June 18: Stonehenge & Salisbury

This morning started early, but not as early as tomorrow is going to be. We departed for Stonehenge at 9am. Stonehenge was cool, but it’s one of those places you see and take photos of and there is really nothing else to do. They no longer let you go up in the rocks, which is a shame, but people were defacing them and chipping parts away as souvenirs so now it’s roped off. The main thing there was the beetles! They were ridiculous. They loves Amelia and my hair and were not easy to get off. After that we departed for Salisbury where we saw swans, beautiful churches and the Salisbury Cathedral. It was amazing and beautiful! To think how long ago it was made and all the detail that went into it! A bunch of us went to lunch at the Haunch of Venison and I decided to try something new. That didn’t go very well. I had a salmon sandwich, but the salmon was weird, thinly sliced and I’m not sure if it was cooked. We got a guided tour through part of the Salisbury Cathedral and got to see the Magna Carta, which was pretty cool. That is probably the oldest piece of paper I’ll ever see. The ride back should have been a half an hour, but it took considerably longer because of traffic issues.

Today’s blog seems incredibly short for such a busy day, but nothing too exciting happened it was just a lot of pictures and touring. Tomorrow is bright and early for a 7am train to London. Now that is going to be a busy day and I’m sure I’ll have quite the stories to tell.

photos from today

June 17: I saw the sun rise this morning...

As evident by my picture from today, it has been a long week. I was up until a little after 5am working on my papers this morning. The sun came up at around 4:00am, which is so weird. It was hard to get up this morning, but I did it. Then we ventured down to print out our papers after a final look over. I felt bad for our Jane Austen professor because no one seemed to be with it this morning. Between classes I took Laura to Retro for her first sandwich there. The guy was so nice and gave her two stamps (once you get five stamps you get a sandwich free). When I walked up to the counter he said hello and asked if I wanted my usual :] he has learned who I am. The people here are so nice!

I edited my paper between my two classes and then went on to film where we watched Another Country. I had my bottle of coke ready for keeping me awake during a very anti-action packed movie. We then unexpectedly had a very long thought out discussion on what we are going to do in London. It was quite a planned out endeavor that culminated in us purchasing our train tickets. Here is what we are planning ot at least see

1. Abbey Road (complete with Beatles picture photo shoot)

2. King’s Cross Station (for the harry potter picture)

3. British Library

4. The Globe

5. Holmes’s House

6. British Museum

7. Tower of London / Tower Bridge

8. Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, London Eye, Portrait Gallery, Ben Franklin’s house, Downing Road

The things at the end are all together and we are just planning to take pictures of them and not actually go in them. If you have any suggestions of major things we’re missing let me know asap!

Next we had to take our cinema exams that we have every Thursday. It wasn’t that bad actually though and I’m pretty sure I got a 100. The original plan was to go out to dinner today, but the planning of London took such a long time that we just chilled out here as a house and had a nice chat in the common room before attempting to watch The Matrix. After battling with the tv and vcr I came upstairs to meet Kendy on skype.

Tomorrow will be a busy day as we go to Stonehenge and Salisbury bright and early, but not as early as our planned excursion to London on Saturday. Well I think I’ll go to bed before too long since it was a late night last night. Talk to you after I've witnessed these mysterious stones that have perplexed people for years.

photos from today (page 6 the second to last picture on the page or #119)

June 16: I'd rather be trying on corsets than writing these papers

This morning was a slightly earlier morning as the Jane Austen classes were to meet at the fashion museum. That was a fun class, I mean who wouldn’t take a field trip over discussion any day? We got to see a lot of dresses, obviously including some that I would definitely not consider stylish, but apparently someone did. The most fun was trying on the big skirts and corsets though. Especially seeing our professor in his stylish corset and green hat complete with feather.

We finished the museum at 11:40 (ten minutes after my class is normally starting) and instead of venturing back to the house (which was actually only a short ways away) I decided to go down to the Nelson house to try and be productive. The house has so many distractions mainly my computer and photos that returning would inevitably result in negative work. I walked with Abbey and Casey to retro to get some food. While eating I worked on editing Amelia’s film paper. Hopefully that was helpful to her and then I went to the computer to work on my Jane Austen paper. I forgot to email my work from last night so I ended up starting from scratch (mind you my Jane Austen paper did not get very far as I decided to go to bed and think on it than stay up for hours getting nowhere). I ended up getting around 900 words in my lunch break towards the total count of 1000-1500.

Film class had us discussing The Beautiful Laundrette that we watched yesterday. Nothing too noteworthy discussed. As Laura asked her professor a question I went in and talked to Claire about things to do in London. We are venturing there on Saturday for the day. If you have any suggestions feel free to pass them along.

The entire evening has been basically working on my two lovely papers. I had the film paper pretty much written last night, but today I elected to rewrite it. Since then it has gone through some edits and I am now stepping away to look at it again hopefully with almost new eyes. The Jane Austen paper was seemingly more difficult, but for two of my roommates I think it was a lot easier. I have successful written drafts on paper and have edited them both. They are both slightly over the word limit (less than 100 words over each) so I will go back and fix them in a few minutes. I think they are good and I have been working on them for an awfully long time, but I am not sure my professors will share my belief. In addition to those papers I also have reading to do, so it is going to be a long night.

Tomorrow is the last day of classes for the week, which is surprising, but welcomed as its been a stressful week with the papers. A bunch of us are thinking of going out tomorrow to celebrate our completion of the first draft of papers. Then Friday brings Stonehenge and Salisbury and Saturday London. No plans for Sunday, but possibly walking along the canal or something close by in Bath.

My entries seem to be steadily decreasing in length, a reflection on the workload I think, but hopefully they are still informative of the happenings over here in Bath. I must go back to the bane of paper editing and reading now...

photos from today (same album as yesterday. they start on page 2 in the second row or #27. there are a lot from today enjoy!)

June 15: "I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours"

As I seem to be the queen of procrastination what better way to further delay other than writing my blog. I wouldn't want to skip a day you see so I better write a little something of today's uneventful happenings. I woke up on my own accord before Laura. SHOCKING! I went down to class early to meet with Baxter, my presentation partner. Our presentation could have gone better, but its over. Nothing too exciting happened today in classes. We made a trip to the train station to inquire about tickets for the weekend, but we are going to plan out a bit more before purchasing since the ticket rates are fixed.

I made it to and from class today all on my own. Today was pretty much going to class and working on my papers, the source of my procrastination. I have two papers due Thursday, which I'm trying to create drafts of tonight, but as its already midnight it seems that I am procrastinating quite well. As anything else I write will just further the procrastination I will end it early. Facebook must also know that I should be writing papers because it will not let me upload the photos from today so I will have to do those tomorrow. Hopefully the next time I write here I will have made substantial progress on my papers.

photos from today (same album as yesterday photos start on page 1 #9 or the picture of the chocolate cake)

June 14: Sadly it's a school day

Today was sadly a school day. After a weekend of being a tourist it was not easy to try and switch back in the mode of schoolwork. After spending quite some time last night trying to figure out why facebook was being particularly annoying with photo uploading I finally went to sleep and got out of bed at 10:15am. This required some coaxing. I was awakened earlier by a heated debate over the internet between Jason and Peter, but when I asked them about it this evening they had no knowledge of such a debate, but Laura and I both heard it this morning. I had plenty of sleep and more than once my body tried to insist I arouse from bed earlier but I adamantly refused.

I can’t believe it is already the second week. Time is really going to fly by. Today’s classes were uneventful except for the handing out of the assignment sheet for the Jane Austen paper due on Thursday. It was revealed to be quite a bit longer than we anticipated, but it will be done sometime in the next few days. Our film paper is also due on Thursday. Tomorrow is our Jane Austen presentation. I met with my partner after classes today and worked on it a bit after returning here.

I find myself quite tired after a restful night sleep so I feel as though I may head to bed soon to prepare for the long nights ahead writing papers. There are very few photos today but a couple of the town as I walked back to the house after classes. I managed to make it back on my own after some confusion on meeting up with others. It is quite a miracle that I managed to navigate through the city after only a week, but I did!

I broke with my eating British things as my housemates decided on ordering Dominos for dinner. This proved that we are all not math majors and trying to calculate the divided cost with random coupons added was far beyond us.

As I prepare for bed Laura is diligently working on her papers for later in the week proving herself a much better student that I. I will consider it quite an accomplishment if I prove successful in writing drafts of my papers tomorrow.

small selection of photos from today

I also added a brief bit about a piano in the mansion and a group photo on yesterday's post

June 11-13: Weekend in Cornwall - of King Arthur, lizards, and millionaires

I'm playing around with different backgrounds of this blog as I try to decide what I like (it may change again ;) I also warn you that there are a lot of pictures that go with the links (around 250 from all three days. You were warned)

So this weekend involved a lot of walking. On Friday we left at 7:30am for Tintagel, arriving there a little after 1pm. Tintagel is the legendary birthplace of King Arthur. According to legend (and recorded in some medieval romances, including ones I read last semester), King Uther fancied the wife of a Duke, Ygerna. King Uther disguised himself as the Duke, snuck into the castle, and conceived Arthur with Ygerna. The Duke subsequently died in a battle that evening and King Uther made Ygerna his queen. Now saying we went to Tintagel Castle is a little misleading. There is no castle actually there, but simply ruins. And it is quite a ways down and then up some steep steps to get to the actual “castle”. They started this part with the warning “Do not stray from the path because the grass overhang is just grass and there is nothing underneath. A student died a couple years ago from straying off the path.” Needless to say we didn’t really stray off the path (but we went on some rocks a couple times (far from the edge but not on the designated path).

Now they said that the major hike was going to be on Saturday, but many of us felt that these stairs warranted a warning of their own. Not really enough time to walk along this area, have lunch, and shop so we found ourselves quickly hurrying along to get back on the bus to head to the Roskilly’s Farm. This was a farm, but very few animals were there, just some cows. They described it on a handout to us as “whilst here for our BBQ, you can explore the farm, meet the cows and donkeys, amble along paths through charming valley of ponds, meadows, and woods, feed the ducks, or follow the path to ‘Joe Stones’, a great look out place from which you can see over the sea to St Mawes and the Cornish mountains.” Now we went exploring and all we found was a little pond, some cows in a pasture, and a major road. We had barbeque for dinner and ice cream for desert, which they are famous for. I had coconut bounty and green mint chocolate (interesting to note that Mint Chocolate Chips is called green mint chocolate in the UK).

We then got on the bus again and drove to the hostel we would be staying at. The bus parked and they pointed way across town and upwards to where we were staying. We lugged our bags up many more hills until we arrived at the hostel. Now the hostel was much nicer than I ever expected a hostel to be. Many of the rooms were quite spacious (not ours) and they served hot breakfast in the mornings. After settling in, we ventured down to the coast for some pictures before heading back up and calling it a day.

Photos from Day 1

Day 2 of the weekend had us, of course, riding on the bus to the Lizard. Breakfast was at 8am leaving the hostel at 8:40 to make the trek to the bus pick up point to depart. The Lizard is the most southerly part of England and the National Trust owns much of it so it protects it from development. This is the hike they had been warning us about and made sure we wore proper shoes. Now this was a hike, but it was much more level than Tintagel or even the city of Bath with a few inclines and such, but not too bad at all really. Laura and I are also convinced that it was not close to 4 miles but more like 2. Before beginning on the hike our guide showed us the most southerly football field and proceeded to make comments about the game that night. We walked along the path, stopping at the most southerly loo in England and the most southerly café (where I fell, but who can say the fell at the most southerly part of England? Only me from our crew). We walked along the lizard and around the Southern part of England for quite some time, taking many photographs along the way. We eventually got back on the bus and headed for St. Ives. St. Ives is a little town at the bottom of a hill (noticing that a hill is included in everything). We had very little time for this part of our exploration, but we decided we wanted to accomplish it all. We got lunch at a little sandwich place, went to the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, visited the Tate and went to the ocean. I was the only one in our close crew who ventured into the ocean, but some of the other sin the large group choose to sunbath and be on the beach the whole time. It was quite cold as was expected since it is the Atlantic, but I couldn’t not go in the water! MJ and I even stopped for a picture by (well with the) lighthouse from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in the Background for Professor Flynn (our English professor at Gettysburg College who loves Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse.)

We departed St. Ives at 5pm and passed a military barracks and the Goonhilly Satellite Communications Earth Station where the first trans-Atlantic telephone call to the U.S. was transmitted. It was then up the hill to drop stuff off at the hostel and back down the hill to the Paris pub. Here we had a pasty supper (not my favorite) and watched the much anticipated US vs England football game in the world cup (The two have not met in a World Cup since 1950 when the US beat England 1-0. They were interested in some long awaited payback). The England supporters sang their national anthem so naturally the Americans got up to sign our national anthem (I should say tried as it was a bit more difficult to coordinate and sing in tune than the English one). Within the first five minutes the English supporters were up with cheers singing “Engaland Engaland!” with their first goal. Thankfully the US scored a goal not too much late, but to say they scored gives them some sort of credit rather than acknowledging that it was simply a goalie error. Laura and I felt bad for the goalie after that. There was much yelling and differencing perspectives throughout the game, but as climatic as it was it ended in a tie, which didn’t seem that satisfactory. It meant there could be no boasted from either side, but it seemed unfinished. It was quite fun to be in that atmosphere for the game and it was completed by drinking their special cider, which was quite good.

Happy 18^th Birthday Steven! Sorry I wasn’t there to celebrate. Hope you enjoyed your week at the beach!

Today we woke up for breakfast at 8am again and departed for Knightshayes at 9am. We arrived at Knighshayes a little after noon and had until 3pm to explore, which proved to be more than enough time. Knightshayles is a house built by a millionaire in 1867. It remains the only example built of “a medium-sized Burges country house, to the ‘standard’ Victorian arrangement.” Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take pictures of the interior of the house but we made up for it with the large number of the exterior and in the garden. I also played a short song on the piano thus starting a trend of other's playing on the piano. But I figured I had to do it because when else would I have the opportunity to play the piano in a mansion? The trek back to the Bath seemed to drag on for quite some time, but we eventually were back in our house around 5:30pm. A letter was waiting for me from Jenny :) Thanks Jenny! We had a group dinner made by Chelsea, had a conversation about movies including Harry Potter, and then split up to do homework and sort through photos.

After the weekend is said and done I came out with pink cheeks (big shocker there since no matter how much I apply sunscreen I always have pink cheeks), a red right arm that will make a nice farmers tan and red behind the knees, but compared to many others I did well. Not a lot of homework for me tonight, but there are quite a lot of pictures to sort through and later this week will not be so fortunate for homework with a presentation on Tuesday and two papers due Thursday. But Thursday is the end of the week and Friday has us going to Stonehenge and Salisbury and then probably off to London on Saturday. Hope you all had a nice weekend and hopefully my dad, brother and Mary are enjoying Steven’s birthday dinner out!

Photos from Day 2 & 3 (too many to all the days to fit in one album ;))

the entire group minus our academic advisor Jonathan just so you have a gauge of how many people are in the program (the teachers are in the photo too)

June 10: manapu...minapi....manipula...oh you know what I mean

I can’t believe today was my last day of class from the first week. Time is really flying by. Right now I am trying to figure out what to pack for my trip to Cornwall this weekend, which is proving difficult since I’m just a bad packer to begin with, but I have decided I should try to write my blog before I just go crazy trying to decide what to bring.

Today was our first real Jane Austen class and we talked about some extra articles we were given to read concerning Jane Austen and Northanger Abbey. When I tried to participate I had the hardest time trying to say manipulative which was pretty embarrassing, but aw well, I participated that’s the important part right? Between classes I found the post office! And I bought them out of house and home with my stamp purchase, but post cards went out in the mail today. On the way back a British guy (who was cute) said good afternoon to me :) In film we watched Chariots of Fire which was good, but very different than the other movie we watched. It was hard to take notes and try to figure out what he would ask us to talk about on Monday. Still no word from my presentation partner, but I have emailed him and hopefully will try to corner him this weekend to ask him about it. I wanted to ask him after class, but as I stood up the table collapsed so MJ and I spent a few minutes trying to put it together.

The evening was pretty uneventful, but I took pictures on the way home. Not very many at all, but I’m sure the many this weekend will more than make up for the lack today. I’m a little nervous about this weekend, but it should be fun and I can hopefully do this long hike. Tomorrow we have to be ready to be picked up at the bottom of the hill at 7am. It is quite a long bus ride but we stop at Tintagel, the legendary birthplace of King Arthur. We end at the Roskilly Farm for a bbq and it's famous for its icecream. On Saturday we are hiking along the Lizard, which is a walk around the most Southern part of England. It is around a 2 hour hike.In the afternoon we are visiting St. Ives with swimming in the Atlantic (and you bet I will be swimming despite the cold), the Tate Gallery and the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden along with exploring the little town. That evening we return to Coverack and have pasty at a pub where we will be watching the England vs USA world cup match! On Sunday we depart at 9am for Knightshayes court, which was a house commissioned by Sir John Heathcoat-Amory. It is the only example built of a medium-sized Burges country house to the standard Victorian arrangement. We will be arriving back in Bath around 5pm.

I have a busy weekend ahead of me and I still need to finish packing and get a shower. Hope you all have a lovely weekend and I will talk to you on Sunday night!

photos (only a couple today starting on the last page #124)