Whoopsie!

I meant to do another blog before I left....I guess this counts.
I get on a bus in less than six hours to go to the airport. Yay!
It's an eight-ish hour long flight. I'll be back in the US at 1:11pm or something. It's going to be a very long day.
But I'm excited! It's been grand, but I miss my own house and room and everything. And a shower with the showerhead attached to the wall. That'll be nice.

Toodles, London. See you again someday.

Land of the yummy cheese and chocolate. And really cool mountains.

I'm really quite terrible at posting my blogs soon after I go places. I've been back from Switzerland for a week now. But hey, better late than never, right?

Well, Switzerland was awesome of course. I stayed in Interlaken, which is a relatively small city located between two lakes and amongst the beautiful Alps. I left to go there on Thanksgiving and got to have a real Thanksgiving dinner the next day at our awesome hostel, Balmer's. I spent most of my time in Switzerland shopping and relaxing, but I did spend one day hiking up into the Alps. The hike consisted of a bus ride, a train ride, a very long walk through an adorable Swiss village with a really cool waterfall, and then a gondola ride (not the Venetian kind) up a mountain. And then I ate a Toblerone and took a bunch of pictures. Then we came back down. 

I regret not paragliding while in Interlaken. A variety of extreme activities such as skydiving (which two of my friends did), paragliding, cliff jumping, and so on are one of the greatest draws to Interlaken. I am determined to paraglide someday.

My purchases for myself were a Minichamp Swiss army knife (with Henry on it!), a silver necklace with an edelweiss charm, and a Swatch watch to add to my collection. And chocolate. I think I lost count of how many Toblerones I had while I was there...

Some of my favorite pictures...

The view from our hostel window.

Interlaken

One of my favorite pictures from our hike.

Awesome waterfall.

A random rock by the side of the road...

Eating a Toblerone with a Swiss flag and a mountain in the background...how much more Swiss can you get?

Love the Alps <3

Taken from the other mountain we rode a gondola up to.

My very own knife. :)  I haven't cut myself yet...

Our little hostel, Balmer's.

Paris at night from a plane.

Oh, and here are the rest of my pictures from the trip.

221b Baker Street.

This past Saturday, I got to visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum which is located at the famous address where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson lived. I mean, they didn't actually live there, but you know what I mean. It was a super duper cool museum, but it wasn't really that much of a museum. I forgot my stinkin' camera, but I went with my friend Colleen, whose pictures I stole from facebook. :)
It was a home decorated in the style of the 1890s-ish era that Holmes and Watson lived in. They had all sorts of neat little artifacts from the stories and it was easy to just pretend that they still lived there. On the upper floors, there were wax figures of characters and situations from some of the most famous Sherlock Holmes adventures. One of my favorite parts was being able to read real letters sent to 221b Baker Street that were addressed to Holmes, asking for his help on solving mysteries. People still send him letters to this day, and some of the best ones were displayed. The greatest ones were sent by kids. They were hilarious. This one was my favorite: 


I must admit, my favorite part of the experience was the Sherlock Holmes shop next door. It was FANTASTIC. I wanted to buy everything.

Here are the rest of Colleen's pictures.

I'm off to Switzerland tomorrow for a few days. Yay chocolate!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's about darn time I did tourist-y things.

I've recently been panicking because I thought I wasn't going to have enough time to see some of the major London sights whilst here, which seems just kind of ridiculous, but trust me--it feels like I have had no time to do anything. So today (despite the fact that I have a big research paper due this coming Tuesday) I went with a friend to the Tower of London. Yay!
We literally spent hours there, and I'm pretty sure we saw every single thing there is to possibly see within the Tower. There's not really that much to say about it except that  it's old and awesome and the sight of some awesome historical events. We got a great tour by one of the Yeoman guides aka Beefeaters. His name was Simon.
It was a beautiful day here. It was like 60 or something and sunny and gorgeous. I heard the weather is downright nasty back in Illinois. Ha-ha. Sorry.
Before  we went to the Tower, however, we shopped for a wee bit at Harrod's. We had been there before, but just within the past week a new shop opened up inside the store completely dedicated to Harry Potter memorabilia and it is AWESOME. Intermingled with the merchandise were actual props from the movies including such things as the characters' robes/clothes, Harry's broom, everyone's wands, Hermione's bottomless bag, some of the Daily Prophets, the sword of Gryffindor, and much, much more. It was extremely cool...and I spent a lot of money. I may have bought Snape's wand. It was expensive. I'm calling it my Christmas present to myself...along with every other item I purchase for myself from now until Christmas. I also got a free knit Dobby because I was one of the first five people of the day to spend over a certain amount! Huzzah! He's adorable.
After we visited the Tower, we tried to go to Westminster Abbey, but it closed just a little while after we got there so it wasn't worth going in. But we got some nice pictures of the outside!

Here are all the loverly pictures from the day's adventures. Didn't take any pictures of the Harry Potter stuff because I'm stupid. Here's my Dobby holding Snape's wand, though.

Okay fine. I admit I'm not a very good blogger. I'll tell you about Bath now.

Yikes. I'm awful. We went to Bath Friday the 4th, and I'm just now blogging about it. I'm the worst. I do have an excuse, though! I've been locked in the British Library during my free time to do research on the pirates of the South China Sea during the early 19th century. Fascinating, I know.

Bath is beautiful. I wouldn't mind living there at all. Every building is built of out the lovely yellow Bath Stone, and it just makes you feel like you've traveled back a couple centuries.
I mean, there are also rumors that Johnny Depp owns a house there in Park Crescent (see picture below)....so that may be a good reason to live there as well. ;)

The Roman Baths were very awesome also. They slightly rekindled my desire to someday become an archaeologist...

After exploring the baths, we got to enjoy some delightful afternoon tea in the Pump Room, which is right next to the Roman Baths.

Roman Baths ^                            ^Pump Room

The Pump Room is so magnificent and grand. There was a guy playing the grand piano while we drank our tea and ate our delicious scones. I've developed a bit of a scone addiction. It's something I'm going to have to work on before I come home to the land of no afternoon tea. At the Pump Room, I had the Ceylon tea. It was yummy.

 Before

After

So that was fun. I greatly enjoyed pretending to be a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. Both "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey" were set in Bath. We also got to drive by the Assembly Rooms where they would go to balls and all that fun stuff. 

All in all, it was a lovely day in Bath and I would love to visit again. Or live there. Either one.

Now I'm off to have an authentic English afternoon tea in my art history teacher's vicarage.

Cheers! 

Yeah football! Woo.

Thursday night was the Fulham Football Club v. Wisla Krakow match. It was a very interesting experience. I had a great seat, but it just happened to be right in the middle of some very passionate fans for the opposite team. So that was terrifying. They were just yelling and singing in Polish the whole time. And I mean the WHOLE time. At least I wasn't in the bigger Polish cheering section, where some of the fans set off smoke bombs for some reason. It made the whole field smokey for a while and it was just stupid.

Notice all of the police surrounding their section.

Also, being in a section with a lot of hardcore football fans meant that I didn't get to sit down the entire time. That was kind of stinky. But hey, at least Fulham won! 4-1! I left before it was over in fear of the angry Polish men who were now even angrier.

And that was my British football experience.

I'd trust them with my life.

Tonight was the taping of Trust Us With Your Life. It was GREAT.
They gave us free beer/wine when we got there. Probably to try to make us laugh a lot. Didn't need it.
We got there early and somehow managed to be in the VERY FRONT row. It was ridiculous. I swear there was a guy kneeling with his camera in my face for over half the show. If I don't get airtime, I will be legitimately shocked.
The gist of the show is that it is an improv comedy show with four guys acting out different scenes from the "special guest's" life. They acted out each scene in a different way--one was rapped, one was putting words into someone else's mouth, another was a song, and so on. Very "Whose Line is it Anyway?"-esque. This show was created by the same guy who created Whose Line. He's a genius.
The special guest for tonight's show was Florence Henderson, or more commonly known as Mrs. Brady from the Brady Bunch. I'm kinda sad we didn't get a different guest--David Hasselhoff was the guest this past Sunday and I believe Ricky Gervais is tomorrow's guest. Oh well.
The brilliant comedians we had in tonight's show were Wayne Brady, Colin Mochrie, Jonathan Mangrum, and some other guy. The host was Fred Willard, who is a good actor but a not very good at all host.
I had lots of accidental eye contact with Wayne Brady. It was awesome.
There were lots of laughs and LOTS of clapping. After the show they had to shoot a ton more footage of introductions and "links" and the ending and us clapping over and over and from every angle and my hands were quite tingly by the end. It was fun, though.
So the show will hopefully premiere next January in America on ABC. Watch out for the episode with Florence Henderson. You'll probably see me laughing. The other episodes will probably be worth watching as well. It's no Whose Line, but it does have hilarious moments.

I'm still here.

It may seem like I've been neglecting my blogging, but fear not. I am still here. There just hasn't been a lot recently to report. I went to Liverpool for a class and am now on Fall Break until next Monday. I've been relaxing, kind of doing homework, seeing shows, and figuring out my classes for next semester.

It's crazy how many shows I've seen since being here. Most of them have been for my Shakespeare and Others in London Theatre class, but not all. I have seen Doctor Faustus, Much Ado About Nothing, War Horse, The Kitchen, 13, The Faith Machine, Wicked, Billy Elliot, and Jersey Boys. We are going to see One Man, Two Guvnors, Comedy of Errors, and hopefully Matilda the musical (put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company).

ALSO this Friday I get to go see a taping of "Trust Us With Your Life", which is a new comedy/improv show with Wayne Brady, Colin Mochrie, Jonathan Mangum, Greg Proops, and more. My friend won tickets for six of us to go and I am VERY excited.

So that's what's going on. Oh, and my wallet was stolen/lost last week. That's been fun. Poof goes 90 GBP (the equivalent of $145) which was my food stipend for last week and this week, my driver's license (good riddance, my picture was HORRIBLE), my debit card, and my credit card...which I got in case I lost my debit card....whoops...

But it's mostly all sorted out now. It was just very inconvenient for a few days.

Just a reminder that any sort of care package or letter is always welcome! ;)

Deep Scottish Love. Och aye.

Scotland is the greatest place in the world. A little chilly and rainy, but the rest makes up for it.

I was there from last Thursday (the 13th) until Sunday (the 16th). Nowhere near long enough.

To live in Scotland is my new dream.

We took the train to Edinburgh, but only had a few hours there the first night. It was just enough time to go to dinner at an Indian/Thai restaurant and have some drinks at the hostel bar. It was a really nice hostel. We left Edinburgh at 8:30 Friday morning and didn't get to go to the castle or anything. :(

That was the saddest part of the trip.

We traveled around Scotland with a tour bus company called Haggis Adventures. I believe our tour was called "Wild and Sexy Scotland" and our tour bus had WILD AND SEXY written across the side.

Our tour guide's name was Kay (she told us to call her Special Kay), and she was AMAZING. She was hilarious and knowledgeable and had a fantastic accent. She spent the whole trip trying to instill in us the "Deep Scottish Love", or DSL. I had already started feeling it on the train ride to Edinburgh, but it got ridiculous by the time we left. I love that place.

Our first day was a lot of driving through the Scottish countryside. We made a stop at a wee little town called Dunkeld for a bit which had a pretty cathedral and stuff.

Our first real stop was at the Culloden Battlefield. It has a very sad history, which is explained here.

The rest of the day was a lot more driving and taking pictures until we arrived at Loch Ness.

We stayed at a hostel there called Morag's Lodge. The guy running the hostel was young and very attractive and Scottish. So it was pretty great. They fed us a great dinner and there was a crazy hat party in the hostel's bar that night, which was great fun. I didn't have a hat, but somehow I ended up with the attractive Scotsman's helmet.

Kay made the mistake of telling us that one of the rooms in the hostel was haunted but wouldn't tell us which one. I knew it wasn't my room, but that didn't stop me from waking up in the middle of the night convinced that there was a ghost in my room.

We left bright and early the next morning to go on a short walk through one of the most magical places I've ever been: Invermoriston. This was where J.M. Barrie came every summer as a child and based Neverland on. I can't even describe how amazing it was, and the pictures don't do it justice. It was just incredible.

After some more driving, our next stop was the Eilean Donan castle. It was very neat, but it was only (re)built in 1912, so it wasn't very old and spectacular. It has been in a fair amount of movies, though. According to wikipedia, "It has appeared in such films as The Master of Ballantrae (1953), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Highlander (1986), Mio in the Land of Faraway (1987), Loch Ness (1996), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Entrapment (1999), The World Is Not Enough(1999), Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Made of Honor (2007) and in the television series The New Avengers (1976) and Oliver's Travels (1995)." So that's pretty neat.

Our next stop was some random magnificent cliff where we took lots of pictures. It was awesome, but there was lots of sheep poop everywhere. It made it really slippery. And nasty.

Let's see...what was next...

Oh yeah. We stopped at another cliff on the Isle of Skye known as Kilt Rock. There's a story involving giants attached to it, but I don't recall all of the details. It's just a really cool rock formation. Plus there's a waterfall.

Kilt Rock is the foggy cliff in the background. It's kinda stripy and cool.

The stop after that was one of my favorites. The actual site itself wasn't anything truly special, but what we did there was awesome. Special Kay led us down to a little river and told us a story. Here's what I can remember of the story. Most likely some of it's wrong. So there's these two families that are fighting or something and these elvish folk don't want them to be fighting so they make one clan have the wife get pregnant with the hottest boy baby in the land and the other family's woman pregnant with the hottest girl baby. The idea is to make these two get married, which they are going to do, but on the day of the wedding, something happened and the girl got her face all smashed up and ugly-fied. She was like "Ach, nooo!!! Wha' am I gooing to dooo??" and she decides to just wear her veil down but her fiance made her take it off before the wedding to show his friends how hot she was and he was disgusted and whatnot. So the elvish folk decided to help out and enchant this particular river so that whoever puts their face in the water and keeps it in for five seconds will have eternal beauty. So she did and she was all pretty and stuff. I think she actually ended up marrying the younger brother of the hot guy because the hot guy was mean and the younger brother stuck his face in the river, so he was gorgeous now too. Yay happy ending.

So that's the story. I'm such a good storyteller.

This is a picture of Special Kay telling the story. She's in the hat with the pompom.
And of course me becoming beautified. It was insanely refreshing. Cold, but refreshing. The water is so clear that it is drinkable. Some of my friends filled up their water bottles with it. It was the best water I've ever tasted.

One of our last stops was my favorite. It was called Glen Coe and it was the most beautiful place on earth. It has a bloody history, though. There was a massacre there in 1692. You can read about it here.

With a stop at Trossachs Woollen Mill to visit Hamish the Highland cow and then a final stop at the William Wallace memorial, we were on our way back to Edinburgh to catch the train to London.

Here's my entire Scotland album.

The end. :'(

Oxford and things...

Golly gee, this week went by fast. 'Twas a fairly ordinary week, as far as weeks in London go for me. Classes, trip to the Chelsea Physic Garden and Kew Gardens, visit to the National Gallery (for like the fourth time...), researching in the British Library, and seeing Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe Theatre. And then a day trip to Oxford, of course.

We went to the two gardens for my tea class. They were both beautiful. It was sad that I was there to learn and not just take pictures of the pretty flowers and crazy awesome trees. I ended up doing a little bit of both.
Here are some of the pictures I took at Kew Gardens. The orchids were my favorite.

The production of Much Ado we saw was decent, but it was wayyyy less awesome than Doctor Faustus, which we saw at the Globe a couple weeks ago. I was a groundling once again and somehow managed to elbow my way to the front so I could lean on the stage. Before the show started, there were two men on the stage with a bunch of oranges. One of the actors was literally a couple inches away from me and handed me a slice of orange. It was yummy. But sticky. I absolutely love being that close to the actors and being able to interact with them.

Thursday I began actually researching at the British Library for my tea class. It's really intense and frightening. You look at the books in what's called a reading room (I'm doing my work in the Asian and African studies reading room). You're only allowed to bring in pencils, notebooks, laptops (on silent)....and that's pretty much it. You are also only allowed to do research at the Library if you had a reader's pass, which we had to get. It's all just really intense. You don't check out the books, you can only read them in that one room. You have to order the books over an hour in advance and they bring them to the room for you. Today I was reading a 200-year-old book that smelled like tobacco. Some of my fellow group members got to look at ship logs that were huge and awesome and over 2 centuries old. They're terrifying to even touch. They seem like they could just fall apart at any second. It's almost impossible to read them, too, because the script is so fancy. I LOVE IT.

Oxford is a really great town. Oxford University is made up of a bunch of colleges, some dating back to the 13th century. They're sooooo pretty. We got to tour Christchurch College, which is where they filmed a few scenes for Harry Potter. It's dining hall was also the inspiration for the Great Hall in Hogwarts. We were all geeking out hardcore.

Also while in Oxford we went punting, which reminds me of the gondolas of Venice. You ride in a boat with several other people and one person has to stand at the back with a huge metal pole and push you along. I was too scared of falling in the water to properly "punt"(?), but I was excellent at using the pole as a rudder.

The rest of my Oxford pics. And a few of the Globe, too.

And that's what's new with me. Oh, also last night the fire alarm went off in our apartment building. It was like living in a dorm all over again. Someone started a little fire in their kitchen. We just had to chill outside for a bit while the nice fire brigade men hung out with us.

Today I was supposed to go to the Doctor Who Experience with a couple friends, but then we realized that Lauren was stupid and got the tickets for tomorrow instead of today on accident. It actually worked out quite well, but I wanted to go todaaaay. :(

Ah well, I still get to see the Doctor Who season finale tonight. :D

Actually, in about an hour. Yipeee!!!

Salisbury and the Infamous Stonehenge.

Yesterday was a nice little day trip to see Stonehenge and the nearby town of Salisbury. Stonehenge was very neat, but there is really very little to see. You just do a lap around it, take a bunch of pictures, and then you're done. It takes like ten minutes. I'm glad I saw it and can now check it off my list of things to see, but I have no desire to go see it again.

Salisbury is a rather boring town, really. We went mainly to go see the Salisbury Cathedral, which was amazing. And to get lunch.
We had lunch at an awesome pub called Haunch of Venison. The whole place felt like a funhouse because it was so old and everything was tilted just a little. The food there was excellent. I finally got some traditional British bangers and mash, as per uncle David's request. :)

Salisbury Cathedral is old and beautiful and awesome. It was built in like the 13th century and has the tallest spire in Britain or something. I don't know exactly. But it was really tall. And it was leaning one way quite a bit, which made it terrifying to stand under. It was just gorgeous inside and had lots of incredible stained glass, of course. We also saw in the cathedral the nicest of four existing original copies of the Magna Carta. That was neat. 

The only thing I hated about the cathedral was that it has random pieces of modern art throughout it, which just didn't seem right to me. There were a whole bunch of sculptures by a guy named Sean Henry. They were just sculptures of people chillin' in random places around the cathedral. Sorry, brother, but your sculptures sucked. 

We've been struck by the Plague. But at least we got to see Emperor Palpatine.

Sunday: Jen sick.
Monday: Sean, Abby, and Lauren sick.
Tuesday: Ariana and Mary sick. Also, Jen still sick.
Wednesday: Colleen (not my roommate) and Jason sick.
Thursday: Tim and Katie sick.

This sucks. We really thought it was food poisoning from the mussels, but not everyone who's sick had them. It's a mystery...

But hey! Last night we went to see a play called The Faith Machine. It was really disappointing BUT it had a couple super great actors, including Ian McDiarmid and Bronagh Gallagher. And other grand people, of course, but those two were the most recognizable to me.

Ian McDiarmid

Bronagh Gallagher

She was in Sherlock Holmes!! So cool!!

But yeah. The play was not my favorite.

And now I'm off to learn things! Toodle pip.