Fancy a pint?

Wow, okay, so I'm really bad at keeping this updated. So much has gone on lately! I will try my very hardest to write more often! I apologize in advance, because this is going to be long.

(Also: Hello to the Extended Canadian Family and Grandma, who are also now reading this!)

I finally saw The Dark Knight on Thursday -- despite the fact it was supposed to technically be released in theatres here on Friday. We went to a very American mall to see it, so it felt a little bit like being home. Anyway... we were all settled in our seats, having seen the previews and ads and whatnots...and the most British alarm possible went off. "A situation has arisen and we kindly request that you leave your seats..." This, of course, did not really fly with the presumably mostly American audience, who were all quite displeased with this Situation's Arising. Eventually a staff member came in and informed us that the situation was cleared and we should all take our seats, and that when the projectionist finished going up the stairs he would start the movie for us. Either way, the movie itself was fantastic and well worth the wait. If you haven't seen it, I strongly urge you to!

Friday I went on a tour led by John Morrill, a Leading Cromwellian Scholar and Expert on English Beer (He led the lecture on the history of English beer drinking, which was sort of dull and should have warned me not to take his next tour, but apparently I didn't heed that knowledge). We went to a nice church about 40 minutes away, where we spent about an hour and read some poetry. After that we went to Oliver Cromwell's hometown to look at the Oliver Cromwell Museum and Major Points of Interest in Reference to Cromwell Himself. This was spectacularly dull; the highlight was listening to John Morrill very excited about Oliver Cromwell's Stupdendous Hat, which was large, felt, and sort of ridiculous. This tour lasted about two hours and the real highlight was eating, to be perfectly honest. From there we got back on the bus and drove to a major site of the British Civil War and then went to Ely Cathedral, which was easily the highlight of the entire day. We left at 9 AM and returned about 5 PM; I had been hoping to work a little bit on my paper that day but this was apparently not in the cards for me. After all of this I still don't actually know who Oliver Cromwell actually is, beyond the fact that he liked the Bible a lot.

Saturday we went to Canterbury Cathedral (just like the Pilgrams in the Canterbury Tales!), which quite conviently had a Starbucks next to it, in case the pilgrams wanted a mocha frappachino after their long journey. No, seriously, Canterbury Cathedral was gorgeous! The program had arranged for us to have an audio-guided walking tour of the cathedral, which was convienent provided you could follow directions that were along the lines of "if you turn left next to the pulpit you will find a set of doors. Walk through them until you see three steps, then turn right. Then, please choose the next number on your keypad." I was very bad at these directions and subsequently got lost a few times, but Canterbury was really cool.

From there we hopped back on the coach to Dover, which put everything I had seen so far to shame. We were deposited at the helm of Dover Castle, and from there we walked around the perimeter of it, looked at the White Cliffs, climbed a few hills, and then set off for the beach! In fine form I fell down a rather steep incline near the Hidden Wartime Tunnels. You would think they would not advertise them so much, in the event of another war (HIDDEN WARTIME TUNNELS THIS WAY! ---> etc) but due to time constraints we didn't really get to check them out. We did, however, see a Wartime Lookout (this also had big signs) and reached the ultimate conclusion that part of Atonement was probably filmed here. The beach was beautiful and rocky, but certainly worth the walk down! We did not, sadly, see France, as it was once again in True British Style, fogtastic. But in all seriousness, Dover was easily the coolest place we have been thus far and I'm glad I've been going on these excursions; they've been, for the most part, lots of fun.

Sadly while in Dover my camera broke; the lens doesn't close and doesn't focus, so I don't have many pictures from there. I think I'm going to have to get a new camera though, which is going to be expensive due to dollar/pound exchange rates....

Yesterday I went on an optional trip as sponsored by Stuart, our chef, on a traditional Englishman's holiday to the beach. Stuart is too wonderful for doing this; we finally felt like we were seeing Real England as opposed to Tourist England, which is what much of our trip can occasionally feel like, despite the fact we can say that we've been to Dover, Canterbury, London, etc. A traditional English holiday, so it seems, involved trains - several of them - but we ultimately ended up in Sheringham, which seems akin to the Cape in terms of English Touristybits. We had asked Stuart if the beach was sandy (he said it was...it, much like Dover beach, was quite rocky). We climbed some rocks there, frolicked in the ocean for a bit, and then Stuart took us to two pubs. One was a nearby pub in Sheringham and the other was in Norwich, where he used to live. So, an Englishman's Holiday is essentially a beach and a beer. This is how real English folk live! Sunday is a big day for these sorts of things, it seems; he found it strange that Sundays in America are sort of quiet, subdued days compared to the rest of the week. He had a lot of good stories to tell and was legitimately happy to show us around, which the five of us that went were very happy about. It sucks that everything else we've done was led by the Leading Expert in the Field (Cromwell Day was led by a Cromwell scholar, the castles / cathedrals we've been to have been led by castley/cathedrally people who are quite knowledgeable about it, etc. This was a normal guy living his normal life, and being so kind to take a day out of his life to try and show us real British culture, not the prefabricated tourist culture we're exposed to all the time.

Still coming up: The Bristish Food Entry, The English Language Entry (you knew this was coming)

This weekend: The land of plaid & bagpipes!

Castles and Oxford-in-an-Hour-and-a-Half

On Saturday we went to Broughton Castle and Oxford but never actually made it to Branbury. We - arguably - didn't really see Oxford either. But, I did get a fully guided tour of Broughton Castle! (today's pictures are brought to you by my friend Kat. Mine did not come out this well / I haven't uploaded them yet)

Broughton Castle is actually owned by the Fiennes family (yes. Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, the actors) and people still live there; we saw their dining room and living room. The castle was certainly cool. They have a moat, gardens, and you can stand on the roof! Pretty sweet... The gardens were so well-kempt, too. They certainly put most gardens to shame. Apparently Broughton Castle is used often in films, so maybe you have seen it before? One of the hallways we went down was used in Shakespeare in Love.

This castle is also home to a very steep spiral staircase, perhaps designed to frighten invaders and keep them away from the upstairs. It would have worked on me! Several important British people have come to visit (and apparently survived these stairs) and therefore the rooms they stayed in became big memorials to them. Queen Anne's portrait is in one room in memorandum of her visit.

After visiting the Castle Gift Shop we got back on the bus to go to Oxford, another two hours away. By this time it was around 1PM and we had last eaten at 8:30 that morning, so we were starving. The Brits seem generally uninterested in lunch until about 1 in the afternoon anyway, but when we finally arrived in Oxford it was 3PM. 3 PM with 17 hungry college students is not a good idea!

I didn't spend much time there, it was really more of Oxford-in-an-Hour-and-a-Half, a majority of which was spent at a restaurant. If (to quote the informational papers we recieved on the bus) "Cambridge is a city built into a school, but Oxford is a school built into a city". Oxford (or what I saw of it, at least) reminded me a lot of New York City whereas Cambridge reminds me a lot of Burlington, VT or Cambridge MA. We didn't really get to see very much; we went to a japanese noodle bar and a church and that was about it! I wish they had given us more time there to see some of Oxford University, but I did see Oxford University Press, so I guess that's better than nothing.

Yesterday my one class was cancelled because my professor was stuck in Italy, and it was beautiful day, so I ended up taking a four-hour walk around town, from the colleges to the markets to the residential areas to the Backs (The backs of the colleges - how fitting.) According to our lovely porters, we are currently in the middle of British Summer, which is much like May in New England, but with a little bit more rain. Pictures don't do this place justice; it's absolutely beautiful here and I wish you could see it for yourselves.

Coming Soon: The British Food Entry!

Ye Olde England-Land

Cambridge is sort of far away from a lot of major places in England. Yesterday we drove two hours to Stratford-upon-Avon; London is about an hour and a half away. This is not to say there is absolutely nothing near us, there's a handful of nearby townships with extremely entertaining names including Trumpington, The Gog Magog, Fen Ditton, Madingley, etc. (I'm not making these up. I promise you there are more: here is a rather comprehensive list of British townships, in case you were interested.) As you can imagine, there is a lot of carryover from British towns to American ones - the town right outside of Cambridge is Chemlsford! There is a Newmarket St and a Mill Road, both with buses to take you there... sometimes I forget that these buses won't take me to Newmarket, NH and Mill Road Plaza. (Next weekend we're going to Dover...nope, not that one...)

Anyway, Stratford-Upon-Avon was cool. We didn't get much of a chance to look around; we left Cambridge at 3:30, arrived around 5:30, and had an hour to eat before Merchant of Venice at 7:15. We saw the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre. I daresay I liked the Courtyard theatre more than the Globe as a performance space. The Merchant of Venice was well-done (comparatively, King Lear sort of sucked) and also ended with a joyous jig. I'm not really sure why all the plays are ending with jigs, but I would very much enjoy having jigs performed at the end of everything I do... "Dinner's over!" (jig), "class is dismissed!" (jig), etc. I understand we're going back there in August to see Patrick Stewart and the current Dr. Who perform in Hamlet, so hopefully we will get more time to look around.

Today we took a nice three-mile hike to Grantchester, home of the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forester, Manyard Keynes, Rupert Brooke, Augustus John, Bertram Russell and friends), for a nice luncheon in the garden where they used to meet. This - I promise you - is exciting for us literary folk. There's not a lot there, admittedly; Grantchester was very Ye Olde England-land, with rolling fields and tiny houses. The route we took brought us through the Granchester Meadows of Pink Floyd fame (Fun Side Note: I have been to the pub that Syd Barrett used to sneak into! What now!). It was very pretty, though a bit rainy. Perhaps I will go back there for a picnic or something.

Tomorrow we leave for Oxford, Branbury and Broughton Castle...Harry Potter land, here I come!

Cambridge Life

People Whom I Have Not Yet Met: The Queen
People Who Are Present In My Life: Doddering old men on bicycles

Things in Cambridge are going well. I feel like I have an inordinate amount of time to do all of my work, which is nice because I don't have to rush through it. Every morning the University serves us breakfast from 8-9, then I usually do the day's reading between breakfast and morning coffee at 11. On Mondays and Wednesdays I have my Ulysses class between 11:15-1:15, and more free time until teatime at 4 PM. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have the same schedule but class from 2-4 PM. We meet at the on-campus pub, The Buttery, at 6 for drinks and dinner is served at 6:30. At night we are free to wander around town, but nothing besides pubs and eurotrash clubs are open past 7 PM; even these close around 11 or 12 at night. The only place that is open all night is a cart called the Trailer of Life, which sits in the market at nighttime, feeding the drunk people (a la Kurt's Lunchbox).

Cambridge is a fairly big city, about the same size as Cambridge MA. During the day there is certainly lots going on; across the street from us is a daily market, with different vendors each day. I try to get there every day to see what they're selling. Usually there's a produce market, a juice bar, a used record shop, assorted touristy Cambridge apparel, artisan jewelery, and a bike repair, among other things. The bike guy gets tons of buisness, everyone here rides bikes! I saw my first Cambridge traffic jam yesterday; four "coaches" in a row were stuck in limbo because they all had to stop at the same bustops (not "coachstops" but whatever). England is a very eco-friendly place despite the fact I have yet to actually see a recycle bin anywhere.

In terms of Exceedingly British Things: We recently observed British Problem Solving at tea when someone forgot to bring the hot water. This involved three British people getting very worried, and rather than sending someone to get hot water - the teabags, teacups etc were all present - they came back with around 40 cans of soda from the Buttery...so we had Afternoon Soda that day. Also still here are the Erection Specialists, who are putting up lots of scaffolding for no reasonable purpose beyond making our lives more interesting. There are three courts at Caius - Tree Court, Gonville Court and Caius Court - and recently we left morning coffee in Gonville Court to find ourselves fenced in from Caius Court and barred from a passageway to Tree Court. We ended up getting a porter to talk to the construction workers, who were unconvinced that we were stuck in Gonville Court. As you can imagine, things like this take plenty of time to work around.

Tonight I have High Table, wherein I get dressed up and eat with the professors instead of with the other students. Every night a group of students are randomly selected and invited to eat at High Table, usually a few times over the six weeks we are here.

We have lots planned for the next few days: On Thursday we are taking a trip out to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see the Merchant of Venice; Friday we are walking over to a nearby town to see where the Bloomsbury Group spent time; Saturday we are traveling to Oxford and the surrounding towns to visit the Other English University and tour several nearby castles.

London Calling

On Friday we had an elaborate Opening Banquet. Everyone got dressed up and we were promised our first (and maybe only chance) to stand on the grass. This is a big deal; everyone has made it very clear we are not allowed anywhere near it. Well, all of us got really excited… and then it rained. Of course. We did, however, pretend to be fellows, which was very cool. The fellows have their own elaborate and highly decorated dining hall and drawing-room, lest they be seen with the simplistic peon community of everyone else. Needless to say it was nice -- it was gorgeous and lavish and delicious. (For those of keeping score at home, the Fellows dining room is still intact.)

The fellows are treated like royalty! As mere students, we feel like we’re being treated unnecessarily nicely – we have someone called a bedder who comes in daily and makes our beds, we are served at dinner, tea and coffee, there are porters sitting around waiting for us to ask questions, etc. As Americans we’re not used to that, and while it’s certainly a pleasant luxury we don’t need it by any stretch of the imagination. If this is what Cambridge University does for their students, what do they do for the fellows?

Yesterday we went to London. Basically we were given a day to wander around and be touristy until a performance of King Lear at the Globe that night. We were given a very poorly created map, which I very much wish I could replicate here. It showed us several tourist hotspots but without any sort of detail in terms of how long it takes to get there. There are pictures of dragons in the Thames and off in the corner is marked “Land of Mordor”. Great! We don't know who made this map, but it wasn't very useful...

Anyway, we left at 7:45 in the morning after picking up our prepared box breakfast from the dining hall. They pump us full of coffee here, so it was a grand disappointment that they did not provide it in their little box breakfast. Coffee is available at every opportunity possible! I, obviously, love it. (A fun digression about coffee: the English drink espresso. If you ask for a cup of coffee, you are getting a café americano, which is one part espresso and two parts water. If you ask for an espresso, you get a shot of espresso.)

My group went to the London Eye, which was really cool, and then proceeded to the Dali exhibit, which was beyond awesome; their focus was on his drawings rather than his paintings, so it was something I hadn’t seen before. After that we walked past Parliament and Big Ben to Traflagar Square and looked at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. The National Portrait Gallery was supposed to have a big Beatles exhibit, but we were a month early for it. Somewhere around the Portrait Gallery we realized whoever decided it was a good idea for a herd of English majors to look at major art history displays was very incorrect. We don’t know anything about art! We read the little blurbs provided and tried to understand what they were talking about.

I met up with Kim Pho after the all the Art Exhibits. She took us to Buckingham palace, which was not on our little Joy Winston Map of Epic Failure; we would have never found it on our own. The palace was large and lavish (this appears to be a recurring theme in lifestyles of the Important Brits) and we were there to see the guard marching around for their break. Instead of seeing the Tate Museum of Modern Art – no more art! – we found a great used booksale, where we ran into about half of the group. This was much more exciting than paint on canvas, this is what we’re interested in… we spent the entire time checking out the books there. Maybe we can persuade Joy to make us a map of the bookstores everywhere we go instead! For £15 I bought The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Facsism.

The Globe was wonderful (and way more interesting than art). We had seats in the second tier of balconies, but were free to move about at any time. The performance was set up into two sections, from Act 1-3 and 4-5. For the second portion, my friend Becca and I went to be a Groundling, which was awesome and arguably better than being in Globe Bleachers. Interestingly, the end of every performance at the Globe concludes with a song and dance, which was unexpected. Our next Shakespeare performance is at Stratford-upon-Avon, not at the Globe.

Sorry this was long! So much exciting, blog-worthy things have happened in the past few days. I hope all is going well at home.

A quick update, with a few pictures!

I found wifi! One of the grad students told me to check out the McDonald's (the porter looked at me as if i had 8 heads and asked me if I really wanted to go to a McDonald's, silly American!)and there's a waffle & wifi place in the other direction.

Anyway, Caius has these very weird traditions, which we are being rapidly introduced to lest we accidentally violate one of them. To enter the college you go through the Gate of Humility; to get from Tree Court (where we live) to Caius Court (where the classes are) you walk through the Gate of Virtue. The final gate is the Gate of Honour, which nobody may pass through unless they are graduating (or unless you are a blatant tourist who cuts through from somewhere on Caius Court to the city.) The courts are wonderfully grassy, but only fellows may walk on the grass. Everyone else must walk on wide footpaths provided. Yesterday the landscapers were here and put up big signs reading “Do Not Walk on Grass: Recently Pesticided”. Are the landscapers also fellows? Are they allowed on the grass?

Classes have started. Both of them are TINY classes – my Shakespeare class has 5 other students and my Ulyssess class has no more than 9 students. I don’t like my Shakespeare class very much; I’m so done with Shakespeare after this past semester and my professor wants us to really focus on the performance aspects, which I don’t especially care about. It’s not horrible by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just that I’m a little bored of it. (We have a handful of grad students and one of them is the Older Woman Who Is Back To School and super-excited about this fact; she and the professor sort of blather on for the two hours and the rest of us sort of keep up.) Ulysees is fine so far; the professor is really cool. Our first class was very contextual, which was great. The reading is sort of intense due to how the chapters are broken up, but things seem pretty reasonable.

Cambridge is SO pretty. Yesterday it managed to not rain for almost a full 24 hours (I was quite impressed) and I decided to be touristy and take pictures. For some more, check out my facebook album.

This is Gonville & Caius from the street. I'm totally staying in a castle!

These are some of the dorms. I live at the top of the pointy one.

My massive room. the pictures don't do it justice!

the doorway to my tower is hobbitly cute.

In the stairwell there's all this stained glass. When the light hits it perfectly (read: when it's not raining), it's all reflected.

I'm here!

I’m in England! And (as far as I know, but you might want to check this…) nothing super-important has been blown up! After being in transit for what felt like eternity and a half…

My dad is a really nervous traveler (Hi Mom & Dad, I know you’re reading this) and made me get to the airport around 5 PM even though my plane left at 9:35 at night. I hung out in Logan Airport for a very long time until I ran into Becca, whom I sort of knew from Aegis, our literary magazine. She and her friend Liz were traveling to Cambridge together. There ended up being a lot of people from the program on our flight.

I didn’t sleep on the flight. Our welcome to the UK was punctuated by rain as we landed. How fitting. This was all rather expected. The rest of that day, however, was unexpected. We wanted to take a prescribed coach to Cambridge but this involved a delay and then a minor confusion with tickets but what it boils down to is that England is not an efficient place. The ride was supposed to take 45ish minutes but was something like an hour and a half. At this point Becca, Liz and I made the executive decision to not actually deal with any more public transportation and just walk from one side of Cambridge to the other as it rained on us. We had no general idea of where we were going and got lost several times; this whole procedure was easily an hour and a half too. The act of physically getting from Boston to Cambridge was a very long journey!

We checked in; I live in S15, which is about 3-5 times bigger than my room in the minis. I feel like I could reasonably fit everything I own and more into this room… it’s intense. The UNH Cambridge people totally lied about internet; there is definitely an Ethernet hookup in here. The only direct internet access we have is through the computer clusters in the library or through wifi if I can find it. I guess they’re really trying hard to disconnect us. I don’t know if I like it or not, though. My building seems to be rather empty, with only a few people per floor. Each floor has a toilet and the building shares a shower. I have a sink in my room, which is cool.

The campus is built in the style of medieval castles. Everything is very castle-esque for lack of a better word: my room is at the top of a very worn down spiral staircase. I’m going to try my very hardest to post pictures soon, because it’s beautiful here! This could take some time without a very consistent internet connection. Down the street are two internet cafes, but they will cost me money and it doesn’t appear that there is any sort of wireless hotspot in Caius.

So far nobody has tried to serve me scary British food. I promise I will write an update about Scary British Food when it comes into my life. Dinner yesterday was butternut squash soup, grilled chicken with some sort of sauce, potato fries, corn, yogurt and crème brulee. I can live with this! Every day the University serves me breakfast, morning coffee, afternoon tea, and dinner.

Classes start today. I’m not nervous about them. Shakespeare is going to be a breeze (round three!) and Ulysses will require some attention. Everyone in the program seems really cool so far, but I miss you guys (aww.)

Some more details

Thank you everyone who sent me assorted links & information about plugs! I will hopefully not blow up any of my electronics now that I know about watts and voltage and whatnot.

But anyway, the day of reckoning is nearly upon us! I leave Boston on Sunday evening (at the end of the 4th of July weekend, yikes) after frantically packing on Saturday. I'm looking forward to it, but it still feels very surreal. It'll be fun and it will certainly keep me busy! Both of my classes meet twice a week for two hours each session on Monday-Thursday; on weekends we take assorted trips around the UK:

July 12 - The first excursion to London. We visit the city and spend time on our own all day before we meet up again and watch the evening performance of King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.
July 17 - Excursion to Stratford-upon-Avon. We do our own exploring again before meeting up and seeing Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
July 19 - Excursion to Oxford, Banbury, and Broughton Castle
July 25 - Tour around the surrounding Cambridge area with a prominent Cambridge professor.
July 26 - Excursion to Canterbury and Dover.
July 31 - Leave for a four-day weekend in Edinburgh, Scotland and stop at the Bronte House in Haworth.
August 1 - Visit Edinburgh and enjoy its night life.
August 2 - We can explore Inverness, Loch Ness, or spend more time in Edinburgh.
August 3 - Return from Edinburgh, stop at York Cathedral on the way back.
August 8 - Excursion to Stratford-upon-Avon. We can, once again, explore Stratford on our own before meeting up for the evening performance of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

There's also a bunch of things going on at Gonville & Caius like assorted guest lectures on things like A History of Beer Drinking in England. With my Shakespeare class I think I'm going to see three other plays, but I'm not sure of the details involved yet.


The next time you will hear from me I will be in England! The first few days are probably going to be very busy, getting acquainted with Cambridge and picking up books and whatnot, but I'll be keeping a much more comprehensive pen-and-paper journal too. I guess that's it for now... I hope you are all having a wonderful 4th of July!