; it was also one of the coolest castles we've been to, as it's set up as half a historical site and half a Renaissance Faire. They have people in costume giving demonstrations at different points around the castle - we had someone tell us about longbows (and rude English hand gestures), and we saw them fire their trebuchet, and inside the castle itself we saw a falconry demonstration. There is also one hallway in the castle that has wax figures (which are almost alarmingly realistic) and props all set up to look like the castle would have done in the 12th century. Tory also bought a wooden sword (which is now hanging above our mantle, of course), and I must admit I did enjoy gesturing dramatically with it as we went from one part of the castle to another.
After exploring the castle and having lunch in a very nice little fish and chip shop that proclaimed itself to be a diner (Lisa and I, as we are both from New Jersey, Land of the Diners, begged to differ, but it was a nice lunch all the same), we got back onto the bus and headed off towards Stratford.
(I ought to clarify slightly; Stratford-upon-Avon is Shakespeare's birthplace; Stratford is a part of London that apparently isn't very nice, although there's an Olympic stadium there now, so that might be better. In the interests of time, however, when I say Stratford, I mean the one that is upon the Avon.)
When we arrived in Stratford, we checked into our bed-and-breakfast (I suppose because we were only there for one night, and because I don't think there is a hostel in the town, we got to pretend to be fancy for the day), which was a really charming place with amazingly comfortable beds that Lisa and Tory quite quickly made use of. While they catnapped, I borrowed Lisa's internet and talked to my dad a bit about the trip we're trying to plan to Florence after my term here finishes (something I'm quite excited about, of course!!). When they woke up, we wandered around the town for a little bit, and I ogled the long rows of half-timbered houses up and down every street (I love Tudor houses), and we discussed how Stratford is really the definition of "quaint," before grabbing a bite to eat at a pub and then heading over to the Royal Shakespeare Company to see a production of Twelfth Night.
Twelfth Night, I think, is my favorite Shakespeare play; at the very least, it's my favorite of his comedies, as I'm also quite fond of Macbeth. I love the mistaken identities and general chaos of Twelfth Night; I like that it's funny, but it has much more to it than sheer comedy; and of course I love that everything works out all right in the end. A lot of people on the trip don't seem to have enjoyed the production that we saw, but I absolutely adored it. I loved the set, the costumes, the lighting, Feste's songs. I thought all but one of the actors, and certainly the main four, were amazing - Viola and Olivia especially impressed me. And I thought the ending, when everything has been sorted out and mistaken identities revealed and each person has wound up with their true love, was just so sweet and heartwarming and perfect. I must admit I got a bit choked up, and it put me in an excellent mood for the rest of the night. We've been seeing quite a lot of dark and dreary stuff, and it was nice to see something that, while certainly not frivolous, was more on the lighthearted side, and was less about how much people can destroy one another and much more about how wonderful love can be.
The next day, we met in the graveyard at Holy Trinity church for a lecture on Shakespeare's life in Stratford (a note: all professors should lecture on sunny days in graveyards beside rivers), and then we went inside the church to see Shakespeare's grave. I was of course reminded of my high school English teacher (on the very off chance you're reading this, Mrs. Young, hello! Thanks for being awesome!), who has a rubbing of his gravestone over her whiteboard. It reads: "Good Friend, for Jesus' sake forebear / To dig the dust enclosed here / Blessed be the man who spares these stones / And curst be he who moves my bones." Pretty good reason that Will remains in Stratford, rather than in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, hmm?
After that, we went on a short Shakespeare walk through the town, where we saw the building where Shakespeare attended school and the foundations of the house he bought with the money he earned in London. After that, we were set free for a few hours, and we eventually made our way down to the Avon and, after avoiding the typical Avon swans, we rented a rowboat. Lisa's friend Stephen volunteered to row, and Lisa, Tory and I had a good time trying to warn him about things he shouldn't run into. It was a very enjoyable hour (although I think the sun on the water is why I got a sunburn that day), and after that, it was back on the bus to make our way to Oxford.
We only had two hours in Oxford, and I definitely want to go back. All of the buildings are so old and ornate, and it's a very pretty place. We walked through a chocolate festival (this same festival is in London this weekend... methinks we will go visit it) on our way to the Botanic Gardens. Because if you only have two hours in Oxford, you have to go and find Will and Lyra's bench. It was actually surprisingly easy to locate; luckily no one was sitting on it at the time. It's just an ordinary bench, but it has Lyra's name carved into it and a card next to it with Philip Pullman's name on it. Lisa hasn't yet read the last two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy, so we did our best to assure her that the bench was important without giving anything at all away.
After that, it was back on the bus, this time headed back to home-sweet-London. Our adventure wasn't quite over, however; that night, Lisa, Matt and I went to the British Film Institute's all-night showing of all three Lord of the Rings films, in a row, starting at midnight (thank goodness they had free tea in the intervals!). I'd never seen any of them in theatres before, so it was fantastic for me (even though I did doze off during the Shelob scene and a few other bits late in The Two Towers and early in Return of the King. It was 7am by that point!!). It wasn't in IMAX, but it was on the IMAX screen, so it was HUGE - seeing it in that format made the helicopter landscape shots that much more breathtaking, and the battle scenes that much more epic. The charge of the Rohirrim at Pelennor fields, quite possibly my favorite scene (aside from perhaps the "I am no man" bit of Eowyn awesomeness), is just astounding on the big screen, with the music in surround sound. It was so much fun, but needless to say, we got home and very quickly passed out. It was yet another most excellent - and exhausting! - weekend of adventures.
Our trip last weekend started at actually a fairly decent hour of the morning. We walked over to school and hopped on the coaches (which is what long-distance buses seem to be called here) and headed off to the first stop on our trip, Warwick.
Although Matt and Lisa and I headed into the town itself in search of some lunch a bit later on, the main reason we were in Warwick was to look around Warwick Castle. William the Conqueror ordered a castle built in Warwick in 1068; I'm not entirely sure when the castle was finished, but even so, it was very cool to be clambering around in a building that old. I'm also not sure if it's been restored at any point, because it is quite intact; it was also one of the coolest castles we've been to, as it's set up as half a historical site and half a Renaissance Faire. They have people in costume giving demonstrations at different points around the castle - we had someone tell us about longbows (and rude English hand gestures), and we saw them fire their trebuchet, and inside the castle itself we saw a falconry demonstration. There is also one hallway in the castle that has wax figures (which are almost alarmingly realistic) and props all set up to look like the castle would have done in the 12th century. Tory also bought a wooden sword (which is now hanging above our mantle, of course), and I must admit I did enjoy gesturing dramatically with it as we went from one part of the castle to another.
After exploring the castle and having lunch in a very nice little fish and chip shop that proclaimed itself to be a diner (Lisa and I, as we are both from New Jersey, Land of the Diners, begged to differ, but it was a nice lunch all the same), we got back onto the bus and headed off towards Stratford.
(I ought to clarify slightly; Stratford-upon-Avon is Shakespeare's birthplace; Stratford is a part of London that apparently isn't very nice, although there's an Olympic stadium there now, so that might be better. In the interests of time, however, when I say Stratford, I mean the one that is upon the Avon.)
When we arrived in Stratford, we checked into our bed-and-breakfast (I suppose because we were only there for one night, and because I don't think there is a hostel in the town, we got to pretend to be fancy for the day), which was a really charming place with amazingly comfortable beds that Lisa and Tory quite quickly made use of. While they catnapped, I borrowed Lisa's internet and talked to my dad a bit about the trip we're trying to plan to Florence after my term here finishes (something I'm quite excited about, of course!!). When they woke up, we wandered around the town for a little bit, and I ogled the long rows of half-timbered houses up and down every street (I love Tudor houses), and we discussed how Stratford is really the definition of "quaint," before grabbing a bite to eat at a pub and then heading over to the Royal Shakespeare Company to see a production of Twelfth Night.
Twelfth Night, I think, is my favorite Shakespeare play; at the very least, it's my favorite of his comedies, as I'm also quite fond of Macbeth. I love the mistaken identities and general chaos of Twelfth Night; I like that it's funny, but it has much more to it than sheer comedy; and of course I love that everything works out all right in the end. A lot of people on the trip don't seem to have enjoyed the production that we saw, but I absolutely adored it. I loved the set, the costumes, the lighting, Feste's songs. I thought all but one of the actors, and certainly the main four, were amazing - Viola and Olivia especially impressed me. And I thought the ending, when everything has been sorted out and mistaken identities revealed and each person has wound up with their true love, was just so sweet and heartwarming and perfect. I must admit I got a bit choked up, and it put me in an excellent mood for the rest of the night. We've been seeing quite a lot of dark and dreary stuff, and it was nice to see something that, while certainly not frivolous, was more on the lighthearted side, and was less about how much people can destroy one another and much more about how wonderful love can be.
The next day, we met in the graveyard at Holy Trinity church for a lecture on Shakespeare's life in Stratford (a note: all professors should lecture on sunny days in graveyards beside rivers), and then we went inside the church to see Shakespeare's grave. I was of course reminded of my high school English teacher (on the very off chance you're reading this, Mrs. Young, hello! Thanks for being awesome!), who has a rubbing of his gravestone over her whiteboard. It reads: "Good Friend, for Jesus' sake forebear / To dig the dust enclosed here / Blessed be the man who spares these stones / And curst be he who moves my bones." Pretty good reason that Will remains in Stratford, rather than in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, hmm?
After that, we went on a short Shakespeare walk through the town, where we saw the building where Shakespeare attended school and the foundations of the house he bought with the money he earned in London. After that, we were set free for a few hours, and we eventually made our way down to the Avon and, after avoiding the typical Avon swans, we rented a rowboat. Lisa's friend Stephen volunteered to row, and Lisa, Tory and I had a good time trying to warn him about things he shouldn't run into. It was a very enjoyable hour (although I think the sun on the water is why I got a sunburn that day), and after that, it was back on the bus to make our way to Oxford.
We only had two hours in Oxford, and I definitely want to go back. All of the buildings are so old and ornate, and it's a very pretty place. We walked through a chocolate festival (this same festival is in London this weekend... methinks we will go visit it) on our way to the Botanic Gardens. Because if you only have two hours in Oxford, you have to go and find Will and Lyra's bench. It was actually surprisingly easy to locate; luckily no one was sitting on it at the time. It's just an ordinary bench, but it has Lyra's name carved into it and a card next to it with Philip Pullman's name on it. Lisa hasn't yet read the last two books in the His Dark Materials trilogy, so we did our best to assure her that the bench was important without giving anything at all away.
After that, it was back on the bus, this time headed back to home-sweet-London. Our adventure wasn't quite over, however; that night, Lisa, Matt and I went to the British Film Institute's all-night showing of all three Lord of the Rings films, in a row, starting at midnight (thank goodness they had free tea in the intervals!). I'd never seen any of them in theatres before, so it was fantastic for me (even though I did doze off during the Shelob scene and a few other bits late in The Two Towers and early in Return of the King. It was 7am by that point!!). It wasn't in IMAX, but it was on the IMAX screen, so it was HUGE - seeing it in that format made the helicopter landscape shots that much more breathtaking, and the battle scenes that much more epic. The charge of the Rohirrim at Pelennor fields, quite possibly my favorite scene (aside from perhaps the "I am no man" bit of Eowyn awesomeness), is just astounding on the big screen, with the music in surround sound. It was so much fun, but needless to say, we got home and very quickly passed out. It was yet another most excellent - and exhausting! - weekend of adventures.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Thoughts from Places: Lots of Geeking Out
So my internet is being an entirely new brand of cranky right now; hopefully I'll be able to slap this post online tomorrow morning before I start my work for the day.
Our journey to Paris, naturally, started at an ungodly hour of the morning. We all got up, grumbling, scrambling around and blinking in the too-early, too-bright lights in our flat, getting dressed and throwing toothbrushes into already packed suitcases before heading out the door to the tube, King's Cross, and then the Eurostar. I now know, from the journey home, that the Chunnel is rather unexciting - it's simply twenty minutes of dark, rather than the flat fields of France or the rolling hills of England - but on the way there, I slept through just about everything, which was probably a good thing, as two very full days were ahead of me.
If any of you are ever planning to go to Paris, do yourself a favor - spend more than two days there. I loved it there, and it's on top of my list of places to return to when I'm rich and famous (ha) someday. (The second is Venice, during Carnival.) We did an awful lot, as you shall see, but there's certainly more that I would have liked to see, given the chance.
Once we had arrived in Paris, found the hostel, and dropped off our bags, my French Revolution professor took us back onto the Metro and we began our French Revolution walk, starting, naturally, at the Place de la Bastille. We saw, among other things, the site of La Force prison and the oldest cafe in Paris and the Conciergerie and Notre Dame and the Palais Royale. The Conciergerie and Notre Dame especially were the first of many instances in Paris where I was utterly overwhelmed with amazement at the simple fact that I was standing where I was and seeing what I was seeing. I've done so much research and written so much about the Conciergerie, and there I was, standing right in front of it. I've seen so many pictures of and read books about Notre Dame, and there I was walking through it; I even touched one of the many Gothic columns. (That's one thing I like about old architechture; it feels like walking inside a work of art, and yet you can reach out and touch it to remind ! !yourself that it's real, that someone once made the thing you are marveling at.) In simpler terms: I did an awful lot of geeking out in Paris.
After the walk, we returned to the hostel to check in properly and put our things in our room; we were quite pleased to find that there was a lot of floorspace (more on that later) and that our beds each had curtains on them, rather like sleeper cars in a train. It felt very fancy.
Lisa and I then had a snack (mmm, Croque Monsieur), and then a group of us headed back to the Metro (the Metro, by the way, is very efficient and very easy to use, but feels a bit like people have been put onto a train, and then the train placed in a box, and then the box shaken by a very eager small child) to go to the Louvre, which is free for under-26s on Friday nights (the student discounts in Paris, by the way, are epic). We of course went right to the Mona Lisa - we were, after all, there, and could hardly pass it up - and then we spent another few hours wandering around the Greek and Roman statues and the Egyptian section before our feet decided they had had quite enough. We stopped for some dessert (mmmm, chocolate mousse), and then attempted to complete our plan for the evening, but we quickly discovered that while the Eiffel Tower LOOKS like it is quite close to the Louvre, it most definitely is NOT close, and as we were quite certain we would not make it all the w! !ay there before the last elevator at 10:30, we went back to the hostel and collapsed for the night.
The next morning, Lisa, Tory and I were joined by our friend Bonnie, and the four of us jam-packed our day. We started off with a visit to the Catacombs; after having a bit of difficulty initially finding the entrance, we descended the twenty-six meter spiral staircase (with every step, I gained a new appreciation for just how much my characters must hate me for putting them through that) and headed off into the dark tunnels. There is quite a long walk in the tunnels to get to the actual ossuary, but that was fine with me; the whole time, I was taking mental notes, glad to see that I'd gotten the approximate size and general feel of the tunnels right, telling myself that I ought to write the dampness of the air down there into my manuscript, and again thinking that Rose must hate me so very much for making her walk down there without any light. Finally, we reached the entrance to the catacombs themselves (I might have freaked out a bit upon seeing the "Arrete! C'est ici l'em! !pire de la mort" sign over the entranceway; I asked the others if it was morbid of me to think of the catacombs as one of those places where I could hardly believe I was actually there, and some other American tourists seemed to get a kick out of that. Hopefully they also heard the impromptu history lesson on the catacombs that I gave, so they know I'm not a complete weirdo... just a little bit of a weirdo). The catacombs are kind of unreal. I almost could not process what I was seeing as anything other than, say, a movie set. I could not believe that there were really six million skeletons all arranged down there, and that six million skulls were watching me as I walked past them. The bones go on forever, with the skulls sometimes arranged into hearts or crosses, with plaques on some pillars or propped up by more skulls explaining where the bones had originally been buried or presenting a quotation on the nature of death. It was extremely eerie, but absolutely fascinating.! !
After the catacombs, we stopped for lunch (because seeing six million dead bodies naturally makes you hungry, right?) and then we headed off to the next stop on our itinerary - the Opera Garnier. There, of course, I geeked out quite a bit more, although I refrained from the impromptu history lesson this time. I was thrilled by this place not because I had written about it, but of course because Phantom of the Opera is one of my favorite musicals, and there I was, in the Phantom's opera house, looking at the real chandelier and the real Box 5. The building is stunningly beautiful, with every hallway filled with chandeliers and mirrors and gilt woodwork. I could easily have spent hours there poring over every room, wishing we could have visited the cellars, and imagining Faust being performed on the stage or the staircase filled with people at the Masquerade.
We had to be off to our next stop, however; we went back to the Ile-de-la-Cite, crossing the Pont Neuf and walking alongside the Conciergerie (which was sadly covered in scaffolding) to stop in at Shakespeare and Company, a really neat English-language bookstore across the street from Notre Dame. It was a really neat little shop, if a bit crowded for its size, and I had a good time poking around before we got back on the Metro for our last stop of the day - the Eiffel Tower.
The Eiffel Tower involved an awful lot of standing in line - first, there was the line for the tickets, and then the line for the elevator to the second floor, and then the elevator all the way to the top, and then again for both elevators on the way down - and while the weather was sunny and gorgeous on our first day in Paris, it was cold and a bit drizzly that evening while we were standing beneath the tower and waiting. I do think however that the view from the top, the way that the rain looked like golden glitter in the lights on the tower on the way down, and the fact that I can in fact say that I've been to the top of the Eiffel Tower all made the long lines worth it.
We left Paris late enough the next morning that I was able to stay awake on the train, but early enough that we couldn't really do anything much other than visit a boulangerie. Even though every time I return to London from an adventure, it feels more and more like home, I definitely felt that I had not had quite enough time in Paris, and I will definitely be going back there someday.
Our journey to Paris, naturally, started at an ungodly hour of the morning. We all got up, grumbling, scrambling around and blinking in the too-early, too-bright lights in our flat, getting dressed and throwing toothbrushes into already packed suitcases before heading out the door to the tube, King's Cross, and then the Eurostar. I now know, from the journey home, that the Chunnel is rather unexciting - it's simply twenty minutes of dark, rather than the flat fields of France or the rolling hills of England - but on the way there, I slept through just about everything, which was probably a good thing, as two very full days were ahead of me.
If any of you are ever planning to go to Paris, do yourself a favor - spend more than two days there. I loved it there, and it's on top of my list of places to return to when I'm rich and famous (ha) someday. (The second is Venice, during Carnival.) We did an awful lot, as you shall see, but there's certainly more that I would have liked to see, given the chance.
Once we had arrived in Paris, found the hostel, and dropped off our bags, my French Revolution professor took us back onto the Metro and we began our French Revolution walk, starting, naturally, at the Place de la Bastille. We saw, among other things, the site of La Force prison and the oldest cafe in Paris and the Conciergerie and Notre Dame and the Palais Royale. The Conciergerie and Notre Dame especially were the first of many instances in Paris where I was utterly overwhelmed with amazement at the simple fact that I was standing where I was and seeing what I was seeing. I've done so much research and written so much about the Conciergerie, and there I was, standing right in front of it. I've seen so many pictures of and read books about Notre Dame, and there I was walking through it; I even touched one of the many Gothic columns. (That's one thing I like about old architechture; it feels like walking inside a work of art, and yet you can reach out and touch it to remind ! !yourself that it's real, that someone once made the thing you are marveling at.) In simpler terms: I did an awful lot of geeking out in Paris.
After the walk, we returned to the hostel to check in properly and put our things in our room; we were quite pleased to find that there was a lot of floorspace (more on that later) and that our beds each had curtains on them, rather like sleeper cars in a train. It felt very fancy.
Lisa and I then had a snack (mmm, Croque Monsieur), and then a group of us headed back to the Metro (the Metro, by the way, is very efficient and very easy to use, but feels a bit like people have been put onto a train, and then the train placed in a box, and then the box shaken by a very eager small child) to go to the Louvre, which is free for under-26s on Friday nights (the student discounts in Paris, by the way, are epic). We of course went right to the Mona Lisa - we were, after all, there, and could hardly pass it up - and then we spent another few hours wandering around the Greek and Roman statues and the Egyptian section before our feet decided they had had quite enough. We stopped for some dessert (mmmm, chocolate mousse), and then attempted to complete our plan for the evening, but we quickly discovered that while the Eiffel Tower LOOKS like it is quite close to the Louvre, it most definitely is NOT close, and as we were quite certain we would not make it all the w! !ay there before the last elevator at 10:30, we went back to the hostel and collapsed for the night.
The next morning, Lisa, Tory and I were joined by our friend Bonnie, and the four of us jam-packed our day. We started off with a visit to the Catacombs; after having a bit of difficulty initially finding the entrance, we descended the twenty-six meter spiral staircase (with every step, I gained a new appreciation for just how much my characters must hate me for putting them through that) and headed off into the dark tunnels. There is quite a long walk in the tunnels to get to the actual ossuary, but that was fine with me; the whole time, I was taking mental notes, glad to see that I'd gotten the approximate size and general feel of the tunnels right, telling myself that I ought to write the dampness of the air down there into my manuscript, and again thinking that Rose must hate me so very much for making her walk down there without any light. Finally, we reached the entrance to the catacombs themselves (I might have freaked out a bit upon seeing the "Arrete! C'est ici l'em! !pire de la mort" sign over the entranceway; I asked the others if it was morbid of me to think of the catacombs as one of those places where I could hardly believe I was actually there, and some other American tourists seemed to get a kick out of that. Hopefully they also heard the impromptu history lesson on the catacombs that I gave, so they know I'm not a complete weirdo... just a little bit of a weirdo). The catacombs are kind of unreal. I almost could not process what I was seeing as anything other than, say, a movie set. I could not believe that there were really six million skeletons all arranged down there, and that six million skulls were watching me as I walked past them. The bones go on forever, with the skulls sometimes arranged into hearts or crosses, with plaques on some pillars or propped up by more skulls explaining where the bones had originally been buried or presenting a quotation on the nature of death. It was extremely eerie, but absolutely fascinating.! !
After the catacombs, we stopped for lunch (because seeing six million dead bodies naturally makes you hungry, right?) and then we headed off to the next stop on our itinerary - the Opera Garnier. There, of course, I geeked out quite a bit more, although I refrained from the impromptu history lesson this time. I was thrilled by this place not because I had written about it, but of course because Phantom of the Opera is one of my favorite musicals, and there I was, in the Phantom's opera house, looking at the real chandelier and the real Box 5. The building is stunningly beautiful, with every hallway filled with chandeliers and mirrors and gilt woodwork. I could easily have spent hours there poring over every room, wishing we could have visited the cellars, and imagining Faust being performed on the stage or the staircase filled with people at the Masquerade.
We had to be off to our next stop, however; we went back to the Ile-de-la-Cite, crossing the Pont Neuf and walking alongside the Conciergerie (which was sadly covered in scaffolding) to stop in at Shakespeare and Company, a really neat English-language bookstore across the street from Notre Dame. It was a really neat little shop, if a bit crowded for its size, and I had a good time poking around before we got back on the Metro for our last stop of the day - the Eiffel Tower.
The Eiffel Tower involved an awful lot of standing in line - first, there was the line for the tickets, and then the line for the elevator to the second floor, and then the elevator all the way to the top, and then again for both elevators on the way down - and while the weather was sunny and gorgeous on our first day in Paris, it was cold and a bit drizzly that evening while we were standing beneath the tower and waiting. I do think however that the view from the top, the way that the rain looked like golden glitter in the lights on the tower on the way down, and the fact that I can in fact say that I've been to the top of the Eiffel Tower all made the long lines worth it.
We left Paris late enough the next morning that I was able to stay awake on the train, but early enough that we couldn't really do anything much other than visit a boulangerie. Even though every time I return to London from an adventure, it feels more and more like home, I definitely felt that I had not had quite enough time in Paris, and I will definitely be going back there someday.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Thoughts from Places: Venezia
Hello blog! I've missed you!! I'm sorry I've been absent; my internet in the flat has lately decided to hate me with a vengeance. It's a bit better at the moment (although not quite good enough that it'll let me put pictures into this post; apologies), so hopefully I will be able to tell you the last installment of my spring break saga, and then I have the adventures of the last two weekends in Paris and Stratford-upon-Avon! (I promise I will get back to the writing stuff soon as well.)
So. When I left off, we had arrived in Venice under less than ideal circumstances, but we had finally found our hotel and gone to sleep. We got up around 10 the next morning, as it had been too stressful of a night to do our usual "get up early-ish and seize the day!" thing. We decided that our plan was to explore Venice a bit and get our bearings, but to get back to our hotel before dark, because we had had quite enough of wandering around Venetian alleyways in the dark with no idea of where we were going. We found a cafe around the corner from our hotel and had the first of several days of cake for breakfast. The food in Italy, by the way, is outstanding.
We wandered around a bit after breakfast, without really having too strong of an idea of where it was we wanted to go. We finally did manage to find the Grand Canal and we sat on the edge and watched the boats go by for a little while. I hadn't thought of it beforehand, but Venice smells like the ocean, and sitting there in the sun watching the gondolas and vaporetti, and the wake of the boats splashing up against the edge of the canals, really felt like a proper vacation. Once we'd gotten there, our time in Venice was very relaxed and pleasant - I'd love to go back someday.
After watching the boats for a while, we followed the signs on the sides of various buildings towards the Rialto bridge, and then from there we made our way to the Piazza San Marco. The square is beautiful, and while it is full of pigeons we did not have any of them clambering over us this time (always nice). It also has the famous Venetian winged lions - much more fun than pigeons, even if these don't move. We went into the Basilica San Marco as well, and marveled at the mosaic work inside. Everything, from floor to ceiling, is done in intricate mosaic tiles. As I walked around staring at the gilded ceiling, probably with my mouth hanging open, all I could think, aside from general awe, was "how did they get that up there?!"
My favorite part of the Piazza San Marco, however, was the view out to the sea from the square.
I'm not quite sure exactly what it is, but there really is something about the quality of the sunlight in Italy that makes it seem different from everywhere else. While we were in Venice, the weather was gorgeous - blue skies as far as we could see, in this case stretching out over the water for what seemed forever. The buildings are all very close together in Venice and reach up about three stories, which leaves you wandering through small, dim alleyways most of the time, until you stumble out into the brilliant sunlight of a little piazza or a bridge. It's somewhat blinding, but it's beautiful; the light just seems so clear and warm, so inviting; everything in Venice seems awash in this lovely golden glow, varying in shades from the dimmest alleys to the brightest squares. Even a few weeks later, just thinking about it makes me feel much warmer than the darkness outside the window of my London flat would suggest.
After the Piazza, we wandered back to our hotel for a nap, and then, after going in search of a (very delicious, naturally) dinner, we came back to our hotel and played cards and talked until late into the night. We never went out in the evening after dinner in Venice, for fear of getting hopelessly lost in the dark again, but I don't think any of us minded in the slightest, and for me, those evenings of chatting together, all sitting curled up on the same bed, with me losing dreadfully at cards, were even some of the highlights of the trip. I've become such good friends with Lisa and Tory, and they're a lot of fun to talk to. Our late night conversations really run the gamut of frivolous to quite meaningful, with just about everything in between, and I've really come to value them.
Also, our last two evenings in Venice involved such conversation, delicious Italian pastries, and some wine (not that much, I promise), so that was also fun. ;)
The next day, we got on a vaporetto and took the ten-minute trip over to Murano, the island near Venice famous for its blown glass. We found a glass-blowing demonstration almost immediately after landing on the island, which was really cool. I also had a good time trying to work out what the man explaining the glass-blowing trade to us was saying to us in Italian before he translated it into English (I got some of it). We made our way to the glass museum then, which was really beautiful - they had samples of glass from Roman times to modern day, which was incredibly impressive; it was amazing to see such an extensive and old collection of such fragile things. We then spent quite a lot of time wandering into the zillions of glassware shops in Murano - some of them quite touristy, some of them, like the blown-glass chandelier shop we found on one street, almost like art museums in their own right. My reaction to a lot of the glass was similar to my reaction to the mosaic ceiling in the basilica - I wanted to know how someone could make such a thing. Some of the stuff was a bit kitschy, of course, but a lot of it was rather impossibly lovely - it seemed so strange to think that someone could really create such delicate sculptures or beautiful jewelry.
Our last day was spent in wandering yet again, going in search of postcards and gifts for friends and family, and of course more gelato and other delicious food. (I miss Italian gelato already.) My Italian professor suggested that we find a pasticceria called Tonnolo, and if any of you are planning on going to Venice, I highly recommend finding it! The pastries there were absolutely delicious. We actually wound up going twice that day, once for breakfast and again in the evening, to get provisions for our evening of pastries and card games and fun conversation. On the way back, we finally encountered that all-too-true Italian stereotype: we passed a gelateria with two men standing behind the counter, and from both of them we received a two-syllable "ciao" - basically the Italian equivalent of the American two-syllable "damn." We were all pretty amused by it; even now Tory says we missed a prime opportunity for free gelato.
And of course, on our last day there, we took a ride in a gondola. It was a short ride, but still quite expensive - even so, I think the fact that I can now say that I've ridden in a gondola down the Grand Canal, with the gondolier singing to us as he pushed the boat along and the setting sun glittering on the water, was absolutely worth it.
So. When I left off, we had arrived in Venice under less than ideal circumstances, but we had finally found our hotel and gone to sleep. We got up around 10 the next morning, as it had been too stressful of a night to do our usual "get up early-ish and seize the day!" thing. We decided that our plan was to explore Venice a bit and get our bearings, but to get back to our hotel before dark, because we had had quite enough of wandering around Venetian alleyways in the dark with no idea of where we were going. We found a cafe around the corner from our hotel and had the first of several days of cake for breakfast. The food in Italy, by the way, is outstanding.
We wandered around a bit after breakfast, without really having too strong of an idea of where it was we wanted to go. We finally did manage to find the Grand Canal and we sat on the edge and watched the boats go by for a little while. I hadn't thought of it beforehand, but Venice smells like the ocean, and sitting there in the sun watching the gondolas and vaporetti, and the wake of the boats splashing up against the edge of the canals, really felt like a proper vacation. Once we'd gotten there, our time in Venice was very relaxed and pleasant - I'd love to go back someday.
After watching the boats for a while, we followed the signs on the sides of various buildings towards the Rialto bridge, and then from there we made our way to the Piazza San Marco. The square is beautiful, and while it is full of pigeons we did not have any of them clambering over us this time (always nice). It also has the famous Venetian winged lions - much more fun than pigeons, even if these don't move. We went into the Basilica San Marco as well, and marveled at the mosaic work inside. Everything, from floor to ceiling, is done in intricate mosaic tiles. As I walked around staring at the gilded ceiling, probably with my mouth hanging open, all I could think, aside from general awe, was "how did they get that up there?!"
My favorite part of the Piazza San Marco, however, was the view out to the sea from the square.
I'm not quite sure exactly what it is, but there really is something about the quality of the sunlight in Italy that makes it seem different from everywhere else. While we were in Venice, the weather was gorgeous - blue skies as far as we could see, in this case stretching out over the water for what seemed forever. The buildings are all very close together in Venice and reach up about three stories, which leaves you wandering through small, dim alleyways most of the time, until you stumble out into the brilliant sunlight of a little piazza or a bridge. It's somewhat blinding, but it's beautiful; the light just seems so clear and warm, so inviting; everything in Venice seems awash in this lovely golden glow, varying in shades from the dimmest alleys to the brightest squares. Even a few weeks later, just thinking about it makes me feel much warmer than the darkness outside the window of my London flat would suggest.
After the Piazza, we wandered back to our hotel for a nap, and then, after going in search of a (very delicious, naturally) dinner, we came back to our hotel and played cards and talked until late into the night. We never went out in the evening after dinner in Venice, for fear of getting hopelessly lost in the dark again, but I don't think any of us minded in the slightest, and for me, those evenings of chatting together, all sitting curled up on the same bed, with me losing dreadfully at cards, were even some of the highlights of the trip. I've become such good friends with Lisa and Tory, and they're a lot of fun to talk to. Our late night conversations really run the gamut of frivolous to quite meaningful, with just about everything in between, and I've really come to value them.
Also, our last two evenings in Venice involved such conversation, delicious Italian pastries, and some wine (not that much, I promise), so that was also fun. ;)
The next day, we got on a vaporetto and took the ten-minute trip over to Murano, the island near Venice famous for its blown glass. We found a glass-blowing demonstration almost immediately after landing on the island, which was really cool. I also had a good time trying to work out what the man explaining the glass-blowing trade to us was saying to us in Italian before he translated it into English (I got some of it). We made our way to the glass museum then, which was really beautiful - they had samples of glass from Roman times to modern day, which was incredibly impressive; it was amazing to see such an extensive and old collection of such fragile things. We then spent quite a lot of time wandering into the zillions of glassware shops in Murano - some of them quite touristy, some of them, like the blown-glass chandelier shop we found on one street, almost like art museums in their own right. My reaction to a lot of the glass was similar to my reaction to the mosaic ceiling in the basilica - I wanted to know how someone could make such a thing. Some of the stuff was a bit kitschy, of course, but a lot of it was rather impossibly lovely - it seemed so strange to think that someone could really create such delicate sculptures or beautiful jewelry.
Our last day was spent in wandering yet again, going in search of postcards and gifts for friends and family, and of course more gelato and other delicious food. (I miss Italian gelato already.) My Italian professor suggested that we find a pasticceria called Tonnolo, and if any of you are planning on going to Venice, I highly recommend finding it! The pastries there were absolutely delicious. We actually wound up going twice that day, once for breakfast and again in the evening, to get provisions for our evening of pastries and card games and fun conversation. On the way back, we finally encountered that all-too-true Italian stereotype: we passed a gelateria with two men standing behind the counter, and from both of them we received a two-syllable "ciao" - basically the Italian equivalent of the American two-syllable "damn." We were all pretty amused by it; even now Tory says we missed a prime opportunity for free gelato.
And of course, on our last day there, we took a ride in a gondola. It was a short ride, but still quite expensive - even so, I think the fact that I can now say that I've ridden in a gondola down the Grand Canal, with the gondolier singing to us as he pushed the boat along and the setting sun glittering on the water, was absolutely worth it.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Thoughts from Places: How Not to Travel in Europe
A European adventure, it seems, simply would not be complete without some mishaps. Our mishaps were, naturally, all combined into one day - really, it was kind, as it got all of the stress out of the way and allowed us to enjoy the rest of our vacation without any trouble! So, allow me to tell you a little about how not to travel in Europe.
On Tuesday morning, we got up at an ungodly hour, got dressed, and shuffled out of our hostel and towards the airport. The day, in spite of the hour, started well enough; we'd purchased our metro and bus tickets the day before, so we got to the airport without any trouble. The bus, however, told us that all departing flights to countries outside of *muffled sound* should leave from terminal 1. That sounded like Italy to us, so we got off at the terminal 1 stop, found the departures section, and got in the security line.
... we thought.
Lisa was ahead of Tory and I, and she showed her passport and her ticket and got stamped through to the other side. Tory, however, was stopped by the guard she spoke to, and was told that we were in the wrong terminal. But Lisa was already on the other side. We waved to her to come back, but of course she couldn't; you aren't allowed to go *back* through security. I then talked to the guard, asked if he was sure that we were in the wrong place, and then told him that our friend had mistakenly been let through, and could he please help us get her back? He left his box to go get her, but as soon as he turned around, Lisa had vanished. I told her what she looked like (or really, what her coat looked like, as it's pretty distinctive) but he couldn't see her anywhere, so I told Tory to wait and NOT MOVE, and the security guard took me through to the other side to look for Lisa. We couldn't find her anywhere. All the while, I was trying to text Lisa and find out where she'd gone, but texting takes half a million years on my dinky little British phone in the best of circumstances, and it seems to take that much longer when your friend is lost on the wrong side of customs. Eventually, I did reach her; she'd managed to get let through to the other side. The guard escorted me back and took Lisa's passport; there were a few panicked minutes when we all thought we'd be held there for hours and interrogated and miss our flight, but in the end the guard just brought back her correctly stamped passport and told us where we needed to go, and off we went. Lisa told us how she'd gotten back into the country: she found a janitor who spoke almost no English, but managed to convey her situation to him through sheer desperation, and he was nice enough to take her to the other side of customs and get her stamped back into the country (which she'd technically never left). We got through the right part of security and found a place to sit down, and Lisa had carrot cake for breakfast. She needed it.
We boarded a plane for Milan - this plane ride was actually the easiest on me, in terms of ear-popping misery, perhaps because it was the shortest. On the plane, we got tickets to the train station in Milan, where we intended to drop off our bags while we explored for the day before getting on the train to Venice.
When we got off the plane in Milan, however, we were once again confused. We followed the exit signs, like in all other airports, but unlike other airports, this one led directly to... the exit. No customs. No passport stamp. Nothing. Just doors to the outside. We were very confused. We wandered around for a bit before I asked a man at a bus ticket booth about it (he was pretty much the only one to ask) and either because my Italian was terrible or because I was gesturing to my American passport, he explained nicely in English that we'd get stamped on the way OUT. Well, all right then. We boarded the bus to the train station, beginning to worry a bit about whether they'd let us out of the country a few days later.
The train station in Milan is said to be one of the most beautiful in Europe, and I can totally see why. I did not take any pictures of it, however, for reasons which will become apparent. We spent a while trying to find a place to leave our bags (I still don't know the Italian word for "locker," sadly), but once we did, we headed down to the Metro (I got to wow my friends for the first time by asking for three metro tickets in a tabaccheria. Sooooo very impressive. :P )and we hopped on the train towards the Duomo.
The steps out of the Metro stop lead right up to the square in front of the Duomo, which looks like this:
The church is absolutely breathtaking, both inside and out, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Unfortunately, because it is so striking, it is very easy to spot tourists coming out of the Metro station; the awestruck attitude is hard to miss. So we were immediately accosted by three African guys asking for donations. They shoved some corn into our hands and had us feed the pigeons (for rather more than tuppence a bag).
Lisa utterly despises pigeons.
We finally got free of them, and we went off in search of lunch. This part of the day was, in fact, quite enjoyable. We had some delicious pizza and the first of many amazing gelatos (Italian gelato is, in fact, the most delicious thing ever), and we visited a castle and the museum inside it and we saw the inside of the Duomo and walked through the world's prettiest "mall" and saw the outside of La Scala.
Castles are awesome.
At around 5:30, we returned to the train station, retrieved our bags, and found a cafe for dinner. Lisa and Tory had some more pizza, and I had a panino (yes, panino. If I had a panini, that'd be more than one sandwich), and I pulled my map of Venice out of my bag so that we could find the street our hostel was on for that night.
Now, Venice is a very small place, but it's very dense, with lots of very small, crooked streets that don't all connect to each other. Tory and I were looking at this map for a very long time, thinking we just couldn't find the street. But then I glanced at Tory's iPod screen, where she'd written the full address of our hostel. And I saw that the hostel was, in fact, in Lido.
And Lido is not in Venice.
Well. This is a problem.
Never fear! Tory's Kindle has 3G on it! We can get on the internet and fix the problem! Only... Tory's overpacked her bag... and her Kindle screen is now broken... She can get wifi on her iPod! Only... there is no wifi in all of Milan... I speak Italian! We'll just go to the information desk right here and beg for help! Only... the information desk closes at 5, because apparently no one ever needs information in a train station after business hours.
Well then.
Lisa finally called her parents, and they booked us a new hostel, IN VENICE, from America (Lisa's parents: you are awesome). At last, we got on the train and napped for two and a half hours, trying to forget the misadventures of the day. But the misadventures were not yet over.
Our train arrived in Venice at 10:40 pm. Some advice to you all: Never arrive in Venice for the first time in the dark. Ever. It's not that it's dangerous; I didn't feel threatened, or like I'd fall into a canal by accident. We were just so. Hideously. Lost. Venetian streets make little to no sense in the dark. We'd finally figure out where we were, start going in what seems like the right direction... and then be totally lost again after just one turn. We asked for directions, and then almost immediately got lost again. At last, we found the address we were looking for... only to be told that it was not, in fact, the right address, and that we needed to "go down the street to the other one." Eep. Finally, the man at the hotel's front desk called us and came and found us - we were literally around the corner from where we needed to be, and had been for the last hour or so. Uy.
At last, we were shown up to our room, and we got to sit down and put down our bags and shut the door on all the madness of the day. It was only then that it hit me how completely insane the whole experience had been. The whole time, I'd been the one saying "it's okay, we'll make it work, we'll ask for help, we'll find a new place to stay, we'll ask for directions, I speak Italian, we can figure this out guys, it'll be okay" (I guess I am kind of the mom of the flat). But when I sat down on that bed, everything just slammed into me. Being that lost, without a place to stay, in a foreign country is kind of terrifying. The whole time I've been abroad, I've been loving it, to the extent that if I didn't have a degree to finish and people I'd really, really miss, I would try my best to never go home, but Tuesday night, I wanted to go home so very badly. I wanted to curl up in my house with my parents and my sister and my cat and a lot of tea. I wanted nothing more than to forget about the crazy scary thing that had just happened to me.
The thing is, though (which I realized as I slowly uncurled from my tiny little ball), I did it. I was right - we did figure it out. We did find a new place to stay, I did ask for directions in Italian, we did make it in spite of being lost and confused. That was quite possibly the scariest thing I've ever done, but I did it, and a year ago, I would have been a complete wreck. I wouldn't have known how to begin handling a situation like that. But I did it. Looking back on it, even just a week later, I feel so accomplished, and I'm so glad we managed to vanquish that situation.
And besides, it makes one heck of a story. :P
On Tuesday morning, we got up at an ungodly hour, got dressed, and shuffled out of our hostel and towards the airport. The day, in spite of the hour, started well enough; we'd purchased our metro and bus tickets the day before, so we got to the airport without any trouble. The bus, however, told us that all departing flights to countries outside of *muffled sound* should leave from terminal 1. That sounded like Italy to us, so we got off at the terminal 1 stop, found the departures section, and got in the security line.
... we thought.
Lisa was ahead of Tory and I, and she showed her passport and her ticket and got stamped through to the other side. Tory, however, was stopped by the guard she spoke to, and was told that we were in the wrong terminal. But Lisa was already on the other side. We waved to her to come back, but of course she couldn't; you aren't allowed to go *back* through security. I then talked to the guard, asked if he was sure that we were in the wrong place, and then told him that our friend had mistakenly been let through, and could he please help us get her back? He left his box to go get her, but as soon as he turned around, Lisa had vanished. I told her what she looked like (or really, what her coat looked like, as it's pretty distinctive) but he couldn't see her anywhere, so I told Tory to wait and NOT MOVE, and the security guard took me through to the other side to look for Lisa. We couldn't find her anywhere. All the while, I was trying to text Lisa and find out where she'd gone, but texting takes half a million years on my dinky little British phone in the best of circumstances, and it seems to take that much longer when your friend is lost on the wrong side of customs. Eventually, I did reach her; she'd managed to get let through to the other side. The guard escorted me back and took Lisa's passport; there were a few panicked minutes when we all thought we'd be held there for hours and interrogated and miss our flight, but in the end the guard just brought back her correctly stamped passport and told us where we needed to go, and off we went. Lisa told us how she'd gotten back into the country: she found a janitor who spoke almost no English, but managed to convey her situation to him through sheer desperation, and he was nice enough to take her to the other side of customs and get her stamped back into the country (which she'd technically never left). We got through the right part of security and found a place to sit down, and Lisa had carrot cake for breakfast. She needed it.
We boarded a plane for Milan - this plane ride was actually the easiest on me, in terms of ear-popping misery, perhaps because it was the shortest. On the plane, we got tickets to the train station in Milan, where we intended to drop off our bags while we explored for the day before getting on the train to Venice.
When we got off the plane in Milan, however, we were once again confused. We followed the exit signs, like in all other airports, but unlike other airports, this one led directly to... the exit. No customs. No passport stamp. Nothing. Just doors to the outside. We were very confused. We wandered around for a bit before I asked a man at a bus ticket booth about it (he was pretty much the only one to ask) and either because my Italian was terrible or because I was gesturing to my American passport, he explained nicely in English that we'd get stamped on the way OUT. Well, all right then. We boarded the bus to the train station, beginning to worry a bit about whether they'd let us out of the country a few days later.
The train station in Milan is said to be one of the most beautiful in Europe, and I can totally see why. I did not take any pictures of it, however, for reasons which will become apparent. We spent a while trying to find a place to leave our bags (I still don't know the Italian word for "locker," sadly), but once we did, we headed down to the Metro (I got to wow my friends for the first time by asking for three metro tickets in a tabaccheria. Sooooo very impressive. :P )and we hopped on the train towards the Duomo.
The steps out of the Metro stop lead right up to the square in front of the Duomo, which looks like this:
The church is absolutely breathtaking, both inside and out, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Unfortunately, because it is so striking, it is very easy to spot tourists coming out of the Metro station; the awestruck attitude is hard to miss. So we were immediately accosted by three African guys asking for donations. They shoved some corn into our hands and had us feed the pigeons (for rather more than tuppence a bag).
Lisa utterly despises pigeons.
We finally got free of them, and we went off in search of lunch. This part of the day was, in fact, quite enjoyable. We had some delicious pizza and the first of many amazing gelatos (Italian gelato is, in fact, the most delicious thing ever), and we visited a castle and the museum inside it and we saw the inside of the Duomo and walked through the world's prettiest "mall" and saw the outside of La Scala.
Castles are awesome.
At around 5:30, we returned to the train station, retrieved our bags, and found a cafe for dinner. Lisa and Tory had some more pizza, and I had a panino (yes, panino. If I had a panini, that'd be more than one sandwich), and I pulled my map of Venice out of my bag so that we could find the street our hostel was on for that night.
Now, Venice is a very small place, but it's very dense, with lots of very small, crooked streets that don't all connect to each other. Tory and I were looking at this map for a very long time, thinking we just couldn't find the street. But then I glanced at Tory's iPod screen, where she'd written the full address of our hostel. And I saw that the hostel was, in fact, in Lido.
And Lido is not in Venice.
Well. This is a problem.
Never fear! Tory's Kindle has 3G on it! We can get on the internet and fix the problem! Only... Tory's overpacked her bag... and her Kindle screen is now broken... She can get wifi on her iPod! Only... there is no wifi in all of Milan... I speak Italian! We'll just go to the information desk right here and beg for help! Only... the information desk closes at 5, because apparently no one ever needs information in a train station after business hours.
Well then.
Lisa finally called her parents, and they booked us a new hostel, IN VENICE, from America (Lisa's parents: you are awesome). At last, we got on the train and napped for two and a half hours, trying to forget the misadventures of the day. But the misadventures were not yet over.
Our train arrived in Venice at 10:40 pm. Some advice to you all: Never arrive in Venice for the first time in the dark. Ever. It's not that it's dangerous; I didn't feel threatened, or like I'd fall into a canal by accident. We were just so. Hideously. Lost. Venetian streets make little to no sense in the dark. We'd finally figure out where we were, start going in what seems like the right direction... and then be totally lost again after just one turn. We asked for directions, and then almost immediately got lost again. At last, we found the address we were looking for... only to be told that it was not, in fact, the right address, and that we needed to "go down the street to the other one." Eep. Finally, the man at the hotel's front desk called us and came and found us - we were literally around the corner from where we needed to be, and had been for the last hour or so. Uy.
At last, we were shown up to our room, and we got to sit down and put down our bags and shut the door on all the madness of the day. It was only then that it hit me how completely insane the whole experience had been. The whole time, I'd been the one saying "it's okay, we'll make it work, we'll ask for help, we'll find a new place to stay, we'll ask for directions, I speak Italian, we can figure this out guys, it'll be okay" (I guess I am kind of the mom of the flat). But when I sat down on that bed, everything just slammed into me. Being that lost, without a place to stay, in a foreign country is kind of terrifying. The whole time I've been abroad, I've been loving it, to the extent that if I didn't have a degree to finish and people I'd really, really miss, I would try my best to never go home, but Tuesday night, I wanted to go home so very badly. I wanted to curl up in my house with my parents and my sister and my cat and a lot of tea. I wanted nothing more than to forget about the crazy scary thing that had just happened to me.
The thing is, though (which I realized as I slowly uncurled from my tiny little ball), I did it. I was right - we did figure it out. We did find a new place to stay, I did ask for directions in Italian, we did make it in spite of being lost and confused. That was quite possibly the scariest thing I've ever done, but I did it, and a year ago, I would have been a complete wreck. I wouldn't have known how to begin handling a situation like that. But I did it. Looking back on it, even just a week later, I feel so accomplished, and I'm so glad we managed to vanquish that situation.
And besides, it makes one heck of a story. :P
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Thoughts from Places: Prague
For once, this travel story does not start with "I woke up at a ridiculous hour of the morning to go somewhere." Instead, it begins in a leisurely fashion, waking up at a normal hour last Saturday, packing, exchanging money, and hopping on the Tube, thus beginning our spring break adventures and our survey of European public transportation (after this one-week trip we had traveled on the underground of three different cities, two trains, three (!!!) airplanes, four buses, one tram, one vaporetto (water taxi) and one gondola. The gondola was, of course, the most fun).
I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I am really, really not a fan of flying. I think my irrational, historically-minded self simply refuses to believe that it is safe or possible for me to be several thousand feet in the air without plummeting to my death. The more rational side of me, of course, severely dislikes it because it really affects my ears quite badly; for hours after a flight, I still feel like I'm underwater, and when it's really bad, I get all dizzy and miserable. Sigh. But the flight to Prague was uneventful, and we stumbled into the city by bus and then by metro. My first experience of Prague was in the dark, in that unpleasant underwater-can't-hear-anything bubble, but I could already tell that our stay there was going to be lovely.
We found our hostel and had a nice chat with the girl at the front desk - who, like pretty much everyone in Prague, thank heavens, spoke very good English - and we signed up for breakfast in the morning and a walking tour the next day before going up the stairs to our room.
Guys. This was the most glorious hostel room I have ever been in. I have stayed in HOTELS that were not as nice as this place. The breakfast was also amazingly delicious; they had a buffet of fruit and bread and cereal and they'd also make you whatever you wanted in terms of eggs or crepes or pancakes. Oh so very tasty.
After breakfast, we napped for about half an hour (what? It was morning and we're college students) and then we trooped down to the lobby in order to meet our walking tour group at 10. Except... there was no one else in the lobby. Well, okay, fine, there are other hostels on this walking tour, perhaps they're just late picking up another batch of people. At about 10:15, we asked the receptionist, and she looked all worried and called the tour people and started speaking rapid-fire Czech (Czech, by the way, is an impossible language. There was a list of helpful phrases on the map from the hostel and none of us could manage any of them). She then told us that somehow, they'd forgotten to stop by Miss Sophie's (our hostel) and that someone would be coming to get us if we could wait another five minutes. Hooray!
We finally met up with the tour group, and we talked a bit with two other American girls from Chicago and an Australian guy, as well as Aoife, our lovely Irish tour guide (yes I asked her how to pronounce her name). We spent four hours walking around the city, listening to Aoife as she told us what seemed like everything: this monastery was built in such-and-such a year by these people, and this castle was refurbished by this woman, and this is one of the three locations of the defenestrations of Prague.
The location of the third and (so far) final Defenestration of Prague, in 1948. They sure do like to defenestrate people in Prague.
Other than being a place where people are thrown out of windows and speak a language where the letters don't make any sense, Prague is just an amazingly beautiful city. What I've told everyone about it is that it feels like walking through a fairytale, and it really does. Everywhere the streets are a little bit narrow and all paved with cobblestones and every street, especially in Old Town and the Castle District, is just filled with beautiful old buildings. It's a city so lovely that neither Hitler nor the Communists wanted to destroy it, so from a historical standpoint it's probably the most intact of all Eastern European cities.
This is an average street in the Castle District:
And this is the view from near the monastery (complete with our lovely faces, of course):
And this is a bit of St. Vitus' Cathedral, which is inside Prague Castle:
On Sunday afternoon, after the walking tour let out, we walked over to the National Theatre and, even though we simply walked into the box office three hours before the performance, we got tickets to see that evening's production of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana. We meandered our way back to the hostel then and got a bit fancier (it was the opera, after all), and then headed back towards the theatre. We ate dinner across the street and then went up to discover that our seats, even though they came to about twelve dollars, were fantastic, and that the theatre looked like this:
Gosh I love old theatres.
Gloriana, which is about Elizabeth I and was written for Elizabeth II's coronation, will probably never be my favorite opera - there's too much recitative and not enough aria for my liking. It was, however, incredibly fun to go to this production. The singers were all excellent, and the music is very pretty, if not particularly catchy. It was also quite visually stunning, with period costumes and stark, modern sets, with lots of excellent visual symbolism and the oddest ballet I've ever seen before. I was really happy that we got to go and do that - it isn't everywhere that you can walk into a theatre that late in the day and get such good seats, and I've never really been to an opera on that scale before, so it was a lot of fun to see that.
Monday was spent doing a lot of wandering. Our plans for the morning were thwarted, as we discovered that the National Gallery is closed for five years for renovations. So instead, we spent our time meandering through the streets, stopping in stores or touristy shops or street markets now and again, and finally finding a museum to visit - an exhibition on Alphonse Mucha's art nouveau posters and sketches (very cool!) and an exhibition of Salvador Dali (very weird). We also went back to visit Charles Bridge, one of the places we'd been on our tour and one of the most iconic of Prague's landmarks, at night, which is quite lovely, with lots of dimmer-than-you'd-think streetlamps and shadowy statues hovering over you in the dark.
After that, continuing in our newfound tradition of eating in places where famous people have eaten, we had dinner at the Cafe Louvre, where Einstein and Kafka apparently ate (presumably not together :P), and then, even though Tory wanted to go on a pub crawl, we headed back to the hostel and packed our things and went to bed because the next morning, we had to, of course, get up at a ridiculous hour to start the next leg of our wonderful European journey.
I hope everyone in the blogosphere had a good week last week! I'll be posting again tomorrow as well, as the tales of spring break will take up three posts, I think. Talk to you soon, blog!
I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I am really, really not a fan of flying. I think my irrational, historically-minded self simply refuses to believe that it is safe or possible for me to be several thousand feet in the air without plummeting to my death. The more rational side of me, of course, severely dislikes it because it really affects my ears quite badly; for hours after a flight, I still feel like I'm underwater, and when it's really bad, I get all dizzy and miserable. Sigh. But the flight to Prague was uneventful, and we stumbled into the city by bus and then by metro. My first experience of Prague was in the dark, in that unpleasant underwater-can't-hear-anything bubble, but I could already tell that our stay there was going to be lovely.
We found our hostel and had a nice chat with the girl at the front desk - who, like pretty much everyone in Prague, thank heavens, spoke very good English - and we signed up for breakfast in the morning and a walking tour the next day before going up the stairs to our room.
Guys. This was the most glorious hostel room I have ever been in. I have stayed in HOTELS that were not as nice as this place. The breakfast was also amazingly delicious; they had a buffet of fruit and bread and cereal and they'd also make you whatever you wanted in terms of eggs or crepes or pancakes. Oh so very tasty.
After breakfast, we napped for about half an hour (what? It was morning and we're college students) and then we trooped down to the lobby in order to meet our walking tour group at 10. Except... there was no one else in the lobby. Well, okay, fine, there are other hostels on this walking tour, perhaps they're just late picking up another batch of people. At about 10:15, we asked the receptionist, and she looked all worried and called the tour people and started speaking rapid-fire Czech (Czech, by the way, is an impossible language. There was a list of helpful phrases on the map from the hostel and none of us could manage any of them). She then told us that somehow, they'd forgotten to stop by Miss Sophie's (our hostel) and that someone would be coming to get us if we could wait another five minutes. Hooray!
We finally met up with the tour group, and we talked a bit with two other American girls from Chicago and an Australian guy, as well as Aoife, our lovely Irish tour guide (yes I asked her how to pronounce her name). We spent four hours walking around the city, listening to Aoife as she told us what seemed like everything: this monastery was built in such-and-such a year by these people, and this castle was refurbished by this woman, and this is one of the three locations of the defenestrations of Prague.
The location of the third and (so far) final Defenestration of Prague, in 1948. They sure do like to defenestrate people in Prague.
Other than being a place where people are thrown out of windows and speak a language where the letters don't make any sense, Prague is just an amazingly beautiful city. What I've told everyone about it is that it feels like walking through a fairytale, and it really does. Everywhere the streets are a little bit narrow and all paved with cobblestones and every street, especially in Old Town and the Castle District, is just filled with beautiful old buildings. It's a city so lovely that neither Hitler nor the Communists wanted to destroy it, so from a historical standpoint it's probably the most intact of all Eastern European cities.
This is an average street in the Castle District:
And this is the view from near the monastery (complete with our lovely faces, of course):
And this is a bit of St. Vitus' Cathedral, which is inside Prague Castle:
On Sunday afternoon, after the walking tour let out, we walked over to the National Theatre and, even though we simply walked into the box office three hours before the performance, we got tickets to see that evening's production of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana. We meandered our way back to the hostel then and got a bit fancier (it was the opera, after all), and then headed back towards the theatre. We ate dinner across the street and then went up to discover that our seats, even though they came to about twelve dollars, were fantastic, and that the theatre looked like this:
Gosh I love old theatres.
Gloriana, which is about Elizabeth I and was written for Elizabeth II's coronation, will probably never be my favorite opera - there's too much recitative and not enough aria for my liking. It was, however, incredibly fun to go to this production. The singers were all excellent, and the music is very pretty, if not particularly catchy. It was also quite visually stunning, with period costumes and stark, modern sets, with lots of excellent visual symbolism and the oddest ballet I've ever seen before. I was really happy that we got to go and do that - it isn't everywhere that you can walk into a theatre that late in the day and get such good seats, and I've never really been to an opera on that scale before, so it was a lot of fun to see that.
Monday was spent doing a lot of wandering. Our plans for the morning were thwarted, as we discovered that the National Gallery is closed for five years for renovations. So instead, we spent our time meandering through the streets, stopping in stores or touristy shops or street markets now and again, and finally finding a museum to visit - an exhibition on Alphonse Mucha's art nouveau posters and sketches (very cool!) and an exhibition of Salvador Dali (very weird). We also went back to visit Charles Bridge, one of the places we'd been on our tour and one of the most iconic of Prague's landmarks, at night, which is quite lovely, with lots of dimmer-than-you'd-think streetlamps and shadowy statues hovering over you in the dark.
After that, continuing in our newfound tradition of eating in places where famous people have eaten, we had dinner at the Cafe Louvre, where Einstein and Kafka apparently ate (presumably not together :P), and then, even though Tory wanted to go on a pub crawl, we headed back to the hostel and packed our things and went to bed because the next morning, we had to, of course, get up at a ridiculous hour to start the next leg of our wonderful European journey.
I hope everyone in the blogosphere had a good week last week! I'll be posting again tomorrow as well, as the tales of spring break will take up three posts, I think. Talk to you soon, blog!
Friday, March 2, 2012
Venetian Holiday
Not quite Roman Holiday, I know, especially since it also involves Prague and a brief stay in Milan. I did get my hair cut today, though!
So yes. Tomorrow at four-thirty I will be getting on a plane to Prague with my two lovely flatmates Tory and Lisa, and I will be returning to London from Venice a week from tomorrow. I AM SO EXCITED. I mean, even though I'll be visiting a country where I do not speak the language at all and a country where I sort of speak the language, which is a little terrifying, I am really really excited to go see new places and explore some new cities and I GET TO EAT GELATO, GUYS. It's going to be fantastic!!
I will not, however, be bringing my computer with me, so next week I won't be posting new things on the blog. I promise I will have lots of adventure stories for you when I get back!!
Enjoy your week, citizens of the blogosphere. Arrivederci!
So yes. Tomorrow at four-thirty I will be getting on a plane to Prague with my two lovely flatmates Tory and Lisa, and I will be returning to London from Venice a week from tomorrow. I AM SO EXCITED. I mean, even though I'll be visiting a country where I do not speak the language at all and a country where I sort of speak the language, which is a little terrifying, I am really really excited to go see new places and explore some new cities and I GET TO EAT GELATO, GUYS. It's going to be fantastic!!
I will not, however, be bringing my computer with me, so next week I won't be posting new things on the blog. I promise I will have lots of adventure stories for you when I get back!!
Enjoy your week, citizens of the blogosphere. Arrivederci!
Friday, February 24, 2012
Thoughts from Places: Edinburgh
Last Friday morning I woke up at an absurd hour (I sense there will be a lot of that when it comes to traveling this semester) and stumbled around in the dark for a bit before grabbing my overstuffed backpack and my flatmates and heading off to King's Cross Station. I did not see Platform Nine and Three Quarters, because it was busy and because it was early, but I did head over to platform 8 to board a train for Scotland.
I've only ever been on a train once before, and it was a short ride into Manhattan to see a show. The four hour train ride from London to Edinburgh was just lovely. Once we had gotten past the inexplicably ear-popping train tunnels out of London, there was nothing but rolling hills and fields and the occasional train station. We rode past innumerable sheep and little copses of trees and old farmhouses and the occasional Gothic spire in the distance. The English countryside feels so very spacious - miles of green hills topped by endless blue sky, stretching out around the train windows for forever. And then we crossed the Tweed River into Scotland, and all of a sudden the fields fell away into steep cliffs that dropped down towards the sea, an unimaginably breathtaking sight that left me leaning closer to the window to try and catch a better glimpse of it all.
We arrived in Edinburgh then, for three days of whirlwind excitement. We visited Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyrood, two more beautiful instances of history come to life for me, of feeling the weight of walking in a place where Bonnie Prince Charlie walked and Mary Queen of Scots lived, of feeling that history wasn't just a story after all and it was all there, in front of me, waiting for me to explore it. We spent a lot of time walking around the city; it's a beautiful city, a mixture of old and older architecture, and it makes me wish that we had proper alleyways in America. Edinburgh is very hilly, but it makes for some truly beautiful little streets, with all the Georgian buildings curving down the hill in little rows, letting in a glimpse of sea or sky over the rooftops.
On Saturday, we climbed Arthur's Seat, which I will refer to as a mountain simply because it is much too big to be called a hill. It was a "weather permitted" activity in our itinerary, but on flat ground it was a beautiful day, sunny and a bit cold, and a little windy. We began walking up, with the sun sneaking up on us over the top of the mountain to show off the heather and the steep valleys that kept appearing around us. As we went up, it got windier and windier, to the point where I, a rather scrawny person, was on occasion legitimately afraid of being blown off the top of the mountain. The view from the top, however, was more than worth a bit of buffeting.
It was beautiful - much like Glastonbury Tor, we could see for miles from the top; we had a view of the castle and the palace, of the whole of the city and the hills beyond it on one side, and the bay and the sea on the other side. We could see the clouds rushing over us in the wind - and yes, I did have to bend down or hold on to the rock from time to time, but it felt, as scary as it was, a little bit like flying might.
We then spotted a rather ominous looking cloud heading towards us and, not wanting to get caught in the rain, headed down the mountain. The cloud caught up with us, however, but it didn't rain - it started to snow. At first, it was beautiful - where one moment it had been sunny, suddenly everything was grey and green and white, covered in mist and little tiny snowflakes swirling around us in the wind like magic. But then, about halfway down the mountain, the wind kicked up and the snow turned to hail, and we were blown halfway down on the wrong side. It was terrifying and exhilarating; I was actually afraid that I might fall or someone else might fall and get hurt, but at the same time, it was fun. Either way, we made it down safely, even though we had to walk all the way around the base of the mountain to get back to the front again.
That evening, we went to a ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee), a traditional Scottish dance. I can hardly even explain how much fun I had. The little band - consisting of a drummer and an accordion player - walked us all through the dances first before we did them. I felt like I had stumbled across the ballroom at Netherfield (we did, in fact, do a few of the dances shown in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice), only with even livelier music and much more laughing. A little old Scottish man in a kilt asked me to dance, one of the dances that hadn't been taught yet, but he was the perfect leader; he could show me what to do without telling me anything, simply by guiding me around the floor, and by the end I knew exactly what I was doing. Everyone was so very nice and were so glad to talk to us and ask us how we liked it there. After the ceilidh, we went to a pub down the road and listened to another little band play American rock music and talked to two lovely old ladies who made room for us at their table. They seemed so happy to have us there with them, and I talked to them about my writing and their grandchildren and Scottish home rule. It was an absolutely amazing night. There's a ceilidh in Camden tomorrow night, and we're going to try and go.
The next morning, we wandered around various tourist shops and then Lisa, Matt and I split off from the group for a delicious lunch at The Elephant House, the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote some of the earlier Harry Potters. There's a view of an old graveyard and the castle out the back window of the cafe - no doubt inspiring for a fantasy writer! Perhaps I can hope that a little of that inspiration will rub off on me?
Then it was time to board the train for the four hour ride home. We did so many things and saw so many things, and I feel I got to know the people I spent my time with in Edinburgh much better than I had previously. And so, after a perfectly amazing weekend, we headed home to London. I inexplicably managed to trounce my friends at iPad Monopoly on the train ride home, another fun and silly thing to add to the weekend's accomplishments. After the sea and the cliffs, the hills and the sheep and the sunset, had all passed us by, we arrived back in London and traipsed back to the little flat I've come to call home, absolutely ready to take the weight off my very sore feet and somewhat less ready to bring the weekend to a close.
I've only ever been on a train once before, and it was a short ride into Manhattan to see a show. The four hour train ride from London to Edinburgh was just lovely. Once we had gotten past the inexplicably ear-popping train tunnels out of London, there was nothing but rolling hills and fields and the occasional train station. We rode past innumerable sheep and little copses of trees and old farmhouses and the occasional Gothic spire in the distance. The English countryside feels so very spacious - miles of green hills topped by endless blue sky, stretching out around the train windows for forever. And then we crossed the Tweed River into Scotland, and all of a sudden the fields fell away into steep cliffs that dropped down towards the sea, an unimaginably breathtaking sight that left me leaning closer to the window to try and catch a better glimpse of it all.
We arrived in Edinburgh then, for three days of whirlwind excitement. We visited Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyrood, two more beautiful instances of history come to life for me, of feeling the weight of walking in a place where Bonnie Prince Charlie walked and Mary Queen of Scots lived, of feeling that history wasn't just a story after all and it was all there, in front of me, waiting for me to explore it. We spent a lot of time walking around the city; it's a beautiful city, a mixture of old and older architecture, and it makes me wish that we had proper alleyways in America. Edinburgh is very hilly, but it makes for some truly beautiful little streets, with all the Georgian buildings curving down the hill in little rows, letting in a glimpse of sea or sky over the rooftops.
On Saturday, we climbed Arthur's Seat, which I will refer to as a mountain simply because it is much too big to be called a hill. It was a "weather permitted" activity in our itinerary, but on flat ground it was a beautiful day, sunny and a bit cold, and a little windy. We began walking up, with the sun sneaking up on us over the top of the mountain to show off the heather and the steep valleys that kept appearing around us. As we went up, it got windier and windier, to the point where I, a rather scrawny person, was on occasion legitimately afraid of being blown off the top of the mountain. The view from the top, however, was more than worth a bit of buffeting.
It was beautiful - much like Glastonbury Tor, we could see for miles from the top; we had a view of the castle and the palace, of the whole of the city and the hills beyond it on one side, and the bay and the sea on the other side. We could see the clouds rushing over us in the wind - and yes, I did have to bend down or hold on to the rock from time to time, but it felt, as scary as it was, a little bit like flying might.
We then spotted a rather ominous looking cloud heading towards us and, not wanting to get caught in the rain, headed down the mountain. The cloud caught up with us, however, but it didn't rain - it started to snow. At first, it was beautiful - where one moment it had been sunny, suddenly everything was grey and green and white, covered in mist and little tiny snowflakes swirling around us in the wind like magic. But then, about halfway down the mountain, the wind kicked up and the snow turned to hail, and we were blown halfway down on the wrong side. It was terrifying and exhilarating; I was actually afraid that I might fall or someone else might fall and get hurt, but at the same time, it was fun. Either way, we made it down safely, even though we had to walk all the way around the base of the mountain to get back to the front again.
That evening, we went to a ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee), a traditional Scottish dance. I can hardly even explain how much fun I had. The little band - consisting of a drummer and an accordion player - walked us all through the dances first before we did them. I felt like I had stumbled across the ballroom at Netherfield (we did, in fact, do a few of the dances shown in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice), only with even livelier music and much more laughing. A little old Scottish man in a kilt asked me to dance, one of the dances that hadn't been taught yet, but he was the perfect leader; he could show me what to do without telling me anything, simply by guiding me around the floor, and by the end I knew exactly what I was doing. Everyone was so very nice and were so glad to talk to us and ask us how we liked it there. After the ceilidh, we went to a pub down the road and listened to another little band play American rock music and talked to two lovely old ladies who made room for us at their table. They seemed so happy to have us there with them, and I talked to them about my writing and their grandchildren and Scottish home rule. It was an absolutely amazing night. There's a ceilidh in Camden tomorrow night, and we're going to try and go.
The next morning, we wandered around various tourist shops and then Lisa, Matt and I split off from the group for a delicious lunch at The Elephant House, the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote some of the earlier Harry Potters. There's a view of an old graveyard and the castle out the back window of the cafe - no doubt inspiring for a fantasy writer! Perhaps I can hope that a little of that inspiration will rub off on me?
Then it was time to board the train for the four hour ride home. We did so many things and saw so many things, and I feel I got to know the people I spent my time with in Edinburgh much better than I had previously. And so, after a perfectly amazing weekend, we headed home to London. I inexplicably managed to trounce my friends at iPad Monopoly on the train ride home, another fun and silly thing to add to the weekend's accomplishments. After the sea and the cliffs, the hills and the sheep and the sunset, had all passed us by, we arrived back in London and traipsed back to the little flat I've come to call home, absolutely ready to take the weight off my very sore feet and somewhat less ready to bring the weekend to a close.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Teaser Tuesday: Empty, Rolling Hills
So apparently it's Mardi Gras? Or rather, Pancake Tuesday here in the UK. It's rather a nonevent here; I would have forgotten had I not been talking to my friend who goes to LSU. Enjoy, all!
Midterms are next week, so between that and the traveling I haven't gotten as much writing done as I should be. I have, however, spent a lot of time staring out of train windows watching rolling hills and seeing the cliffs fall away into the sea. Yes, it was Scotland, not Ireland (I'm going there too, never fear!) but it feels so nice to know my setting firsthand for a change. I've seen more or less exactly what Maire is seeing here, and I can see why she would feel this way about it, even though I love the spacious feeling she hates so much.
Enjoy!
-------------------------------
The sun had risen by then, the grey sky replaced by gold-tinged blue, a clear day as far as she could see. There was no wind on the waves, no rolling clouds on the horizon, just endless green beneath her and endless blue above, a disorienting span of lifeless nothing that whisked by instant by instant. She wondered if he had calculated this route, this sad and hopeless path almost completely devoid of trees or houses or barns, on purpose. He had no need to create a labyrinth and lock her away in it – he only needed to ride, in a straight line but very fast, past nothing at all.
It was terrifying, that emptiness. Terrifying and infuriating. The wide expanse of the sea was one thing – perhaps it was still a straight line to the horizon, but the water moved and changed, the breeze brought new scents from the ocean, from the docks, from the ships themselves. But here, only a few miles inland, it was empty. The ground had failed them, and Providence abandoned them – Maire and everyone she knew and thousands she did not know were left alone in the dark to make something out of nothing, and they were finding that they could not. She clenched her hands tighter in the horse’s coarse black mane, making its ears flick backwards but not caring. She wished she could strike at the nothingness she had been granted, to throw stones or curses, but she did not even have anything at which to aim.
If it all came to nothing, where did this strange, devilishly persuasive man think that he was taking her?
And then, just at the crest of a hill, they stopped. The man yanked back on the horse’s head so hard that the beast reared up, causing Maire to slide half out of her seat. When the horse’s front legs hit the ground again with a resounding thud, the man let go of the reins with one hand and dropped his arm to his side – the arm that had been, until then, supporting Maire in her tenuously upright position. She fell, tumbling out of the saddle and onto the ground, covering her face in dirt and only just managing to roll away quickly enough to avoid being trampled into the earth as well as caked in it.
Midterms are next week, so between that and the traveling I haven't gotten as much writing done as I should be. I have, however, spent a lot of time staring out of train windows watching rolling hills and seeing the cliffs fall away into the sea. Yes, it was Scotland, not Ireland (I'm going there too, never fear!) but it feels so nice to know my setting firsthand for a change. I've seen more or less exactly what Maire is seeing here, and I can see why she would feel this way about it, even though I love the spacious feeling she hates so much.
Enjoy!
-------------------------------
The sun had risen by then, the grey sky replaced by gold-tinged blue, a clear day as far as she could see. There was no wind on the waves, no rolling clouds on the horizon, just endless green beneath her and endless blue above, a disorienting span of lifeless nothing that whisked by instant by instant. She wondered if he had calculated this route, this sad and hopeless path almost completely devoid of trees or houses or barns, on purpose. He had no need to create a labyrinth and lock her away in it – he only needed to ride, in a straight line but very fast, past nothing at all.
It was terrifying, that emptiness. Terrifying and infuriating. The wide expanse of the sea was one thing – perhaps it was still a straight line to the horizon, but the water moved and changed, the breeze brought new scents from the ocean, from the docks, from the ships themselves. But here, only a few miles inland, it was empty. The ground had failed them, and Providence abandoned them – Maire and everyone she knew and thousands she did not know were left alone in the dark to make something out of nothing, and they were finding that they could not. She clenched her hands tighter in the horse’s coarse black mane, making its ears flick backwards but not caring. She wished she could strike at the nothingness she had been granted, to throw stones or curses, but she did not even have anything at which to aim.
If it all came to nothing, where did this strange, devilishly persuasive man think that he was taking her?
And then, just at the crest of a hill, they stopped. The man yanked back on the horse’s head so hard that the beast reared up, causing Maire to slide half out of her seat. When the horse’s front legs hit the ground again with a resounding thud, the man let go of the reins with one hand and dropped his arm to his side – the arm that had been, until then, supporting Maire in her tenuously upright position. She fell, tumbling out of the saddle and onto the ground, covering her face in dirt and only just managing to roll away quickly enough to avoid being trampled into the earth as well as caked in it.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Adventure Time!
"I'm glad you feel comfortable enough with us to try new things," my flatmate said to me as I had my first ever glass of wine. (Disclaimer: I am twenty-one. I have been twenty-one since November. S'all good, guys.) "You need to feel safe when you're doing this, and I'm glad you feel safe with us."
She was absolutely right. Not that I've developed a taste for alcohol - my lifelong drink total remains about two and a half - but in order to try new things, you need to feel comfortable enough to try them. I'm talking about everything from putting Brie on a piece of bread to having a glass of wine to navigating the bus system on your own. Trying something new involves taking a risk - sometimes that risk is very small, and it might wind up that you simply don't like the food you've taken a bite of. Sometimes the risk is much larger - like the chance that you'll misread the bus schedule and miss your internship interview (which didn't happen, mind, but it's certainly a worry). And whether it's a big risk or a small one, you have to be confident enough in yourself to take it.
I feel confident here. I feel safe here. I've done a lot of things I haven't needed to do or wouldn't have done back home - find a flat to rent, for example, or find my way around the city on my own, without anyone to show me where to go first. I don't really consider myself a very self-confident person, but in the space of about an hour I've had three people tell me that I was, so either I hide it well or I'm turning into a confident person. I think being in a foreign country will do that to people.
So here's to London, guys. Here's to having cool and nerdy adventures with wonderful people, to finding my way around this beautiful city without getting lost or feeling afraid. This is a feeling I like, and it's one I think I'm going to take home with me.
We're off to Scotland tomorrow for more adventures. I'm looking forward to more exploring. :)
She was absolutely right. Not that I've developed a taste for alcohol - my lifelong drink total remains about two and a half - but in order to try new things, you need to feel comfortable enough to try them. I'm talking about everything from putting Brie on a piece of bread to having a glass of wine to navigating the bus system on your own. Trying something new involves taking a risk - sometimes that risk is very small, and it might wind up that you simply don't like the food you've taken a bite of. Sometimes the risk is much larger - like the chance that you'll misread the bus schedule and miss your internship interview (which didn't happen, mind, but it's certainly a worry). And whether it's a big risk or a small one, you have to be confident enough in yourself to take it.
I feel confident here. I feel safe here. I've done a lot of things I haven't needed to do or wouldn't have done back home - find a flat to rent, for example, or find my way around the city on my own, without anyone to show me where to go first. I don't really consider myself a very self-confident person, but in the space of about an hour I've had three people tell me that I was, so either I hide it well or I'm turning into a confident person. I think being in a foreign country will do that to people.
So here's to London, guys. Here's to having cool and nerdy adventures with wonderful people, to finding my way around this beautiful city without getting lost or feeling afraid. This is a feeling I like, and it's one I think I'm going to take home with me.
We're off to Scotland tomorrow for more adventures. I'm looking forward to more exploring. :)
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Cardiff and Nerdy Things!
Hello, all! I'm sorry I didn't post anything on Thursday, but my internet decided to fritz out, and also I didn't really have too much to talk about but today I do because I went to Cardiff!! It was a very awesome and very educational day.
Lisa (my flatmate) and I got up at 6:30 and then went on an epic journey to find the Victoria Coach Station (thing 1 learned: the difference between the term "bus" and the term "coach" is that buses are the red double-decker things that go around London or other short term trips and coaches are things that take you cross-country. So don't go to Victoria Station (for trains, buses, and the underground) and expect to find your coach). We got there in plenty of time, watched the pigeons that had gotten inside flap around and sit up on the ceiling fans and such, and then got on a nice warm bus to Cardiff.
Bus travel is extremely uncomfortable if you are tall and have a long neck. Like me. I think my shoulders are still mad at me. But after many hours of dozing off and jerking awake and looking out the window and dozing off again, we arrived in Wales. Wales is a terribly pretty country - there was snow on the mountains as we drove in, and lots more rolling hills and sheep and birch trees. Also, all of the road signs are twice as long, because they are in both English and Welsh. I had no idea that Welsh was as prevalent as it seems to be, but it's absolutely everywhere. According to Wikipedia, approximately 21% of the Welsh population speaks Welsh, with over half of those Welsh speakers claiming to speak it every day. Kinda neat! Welsh is cool - it looks completely incomprehensible to me, and it sounds somewhere between Gaelic and German, I think. It's quite intriguing.
After getting extremely lost for a good half hour at least, Lisa and I found the National Museum and decided to go in. This seems to be a museum of everything - they have art and natural history and all sorts of things. We went and looked at the natural history things first, of course - we saw rocks from space and some interesting videos in Welsh and some dinosaurs, and then we walked through the weird modern art and saw an exhibition of teacups and other beautifully decorated china and then we found the Impressionists wing. It was amazing to find all sorts of really rather famous art in this tiny little museum in Wales - Lisa, who studied French in high school, was really happy to see all of the Rodin things they had there especially. It was really cool!
After lunch, we went into Cardiff Castle (Castell Caerdydd). It was absolutely incredible. The castle itself and the keep were built in the 1100s, I believe, but over the centuries of people living there, things kept getting added and changed to suit the comfort of the family and the decorative style of the time period. One of the things I'm loving most about living in England is that it is an absolutely amazing feeling to be walking somewhere where people have walked for centuries - to be climbing (incredibly steep) steps that Oliver Cromwell might have climbed, to walk along the tunnels under the keep that were turned into air raid shelters during World War II and feel what it might have been like to hear German planes overhead. It's just so exciting to be in a place where history seems so very alive.
Yeah, we climbed to the top of that. :D
After the castle, Lisa and I walked down to Cardiff Bay (Bae Caerdydd) because we are both massive Doctor Who fans and we could not pass up the opportunity to walk down to Roald Dahl Plass and see this:
It's the rift! Unfortunately, we saw no sign of the Doctor while we were there. Alas.
At this point, we were rather frozen, and we walked back to Cardiff Central and had some dinner and waited around for the bus. Another fun fact: sometimes, Megabuses are not Megabuses. We sat at the bus stop for a good forty-five minutes, unaware that our bus was right in front of us. Fortunately, a nice British lady pointed this out to us and we hopped on the bus, dozed off, and made it back to London in time to catch the tube back home. It was a most excellent day. :D
Lisa (my flatmate) and I got up at 6:30 and then went on an epic journey to find the Victoria Coach Station (thing 1 learned: the difference between the term "bus" and the term "coach" is that buses are the red double-decker things that go around London or other short term trips and coaches are things that take you cross-country. So don't go to Victoria Station (for trains, buses, and the underground) and expect to find your coach). We got there in plenty of time, watched the pigeons that had gotten inside flap around and sit up on the ceiling fans and such, and then got on a nice warm bus to Cardiff.
Bus travel is extremely uncomfortable if you are tall and have a long neck. Like me. I think my shoulders are still mad at me. But after many hours of dozing off and jerking awake and looking out the window and dozing off again, we arrived in Wales. Wales is a terribly pretty country - there was snow on the mountains as we drove in, and lots more rolling hills and sheep and birch trees. Also, all of the road signs are twice as long, because they are in both English and Welsh. I had no idea that Welsh was as prevalent as it seems to be, but it's absolutely everywhere. According to Wikipedia, approximately 21% of the Welsh population speaks Welsh, with over half of those Welsh speakers claiming to speak it every day. Kinda neat! Welsh is cool - it looks completely incomprehensible to me, and it sounds somewhere between Gaelic and German, I think. It's quite intriguing.
After getting extremely lost for a good half hour at least, Lisa and I found the National Museum and decided to go in. This seems to be a museum of everything - they have art and natural history and all sorts of things. We went and looked at the natural history things first, of course - we saw rocks from space and some interesting videos in Welsh and some dinosaurs, and then we walked through the weird modern art and saw an exhibition of teacups and other beautifully decorated china and then we found the Impressionists wing. It was amazing to find all sorts of really rather famous art in this tiny little museum in Wales - Lisa, who studied French in high school, was really happy to see all of the Rodin things they had there especially. It was really cool!
After lunch, we went into Cardiff Castle (Castell Caerdydd). It was absolutely incredible. The castle itself and the keep were built in the 1100s, I believe, but over the centuries of people living there, things kept getting added and changed to suit the comfort of the family and the decorative style of the time period. One of the things I'm loving most about living in England is that it is an absolutely amazing feeling to be walking somewhere where people have walked for centuries - to be climbing (incredibly steep) steps that Oliver Cromwell might have climbed, to walk along the tunnels under the keep that were turned into air raid shelters during World War II and feel what it might have been like to hear German planes overhead. It's just so exciting to be in a place where history seems so very alive.
Yeah, we climbed to the top of that. :D
After the castle, Lisa and I walked down to Cardiff Bay (Bae Caerdydd) because we are both massive Doctor Who fans and we could not pass up the opportunity to walk down to Roald Dahl Plass and see this:
It's the rift! Unfortunately, we saw no sign of the Doctor while we were there. Alas.
At this point, we were rather frozen, and we walked back to Cardiff Central and had some dinner and waited around for the bus. Another fun fact: sometimes, Megabuses are not Megabuses. We sat at the bus stop for a good forty-five minutes, unaware that our bus was right in front of us. Fortunately, a nice British lady pointed this out to us and we hopped on the bus, dozed off, and made it back to London in time to catch the tube back home. It was a most excellent day. :D
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Thoughts from Places: How to Commute
So I woke up yesterday morning at 7:45 and grumbled about the dark and the early because I am a college student and that's what college students do. (Also, England is farther north than you would think it is, since it's so warm here, and so the sun rises around 8 and sets around 4:30.) I was the only one up in the flat, because I had to eat and get dressed and catch a bus to Fulham to start my first actually full day of work.
There is a thing about buses in London, other than the fact that sitting on the top of a double-decker bus is outrageously cool. If you look up the time that a journey will take you on the Transport for London website, they are lying to you. Granted, I like to err on the side of caution, but still. It does not take thirty minutes to get from my flat to my internship. It takes fifteen. Tops. Another thing about double-decker buses is that if you sit on the top in the front, there's a windshield in front of you, just like there would be in the front of a regular bus or car. And from a good six feet in the air, looking down onto the street feels a bit like you are going to crash into absolutely everything in front of you. There have been many occasions - and I've only ridden the bus six times now - when I have thought OH GOD WE ARE GOING TO HIT THAT CAR or OH GOODNESS THERE'S A PERSON RIDING A BIKE DOWN THERE THEY'RE GOING TO BE FLATTENED. This is especially true when the bus you are on is going way too fast, honking at pedestrians and cars trying to pass when the bus is trying to turn, and generally lurching about (ie my Wednesday morning commute).
So after a harrowing ten minutes that left me at my stop fully half an hour before I needed to be there, I decided to take a walk. There really isn't much of anything besides houses in this area of London - they're really lovely houses, it makes me feel like I'm walking through the set of Mary Poppins (and I did, in fact, sing a bit of Chim Chim Cher-ee to myself because I'm cool like that), with all the neat roofs and chimneys and the pretty little front gardens.
Speaking of front gardens:
Yes, that is in fact a blooming rose bush. In JANUARY.
Have I mentioned how much I love London?
I spent my extra half an hour wandering around, looking at the roses in the gardens and the neat little houses, and I ended my wander by walking across the street from my internship's building to the Thames walk.
It was one of those moments - and I still have them now and again, even though I'm getting used to the idea - when it hit me that I live here. For four months, at least, I live in London, a beautiful city that barely feels like a city, a place that's full of history and culture and people speaking so many different languages I can't even identify them all. A city where I can see mockingbirds in the trees and and ducks on the Thames, where I can see roses in front gardens when in Ithaca, it's snowing away. A city that isn't a miracle or a dream or perfection, but a very real place, and it's the place that I'm lucky enough to explore for now.
And, at the end of a long day of searching Shutterstock for the least ridiculous images so I can put them into books, it's the place where I get to get onto a double-decker bus and lurch through the traffic, nearly hitting pedestrians and bikers, until I get to walk the last few blocks in the dark, back to the place I am, for now, calling home.
There is a thing about buses in London, other than the fact that sitting on the top of a double-decker bus is outrageously cool. If you look up the time that a journey will take you on the Transport for London website, they are lying to you. Granted, I like to err on the side of caution, but still. It does not take thirty minutes to get from my flat to my internship. It takes fifteen. Tops. Another thing about double-decker buses is that if you sit on the top in the front, there's a windshield in front of you, just like there would be in the front of a regular bus or car. And from a good six feet in the air, looking down onto the street feels a bit like you are going to crash into absolutely everything in front of you. There have been many occasions - and I've only ridden the bus six times now - when I have thought OH GOD WE ARE GOING TO HIT THAT CAR or OH GOODNESS THERE'S A PERSON RIDING A BIKE DOWN THERE THEY'RE GOING TO BE FLATTENED. This is especially true when the bus you are on is going way too fast, honking at pedestrians and cars trying to pass when the bus is trying to turn, and generally lurching about (ie my Wednesday morning commute).
So after a harrowing ten minutes that left me at my stop fully half an hour before I needed to be there, I decided to take a walk. There really isn't much of anything besides houses in this area of London - they're really lovely houses, it makes me feel like I'm walking through the set of Mary Poppins (and I did, in fact, sing a bit of Chim Chim Cher-ee to myself because I'm cool like that), with all the neat roofs and chimneys and the pretty little front gardens.
Speaking of front gardens:
Yes, that is in fact a blooming rose bush. In JANUARY.
Have I mentioned how much I love London?
I spent my extra half an hour wandering around, looking at the roses in the gardens and the neat little houses, and I ended my wander by walking across the street from my internship's building to the Thames walk.
It was one of those moments - and I still have them now and again, even though I'm getting used to the idea - when it hit me that I live here. For four months, at least, I live in London, a beautiful city that barely feels like a city, a place that's full of history and culture and people speaking so many different languages I can't even identify them all. A city where I can see mockingbirds in the trees and and ducks on the Thames, where I can see roses in front gardens when in Ithaca, it's snowing away. A city that isn't a miracle or a dream or perfection, but a very real place, and it's the place that I'm lucky enough to explore for now.
And, at the end of a long day of searching Shutterstock for the least ridiculous images so I can put them into books, it's the place where I get to get onto a double-decker bus and lurch through the traffic, nearly hitting pedestrians and bikers, until I get to walk the last few blocks in the dark, back to the place I am, for now, calling home.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Some Things About London
I have been in London for a whole week now (!!!), and so I guess I am qualified to tell you guys a few things that I have learned so far.
Thing 1: London is gorgeous. I'm a complete history nerd, so I am so excited to simply walk down the street and see all the ornate old buildings.
THIS is the street that I go to school on:
And THIS is the Natural History Museum:
And THIS is MY FLAT:
Look at all the pretty! :D
I just love walking around in London; I'm used to NYC, which has a completely different feel to it. London feels much more open and airy (and clean), like it spreads outwards forever instead of upwards forever.
Thing 2: I still do not fully understand English traffic. There are NO STOP SIGNS here. And yes, everyone knows that they drive on the wrong side of the road, but that didn't really hit me until I was trying to cross the street for the first time. I'm being super super super careful about that.
Thing 3: All the outlets have switches on them. I discovered this initially at the hotel, when my laptop wouldn't register that it was plugged in even though I had plugged it in, and I realized that the second switch by the outlet wasn't for a lamp that wasn't working, but for the outlet itself. Unfortunately, when we got to our flat, we did not realize that the refrigerator was plugged in but not, in fact, switched on. So we accidentally froze some apples and tomatoes and things. Whoops. Made for some pretty good tomato sauce, though.
I feel like I had more to say, but my brain seems to be shutting down for the night. I've gotten over the jet lag, of course (jet lag is eeeeeeeeeeeevil) but still, the time change does seem to have set me into a wake-up-in-the-mornings and go-to-bed-really-early schedule. Not sure how much I like that just yet; we'll see.
There'll be more London stuff ahead, I assure you!
Thing 1: London is gorgeous. I'm a complete history nerd, so I am so excited to simply walk down the street and see all the ornate old buildings.
THIS is the street that I go to school on:
And THIS is the Natural History Museum:
And THIS is MY FLAT:
Look at all the pretty! :D
I just love walking around in London; I'm used to NYC, which has a completely different feel to it. London feels much more open and airy (and clean), like it spreads outwards forever instead of upwards forever.
Thing 2: I still do not fully understand English traffic. There are NO STOP SIGNS here. And yes, everyone knows that they drive on the wrong side of the road, but that didn't really hit me until I was trying to cross the street for the first time. I'm being super super super careful about that.
Thing 3: All the outlets have switches on them. I discovered this initially at the hotel, when my laptop wouldn't register that it was plugged in even though I had plugged it in, and I realized that the second switch by the outlet wasn't for a lamp that wasn't working, but for the outlet itself. Unfortunately, when we got to our flat, we did not realize that the refrigerator was plugged in but not, in fact, switched on. So we accidentally froze some apples and tomatoes and things. Whoops. Made for some pretty good tomato sauce, though.
I feel like I had more to say, but my brain seems to be shutting down for the night. I've gotten over the jet lag, of course (jet lag is eeeeeeeeeeeevil) but still, the time change does seem to have set me into a wake-up-in-the-mornings and go-to-bed-really-early schedule. Not sure how much I like that just yet; we'll see.
There'll be more London stuff ahead, I assure you!
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