Why I Love UEA Sometimes

This morning, my Austen and the Brontes instructor compared Sir Walter Elliot of Persuasion to Pontius Pilate in Monty Python's Life of Brian. What more could you ask for, really?

Earthquake!

Apparently, there was an earthquake in the UK early this morning. To be honest, I didn't know until Allie emailed me about it, because I didn't check the news this morning when I woke up, and no one in my class talked about it. So obviously, I'm fine, and I didn't even notice. There hasn't been much damage reported in Norfolk, though the police did take 180 calls from people wondering what was going on.

New talent: sleeping through earthquakes.

Some news sites:

Eastern Daily Press article
BBC Norfolk article
BBC general article

Aw...

My flatmates just knocked on my door to wish me a happy birthday and gave me a card and a UEA sweatshirt. It was really cute...I have a really nice flat, and I really appreciate it, even though I don't hang out with them that much. They're all really sweet.

Lancaster and the Lake District

I went up to Lancaster this weekend to visit my friend, Whitney. We had a great time (well, I did. I'm pretty sure Whitney did, too. We did some random things...). First of all, the train ride over there is 6 hours. This is because Norwich is in a pocket and you can't get out of it. It basically makes every train ride two hours longer than it has to be. Oh well--Norwich is a nice city. And I have easy access to better shopping!

I finally got to go to the Lake District! We went to Windermere and Grasmere--where William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived for a time. That was really cool. We got to go to their cottage. We learned that people used to sleep sitting up, because they thought it was better for the respiratory system, and that William Wordsworth makes the kind of stupid mistakes that I would make. He tried to write his name on his suitcase, but ran out of room, so he had to stick the "h" in above the rest of his name. This made me feel much better about myself. Anyway, I really love Romantic poetry, in particular Wordsworth, so it was really cool to see his house.

Other than that, we hung around Lancaster, doing the sort of thing we probably would have done on a normal weekend at St. Olaf. It was really nice, except there were more castles involved. Among other things, we:

• watched Schoolhouse Rock (with a British person! Yay!)
• watched Bride and Prejudice (the Bollywood version of Pride and Prejudice)
• made brownies
• ate spotted dick. It was good. I thought it tasted like coffee cake without the crusty bit and with raisins.

So, that's about all I have to say. I'm starting to worry about my papers that are due in two weeks, so I don't think I'll be doing anything interesting for the next two weekends. But after that, I'm off to Ireland, so it's okay!

Ireland

What a loser! That last post was my 100th post, and I didn't even notice!

Anyway, I'm going to Ireland for 8 days: 12 March-20 March. I'll fly back into Norwich with time to repack, sleep, and catch a train to London to meet my family. I don't know where in Ireland I'm going yet, though. I've got the plane tickets, but nothing else set. So more planning is in order--and I've only got three weeks!

I Am Smart.

I read all of Jane Eyre today (and didn't turn the computer on until now). I am two books ahead of schedule in my Austen and the Brontes class! Now I just have to start my paper...

Travel!

Next Weekend: Lancaster, to visit Whitney

29 Feb-2 March: ???

7 Mar-9 Mar: ??? (I do have two papers to write, so I probably ought to stay at home and do that...)

14 Mar-21 Mar: Completely open. First week of Easter Break.

21 Mar-30 Mar: Running my family around. London, Paris, probably Oxford and Norwich.

31 Mar-13 April: Running around like a crazy person with Teri from Arizona (I met her 3 days ago. Crazy). Woot! Anyway, itinerary:

31 Mar: To Frankfurt

1 April: To Bern, to meet Teri, then to Interlaken

2 April: Interlaken

3 April: To Vienna, stopping off in Liechtenstein for a bit.

4 April: Vienna

5 April: To Prague

6 April: Prague

7 April: To Berlin

8 April: Berlin

9 April: To Bruges

10 April: Bruges

11 April: To Amsterdam

12 April: Amsterdam

13 April: back to London, then hopefully Norwich, eventually.

Places I have left to see (and no current plans to do so):

• Canterbury
• Hastings
• Winchester (because Jane Austen lived nearby, of course!)
• Cornwall
• Haworth (home of the Brontes)
• Wales
• Ireland. All of it.
• Inverness (because when you have a chance to see Loch Ness, people, you do not turn it down. Ever. This is just a general rule of life.)
• Krakow, Poland
  

I would have liked to see Greece or Turkey, but I don't think I'll make it this time around. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll get there, but not yet.

Pictures!

Finally, I have finished putting up my pictures from Christmas break. Yeah, yeah, it took me long enough. I've also got pictures from visiting Allie up, as well, and will get pictures from London and Bath up as soon as I can. Enjoy them!

Ennui

I've reached the point in the year where, traditionally, I fall to pieces. February is the cruelest month, cold and wet when you're sick of winter, short, and grey. February is the month when I get hit by absolute boredom and hatred of, well, pretty much everything (except the internet. Oh how I love the internet). Strangely enough, I still havethe February sense of life, even though the weather here seems more like April (but is as fickle as March). February is marked by ennui.

Last week, if I had written this post, I would have told you about how homesick I was, how jealous I was that Allie got to go home, how tired and bored I was...but not this week. This week, despite a nasty chest cold, I feel much better. I woke up this morning and felt at home for the first time in a long time. However, February is working its cruel charms, and I am still tired and bored with my work. But we are already halfway through, and soon enough February will be gone, and I will have two papers due.

In other news, it's Abraham Lincoln's birthday today! And Charles Darwin's, as well. So a happy birthday to two hugely influential, intelligent, and dead men.

Jane Austen and Guess Where?

Jealous yet?

Firstly, let me just say this: I am separated from my email for an entire weekend, and then I come back, only to find that there is an issue with Roundcube and I cannot check my email. I feel so empty!

Edit (7:54PM): Roundcube's working again! I think I'll go dance.

Royal Crescent

Anyway, I had an absolutely fantastic weekend with Whitney in Bath. It was so great to see another Ole who isn't leaving soon! This means I can say, unabashedly, that the weekend was amazing, and untainted with jealousy or sadness (because the other person gets to go back/will be leaving me). We both got in late Thursday night, caught up, and went to bed. The next day, we toured. We were so efficient--it wasn't even funny. We toured Bath Abbey in 15 minutes. We saw the Roman Baths, the Pump Room, the Jane Austen Centre, and the Assembly Rooms/Fashion Museum, all before 2:00. We even got to take tea in the Assembly Rooms, and then I felt really cool. Oh, and we also learned to how to speak with fans and I had to try on a corset. I got a headache soon after--I wonder if this may have something to do with the incredibly prevalent "brain fever" in Victorian literature...(which is pretty much my favorite disease of all time. I mean, brain fever? It's pretty much hilarious). Then, we wandered around Bath for a while, looking at the flowers and the Georgian architecture, and the "bird aviary" in the Royal Gardens. That evening, we hung out at the hostel for the most part, though we did venture out to find the Wetherspoons (because it was called the Kings of Wessex--the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kings during the bulk of the Viking invasions through to the Norman Conquest), only to decide that we were not, in fact, hungry.

One of Jane Austen's homes in Bath, now dental surgery.

Yesterday, we decided to go on a day-tour. We met our group at 8:35 AM to drive through the misty hills to...guess where. No, really, guess. I'll give you a hint:



Yep. I got to go to Stonehenge! I'm still so excited about being there. It's kind of ridiculous. But good lord, people, it's Stonehenge!! And we were there early in the morning, so there weren't that many people there. We spent about an hour there, before driving on to Avebury, another stone circle in Wiltshire. That was almost cooler, because you could walk among the stones and even touch them. Next, we went to Lacock, which is a historic little village now owned by the National Trust.

A house in Lacock, used as the Potter house in the films

They've used it for all kinds of different movies, including Harry Potter and the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice. Finally, we headed on to Castle Combe, in the Cotswolds, which has also been a movie set, for the Dr. Doolittle with Rex Harrison and for Stardust.

Castle Combe

I was really excited about that. There's also a Crusader buried in the church there, and according to the little sign in the church, he had been on two Crusades. How do they know this? The legs of his effigy are crossed. Does anyone else feel like they make this stuff up sometimes?


When we got back that night, we decided to go see a movie (so we wouldn't be quite so pathetic as the night before!). So we went to National Treasure. Whitney had never seen the first, but I assured her it would be fine. After all, neither had Catie, and she seemed to do just fine watching it in Italian! I'm so glad I got to see it again--it's really nice to see it in a language I understand. Besides, I love the first one so much...anyway, after the movie, there were about twenty million people in our room, so we headed out to a pub and sat there for a while before going to bed.

Today, we got up and wandered aimlessly before deciding we had pretty much covered Bath in a matter of hours on the first day and just going to the train station. I caught a train to London that was so crowded that I had to lean against the luggage rack for two hours. It was absurd. Then, I had to catch a bus to Colchester and finally a train to Norwich. I just got back (and found out my email doesn't work). So, yeah. I had a great weekend. I saw a ton, and I'm so glad I went.

Pictures: The Mediterranean

I have pictures up (finally) from Marseille, Nice, Monaco, and Cinque Terre. Go look at them!

London

Since I already did a post from Sheffield, I'm going to skip over that weekend (though it was a lot of fun!) and head straight on to London. I got up ridiculously early Friday morning and got on a train from Norwich to London. Luckily, the train is only 1 hr 56 min (exactly). Then I took the Tube to my hostel, and wandered down the wrong street trying to find it...so much for being able to find my way around!

Finally, I got to the hostel and hung out while I waited for Allie to repeat the exact same mistakes I made trying to find the place. Once we checked in and got settled, we headed out for the Tate Britain museum. I must be honest, my already limited concentration for art museums is pretty much shot by this point. So we mostly just wandered aimlessly and talked. I did get to see some work by William Blake (who, along with being an artist, is one of the Romantic poets I'm studying in my Romanticism class. However, I happen to not like his work very much) and some by George Stubbs, who apparently does not actually know what a horse looks like. Unfortunately, he's praised as one of the premier horse painters. Okay, so some of his stuff is good, but a lot of it is just odd. Once we finished up there, we headed over to the British Museum. It was open late, thankfully, and I got to see the artifacts from the Sutton Hoo burial mounds, which was pretty cool, to say the least! Allie and I got a little obsessed with the Anglo-Saxon and Viking stuff. We also went to look at the friezes from the Parthenon (because Allie was just there. I'm jealous!). We went to a few of the gift shops, but missed the kid's shop by a hair. The other ones were disappointing. We came back to the hostel, went to Tesco, and had dinner, then went to bed.

Saturday morning, we got up and headed out to Windsor Castle. This was also pretty cool. We got the audio tour and again, wandered aimlessly for a while. It was impressive. I've decided that I like the Georgian style of decorating. We came back, went to Oxford street (to find the John Lewis flagship--this is apparently a tradition with us), and then tried (again) to go to the kid's gift shop at the British Museum. Again, we failed. So we went to the Tate Modern. It broke my brain, people. I mean, I'm not much of one for modern art, anyway, though I do like Surrealism (to a point), but this...especially when we got to the minimalist bit. One room had a film where the filmmaker had put paint directly on the film and had deliberately scratched it, setting it to really energetic, almost ear-splitting music. The next room was painted black with white pinstripes on the walls. In the stripes were different shapes--a triangle, a trapeziod, a square. The third room had various sculptures on the wall made out of neon lights. I couldn't handle it. It gave me a headache, and I came out of those rooms only to stare blankly at Allie and say, "It broke me." It was crazy. There was also one woman who did a series where she took a job as a cleaner at a hotel in Venice for a few weeks, and dug through the guests' stuff and documented it. It was creepy. Anyway, we got back late that night, and went straight to bed.

Sunday, we walked though Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park to go to the Victoria and Albert museum, which houses decorative art. We went through an exhibit on fashion (and I have decided that almost everything from the eighties should be trashed. Except me. And select other people). There was also this bit with plaster casts of famous places/things. This was incredibly exciting, because there was a cast of the Ruthwell Cross, as well as casts from Rosslyn Chapel, Notre Dame, and tons of other places Allie and/or I had visited. It was basically a short stroll through my travels of the past six months.

After that, we walked down the street to the Natural History Museums. We got to see dinosaurs! Pretty much, I just geeked out for a while and babbled incoherently about DINOSAURS! Um...yeah. Sorry, Allie. You ought to be used to it by now. So anyway, that was fun. And they had the best gift shop of all. To Allie's disappointment, they did not have many plant fossils, and none of what she was looking for.

Shortly after that, we picked up our bags at the hostel and head our separate ways to go home. That's the last time I'll see Allie until the summer, at the earliest (hopefully). I can't say I'm not jealous that she gets to go home, but there's a lot I have left to do.

Routine

It's now week 4 of my second semester abroad. Life has slowly settled back into some semblance of routine--I go to class, run errands in town, pretend to do my homework, and so on. There is one significant difference: I have been doing something interesting every weekend so far. Liz came down, I went up to visit Allie in Sheffield, and I went to London. Next weekend, I'm going to Bath and Salisbury with my friend Whitney, currently studying in Lancaster.

Classes have been going well. I have much less work this semester, due to the lack of a third-year course. It's so nice! I'm taking Austen and the Brontes: Reading the Romance, Romanticism, and Norman and Plantagenet England. I've read everything we've looked at so far in my two lit classes before, which is also really nice. Not only do I get to take a bit of a break, but I don't have to pay such close attention to generic details and can get more specific. My Austen and the Brontes class is composed entirely of girls. This is strange to me. However, it doesn't make me any more comfortable participating in general class discussions. I love my instructor for Norman and Plantagenet England--he's constantly making really random statements that have only tenuous relations to the subject at hand. He doesn't seem to be a huge fan of undergrads, though.

Hopefully, in a few weeks, I'll get to go on a Host UK weekend. I've sent in my application, and I'm just ironing out the details before they process my application entirely. Host UK is a program where volunteers host international students for the weekend and show the students around their towns. I don't know yet where I'll go, but I'm really excited!

Other than that, I don't have much more to say. Hopefully, I'll put up accounts of the past few weekends soon, and I really need to get working on putting pictures up. I'm busier now than I ever have been before, and it's taking a toll on me. I barely get a chance to recover during the week before I'm gone again! So we'll see.

London

Right, folks, I'm off to London for the weekend! I've been really cold the past few days (for no reason--it's 40+ degrees!), so I'm wearing a ridiculous amount of layers. Have a good weekend!