silent sigh

So, here's a question. Why did I not do the things I needed to do over the weekend? Here's another question. What was I thinking?? For the love. Oh well, that means there will be lots of library time in my future. Thanksgiving break, by the way, was delightful, delicious, delectible. And if I could rewind, I still wouldn't do my homework.

We painted D and A's house. It looks fantastic. We had a little bit of a paint crisis, but it ended up great with oat and roast. I hate filbert. Blech.

letters revisited

Why is the internet such a pain in the batoosh? I got my other two packets to my letter writers today, and have been trying and trying to submit them as online recommenders, and EVERY website has been down! It's driving me crazy.

It feels great, though, to be on break. I ran into one of my students today, and I think we're both really happy that I cancelled class.

Now I need to start writing my statement of intent. I sort of know what I'm going to say, but it's all about getting started. I have writers fear. I'm planning on starting with my popculture story--where the lady told me to slow down, and then I got grilled at the end. It was SO funny!

changes

I suppose I should mention that since Wales is over I think I'll use the blog for more mundane posts. It seems a shame for all this great computer space to go to waste, so I plan to now post about more every day things...grad school, papers, teaching, school, things of that nature. So we may not get as many wild pictures (I'll see what I can do), but at least I'll have a vent spot.

schools finally

You know, this grad school application thing gets tiring! And it makes me crave going out to dinner rather than going home and cooking myself something. Whatever. Panda Express sounds good. Or Thai food. Or maybe Zupas. So, today I've been gather letter of recommendation stuff and compiling folders. Cutchins's is all done and sitting outside of his office. It took about a million hours to find it all. Now I have to get Matt and Nick's together. I also finally compiled a final list of schools: (!)

U Penn
Indiana
NYU
UW
Vanderbilt
Notre Dame
U of Colorado
SUNY Stony Brook
U of South Carolina

I'm pretty excited about all of them. Getting into my top will be nothing short of miraculous. But hey, I believe.

i can't resist

I'm about as good at this blog thing as I am at the journal thing. Whatever.

So, just in case my mom or any other concerned party reads this particular post, I'd just like to say that I'm very safe and capable here in London. I'm being very very careful and there are always tons of people around. And I'm about 5 years older than anyone in these hostels, so I promise that there is nothing to worry about. That said, I just can't help writing down a few hostel stories.

So, my first hostel post-program was the nastiest place I've ever slept. Luckily I had clean sheets all to myself. However, on the bright side, it was a multi-cultural experience. I met people from Spain, Italy, Germany, and Croatia (they won the football match apparently).

Yesterday I moved into my new hostel. It's much much nicer, but last night just made me laugh:

I got back from the theatre (Seven Brides for Seven Bros) around 10:30. The light in my room at the hostel wasn't working, so my roomies had the door propped open so that they could get drunk on vodka and redbull (could there be a nastier mix?) as they got ready to go clubbing. They sprayed lots and lots of cologne (red bull + cheap vodka + cologne. can there be a nastier smell?). I swear they are all 15 years old.

When I woke up this morning there were at least two extra people beyond my roommates passed out in the beds or on the floor of our room. Wow, London night life (in which I do not participate, mom).

Good times in London! I bought a Khans shirt earlier this week. It is perhaps the best purchase I have made since I arrived in the UK. On the back it says "If you haven't been to Khans, you haven't been to London" I can't wait to wear it every day.

Craziness

Yes my friends, we are going to go see The Tempest at Stratford Upon Avon starring this man:




I'm so excited I might die.

Art

One of our professors here is Brian Kershisnik. I really like his work--it's kind of modern I think. Check it out if you like: kershisnik.com

London Fiasco!

This weekend our program split into two groups. Half of us decided to hike 10 mi through the night to camp out and touch the stones at Stonehenge. I've already done that minus the 10 mi hike, so I opted to go to London with the other half. I had a blast! It was Brian Kershisnik (the art prof) and his wife Suzanne and their two girls Eden and Leah, and Susan (welsh student, mom), Jennie (my roommate), Melissa (culture house), and George (Katy and Tom's nephew)--perfect size group. So once we got there we went to Portobello road, the huge open air market. I bought a cute jacket and had a great tomato and avocado sandwich for lunch. Then I went off on my own to the National Portrait Gallery. It's a small offshoot of the National Gallery and has tons of famous portraits. I loved it! I went nuts seeing portraits of Richard III and Sir Thomas Moore and Elizabeth I and Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, William Pitt, Dickens, George Eliot, John Donne, Edmund Burke, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Isaac Newton...all the people I've read about and more. And they had these great little blurbs in each room so I kind of got to put the literature I know in the context of scientific, cultural and political history. It was so great! Then we went and had dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant, Khan's (it was my third time It's SOOO good. If you guys come, we'll go).

That's when the fiasco happened. For this program we bought (meaning Tom bought with the program money) British Rain flex passes. It gives us 15 days of travel throughout the UK. We've been using them for non academic saturday trips and we go as a group (We have 18 tickets or so, and 9 tickets must travel together). This weekend we split them up so a group could hit Stonehenge, and the rest of us could go to London. Brian had the tickets, and when we got to Paddington Station to go back to Cardiff they were lost!! We don't know if they got left somewhere or if he was picked. I felt so bad! We spent the next few hours trying to find them. Brian and George went and backtracked through the day. Suzanne and I looked around Paddington--the ticket offices, the lost and found, etc, and tried to figure out how much it would be to get home. British people are so funny. Some of them were so super helpful. Others were less so. Suzanne went to talk to one of the ticket counters to see if anything had been turned in. She explained what happened and the man at the counter said "I don't think we would have anything like that turned in today." She opened her mouth to reply and he waived her on. Are you serious?! You don't think?? Well, I beg to differ!! It was so funny. Luckily the tickets are insured, so we can get them back eventually. However, we couldn't get on the train tonight w/o tickets. So, finally Brian and George come back to Paddington station (after encountering many more unhelpful people such as police men) and said that we needed to fill out a police report. So I asked around and found the Paddington police station. Of course it was closed. So I picked up the emergency phone by the door. No one answered. Emergencies are obviously a top priority in the largest train station in one of the world's largest cities. So George uses his cell phone to call this other number on the door. They talk to him for a second and then transfer him to voice mail. So I try, and they say that they'll send someone over. I wait for about 20 minutes. Suzanne goes to some lady at a counter and says " If I commit a crime will the police come?" The lady avoids the question. I laughed so hard. So we give up on that since we have about 20 minutes until the last train to Cardiff comes. HELLO! Terrorists? Are we no longer worried about those? Anyhow, we bought tickets (or rather, Brian bought tickets 210 GBS (ie around $400)) and came home and laughed the whole time.

Poor Brian. I felt bad for him--better him than me though. I bought him a Dr. Pepper. Anyhow, great times in London. I love that city.

Canterbury

On Saturday for our optional trip we visited Canterbury Cathedral. I think it is the most beautiful cathedral in the UK. It has tons of stained glass windows and is the resting place of Edward the Black Prince of Wales of Henry V fame. Friday night we went with some of the young single adults in the area to a regional dance in Birmingham. It's about 2 hours away so we didn't get home until around 3am. We had to leave for the train station to get to canterbury at about 5:15am so lots of the girls stayed home. So it was Tom's family, the Kerschiznic family and 5 of us stuents. The smaller group was very fun, and we stopped in London on the way home for some great indian food at Khan's. Wow, I can't wait for our next London trip to get some more. Although, I must say, Bombay is just about as good. Incidently, they also have great mcflurries here. They put in British candy and wow.

ps. Music at UK church dances is weird. Kind of a mix between rap and easy listening in the same song. And they also threw in Whoop There It Is.



Here's a picture of Hannah and I attacking our nasty benjamin kitchen floor. We had lots of nice black mold and spider webs and about 3 layers of rotting tile. However, victory for us. Hannah is one of my favorite people in our group. She's chill and funny and likes to laugh. She and I go at the same pace, and we were the only two girls that went to the dance and to Canterbury the next day. Good times.

Tintern Abbey and Monmouth

On Wednesday we had a travel day and went to Tintern Abbey. The Abbey is a gorgeous ruin of huge symmetrical archways and we got to explore and climb all over it. Brian, an art professor from BYU, gave us a drawing lesson there. I stunk, but it was fun.



We also went to Monmouth, the birthplace of Henry V--he's Welsh you know!

Ymolchyn Du!

Tonight we went to a Welsh pub called Ymolchyn Du (The Black Pig) for their folk music night! (I don't know how the picture turned out--it's of a pig saying "Cymru am byth" with a Welsh Dragon tatoo on its bum. I want one.) It was so cool! Firstly, the park that we like to cut through closes at 9:00 and we left around 9:30 so Tom, us Welshies, and the other professor Brian Kershiznick all hopped the fence to get there. The pub was packed (lots of BRAINS jersies). A bunch of Welsh people sat around a central table with violins and a harp and a recorder and played folk music and sang in Welsh. We sat around and drank ginger beer (much much better than ginger ale--mas fuerte). It was so much fun--none of the musicians had music. One of the violinists would start a tune, the others would listen and then join in, do rounds, and harmonize. Amazing. I'm pumped for next week! And then we jumped the fences again to get back.

thanks Don for the tips on how to do this!

Les Miserables, Slugs, and other Sundry

Every Saturday we're scheduled to take a non-academic fun day trip to some location in the UK. Yesterday we went to London, and some fellow students and I took Tom's kids to Les Miserables. The majority of our group had never seen it, and it was a great production. I've seen it a couple of times before, and you'd think I get tired of the music, but I loved it. The opening music began and I got the chills. It was so fun. We also had some great Indian food and enjoyed walking through Kensington Gardens. I love London differently than any other city. I guess it seems very Victorian (my favorite) to me. It feels like I'm walking through all of my favorite novels, sort of. It's tough to explain, and I wish you were all here to experience it with me. And not the smug I-wish-you-were-here-too-bad-for-you, but I really think our family would love this (so would brooke and sarah--we need to come!).

So, I got up a little early the other day. I'm sitting innocently on the couch in our livingroom, minding my own business, reading my book. Susan walks in and examines a black line on the carpet that I had missed. It was a FOUR INCH SLUG chilling on our carpet!! I was in bare feet, I could have stepped on it! I was so grossed out I couldn't even look at it. I love Cardiff, but we do have our fair share of critters in the house, including mutant rolly-polly bugs. Nasty-b.

Anyhow, incidently Middlemarch is a great book. Loving it. Highly recommend it.

Still trying to figure out how to post pictures. Hopefully I'll have some up soon.

MADE IT!

After 2 surprisingly short flights (I slept through 90% of both) we've made it to our hostel in London. We ran into a BYU student going to the BYU London Centre in the airport, and I'm proud to say that I helped him find the Centre and I found our hostel in downtown London. Kudos to me. It's a gorgeous day, temperatures in the 70s. We're staying for the next 2 days really close to Kensington Gardens in the neighborhood of my first London experience. It is so so fun to be here, it feels great, and I'm excited for the next couple of months. I'm not sure what my companions are up to, but I'd like to go walk through the parks, and maybe go look at some art, and hit the hay relatively early tonight.

I, of course, brought 6 books or so to get started on my masters thesis, but I, of course, forgot the 2 books I was supposed to bring for my study abroad. I think I can get them in Cardiff though.

It's so fun to be here. The only thing that would make it better is being with you all.

Welcome to my blog!

Tomorrow, my friends, I will be on my way to Cymru to learn the beautiful language of Cymraeg. I plan to post pictures and updates here periodically, so if you're ever interested, come and visit!