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.

Oh dear, I've got too much to blog about.

I suppose I'm going to have to divide this into multiple posts. Perhaps. We shall see.

I think the first thing I have to catch y'all up on was seeing a performance of Doctor Faustus at the Globe Theatre. It was one of the best nights of my life. We had to see the play for our theatre class, but little did I know that one of the main characters was being played by one of my favorite actors from the TV show Doctor Who.
The actor's name is Arthur Darvill. Here is a picture of him as I saw him at the Globe. (He's the one in red/orange). At times he was probably no more than a foot away from me, and I swear we made eye contact multiple times. It was sooooo incredibly awesome. I may have also stolen a fake grape from off the stage that he possibly threw during the play.
So that was an awesome night. Despite staring in awe at Arthur for most of the play, I really enjoyed every aspect of the production. I especially liked being a "groundling", which is having a spot right up against the stage instead of having a real seat. Paul Hilton, who played Faustus, literally leaped directly over my head at one point. It was terrifying and awesome.

Wednesday we left for the infamous Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

Amsterdam
It was a really neat city, with the canals and bikes and bridges everywhere, but just a couple days there was enough. I got tired of nearly getting run over by bicyclists numerous times and getting a huge whiff of marijuana every time I walked past a "coffee shop" (of which there were many). That smell makes me nauseous.

We did get to see some really incredible things, mainly the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Anne Frank house. We also saw Rembrandt's house, but it was pretty dull.
Those first three things were all equally awe-inspiring in their own way.
Some of the food I had in Amsterdam was just delightful. Haagen-Dazs was especially wonderful. I had it twice. Shhhh....
The other food I had that deserves mentioning was when we ate at The Pancake Bakery, which supposedly has the best pancakes in Amsterdam. They were pretty darn good. I had a bacon and pineapple pancake that was bigger than my head. Choosing what kind of pancake to get was one of the most difficult decisions I've had to make. There were ridiculously many options. But I have no regrets.

After Amsterdam was a day trip to Rotterdam and then a night in Brussels.

Rotterdam
I didn't particularly care for the city of Rotterdam. We only went there to see an exhibit on the Dutch/Chinese trade relations, which relate to my Tea class, at the Maritime Museum which is located in Rotterdam. We learned some junk and got to walk around a boat. Then I found an H&M and bought a grey bowler hat and then we were off to Brussels, Belgium.

Brussels
I like Belgium better than Holland (the Netherlands). Mostly because French is one of their major languages, therefore I understood more, but also because it's just much more purdy. We really only went to Belgium to spend the night there, eat some waffles, and then take a train from there back to London. Via the chunnel, of course.
Our first mission was to get a Belgian waffle. Our director knew of supposedly the best waffle place in Brussels, so we went there and weren't disappointed. It was right next to the famous fountain called the Manniken Pis, which is a statue of a little boy who is peeing. It has a bunch of legends about it, but I still haven't quite figured out why it's so special. I enjoy the fact that they dress him up in different costumes for holidays and such. 
So our waffles were deeelicious (mine had whipped cream, strawberries, and chocolate sauce on it). We then just started exploring Brussels and found a huge square with incredibly ornate buildings and some sort of festival-y thing going on. I tried escargot for the first time (and enjoyed it), got some fresh mussels (which are a Brussels specialty), and saw some dudes dancing in huge feather hats and clogs.
I really enjoyed my mussels at the time, but today myself and at least two other people are really sick, and we think the mussels were the cause. It's the WORST. I had to miss my Shakespeare class. We were watching the first half of the wonderful movie Shakespeare in Love today. :'(


Bruges
Bruges was THE BEST. I haven't even seen the movie In Bruges, which is the city's biggest claim to fame, but now I definitely want to. It is an amazing medieval town that is just the cutest place you ever did see. And there were SOOO many chocolate shops. Belgian chocolate is heavenly.
One of the most random things that happened in Bruges was finding a square with a big stage set up and some sort of fitness/aerobics/dance thing going on. It was great fun. The best part was not actually dancing myself, but rather seeing my 60-year old professor do it. Hilarious.
Some of us girls did a bit of shopping. I limited myself to chocolate and an incredible silk scarf. Belgians are also apparently known for their tapestries and such. I got my scarf from a shop primarily selling tapestries. It cost too much, but it's worth it. It's so sooooooft and niiiiiiiiiice....
I would totally live in Bruges. It rocked my socks.

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We returned from Belgium last night. I spent pretty much all of the night posting my many pictures to facebook and starting to write this. So that's that.

Flat 20.

I have made several attempts to try to make and upload a video tour of my flat, but it's just not working. So here is the best I could do.

Welcome to Flat 20.

It is a lovely little flat. It is being inhabited, though, by five college students, so don't expect it to be tidy or anything. Because it's not (most of the time).

Our hall. My room's the second door on the left.

The room Colleen and I share.

The other side of our room.

Our minuscule kitchen. And the door to my room again.

 The living room. I was not watching golf, by the way. I just put it on that

channel because Doctor Who is starting in a few hours and I didn't want to miss it.

The other side of the living room.

Our bathroom. I couldn't get a good picture of it. Not like there's anything to see, really.

The view from our bedroom window.

Ta-da!! I think that's all there really is to see. Our flat is most satisfactory. And cute.