Even More Sonic

"You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford" ~Samuel Johnson

Have I mentioned recently, that I love this place. Here are the favorites of the moment:

St. George's Day
April 23rd is, among other things, St. George's Day, which commemorates St. George who slayed a dragon and saved England/London/The World from the dragon/pagans/evil. Those of us who went to Wales missed St. George's day proper (The Welsh couldn't care less, St. David is their man), but fortunately for us, the 23rd being a Friday, there have been festivities all weekend. On Saturday, the mayor of London (and his music festival planning cronies) held a music festival in Trafalgar square. The whole atmosphere was very festive--a la the Defeat of Jesse James Day minus the pistol fire. There was however a re-enactment of the dragon-slaying:The music was great, and included some of the winners of last years London Transport Busking competition. Busking, which is essentially playing music in public places like the Tube, is taken very seriously. You have to be a licensed busker, and one way to get such a liscence is to participate in a busking competition. Many of the performers were students, one at a university in London, another pair working on their A-levels between producing cds and, apparently, playing in Tube stations. (note: it was not actually raining--that's spray from a fountain.)

The was, our course, festival food. All of which was a variation on food=meat+bread. We decided to forgo the "authentic wood-smoked" bacon sandwiches for burgers sold by a stand called Northfield Farms featuring a very contented looking cow it's sign. We felt sure this guaranteed that it was the right choice.

The only other highlight was K and my bold moment of street dancing. We both do social dance but I can lead, dependably, only two dances, Cha and (on good days) American Rhumba. Fortunately there was a song that started as a Rumba, but just as we started took a dramatic turn towards very fast Cha. Very fast. While wearing clunky tennis shoes. In the middle of a very crowded Trafalgar square. But we got complimented by on it by an man standing behind us with a southern (probably American, possibly English) accent.

Speaker's Corner
My other bold move into quasi-socialization with non-Carls was today's excursion to the Speaker's Corner of Hyde Park. I went straight from church and then met up with D to take in the crazies. Some highlights include this guy:
He was pontificating about the ways in which the meaning of life centered on carrots and bananas. He seemed to just be there for the fun of it, and not taking himself too seriously. That was not the case for most people. This guy (belowed) called me out for being a miserable sinner and kept going on about how I needed to find my purpose in life, without ever going so far as telling me what that was (I probably could have guessed.) By now I can say I've taken on the nutty Evangelicals of Speaker's corner.
The best part, among all the crazy, angry, divisiveness, was how engaged everyone was. Speaker's expected you to participate (which I was NOT prepared for until being addressed in front of twenty people by Blue-Shirted-Evangelical-Who-Looked-Like-My-Highschool-TOK-Teacher). Live and learn I guess, because these guys (right) seemed to come prepared to stand in tight circles in the middle of sidewalks and engage each other in debate.


I may go radio silent for a while. I am going to Scotland to hike with SmallShacat on Friday, but you can assume I'm still alive.

Love,
The Mouse

A Little More Sonic

Unable to bear the thought of spending an entire weekend in London (no program trip this week), four of us headed off to Cardiff on Friday. And thus, we added a second country to our adventures (there is some debate about how much of a separate country Wales really is. But w's are vowels here, so I think it counts.) Although there is a lot to see in Cardiff, the obligatory castle/cathedral combination, a science museum which promises you can launch your own hot-air balloon (D was really disappointed we couldn't get to this one), and the only Welsh themed carousel in the world, we had one mission and one mission only: to see the Dr. Who Museum.

Granted, the logistics of this pilgrimage were a little ridiculous. It is far less expensive to get to Cardiff by bus, but it takes four hours. So we spent 8 hours in transit to be in Cardiff for 6, essentially to see one museum. It was well worth it, however. There were Dalek's, there were Ood, there were Weeping Angels (don't blink!), and I now have slipper sock's with David Tennent's face on them. Mission Accomplished.

At some point, we had to face the fact that you can only spend so much time in one museum, so we spent the remaining 2 hours wandering around Mermaid Quay and Cardiff Bay and then ended with our obligatory end-of-day-trip pub food. (Mom, I didn't just have chips for dinner, I promise. There was steak and ale pie, and PEAS! And the best shortbread I've ever had. I am considering bringing nothing but a suitcase full of shortbread cookies back as a souvenir.)

At least we thought that our adventure was over, but then the bus was late. The bus which we ran to catch from Victoria tube station, risking life, limb, and our fourth traveling companion at 8:30 in the morning, afforded us a more leisurely walk in the afternoon. It just forgot to tell us. The good news was that we didn't have to call St. George and the RAs to say that we were spending the night in Wales. Every day an adventure, and it's always the mundane stuff.

Love,
The Mouse

Life In Modern Babylon

I realize that I have mostly posted about our field trips and very little about every day life in London. I am still a bit astonished that everyday life manages to happen in a city like this, but here I am after three whole astonishing weeks of everyday life.

Here's what it looks like:

Roommates
I live in a quad with three other girls: my roommate the chem major from the last two terms, and close friend of ours and a close friend of hers. Although we each only knew some of each other at the start of the term, we have found that we are all of pretty much the same mind and get along great. We more in a pack, which we didn't realize was noticeable until our professor approached us outside the National Theater and asked us, since we were always together, if we had a nickname. I think he was a little surprised to discover that we did: D.E.L.K.I.E - Our initials + In England. Here is a picture of us, in our natural environment, eating dinner while only using Spock hands, a pretty typical meal:
Grocery Shopping
One of our greatest adventures has been grocery shopping. Most of us have, thanks to parents and dining halls, never had to feed ourselves. Fortunately we are given a very generous stipend (I can feed myself for a week on what they give us for a day, even when buying such exciting things as houmous and short bread cookies) and we are a block from a grocery store--so there is plenty of room for error. The greatest challenge has been navigating expiration dates, which none of us are used to worrying about. On top of that, there are way less preservatives in British food and we are each cooking and buying for one. We've been doing pretty well, but we still sometimes have meals like yesterday's dinner at which among the four of us we had two bags of carrots and some miscellaneous meat that was all within about a day of expiring.

Street Crossing
Almost as exciting as grocery shopping has been street crossing. We are used to our quiet little Minnesota college down where you can walk down the middle of the street during rush hour. As a result the drive-in-traffic-at-break-neck-speed-turn-signals-and-lanes-are-optional atmosphere of London traffic has been a bit of a shock. Add to this the black-taxis-of-doom, double decker buses, and the fact that the traffic drives on the other side of the road, and you can see that every day life stays pretty interesting. D and I made a sign commemorating days since last lost traffic standoff to track our progress. Here is a picture from Thursday at a record number of three days.
Unfortunately, we had to reset this morning when we nearly got run over by a bus while going grocery shopping.

Love,
The Mouse

Sausages and Science

Despite the fact that the circus family is still with us (St. George's wife and children were supposed to fly out Friday morning), you would never guess that a volcano in Iceland was a) erupting or b) grounding all flights out of Western Europe. The sky was blue, the sun was shining--thank you, ash cloud. (Not quite so much to it's credit, apparently the reason they are grounding flights has less to do with visibility and more to do with the ash melting in the plane engines and filling them with molten glass.)

Between the Volcano and me setting off the fire alarm at the Pickwick trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich we had an interesting start to our weekend in Cambridge. After arriving, it's only about an hours drive, and unloading stuff at our hostel (certainly a step down from the Alhambra Court Hotel at York), we set off for the city center.

Our room and another quad were the first to get St. George's tour of (some of) the Cambridge Colleges. First up was King's College and it's perpendicular Gothic chapel. This building may carrying in the medieval tradition of building sacred structures that can't stand up under the laws of physics, but it's a beautiful church. Unfortunately, the colleges are out of term, so we couldn't hear Evensong sung. Mostly we looked at stained glass and listened talked about Tudor religous politics. Next up was Trinity, which was were our professor had studied for a year in grad school. The highlight of this tour was not the chapel, which was also cool, but St. George pulling rank on one of the porters and getting us into a usually off limits court because he had been a member of Trinity College. We finished the tour by walking by the Cam river back into town and getting St. George's opinions on Cambridge pubs (the Eagle came highly reviewed), the life of British waterfowl (they have it good), and East Anglia's strategic importance to WWII as an airbase (flat and close to places you can bomb).

(What you can't tell from this picture of Corpus Christi College is that the boy in silhouette is wearing and University of Minnesota t-shirt. We got pretty excited.)

We had dinner in our hostel, which included chili and more jokes about summer camp. Then my roommates and I headed back into town to see the nightlife of Cambridge. After wandering a bit-including through a field of cows-we found we couldn't quite work up the courage to actually go into a pub (bear with us, we'll get there). Instead we assumed an air of sophistication and stopped into the Cafe Rouge for dessert and tea. I had a really good tarte tatin. I should have taken a picture, but I was already wearing sneakers in a fancy restaurant (this will one day be the title of my memoirs Sneakers in a Fancy Restaurant) so I didn't risk it. Suffice it to say that it was amazing. Then, despite three cups of Earl Grey, we went back to the hostel and crashed.

We had way more free time in Cambridge than in York. Saturday morning we headed over to the Fitzwilliam Museum, hoping to see Keat's manuscript for Ode to A Nightengale. It was not on display, but they did have William Blake's colored engraving for "The Tyger," so my IB English pilgrimage was complete. We then traded Romantic British art for the Fitzwilliam's super modern (but still British) Sculpture Promanade. This one was my favorite:

After lunch and some wandering around Cambridge, the whole (or most of) the program met at the river for a punt boat tour. Punt boats, which apparently are all the rage here, are sort of a cross between a canoe and a gondola. Exhibit A:

Being a Saturday, especially at what appears to be the start of tourist season, the river was insane. It was a lot of fun though to sit on a boat, float under famous bridges (including one apparently built by Newton which could withstand any weight without bolts. Some students took it apart to see how it worked, but couldn't put it back together, so the Mathematical Bridge now has bolts.)

After the punt tour, the acquisition of icecream, and dinner (mushroom and beef pie, so fewer summer camp jokes), Diane and I headed back into town. We were hoping to see the Cambridge Arts Theater production of The Glass Menagerie but didn't think we had a snowball's chance of getting tickets. To our bafflement, we waltzed up to the stage door at 7:15 (for a 7:45 curtain) and got twelve pound seats together--four rows back in the balcony!! These seats were at least three times as good as the seats we weren't about to pay 23 pounds for that afternoon. The world works in mysterious ways.

The production was very good. It was really interesting to see a British theater do a very American, and for that matter Midwestern, play. With the exception of their interpretation that everyone in St. Louis has a slightly different southern accent, you never would have known it wasn't an American company.

After breakfast (tomatoes and mushrooms! I have fallen in love with English Breakfast as a concept), we packed back up into the bus and headed for the second set of medieval ruins of our term. St. Edmund's Abbey, unlike Reivaulx, did not just fall into disuse, it was sacked by angry peasants. As a result, there is a lot less of it.
After climbing around on the Abbey (which was an activity no limited to St. George's children) and exploring the cute (entirely closed on a Sunday afternoon) town of Bury/St. Edmund's, which included the first self-lighting street sign in Britain and a pasty shop, we head off to Ickworth house, fancy aristocratic house and gardens number two of the term.

The ancestral home, but no longer lived in, home of the Herveys--the Earls of Bristol. By this point I was very tired and a little sick of the British aristocracy, but it turns out I have developed a real love for decorative arts. So I spent an hour or so wandering around by myself, staring at tea services, and asking the guards annoying questions.

Next week we have a whole weekend in London.

Love,
The Mouse

To People Wanting to Comment,

by which I mean, to my mother:

I fiddled with settings and you should be able to comment without selling any or all of your soul to Google.

Love,
The Mouse

The Noble Duke of York

This past weekend was spent in the medieval city of York. It’s not actually medieval anymore, it’s moved into the present with the rest of the island, but from most of the things we saw you wouldn’t have guessed it.

Unfortunately, I have few pictures to share with you, and the ones I do were not taken by me. I got sick the night before we left (learned all kinds of interesting things about Pepto-Bismol) and seemed to have interesting packing priorities in my delirium. I don’t remember packing that clearly, but Saturday when I found myself in the hotel and more or less in my right mind I discovered that I had thought it necessary to bring six shirts, but no camera. Sorry about that.

Its five hours to York by coach bus, which is exactly long enough to read an entire morality but not quite long enough for a good nap—I think this was an intentional choice on the part of our professor. We were joined on our adventure by the circus family, who were, as always, a lot of fun to have around. We were also afforded the rare glimpse of seeing our professor parenting for long (5 hour) periods at a time. Turns out his style of parenting 3 and 6 year old boys is not unlike his style of teaching medieval literature to undergrads. Seriously, he turned his son’s discussion of Viking battle strategy (this kid may or may not be six) into a mini-lecture on medieval monasteries, and definitely teaches time-telling like he leads discussion.

Once in York, after a brief telling-off by the concierge of the very fancy hotel about our rooms being non-smoking and “restraining our children,” we set off to walk the pageant route of the York mystery plays. Ironically, this was the least medieval thing we did all weekend. We did manage, however, while weaving in and out of shopping tourists to force our poor professor to take silly pictures at each of the stations. This included one with a human statue who willingly played along but then insisted on painting St. George purple (the brush was dry, but he didn’t know that.)

Saturday was more medieval that the first. We started off with a tour of the York minster, which is no longer the York minister, but everyone calls it that anyway. The Archbishop was not home, but our tour guide was surprisingly great and I know so much about preserving medieval stain glass that I could probably drop out of school, become a glacier (that’s “glass-i-er” not slow moving ice) and do just fine. We also got to wander around the crypt which had, among other things, the tomb of St. William. St. Williams notable miracle was healing a woman who had gotten indigestion and gone mute after eating a frog.

Saturday afternoon gave us three hours of driving in the English countryside, to and from the ruins of Reivaulx Abbey. The hills were beautiful and dotted with lots of sheep (many numbered-with their lambs- in red spray paint.) and it sparked many heated discussions about what a moor was, how it differed from a heath and which had purple heather. The ruins of the Abbey were beautiful and lots of fun to climb in, sit in windows and generally wander. The weather was gorgeous which was good because as fun as the abbey was it would have been equally miserable had the weather been gross.

The next morning we woke and had a second "real" English Breakfast. This time I could actually enjoy it: eggs, ham, sausage, grilled tomato (the best part, by far)and some sort of deep fried bread (like french toast minus all the things that make french toast good.) We packuped up and headed off to Castle Howard. This side trip was a break from the expected in that it was not medieval, nor was it a castle. It is, in fact, the family home (and museum) of the Howards, the head of which is the earl of Carlisle. And no joke, people live here.



And granted, people live in Buckingham palace. But people who are not the figureheads of English civilization, real actual people live here. The museam consisted of walking through a series of richly decorated semi-Victorian aristocratic-like-you-wouldn't-believe rooms and being equal parts in awe and aghast that people live like this but still charge admission to their house. The gardens, however, were wonderful. They were the perfect examples of groomed British landscape architecture--something out of Arcadia.

Then five hours , one morality play, and some truly bizarre crackers from a Yorkshire rest stop later, we were back in London.

Next week, Cambridge.

Love,
The Mouse

Butter That Has Been Scraped Over Too Much Bread

It's only second week and I am already apologizing for not blogging more. There is a post about my adventures to Bath in the works, but unfortunately there are also homework, papers, and more sight-seeing in the the works. I'm feeling a bit like I'm being pulled in too many directions, but I promise a new post will be up before I leave for York (Friday) and after I finish my paper on Medieval drama (tonight).

Until then, a tidbit of an adventure:

I think I have picked up enough of a Minnesotan accent to sound Canadian to the foreign ear. As far as I can tell, most people on the trip are asked if they are American; I just get asked if I am from (very specifically) North America. Seeing as I don't look the slightest bit Hispanic, Canada seems to be the only other country of origin option. Hmmm...

And a picture of me and my roommates at Abbey Road:
We were out of step and the picture is off, but we were pretty proud of ourselves.

" 'I Have Equipped Myself Properly for Bath Already , You See' (pointing to a new umbrella) "

(Title borrowed from Jane Austen's Persuasion)

That title more or less sums up my trip to Bath. That, and that is was the one day it didn't rain in London.

I went with my three roommates, one of whom had been to Bath before, and two other girls. We were all very proud of getting ourselves up, making lunch, and being on the tube to Paddington Station before 8:00 am. We rolled into Bath a sleepy hour and a half later.

Our first order of business was to take a tour of the Royal Theater of Bath. We very much wanted to go, and the website had said that they only held tours at 11:00am on the first Wednesday and Saturday. We even took an earlier train to be there in time (Did I mention we got six college students out of the hostel by 7:50 am?) Turns out the tours are even more sporatic than that--the man at the desk couldn't even really tell us what dates they were, just that they happen sometimes, at 11:00am. Evidentally, they are run by volunteers and happen when the volunteers turn up to give them.

So, after poking around the theater a bit and wandering around the main drag Bath Street, spent the remaining 45 minutes until the appointed meet-up time in the Bath Abbey. The Bath Abbey was in many ways unlike any other church we've seen so far. Especially going on Good Friday, it was a great amalgamation of Medieval Memorial plaques and the Ladies Bible Study folding programs for the Easter mass. Tourists are everywhere (and they let you take pictures, which is very unusual) but there were also three men in clerical collars arranging flowers in floral foam. The Abbey is clearly able to balance being a church and being a tourist site, in a way that I have yet to see.

Shockingly enough one can only spend so long (about 45 minutes) looking at old tombstones (one more pictures, to the left, of a US senator who died in Bath in 1807). At noon, we emerged to find a very long line into the Roman Baths and rain. It seemed inefficient to eat lunch and not wait in line, so we took turn eating sandwiches and holding umbrellas.

We got into the Roman Bath's faster than the lines looked like we did (I wish I had a picture, it was an insane line). The museum was very cool. The Baths themselves are in ruins and the museum is build in, around, and containing them. The exhibit walks you through the process of excavating the baths, what the Baths were like in their prime, and then dumps you into the central courtyard. Dumps, figuratively. I can't really describe it well, so some pictures:

A model of the Bath complex at it's height and the water system

The head of a statue of Sulis Minerva. She was the part Celtic Brython, part Roman goddess to whom the temple parts are the Baths were dedicated. One part of worship involved etching curses backwards onto pieces of bronze and chucking them into one of the baths. Things like "Caesar stole my cloak, please burn his eyes out." (I'm paraphrasing, but not exaggerating). The hot spring source for all the water in the Baths. The orange is oxidized something, the foggyness of the picture is a combination of actual steam and poor photography skills. The Great Bath. Unfortunately no swimming allowed.

The ticket for the Roman Bathes included a not-quite-two-for-one offer, which essentially meant a 3 pound ticket to the Fashion Museum and Assembly Halls. Despite not being particularly fashiony people (and because it seemed silly to pay three pounds just to see a (spectacular) ballroom) we tramped off in the rain to the fashion museum.

The fashion museam claimes to have 400 years of fashion history represented. It includes such exhibits as nearly fifty years of "Dress of the Year" awards (see 1989, to the right) and the famed "little black dress" of Queen Victoria (to the left). Highlight, however, was not the impressive collection of gloves (including some dating back to the 1500s!), but the Assembly Halls. Labeled helpfully Ball Room, the Assembly Halls were where large dances were, and are-- we ran into a wedding, so we didn't get to stay long, held for the highest echelons of Bath society. Five of the six members of our group are in Social Dance club at Carleton- so naturally we waltzed. Are you getting this? I waltzed (admittedly, badly. I had to lead) in the Assembly Halls!! Like in Pride in Prejudice without the hoards of people or Colin Firth pouting in the corner!!I apologize for the dark picture, but you can see the important things (like the massive chandelier).

Having just waltzed in the Assembly Halls(!!!), the only place left to go was the Jane Austen Centre. It is not located on the property where Jane Austen lived, when she lived in Bath, but very close. And it was disappointingly, to use St. George's word about the Museum of London, kitschy. But the gift shop had a terrifyingly accessible "rare and out of print" books section, which included an 1835 edition of Mansfield Park. I didn't like Mansfield Park, so I bought postcards instead. (Also, it cost about 500 pounds.)

By this point it was 5:30, raining, and we only had about an hour and a half until our train left. We decided that between taking pictures of Georgian architecture and finding food, food was our priority. So we went off on a wild pub hunt. The first featured hot sandwiches for 2 pounds and two bouncers who looked like something straight out of the Godfather. But between an important football match and the hoards of tourists trying to get out of the rain, that was full. So were the next two. Finally we found one called the Pig and Fiddle (I wish I had pictures but my camera died) and proceeded to squeeze six people into a four-ish person booth. I had a grilled cheese sandwich to eat on the train, and wasn't starving so I just ordered some chips. These chips were not only the best fried potato of any kind I have had in my life, but they came on a plate about two inches deep and as big as my face. My mother sent my off to England alone and I end up eating chips for dinner. But it was a great way to end the day.

Love,
The Mouse

Academic Nomads

I've had the opportunity to see some pretty weird things in the week I've been in London: a chainsaw juggler in Covent Garden and a super space age hand dryer with blue lights in the King's Cross restroom.

In return, however, I have gotten to be a part of one of the greatest spectacles Bedford Street has ever seen: Two adults, three children under the age of seven, and twenty-two college students marking down the street to the tube station. Our professor, St. George, brought his wife and three (adorable) children with him to London for the first few weeks, and while they don't come to class they have accompanied us on most of the field trips. It's a great deal for everyone involved. St. George gets to have his family with him, they have twenty-two instant babysitters where ever we go (their children literally attach themselves to us), and we college students get our cuteness quota filled for a while.

But walking down the street together, we must look like a circus family.

And we are a little bit of an academic circus. We students are living in a hostel that is however many stars are between the Ritz and summer camp. The wireless is spotty (probably a good thing for all involved), but they vacuum our rooms once a week and the water pressure is good. Our light bulb emits light more as a hobby, but we have a window that makes up for it.

Our classroom is the library of the Swedenborg society. It's far more august than our usual digs in Laird, but it also feels a bit like having class in a museum dedicated to the "most important man in modern history." (According to the chalkboard outside the bookstore) We have to move chairs on the sly because we don't all fit around the table, but the Swedenborgians are very particular about the conditions of their floors. But being Carleton students we plunge ahead, cheerfully participating in class as if our lives depended on it.

It’s very cool, living with and taking classes with all the same people. We sit around the tables in the kitchen eating scrambled eggs and complaining about the footnotes in our edition of the York Mystery Plays, hashing out the plot of “The Fall of the Angels” and our critiques of Legally Blonde: The Musical (I kid you not, but we saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Macbeth to balance things out.) Or sit on benches in Regent’s Park acting like a weird procrastinator’s book club, because we are all reading the same book. It’s a lot of fun and a great support network.

St. George commented at the end of class on Wednesday, how impressed he was that we could trek across the Atlantic to read Medieval drama (which let me tell you is not written in any kind of English I speak) in the library of a wacky 19th century mystic, and still cheerfully participate in class while being slightly jet-lagged and constantly interrupted by police sirens. He said that he’d like to drag us to the Amazon and make us do problem sets, just to test the limits of the Carleton student. Seeing how we’ve done so far, I think we could take on the Amazon. Problem sets are a different beast entirely.

Love,
The Mouse