London Beckoned

I realize I'm ridiculously, ridiculously behind on updating this.

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 01:08:24 -0500

It’ll get updated… eventually. Though it may take well into next year. But for now, have something totally unrelated to my travels.

Additional photos of Wales taken by the IFSA-Butler staff.

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:13:00 -0500

Us, Bodleian Soul, in second place.

Look, my head!

Our (drunken) quiz master.

Caernarfon Castle

Charles was knighted on the stone circle

Picture of me taking a picture

Look, my back!

Market outside of the castle.

View from halfway up the hike.

Additional photos of Wales taken by the IFSA-Butler staff.

3.9-11.12 - An adventure, Charlie!

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 17:02:25 -0500

My second semester at Oxford ended in a literal hail storm of papers and readings, but once it was over, I’d hardly had a moment to rest before what would become six weeks of travel set in. The day after my last paper was due, I packed my bags and boarded an IFSA-Butler bus to Wales. On the way there, still exhausted from the week before, I passed out somewhere in the sunny suburbs of southern England. When I woke up, we were on a winding Welsh road in fog so thick, visibility was only as far as the bus window. I’d been woken up by the road, which I assume had been relatively straight and flat through England, but which now lurched beneath us in the fog.

“I swear to God,” my friend next to me said, her voice thick with sleep, “if we die on some Godforsaken road before I get to travel, I will haunt the highway authority till the end of days.” That seemed like a real possibility for a while. From our spot at the front of the bus, we could see that there were no headlights - or anything at all - in front of us, and the bus continued lurching from one sharp curve into the next seemingly without rhyme or reason. When the fog slowly began to clear, the outlook was hardly better. The first things made visible were the rocks, giant boulders scattered at random around the road that looked as though they’d fallen from the sky and stuck where they’d landed. The road had clearly been built around them, the curves a result of one giant rock or another. When the fog cleared further, it was apparent where they’d come from - on one side of the road, a hill curved sharply up from the shoulder’s end. A minute later, the other window cleared, revealing an identical steep climb, littered with rocks as the valley was. The road seemed to occupy the single flat space available, climbing and falling when necessary to avoid rocks. And even with the fog largely cleared, there were still no cars in sight, no homes, no life. Just the valley and the mountains above.

Presently, the valley widened, the rock field dissipating in small degrees. A house appeared, a stone building with lights in the window and a sheepdog in the driveway. Five minutes later, another appeared, then another. Then, before we could figure out which grocery store the three homes patronized, a lake appeared before us. As we veered left, the dark grass on the mountains across the lake abruptly ended, giving way to a massive expanse of grey rubble.

“Did the mountain die?” some intelligent Oxford student asked, while others echoed the same thought I’d had on first sight: “Is that Mordor?” We referred to the wasteland of fire and brimstone from the Lord of the Rings, where Frodo and company must risk their lives to take the eponymous ring. No deep chasm of fire was visable, but the cloud cover was so thick at the grey mountain’s summit that it seemed inherently possible one was there. We were all swiveled in our seats, gawking up at the formidable mountain behind us, that we didn’t notice the stately Victorian hotel we’d arrived at until we’d pulled up beside it. At the time, it seemed like an odd choice of place or a hotel so large - it had hundreds of rooms and a Victorian facade that bespoke its opening date - but the next day we were able to see the town of Llanberris that lay just beyond it.

The night of our arrival was fairly uneventful - I was given my own upscale hotel room while the rest of my friends got hostel-style accommodation (I should maybe have felt badly about that, but the heated towel rack was a force of persuasion) and we all gathered in the downstairs conference room for a staff-run pub quiz. My team didn’t win, sadly, but we came in forth and did beat the staff team, which is all that matters in the end. Plus, for a team with six people, all of which had never played a sport, we dominated the sports questions, scoring a perfect because I was able to infer which baseball player had been married to Marilyn Monroe by reasoning which infamous players had belonged to which era.

It wasn’t until the next day that the “adventures” of the IFSA-titled “Adventure Weekend” began. IFSA provided us with a wealth of options, of which we were allowed two choices - I opted for an excursion to a local castle in the morning and a hike around the area surrounding the hotel in the afternoon. And so, after too little sleep and an early breakfast, we boarded the bus for the castle. The kismet of the castle was something I hadn’t realized until after I’d chosen the excursion - IFSA had only called it a castle trip, not revealing that it was Caernarfon Castle until later. This, for me, was stupidly exciting. The idea of a girl from little Caernarvon Township, Pennsylvania, ending up in Caernarfon, Wales in the place where the original settlers of her land had started out just seemed so novel that even the overcast, cloudy weather didn’t bring me down. As we drove toward the castle and the coast, towns became more numerous. At one point, we passed a house where the mother had hung the family clothes out to dry and we marveled over the state of Welsh weather wherein a day like that, with clouds clinging low to the ground, was a suitable day for the Welsh to dry clothes.

Before long, we arrived at a parking lot next to a sailboat-laden inlet, and even the gum-strewn pavement could not detract from the awe-inspiring sight of the castle before us. Sure, I’d seen castles. Oxford had one, but it was mostly ruins covered up by a hill, clung to by the tourist authority despite hardly being an attraction. Buckingham and Blenheim I’d seen, but those buildings were comparatively new, as was the stately, but diminutive, Queen’s House in Greenwich. But Caernarfon was a castle. I remember from my childhood having a fold-out castle, where you could assemble little figures of kings and pages and set them up around stables and armories. This looked exactly like that. The grey stone rose stories above us, arrow slits and turrets and crenelation, everything that a castle should be all right there.

When we were let in and treated to a tour, given by a little Welsh archaeologist named Dilwyn, it seemed even more perfect. At one point, the castle - which had been built by King Edward I as his Welsh home after the conquering of Wales in the twelfth century, had once had a moat. Its passageways were long and winding and often ended in dead ends, specifically for the purpose of disorienting any wayward invaders. And its numerous arrow slits, turrets, and seaside location had been crafted specifically for the purpose of squashing any and all attempted battles begun by the disgruntled Welsh subjects.

The castle became even better when we were allowed to explore. Once the tour was over, we were quite literally given the run of the castle - few, if any, passageways were closed to exploration and the early hour and winter timeframe meant that we often traveled twenty minutes before seeing another tourist to remind us that we weren’t, in fact, invading an enemy castle. Heightening the excitement was Wales’ lax policy on visitor safety, which Europeans generally believe is a prerogative individual to each. Many of the stones - even those on the steep spiral staircases - were left rough from nine hundred years of wear, making the phrase “climbing” the stairs quite a literal one. Things like handrails and keep-out gates had also been neglected, leaving visitors free to climb half-demolished stone walls and cling to hand-holds whilst ascending staircases. In some of the steepest areas, Caernarfon had thoughtfully provided a rope as a primitive hand rail, but if anything, this made the exploration less safe, as the temptation to use the ropes as swings was overwhelming.

And to top off the perfect experience, the sun came out sometime while we were scaling the Dragon Tower. By the time we reached the top, the sun shone brightly over the river and the town of Caernarvon stretched for miles at our feet. It was easy to understand why Queen Elizabeth had chosen this spot wjem sje meeded a suitably regal setting at which to crown her son the Prince of Wales. Standing atop the centuries old tower with the town, the ocean, the castle, and the whole of Wales at your feet, one got a definite sense of what it might feel like to be king.

When we reluctantly had to leave the castle after two hours of exploring, we promptly started up on a half day hike beginning at our hotel. Our guide, a little old lady who was somehow still more fit than the rest of us, led us from the hotel to a crumbling four-story stone tower ten minutes away. “You can tell Caernarfon is an English castle,” Dilywn had said, “because it’s more than one tower. The English had taxpayer money and thus could afford to build places like this. The Welsh’s idea of a castle is a few hundred stones piled together.” This was exactly what this was like and it state of disrepair spoke to its relative unimpressiveness. Still though, local Welsh boys were playing in the castle’s base, causing a fellow hiker to sadly lament, “Having a real castle to play castle? They’re living my childhood dream.” While a few of our fellow hikers explored the small confines, our guide was overcome by panic. “I forgot to get you rain jackets! Oh no, oh no, you’re American! What if you catch cold and sue me?” After a few incredulous eyebrows and enough repetition to ascertain that she was actually serious, we assured her that there would be no suing and continued on.

The hike, as it turned out, was going to take us up the mountain into the grey wasteland we’d seen the day before. After a walk through the woods, we came to the base of what appeared to be a giant pile of slate, stretching above our heads into the clouds. We were prepared to take some pictures and move on, when our guide pointed out a small rock staircase built into the pile, snaking from right to left and back again, at the pile’s base. The steps were made of slate and the walls obscuring the stairway from view were made of slate as well. “We’re going here,” the guide said. One of the hikers started up, only to find that the third step was loose. “If I fall off a mountain of slate,” he said, “I really will sue you.” When our guide’s face paled, he quickly took it back and started up the stairs to cut off any more panicking.

The climb up the pile took about tenty minutes. Mined slate, our guide explained as we walked, is only usable about ten percent of the time. Those pieces of slate that are too small, too fragile, or too irregular are discarded, which is why the mountain had turned grey and why the pile we climbed existed. The slate mine we traversed had been diused since the 60s, when competeing Chinese mines had shut the mine down suddenly. News, they say, of the company’s failure traveled up the mountain in the couse of an afternoon; miners laid down their tools where they were and descended back down into town, where many of them then packed their things and moved to find new work by nightfall. The evidence of this migration was visable when we reached the pile’s end. There were barracks where miners had lived during the work week, their stone walls standing, but their slate rooves and doors pilfered by looters. Here there was a track and a pump station, used to ferry pieces of slate down the mountain. The gears, left where they wre, had since rusted in place, the track obscured by grass in years of disuse. Higher up the mountain, closer to the mines, the houses of foremans and overseers still had rooves, too precariously perched to attempt thievery. Had we done a full day hike, we might have seen the highest house, now crumbling, but with dinnerware still laid for two on the table after fifty years of silence.

Our walk only went as far as the first three mine holes though. The deep, gaping drios hundreds of feet wide were so massive that it wasn’t possible to get them all in one shot on my camera. They’d been given names, these holes, mostly Welsh for things like “Big Hole” and “Hell,” but one further up the mountain, funnily enough, had been named Mordor by miners who thought their workplace just as inhospitable as we did on the bus. The mountain has since become a sporting grounds for mountain bikers and fellow hikers like us, but some brave souls apparently scale the rock faces down into the mines. OCcasionally, one can see the ropes they’ve left behind, dangling from sheer cliff faces into the gaping mouths of the mining holes.

The next day we were all so exhausted by the “adventures” from the day before that the stationarity of the bus ride home seemed a welcome respite, but first we had a morning to spend in the town of Llabdudno. IFSA hadn’t told us much about the place, but as we drove, it became apparent that it was a coastal town - our bus quickly stuck to a coastal highway and stayed for about an hour, keeping us on a road with a ten foot drop to the ocean on one side and a ten foot cliff on the other. The coast curved before us, giving us a stunning view of the penninsula we were headed to, and soon we were in Llandudno. It was a cute little town, but full of enigmas - it had the atmosphere of a Victorian Ocean City, for example, but no beach to speack of - just a narrow strip of grey rock. The numerous, numerous guest houses and hotels we passed had no vacancy signs, but the streets in early March had fair few people and it seemed there was hardly anything to do for vacationers to explain that many full guest houses. The cable car meant to take people to the top of the local mountain, for example, was closed. We had intended to ride it, but when it wasn’t open, we decided to follow a narrow neighborhood alley up the mountain’s side anyway. We made it about a third of the way up, until the neighborhood ended, and stood at a cute little ice cream shop to enjoy the beautiful view of the peninsula and its resident town.

Overall, I enjoyed Wales much more than I thought I would. From the castle visit to the country’s charming little towns and masses of sheep, the country that I’d only gone to to say I’d been turned out to be one to which I’d happily return.

Additional photos of Blenheim Palace by my friend Christy.

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:56:00 -0500

Additional photos of Blenheim Palace by my friend Christy.

3.2.12 - "I am easily satisfied with the best," said Churchill

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:22:00 -0500

As second semester came to a close, IFSA hurried to throw together a few last Emma Watson-funded trips. One was a day trip to Oxford which, for obvious reasons, I did not attend, and the other was to Blenheim Palace, the birth place of Winston Churchill. I was aware of the Palace - friends of mine had been earlier in the year - but for some reason I’d thought it a forty plus minute drive and so had never gone. It was much to my surprise, then, that after ten minutes (and a rainbow vista) on the bus we pulled up to a massive set of guilded gates.

The palace was as ornate as it was huge, but even more expensive were the grounds, which stretched for acres. Included in the extensive space are a lake, a hedge maze, countless gardens, and a train to shuttle you from place to flower-besotted place. The palace sits at the center of this well-kept greenery, a massive expanse of building overlooking its kingdom. Ifsa had arranged for us to take a tour, so after a few minutes of gawking at the pristine estate, we queued up and went inside.

From the expense spared to the grounds and the exterior of the building, one can infer how the interior space, where the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough still live, is decorated. Every wall is covered floor to ceiling in tapestries and paintings of former residents, and much of the furniture dates back centuries. The room in which Churchill was born looks out over the main courtyard and contains momentos from his life, including a white baby gown from his years at Blenheim. The massive dining hall has a mural ala the Cistine Chapel painted to its ceiling and the most expensive set of silver serving platters I’ve ever seen, which our dour guide explained is still used on holidays. The tour itself wasn’t particularly interesting - the little old lady guiding the tour felt it necessary to explain every portrait in exact detail - but the time we were given to wander the grounds more than made up for it.

At the end of the day, I happily converted my ticket into a full year pass to ensure that I’d go back. Blenheim was far too beautiful - and far too close - to miss out on again.

Video

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:46:12 -0600

2.24.12 - Liebe Ist Fur Alle Da

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:39:00 -0600

I start this entry off with a preface, because I tend to get the same reaction every time I try to explain my love for Rammstein to someone unacquainted with them. When I start off with, “they’re a German dance…” the eyes glaze over, but when I end, “…metal band,” the eyes inevitably slide into suspicious slits, as if they’re trying to figure out where I’ve stashed my combat boots and hidden my studded belt. And while I’ll admit that is the default look of most Rammstein fans, it isn’t true for most of the Rammstein fans that I know.

See, it all began when my middle school German teacher attempted a new method of installing an enthusiasm for the language into her students. I can vaguely remember sitting in class as she fiddled with the buttons of a school-issued stereo and told us we’d need to translate the songs she was about to play. First was Du Hast, then Engel. Neither was particularly school appropriate, but we translated them anyway, pouring over battered copies of German-English dictionaries to try and figure out exactly what “du hast mich gefragt und ich hab nichts gesagt” meant.

How that one class period translated into an obsession, I’m not too sure. But somehow or another, I ended up with a copy of Reise, Reise that went everywhere with me. This was before I had an iPod, when I lugged around the CD player and the Reise, Reise case with it. That thing now has so many cracks from how much love it received - the leaflet is stained from being dropped in puddles, but you can hardly tell from how gritty the album art is. The obsession wasn’t a singular thing either. It spanned three grade levels, affecting almost every German student. From cheerleaders to band geeks, we all listened to Rammstein. When Rosenrot came out, we all passed around a copy ordered by the NHS President from Germany, shipped before the CD hit America. Whenever we fundraised in German Club in the idle hope of someday going to Germany, we made very clear to Herr Jacobson that, in the event that Rammstein did a U.S. tour, all of those sold donuts and raffled prizes were funding our metal appreciation. We waited five years, but Rammstein never came.

When they finally did come, I dropped everything to see them. It was their first and only American show in ten years, at Madison Square Garden, on the day I had my last final. But I pleaded with my Professor and got alloted a written test instead. I flew home on Friday night and got up early Saturday morning to take the bus to New York, where we watched the concert from eight stories up. Those were the days before I had my glasses, so I could barely see a thing, but it was still amazing. The pyrotechnics displays are almost better viewed from far away and there’s just something about a crowd chanting in an accented foreign tongue they only know insofar as the lyrics cover that rattles the bones just as much as any bass drum.

So when I saw that Rammstein was coming to London, and that standing tickets were a tenth of what they cost in the U.S., I had to buy one. It cost more than I could reasonably afford, but there was no way I could miss out. Not for Rammstein. I decided soon after I bought the ticket that, with the money I’d spent, I’d have to do the thing right. So on the morning of the concert, I got up at 7 a.m., packed three meals, two iPods, and some Shakespeare (what the hell else would I read at Rammstein?) and headed off to London.

I got to the venue around 11, seven hours before doors opened. It was so early, that there was no clear signage for where concert-goers were supposed to stand, so I had to ask one of the security people. “Which concert?” he asked me and his eyebrows shot up when I replied. “Rammstein? You, little lady?” The look on my face must have spoken volumes, because he was very, very quick to point me off. Thirty or forty people were already in line when I got there and every single one of them was dressed from head to toe in black. I felt extraordinarily out of place until, ten minutes later, another singular girl in normal clothing showed up and sat beside me. She, as it turned out, had also come by herself. Sonia, a Romanian living in London, had been a Rammstein fan for ten years, about as long as I’d been. We spent most of the seven hours trading stories, both of our love for the band and our lives in our respective countries. I shared stories of German Club’s monthly Rammstein Appreciation Day; she lamented that once her Mother had unwound her Live aus Berlin tape as punishment for misbehaving. When security finally started to let people in, we clutched each other’s coats and ran for the barrier. Miraculously, we made front row. It was another hour of waiting before the openers started, but during that hour, the entirety of the stadium trickled in. By the time Rammstein started, it seemed as though every seat in the house was full.

The openers, Deathstars (link), were kind of hilarious. It looked like they had drawn lots to see which band member got which rock-era hair style. The singer had gotten the Sid Vicious punk look, the lead guitarist was a dead ringer for Ozzy, the rhythm guitarist got Slipknot’s three-foot dreads, and the drummer appeared to be copying modern-day Dee Snyder’s ponytail. The bassist had clearly drawn the short end of the lot and gotten stuck with an emo poof ala Black Veil Brides. I spent the first half of their set trying to figure out if they were English or German and, when I’d tentatively decided on the former, I spent the latter half trying to decide if the bassist was male or female. Chest said man, but giant hoop earrings said woman. I’m still not entirely sure which it was.

When Deathstars finally left with rock fingers held high, it was another anxious hour of sets shifting before Rammstein went on. During this time, just after Deathstars, we were distracted by a twitter through the crowd in seats to our right. Till Lindemann, the singer for Rammstein, had come out in his full-get-up, and was peering from behind an amp five feet to my right. He’d come out to survey the attendance and, after a quick scan, disappeared backstage to finish flame-proofing himself. To my left, the head of security shook his head. “That opener, is that what this Ram-steen is like?” he asked. “Sure,” the bloke to my left said, “but better. More fire. And in German.” The look of pure confusion on the man’s face was priceless.

I meant to check his face again when Rammstein came out, but to be honest, I was too busy gawking to remember. It all started with a long iron walkway descending from the ceiling, spewing fire and smoke, forming a bridge between the middle of the arena and the stage. Rammstein entered through the walkways that pedestrians take to reach their seat in a solemn procession lit by torches, three band members from each side of the stadium. Solemnly they crossed the bridge and formed a line on stage, where the bassist used his torch to alight a microphone.

They began with Sonne, or Sun in English, a song that begins with a countdown, one through eight, a motif that repeats during the chorus. From the first verse to the second, the crowd shifted in waiting. Apart from the burning microphone, there was no fire. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the head of security cup his earpiece to his mouth and give an order. Ten seconds later, the twenty security people stationed along the barrier had disappeared. Till Lindemann raised his hand, a singular finger pointed to the sky. “One.” And with that, the whole stage erupted into flame. From behind the drum riser, along the platforms for keys and bass, and along the stage edge eight feet from me, fifteen-foot jets of flame issued forth, so thick at times that we couldn’t see the stage. And the heat was enormous. I hadn’t considered it, but at Madison Square Garden eight stories up, we’d felt the flame. From front row, it was so tremendously hot. We all know that feeling of sticking our hand in an oven, but at Rammstein, there was no oven mitt for protection, no control over when the heat stopped, just continued jets of flame, pulsing in time with the beat of the drum. My make-up melted off, the foundation from my forehead seeping into my eyes, and it was fantastic. I held my eyes open despite the pain, too determined not to miss anything to worry much about foundation leakage.

It’s hard to describe to someone how much something means to you when they have no frame of reference in which to view the object affecting you, so you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that that concert was one of the most amazing things that had ever happened to me. It was so, so weird standing there at the foot of the stage watching it happen. Memories I hadn’t even remembered I had were conjured up by the weirdest of things. Richard Kruspe, the lead guitarist, stood fifteen feet in front of me, looking exactly as he had in all of the pictures I’d seen on the internet. I remembered spending a German class fooling around on the internet making a powerpoint slide on him for a project Katie B. and I had managed to relate to Rammstein. Richard Kruspe, fluent in Russian, lives in New York City, M.A. from Harvard - pointless facts from a powerpoint slide I hadn’t realized I’d remembered. And it kept going throughout the show. Till Lindemann would strike a pose and my mind would flash to a picture of him striking a similar pose, with longer hair, or a different outfit, or ice-blue contact lenses. Flake Lorenz climbed into a raft and my mind would supply that he disliked crowd-surfing, having once been pulled from the raft and stripped naked before security reached him. The whole concert felt like a trip through de-ja-vu, inter-spliced with bits of information my brain had held onto for five, six, eight years without any conscious decision on my part.

It was made even worse, or better depending on how you look at it, from the show was in support of Rammstein’s Best Of album. This was excellent for me - the Madison Square Garden show was good, but it had been in support of their new album Leibe Ist Fur Alle Da, which I hadn’t yet bought, so I only recognized about half of the songs. But because it was a best of show, the band also pulled out many of their old stage gimmicks, the best of, so to speak. The exploding microphone from Du Hast on Live Aus Berlin (link) was aired out, as were the flame-breathing masks from Ich Will on the MTV EMA awards (link) and the fire gun used to roast Flake in a giant kettle from Mein Teil on Volkerball (link), and I recognized a few gimmicks from the eight-story high view I’d seem of them at Madison Square Garden too. But most amazingly of all, I recognized almost all of the songs. I go to a lot of concerts, but for fair few of them do I recognize all of the songs played, especially for two hour sets like Rammstein’s. But at this show, I knew all songs but three. I not only knew of them, but I had them all memorized - German and English. Back in German class, whenever I had a vocab test, the easiest thing to do to memorize it was find it in a Rammstein song. If Rammstein had a song called “Heirate Mich” and I knew in English that the song was about a bride, then it was easy to remember that heiraten meant “to marry.” In this manner, over the course of the six years I took German, I’d memorized all of the English translations of the lyrics. It had only taken five or six listens to each song way back in middle school to have them memorized in German.

It was weird, then, that not many of the other fans there seemed to know what the words meant. In New York, we’d all known. When Till Lindemann sang, in German, “I want to see all of your hands,” all of our hands went into the air. In London, every third hand went up. Sure, every voice chorused along with “Du Hast” and “Ich Will,” but those were two words. When Till held his microphone out to the crowd to sing the line, “Gott weiss ich will kein Engel sein,” during one of Rammstein’s biggest hits, Engel, my voice was the only that shouted back within a ten person radius. It was sort of depressing. Also depressing was the fact that, beside Sonia beside me, I was going the show alone. All my friends from German class back home couldn’t see this, nor could Katie B. who would have been shouting the lyrics right there with me, and had at Madison Square Garden. When Rammstein launched into my favorite song, Ohne Dich, one that had spent a long time as most played on my iPod but had been skipped at the Madison Square Garden show, I couldn’t help but to think back to Katie and how we’d bemoaned its absence then. Sure, I could film it, but it still made me homesick that she couldn’t be there.

The show eventually had to come to an end. The band played two encores - one involved Till Lindemann standing in a shower of sparks for the duration of a song and donning a pair of flame-shooting wings. The second, featuring Rammstein’s only English song, Pussy, featured… well, it’s not really polite to mention, but suffice it to say that I ended up covered in white stuff. …It was soap, don’t worry. I left the show covered in sweat, melted make-up, soap, and glitter fired from a canon, fittingly during Amerika. The shopping area outside of the event was teeming with Rammstein fans in a way that I had missed getting there as early as I did - people in black mingled about with masks from music videos and R+ signs held overhead, their black shirts reading German lyrics that they probably didn’t understand. From a pub just outside, the speakers blared the song Amour, one of Rammstein’s few slow numbers. Given the title and pace of the song, it felt the most apt way to end the evening.

Of course, the evening wasn’t over then - I still had to make it through a tube ride full of Rammstein fans attempting to hot box the car and a bus ride full of old people to make it back, but I had my iPod plugged in the whole way, mouthing along to the words that had taught me the greater portion of my German vocabulary. If I’m being completely honest - and anyone reading will probably shake their heads in disbelief at this, but it’s true - I have to admit I had the best time that day of any I’d had in England. Even meeting Johnny Depp. But then I guess the length of this essay probably speaks more than enough for that.

Sechs Herzen die brennen, das Feuer hält mich warm.

Additional photos of Oxford in winter by my friend Jo.

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 23:35:00 -0600

Additional photos of Oxford in winter by my friend Jo.

1-3.12 - Internet Killed the Video Star

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 21:31:00 -0600

To be honest, for a lot of Hilary term, I laid low. In justifying this to myself, I reasoned that half of my relative inactivity was to due to being busy, the other half to being sick. But that wasn’t entirely true - I did do things, just not touristy things. Not a week went by when I wasn’t out with friends or the like. The real reason? Hilary term was fucking cold. I know, objectively, that it wasn’t cold in the same standards that I’d grown up in, but the last two years spent in New Orleans had completely undone my concept of what cold was. Now, I became disgruntled whenever winter weather lasted for more than two weeks. When it dipped into the 40s, I reached for my scarf and gloves. New Orleans had ruined me and as a result I became a hermit, vowing to return to being an out-and-about tourist once the weather had cheered up in Trinity.

So instead of experiencing Britain from its top tourist attractions, I experienced it from my computer. I’m not sure where my obsession with British television started - usually I’m not a big TV person - but somehow or another I became addicted to several BBC series. The first was Top Gear, a show essentially about cars, but better described as a car-themed British version of MythBusters. My obsession with it started before I’d even come to England, when a friend suggested it the summer before I left. I was dubious - anyone who knows me well knows that cars and I don’t get along - but the “car show” label is mercifully misleading. For example, when the Top Gear team want to test a car’s speed, they try to see if it can go upside down in a tunnel (link) or catch a departing ferry (link). When they want to find out where the world’s most dangerous road is, they buy used cars from the internet and set off (link). And sometimes they stage crashes without trying to prove anything at all (link). Top Gear is actually the most watched show on the planet, broadcast in 117 countries and watched by a billion people. The appeal of cars - and the three ridiculous presenters - is therefore obviously universal and I claim no responsibility for the hours I’ve spent watching.

Similarly, I claim no responsibility for the British comedians I started watching. This addiction also began before I came to England, when my room mate at Tulane sent me some Youtube links to Eddie Izzard. Eddie’s kind of a big deal in England, and is a perfect example of the quintessential British comedian, in that they all seem not quite right in the head - Eddie’s rather fond of wearing women’s clothing. He’s not gay, he just… likes doing it. And so he’ll stand in a dress and blue eye shadow and prattle on about how Jesus dealt with the dinosaurs, the differences between American and British English, or how only idiots would be stuck in a scary movie (link). The other British comedian I’ve watched a lot of is Billy Connolly, a crazy old Scotsman in a cape who’s been doing stand-up for longer than my parents have been alive. His accent takes a good while to understand, but hitting the refresh button is worth it, especially when he gets on the subject of Glaswegian terrorists, his GPS system, or his love for opera (link).

I will admit, however, that the obsession I have with panel shows is my own doing. When I got bored of Top Gear and comedy clips on Youtube, I looked for something else. I’d heard that the Brits had an unexplainable obsession with panel shows - shows like Who’s Line is it Anyway where they have a panel of four-six comedians made to improvise - so I went looking to see what all the fuss was about. That was a terrible decision. Like Whose Line, most panel shows can be divided into four-to-five minute segments and there is nothing that sucks you in more than a four-minute video on Youtube. I would start with one, laugh myself silly for four minutes, then think, “oh, what can one more hurt.” But when I clicked into the next one, the links in the related video bar looked so interesting that I’d think “well… okay, one more.” The next thing I’d know, I’d been watching panel shows for two hours. The list of these shows in the U.K. is really innumerable, but I tend to watch a good bit of Mock the Week (link), where comedians make fun of what had happened the week prior, and Would I Lie to You? (link), in which a comedian must either tell a truth or lie and the other comedians must guess which.

My favorite, however, is QI, which stands for Quite Interesting. It’s hosted by Stephen Fry, who I’d loved already from his appearance in American films like Sherlock Holmes and Wilde. The premise of QI is that four comedians are posed a series of “quite interesting” and often impossible to guess facts, which they must then attempt to answer. Questions may be purposefully misleading, such as “How many states are there in the United States?” (link). They may be seemingly unanswerable, such as, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” (link). Or they may be downright ridiculous, such as “What finally finished off the elderly in Yarmouth in 1960?” (link) or “What is the best floor of a building out of which to throw a cat?” (link). But whatever the question, the answer is always quite interesting and the comedians quite funny. I’ll admit I got so addicted to watching panel shows on Youtube that for Lent, I swore them off (mostly because I’d just found out that you can watch entire episodes of QI online and it’s been airing for nine years - I do not have time for that).

I’ve already mentioned my addiction to Sherlock (link) in a previous blog, so I’ll skip right onto the final BBC series I’ve become addicted to. I also maintain that my addiction to this one is not my fault - I started watching it with no intention of sticking with it, just to find out what the fuss was about. The series - Doctor Who - is one Americans may not be familiar with; it’s popular as an underground series beloved by sci-fi fans, but it’s gaining in popularity with the spread of BBC America as the network’s most popular show. I’d been aware of the show for some time - when I took a class in Science Fiction at Tulane, we’d skipped a meeting because Doctor Who’s season finale was broadcasting during the class and half of the students had informed the professor in advance that Who was their greater priority. My roommate - the Eddie Izzard fan - also loved it; many a nights I’d look over to where she was lying in bed with her laptop, blanket pulled up over her face or hand stifling her gasps. I knew a bit about it from Craig Ferguson too - he kept a model of a prop from Doctor Who sitting on his desk and occasionally allowed guests to stroke it when they recognized what show it was from. And I’d heard of the show’s lead actors too - David Tennant (link) was in Harry Potter (link) and my favorite film version of Hamlet (link) as the title character; Matt Smith (link) is well-circulated around the internet as a TV heart-throb.

But none of this prepared me for Doctor Who in England. I always figured, as a sci-fi show, it had maybe the popularity of Star Trek or the X-Files in the States, but it goes so far beyond that. Doctor Who is a national phenomenon. On my first day in Oxford, I was nearly mowed down by two kids in the street running from pretend Daleks in a game of Doctor Who. At the second Oxford party I went to, a group of drunken Brits tried to explain the show to me. When my friends and I took a bus into London, a family of four told us that they were on their way to see the Doctor Who Experience.

Eventually, I decided to look it up to see what the fuss was about, only to find that Doctor Who has been airing on-and-off since 1963. The latest restart of the series began in 2005 and has taken England by storm: the series runs during prime time and has two spin-off series - Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures - for adults and two - Totally Doctor Who and K-9 - for kids. Additionally, an hour after Doctor Who episodes air, another show called Doctor Who Confidential airs, allowing viewers to see how the Who episode they’d just watched was made; a similar show called Torchwood Declassified airs after Torchwood. Doctor Who traditionally airs a special during prime time on Christmas too, making the show not only a family affair, but something of a British Christmas tradition as well.

My mind blown by all this information, I decided to watch an episode to see what the hell was going on. I sort of randomly clicked into an episode so, to say the least, it was confusing. Doctor Who, as far as I can figure, is about a humanoid alien called The Doctor who travels through time and space in a spaceship called the Tardis that for some reason looks like a blue police box. Because he’s fond of the human race, the Doctor will invite humans to travel along with him. The companions come and go as the Doctor gets bored of them, or them of him, or if they should die or fall in love or whatever. But here’s where it gets really confusing - the Doctor doesn’t die… in most circumstances. Instead, when he gets a fatal wound, he moves on to another life like a cat with its nine and “regenerates,” giving way to a different face and personality. This is what has allowed the series to go on for so long - whenever an actor decides he wants to move on, the Doctor just regenerates and continues on time-/space-traveling with a new face.

Thus far, there have been eleven Doctors and twenty-four companions. The variation partly explains the show’s success - newcomers can jump in pretty much anywhere and old-timers continue watching to join the heated debate about which Doctors and which companions are best. It also explains it in that the constant stream of new actors give the media something to talk about, and talk they certainly do. Whenever the Doctor changes, the media attention is so intense that the last time the actor changed, the writers had to write in a red herring Doctor so the media wouldn’t discover who the new actor was until the reveal episode. Even now, despite that Matt Smith has no plans to leave, the media speculates that he might soon change his mind, and who might take his place if he did. It’s kind of ridiculous.

On the whole though, I still don’t entirely understand why the show’s so popular. It definitely has an addictive quality to it (link), that I wish I’d known about before I started, now that I’ve watched all of the new series. But some of the episodes are so blatantly sci-fi-y that it’s hard to understand the show’s mass appeal. It’s supposedly a family show, but a lot of the episodes had me hiding behind my hands in terror or jumping in my seat, so I have no idea how children watch it. And the Doctor’s prime enemy - a race of killing machines called the Daleks - are so fantastically stupid I cannot understand why the entire nation seems terrified of them; they’re basically giant espresso machines with Microsoft Sam voices.

In the end, the closest I can get to explaining the appeal of Doctor Who is simply that it’s just always been there. I remember watching Scooby-Doo, Flinstones, Jetsons, and Gilligan’s Island as a child because my parents had watched them when they were kids and wanted to pass them on. The same goes for Doctor Who. The difference, however, is that Doctor Who has been smart enough to grow with the children that watched it. Whereas it started as a G-rated kid’s show in 1963, nowadays the Doctor can make out with his companion and drop references to Queen Elizabeth I not being as virginal as her title claims. While the frights of 1963 were hologram faces and men in lake monster costumes, nowadays they’ve evolved into man-eating shadows and statues that are stationary until you blink. For a scifi show, it’s remarkably well-acted and the storylines definitely keep you wanting to know what goes on in the next episode.

I guess from the length I went on about it, it’s clear that I’m a bit hooked. Somehow, I don’t mind; though I’m always going to be a foreigner here, it feels as though I’m one step closer to “getting” British culture now that I understand Who references. Maybe next I can tackle cheese-and-onion sandwiches… or not.

By the way, here’s a trailer for Doctor Who (link) or, if you’d rather, you can see Craig Ferguson explain the show in song (here).

2.10.12 - Ralph Fiennes

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 20:54:00 -0600

I’m beginning to think I’ll never ever be caught up with this thing, so let’s see how many of these things I can pound out in the next week before I head off traveling. First, we start with February 10 - the Oxford-Cambridge Humanitas Symposium of Drama on Politics in Theatre.

Once again, I’ll start by setting up how I came to be there, because it was something of a massive stroke of good luck. I tend to have a reputation for being kind of terrible about checking my Oxford e-mail - the website address is hard to remember and the system logs you out after three minutes of inactivity - so I usually just pretend it doesn’t exist. When I do check it, it’s mostly spam from St. Catz letting me know that the vending machines are stocked, reminding me to stay the hell off the grass, or asking me to attend the weekly meeting of some obscure sculpture-knitter or parrot-owner society. If I manage to check my account, that’s an anomaly enough in itself, but to check it and actually glean some bit of information is a miracle.

Which is why it was such an unprecedented achievement when on the 8th I not only checked my e-mail, but actually read an e-mail from Catz in which, buried at the bottom, was an advert for a symposium to be held on the upcoming Friday. Because I’m that much of a politics geek, the title - Politics in Theatre - was enough to grab my attention, and when I followed the link to the event flyer, I was even more intrigued. The event was to be a discussion headed by theatre critic and St. Catz graduate Michael Billington and actress Vanessa Redgrave. Right then, I was sold. One of my favorite movies, Blow-Up (link), featured Redgrave in a leading role; if she was going to be there, then I would gladly part with two hours of my time. It wasn’t until after I’d reserved my free seat and they sent me the confirmation e-mail that they listed off the other panelists - playwright Simon Stephens and actor Ralph Fiennes, from such films as Harry Potter and Maid in Manhattan, or, to people with more distinguished film tastes than I, Schindler’s List, The Constant Gardener, and The English Patient. I had to read the fine print a few times to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. Ralph Fiennes, speaking at Oxford, not top-billed… for free? It seemed too good to be true, but I messaged all of my friends anyway to let them know about the event. Within half an hour, six of us had our tickets. Twenty minutes after that, a separate e-mail with the event in the header went out. Ten minutes later, all two hundred seats were reserved.

The event itself was held in the grandiose examination halls in Oxford, a building designed hundreds of years ago specifically to terrify students into failing. It was clear from the moment we arrived that this was not to be a pseudo-event for photographing celebrities - a gentleman in tails at the bottom of the stairs offered to take our coats and we were allowed our choice of seats in a room with three-story ceilings, six-foot seventeenth-century clocks, and floor-high paintings of people that looked important. After a short while, a woman stood at the podium and, in a very posh accent, introduced the concept of the symposium and the panelists. The four guests entered to a polite smattering of applause, Ralph leading a wobbly Vanessa along by the elbow.

Never have I felt so deserving of my Oxford studentdom than I did spending a Friday evening listening to those four discuss the problems of presenting political ideas in a theatrical format. The event was all at once so enthralling and oh so very typical of Oxford, in that everyone was very well-spoken, but nobody seemed to have any idea what they were talking about. When one panelist stopped talking, another one started in with something vaguely argumentative, but would either get on an unrelated tangent or be cut off half-way through by someone else who didn’t agree with a nit-picky detail of said argument. It was also very Inside the Actor’s Studio self-congratulatory and self-referencing; the playwright name-dropped at least two dozen recent plays that I hadn’t even heard of. Ralph and Vanessa kept harkening back specific lines in the production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that they had just premiered. I’m fairly sure nothing Vanessa Redgrave ever said was particularly relevant to the conversation at hand, but to her credit, she was very passionate about whatever it was that she was talking about and often spoke for minutes on end about… the thing it was that she was talking about. At one point after she’d spoken, the other panelists looked at each other as if to mentally prod the others to speak first. Finally, Ralph Fiennes tried the waters: “I’m not… quite sure I understand what we’re talking about at present. Perhaps it would help if we…”

And of course, my attention through most of the talk was on Mr. Fiennes. Vanessa Redgrave was certainly interesting, but became less so the longer she talked, and the other two often had very interesting points, but I’d never heard of them. Naturally, my attention was drawn to Ralph. One has certain expectations of him, I suppose, being Lord Voldemort, or even a villainous actor, or an actor in general. We expect poise and well-spoken-ness and all of the calculating calmness he exhibits on screen. But Ralph Fiennes in reality is sort of… flaily. He was extraordinarily articulate, but often times he would have to search a bit for the exact phrase he wanted to use. When this happened, he began skipping like a broken record, repeating the last uttered phrase to buy time until he figured out what he wanted to say, his hands flapping uselessly in front of him as if to pull the right words from the air itself.

When the evening ended, I’d learned essentially nothing except that I would need to look up Simon Stephens and Coriolanus, and contented myself with fan-girling over Ralph Fiennes with my friends as we joined the crowd in filing out. One of my friends was a bit hysteric - she’d spent the whole conversation trying to figure out who Fiennes reminded her of and had come to the startling conclusion that he looked like her Dad. No sooner had the words, “Lord Voldemort is my Dad, guys!” left her lips when someone fell into stride with us two people from my left. Our group of six immediately fell silent. The figure was tall, lean, and had the collar of his black velvet coat popped high over his ears, but the head of hair was unmistakable. We were walking next to Ralph Fiennes. His downfall, apparently, had been the coat room. While us commoners had politely refused the man in tails offering to take our coats, Mr. Fiennes had forked his over. As a result, by the time he’d fetched it, the plebeians had all caught up with him. The urge to whip out my camera was strong, but with the burrowing he was doing inside his coat, I felt it probably wouldn’t be appreciated.

So for thirty seconds, we made wide-eyes at each other and tried to be as quiet as possible as we walked side-by-side with Lord Voldemort. When we stepped outside, six cars were parked neatly along the curb and it was obvious from the onset which was his - the sleek, expensive, black thing was a car fit for a super villain, or an actor of super villains, as it were. He sped up as he hit pavement, climbed into the seat, threw it into gear, and drove off at high speed toward town center. It all took a minute. But a minute was more than enough to have us all in fangirl glee. We spent the night giggling at each other, bemoaning the lack of pictoral evidence, and… well, drinking, frankly, but we had to keep up with the traditional Oxford student evening we were having. And so it came to be that my Harry-Potter-actors-I’ve-seen-at-Oxford tally rose to two, and my actors-in-general tally rose to four. And let’s be honest, this is probably the most I’m going to see, if not for the rest of my life, then certainly in a one year stretch. Sure, it’s no red-carpet experience, but for a soggy little town in England? I’d say I’m not doing half bad.

As a footnote, it seems that Oxford was really serious about the event being an academic-only affair. I haven’t been able to find one single photo or video of the thing, so have the above photo of the Examination Hall and this link to an article about the event instead.

Additional pictures of Stonehenge by my friend Amanda.

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 09:12:00 -0600

Additional pictures of Stonehenge by my friend Amanda.

Additional photos of Oxford in the snow by my friend Stephanie.

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:12:46 -0600

Additional photos of Oxford in the snow by my friend Stephanie.

Stone, Blood, and Music - 2.2-4.12

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:16:00 -0600

To be honest, I didn’t do much the first half month I was here. By the time I’d gotten back to Oxford, I’d forgotten all the lessons I’d learned before - how to schedule my paper writing, how to avoid procrastination, how to check my e-mail daily to ensure I wouldn’t have to run last minute to a meeting, etc. When combining this with all of the get-togethers I had with friends I’d missed over break, it was a hectic few weeks. Fortunately, I’d scheduled myself a break back in October, where after a bad day I impulse bought myself two concert tickets, one to see Panic! At the Disco and one to see All Time Low. I planned on going alone - my friends might have gone with me had I asked, but I always feel bad dragging people along with me and I planned to show up well in advance to get a good spot for both nights.

As such, on the 2nd I made my way to London with three hours before the doors opened. To my surprise, the line was already behind the building. Brits, I later found, take their Panic! At the Disco very seriously. It was cold that day, so I sat huddled waiting to be let in and watched as the lighter dressed Brits around me shivered. One girl, bless her, sat huddled on the curb with nothing but a long sleeve shirt on. About an hour before doors, a security guard stopped and tapped her on the shoulder. It took her a few seconds to get up. I could hear her from where I was and her voice was slurred, her answers slow to come. An ambulance ended up taking her away for hypothermia. As this went on, I struck up conversation with a girl, Keara, next to me. She was also alone and assured me she’d been to many shows by herself. “Is better this way,” she said, her Croatian accent thick.”You don’t worry about separating from your friend, so you get very close to front.” She proved to be right - when we were finally let in, they segregating boys from girls to speed the line process, so many were left standing in the lobby waiting for friends to make it in. Keara and I instead made a beeline for the stage, where I ended up just one row from the front despite how apparently late I’d been. After the first opener, whose name I didn’t catch, I tapped the shoulder of the ridiculously tall guy in front of me. “Excuse me, do you think I can squeeze in next to you?” He was all too happy to let me in and proceeded to keep a watchful eye on me throughout the show.

It was a good thing too. The crowd was already keyed up through opener [Me]’s performance, but when Panic! took stage, things took on a whole new level of insane. I was standing off to one side of the stage and still had my winter coat on, as I was cold. But throughout the first few songs, the EMTs pulled people from the center in a steady stream. How the hell are they getting overheated when it’s cold over here? I thought. It was only after I saw them cart away two people unconscious that I realized it wasn’t heat exhaustion; they were being crushed. About five songs in, Panic’s singer had to pause in his banter to ask everyone to take a step back to save the people in front. Of course, few people listened and people were still sporadically pulled throughout the rest of the show, though no one else was unconscious. Aside being insane, the show was excellent (link). I’d seen concert footage before wherein the singer lost his voice halfway through or didn’t stay on key much at all, but this proved to be a good night for them and I wasn’t disappointed.

The next day was an easy day, comparatively. Two of my friends came over, intent on showing me the popular BBC mini-series Sherlock (link), of which they are both obsessive fans. This show is different from the novels, and indeed, the recent movies, in that they take Sherlock Holmes and transpose him into a modern setting. I was skeptical, but in the end, I became just as hooked as they are. Something about it - perhaps that I’d been to Baker Street and could identify the areas where Sherlock and Watson hurried to and fro, made it seem really natural. They used the vague premises of old stories, but gave the characters modern languages and attributes. Watson was an Afghanistan veteran with a psychosomatic limp, Sherlock is referred to as a sociopath by the investigating officers he helps and is subjected to drug busts whenever he doesn’t behave. Even completely new characteristics feel suited to the character - Sherlock continually steals Watson’s phone because he’s afraid the badies might track him down if he uses his own. Over all, it was highly entertaining.

But more memorable even than the TV show was that, fifteen minutes in, my friend managed to put a staple through her finger. She’d brought along arts and crafts to do as she watched, but had forgotten a stapler, so she borrowed my little finger-sized one. As she tried to unjam it, she managed to get a staple through the tip of her finger and her nail. We were in shock - we hadn’t realized such a tiny stapler could do something like that - but she handled it relatively calmly. She never cried and only screamed later, when we rushed her to the porter’s lodge (naturally the nurse wasn’t in) and the porter used a pair of plyers to rip it from her finger. He cleaned her off, swabbed her up - she was bleeding quite a bit - and told her (in typical British fashion) to head to the pub for a painkiller, but she was fine after that. I gave her some Ibuprofin when we went back to my room and she stopped bleeding, though she kept muttering “I had a staple through my finger,” as if she couldn’t believe it’d happened either. I’m happy to report she’s been fine since then.

The next day was another early one, as I had to take the bus into London to meet up with IFSA to see Stonehenge. I met up with three friends on the bus there and we had the privilege of sitting on the top deck at the front on our double decker, so we had a great view of the rising sun. We made it to London with time to spare and got to Stonehenge without incident. Stonehenge is… well. It’s in the middle of nowhere, frankly. Standing at the base of Stonehenge, one sees nothing but fields and hills for miles. There is, however, a main road that leads you to Stonehenge that is built on the opposite side of a chain link fence three feet from one of the far stones, so you never feel quite like you’re in the middle of nowhere. The crowds help with that too. Our group took up three buses, but there were at least five other buses parked in Stonehenge’s lot, and cars besides. Even for the middle of winter, it was quite crowded. Two of my other friends had taken a separate tour to Stonehenge, so we met up with them for a few minutes before beginning our walk-around.

They provide you with a walkie for the tour, which narrates as you walk around the stones. The stones themselves are fenced off and they never allow you too close, but it’s still interesting. The stones aren’t as big as you might think, but that doesn’t make them any less impressive when the guide tells you that they aren’t really sure how they got there, or what they were for, or how they were put up. Most of the tour is basically variations of “nobody knows,” but somehow that just underlines the enigma of what you’re looking at. It takes a little less than an hour to complete the tour, though there are options of things to do when you’re finished with the stones. Most notably, there’s a collection of large earth mounds a half mile away where they buried their dead, but we didn’t venture out to see it because it was cold.

After that, the bus took us to Winchester, a quaint little town mostly visited because of its proximity to Stonehenge. I had just enough time to see the city center before I hopped a bus back to London for the concert I was scheduled to see that night. This one, an All Time Low concert, was held in a more respectable part of town at a slightly smaller venue. I got to to the venue two and a half hours before doors and, predictably, the line was already around the back of the building. But it was a much more respectable - and warmly dressed line. No one was taken away by ambulance (and no one in line offered to sell me weed), so it was more enjoyable than before. I quickly made friends with the girls behind me, a chatty trio of British teenagers named Lorna, Swarnim, and Siobhan, who were ridiculously impressed by the fact that I was American and kept insisting that I sounded like a video game character. Later, we also started chatting with the two girls in front of us, who showed us the bras they’d brought to throw to All Time Low in an effort to help them achieve the world record of most bras amassed. About an hour before the doors opened, it began to snow.

I was a few people back from the front when I got there, but I was charmed by the whole show. The openers - We Are the In Crowd and The Maine - were both bands I’d heard of before, but never seen, so that was a pleasant surprise. And All Time Low took the stage with their usual amount of energy and dirty jokes. It was their last night of tour, so the show was riddled with pranks. The poor frontman of The Maine got covered in string cheese midway through a slow, romantic song. His band responded by bringing the couch from All Time Low’s dressing room out on stage mid-song, but ATL took it in stride and played a song whilst sitting on the couch. Later, during a slow, sappy song that features a duo with a girl singer, WATIC’s female vocalist came out to sing, but instead stood microphoneless, pulling faces at the side of the singer’s head. Instead, her band’s very masculine bassist performed the duo, speaking the lyrics from a sheet of paper in an overly melodramatic voice while the rest of their band performed an interpretive dance in the background. ATL’s singer was laughing too hard to keep up his part of the duet.

After the show had ended, I stepped out into snowy London, a beautiful sight. It was still snowing at the time and poor England is too ridiculously incapacitated to handle such a phenomenon. Three of the - underground, mind you - tube lines were shut down and the rest were delayed, but I did manage eventually to make it to the bus stop, where that too was delayed. Fortunately, the bus was quick to arrive when I got there, so I spent minimal time in the snow, but it did take about four times longer than usual to get home. It had stopped snowing by the time I got back to Oxford, but the partiers of Saturday night were still up reveling, slipping drunkenly through the unsalted streets. One kind, drunken gentleman stopped to ask me if I was alright, before falling flat on his arse a few feet behind me. I managed not to fall only by walking very slowly and stopping periodically to take pictures, but honestly, despite the delays and the danger, I was ecstatic that it had snowed. I had been disappointed when I’d gotten only brief snow flurries while home in the States, as they told me it rarely snowed in England, so I felt privy to something special by getting to see both London and Oxford in the snow. Snow is and looks the same everywhere you go, but somehow it just seemed prettier in England.

Additional photos of Oxford in winter by my friend Briana.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 03:16:00 -0600

The Bodleian (Hogwarts) Library

Radcliffe Camera

The Thames

The Saxon Tower

Additional photos of Oxford in winter by my friend Briana.

Last Night in Oxford - 12.10.11

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:20:00 -0600

The day before I left Oxford, I had a paper due. I’d furiously worked at writing it and, by the time I’d handed it in and said my last good-bye to my tutor, I was wiped out. However, that night I’d heard that the town of Oxford was lighting its Christmas lights. Saddened that I wouldn’t get to see a European Christmas, I acquiesed to my friends’ suggestions that we go see the lights.

We left too late to catch the lighting ceremony, but evidence of the lighting was apparent as soon as we hit Broad Street, where a humongous lit tree stood before Balliol College. We snapped some pictures of it and headed toward the city center where, turning a corner, we were surprised and delighted to find a carnival. The event was massive - I’ve no idea how we hadn’t heard of it - and stretched for blocks. At our end, a ferris wheel and merry-go-round stood and booths lined the streets for almost a mile, selling knick-knacks and food stuffs and brandy-laced-hot chocolate.

Words cannot explain how singularly happy that carnival made me. The entire week before, I’d been so depressed by the so-called eighth weeks blues, unable to believe that an entire term had already passed and I’d soon be missing my one-term friends. I was happy to go home, sure, but the realization that I was already a third done with Oxford was a hard one to bare. I’d miss my friends for the month and a half I was gone, but I’d miss them more when I’d never see them again. I’d already had the horrible experience of cementing my friendship with a one-term girl only the week before, where a dinner invitation from a shared tutor had gotten us talking. We snickered to each other about our tutor’s drunken state and the obnoxious personalities of our fellow students the entire dinner and chatted the whole way home. When we left, it was with the bitter realization that we’d only see each other a handful more times. She confessed to me that she’d restricted herself to never thinking of leaving, as every time she’d thought about it before, she’d wept.

I’d also had to face the reality of having not accomplished a third of the things of my list of the things I wanted to do while in Oxford. I’d scrambled to finish it in the last week in a vain attempt to meet my designated amount of things done, but it didn’t happen. I did have fun though, particularly at the Ashmolean Museum, one of Oxford’s free museums and the oldest in the country. It’s located, strangely enough, right next to my grocery store, though I’d never gone in. I ventured into it on one particular afternoon, just after the rains had stopped, and found I had almost the entire building to myself. The collection was impressive; they had a particularly large exhibit of busts and an equally large collection of paintings, however my favorite thing was Powhaten’s mantle, a large animal-hide cloak that adorned the walls of Pocahontas’ father’s dwelling. Because I had the museum largely to myself, I was also able to have a bit more freedom than I would have normally, bending in to scrutinize the sarcophagi and taking cliched Myspace shots with busts and statues I particularly liked. When I left, I got groceries, which was particularly jarring after the sheer cultural and historical building I’d just left. It left me with the horrific feeling that I hadn’t been spending my time appropriately at all.

And so the lights and excitement and festivity of a carnival - and a surprise one at that - were exactly what I’d needed. We spent a long time wandering up and down streets, watching tilt-a-whirls moving outside of the Ashmolean, dancers performing in front of Somerville College, and sampling candies at the gates of St. Cross. When we’d had our fill, we wandered down Cornmarket to marvel at the Christmas lights. One of my friends, being the wonderful soul she is, stopped to buy us hot chocolate as a Christmas gift. All in all, it was a wonderful night and I finished my packing in good spirits, finally content to go home. After all, I still had two terms left to go - I was luckier than most.

Additional pictures of the twentieth by my friend Sandra, me,...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:15:00 -0600

Tube station

The Sherlock Holmes Museum, 222 Baker St

Wax figures inside the Holmes Museum

Peter Pan statue, Kensington Gardens

Occupy London

St. Paul's Cathedral

The Globe Theatre

London Bridge

The Golden Hind

Big Ben by nightfall

Additional pictures of the twentieth by my friend Sandra, me, and in the event of the last two, my friend Amanda.

But There's No Place Like London - 11.19-20.11

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 01:02:00 -0600

A few weeks later, IFSA sponsored another day trip, to Dover. When I mentioned this to my Fiction tutor, he looked at me incredulously. “Dover?” he repeated. “What the hell is there in Dover?” “Well,” I answered, “they’re taking us to see Dover Castle and some brewery or another.” He shook his head. “Oxford has a castle,” he answered. “And several breweries. You don’t need to drive hours to get here. Did they tell you that you can see to France from the cliffs there?” When I nodded, he shook his head again. “They lie. On a clear day, you go to Dover and the guides will, without fail, tell you, ‘oh, sorry, you can almost see France today. Tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, you should be able to.’ But you never can.” Still, I vowed to go anyway, at least to get out of my room. None of my friends were going - it was getting toward the end of term and everyone was busy - so when I woke up at 5 that morning to head to London to meet IFSA, I was by myself. Naturally, I missed the bus.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t terribly disappointed. I waited for a half an hour, bought myself some tea, and hopped onto the next bus to London. It was due in right around 8:30, the time the IFSA bus was scheduled to leave. Well, I thought, maybe I’ll make it if I hurry. But if I don’t hurry, then I’ll be left in London… so why hurry? Haven’t I been saying to myself for weeks I’d get to London to explore some more? Now maybe I’ll finally get my chance. So when I ventured down toward IFSA’s offices and didn’t see any buses, I rejoiced. All of London to myself! Better yet, it was early enough on a Saturday morning that the whole city was relatively quiet. The tube had no lines and the cars were only sporadically full. I hopped the first one to Abbey Road, determined to find it like I had promised my boss I would.

This time, it turned out to be remarkably easy. When I exited St. John’s Woods tube stop, there was a coffeeshop - The Beatles Coffeeshop - right there. They only play songs recorded in Abbey Road, so while I was there I heard a Panic! at the Disco song and a Pink Floyd song. I bought myself a cup of tea, asked for directions, and walked about a block before I found it. I didn’t recognize the area at first - I turned a corner, thought, damn, they grafitti a lot in this part of town, and then realized, oh. Oh, this is it. The zebra crossing is ridiculously unremarkable. There’s nothing to mark it as special in the slightest. Cars passed over it without slowing to stop, people walked over it to-and-fro, and right after I’d crossed it a paint truck pulled over and stopped on it, its drivers getting out to survey. I took a bunch of pictures of the studio and the graffiti outside it for Ed (and Katie S.) then decided to look for somewhere to sit and wait for the paint truck to move. In the roundabout across from the zebra crossing is a monument - you can see it in some parody photos of The Beatles cover taken from the wrong side - with some steps leading up to it, so I sat at its base and ate my breakfast until the paint truck passed, watching Beatles fans come and go as I did. To be honest, I was excited, yes, but more excited because I have a poster hanging in my wall, a black-and-white one, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers mirroring the Beatles cover. That was what I was excited about, perhaps disproportionately, and I was happy to see that some of the graffiti on the wall was for RHCP too.

From Abbey Road, I went to central London, determined to catch the changing of the guards. I had a few hours to kill before it started, so I stopped to meander in St. James Park while I waited. The place was beautiful in the fall. The trees had turned golden and were shedding their leaves all throughout the park. Children threw them at each other, birds picked at them, and tiny terriers chased squirrels throughout them. After a while, I stopped at a picnic table to eat lunch, making for two of the most picturesque meals I’ve ever eaten in one day. Then, with an hour and a half to spare, I headed for Buckingham Palace to get a good spot.

To my surprise, by the time I’d gotten there, many of the good spots had already been taken. Police men had already set up fenced off areas and a crowd had gathered around Buckingham’s ornate gates. I staked out a spot by one of the lesser gates, a few people back, but my view of the main quad was blocked. Still, when the changing started, I had a very good view of some of the squadrons as they walked in past my gate, though I couldn’t see any of the acutual ceremony. When it had ended, I left with the masses and was surprised when, fifteen minutes later, one of the squadrons that had been relieved of their duty passed by in formation. It hadn’t occurred to me, I suppose, that they actually had to go somewhere when they left before they were allowed to officially go home.

It was well into the afternoon by this time, but I hopped on a tube to St. Paul’s cathedral, where the royals have their weddings, anyway. I’ll confess that I was only half interested in the cathedral itself, my attention also lying with the Occupy London movement that had made its base camp at the steps of the Cathedral. And I found both the Cathedral and the Occupation equally as impressive. The Cathedral itself is massive, more massive than any church building I’ve ever seen before. It takes up several city blocks and is topped by a huge dome that still makes it one of the tallest buildings in London. When I went inside, however, I found that the church charges a steep fee for entrance, one that I wasn’t sure I was willing to pay, especially given that photography wasn’t allowed. So I gawked a bit at the entrance area and headed outside to the Occupation. The Cathedral itself seems cramped, wedged in between office buildings and food shops, its access only allowed via narrow walkways. The Occupation was wedged in tighter still, sectioning off half of those narrow walkways for the use of tents. The number of tents was staggering - the man at the kitchen told me they had over a hundred. I had heard too, from my parents, that Philadelphia’s Occupation had been cleared and left a smelly mess, but Occupy London wasn’t smelly - actually, they had an open kitchen that was cooking something delicious, so it smelled good - and wasn’t any dirtier than any other campground I’ve seen. They were holding a lecture on the state of Occupations worldwide when I was there and hundreds upon hundreds of people had gathered around to listen to the woman reading facts into a microphone. Behind her, the tent for the library stood, and next to that was the tent that held professor-taught university classes. Opposite it was a tent for prayer, complete with a side for Buddhists, a side for Christians, and a side for Jews. For a bunch of dirty hippies, they really had themselves together.

After that, I went home, too tired from my early morning. But the next day two of my friends were planning on going to London, so I went back with them. The first thing we did was go to the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes was written to have lived. In actuality, the Sherlock Holmes Museum takes up two buildings - 221 and 222 Baker Street, the latter of which houses the ticket counter and the gift shop and has, perhaps, the same amount of space as all of 221. 221 Baker Street is flanked by a man dressed as an 18th century police man, who takes tickets, and a “maid,” who takes your coat when you go in. The museum is very narrow, as houses at the time apparently demanded a lot less land space, but ascends four or five floors. These floors are decorated to look just like they might have at the time - which in itself was worth the fee for me - but also claims a lot of kitschy Holmes artifacts - police posters from the era, replica hats, pipes, and violins, and even a mounted head of the Hound of Baskervilles. My friends had spent their junior years reading Holmes, while I had been obsessed with Agatha Christie, but I still found the place exciting. Another floor had wax sculptures of people depicted in the Conan Doyle novels and they were a great photo opportunity (though Sherlock Holmes was apparently very tall).

From Baker Street, we went to Kensington Gardens, another place I recognized from T.S. Eliot poems. The park isn’t as picturesque as St. James, but it is much, much bigger and boasts to its name a small stream and several large lakes. It seemed, moreso than the tree-covered land of St. James, to be more recreationally-oriented; a soccer team practiced in one of the fields, joggers went by freely, and many people played frisbee with their dogs. The Gardens are also famous for being the area where J.M. Barrie met the Llewelyn Davies family, whom he wrote the novel Peter Pan for, and whom he based the characters John, Michael and Peter after. (Michael Lleyelyn Davies later went to Oxford and drowned about fifteen minutes from where I live, clasped in the embrace of another boy. Oh, the scandal!) They have a statue of Peter Pan erected there now and half of London passes it daily, as it seems Kensington Gardens is today much the same social and recreational hotspot that it was in the Victorian era. We spent a good deal of time there, enjoying the good weather, eating lunch, and people-watching from a bench near the Gardens’ center. There’s also a little museum of modern art there; it’s free to enter, so we spent half an hour enjoying the exhibit.

After Kensington, I took my friends to see St. Paul’s and Occupy. It was much the same as it had been the day before, except for that one of the occupiers had decided to make a Christmas Tree out of balloons. He was in the process of decorating it from a ladder when we got there, boisterously singing Christmas carols as he went. From St. Paul’s, we crossed the Thames on the Infinity Bridge, which led us to the base of the Tate Modern Museum. We perused its gift shop before heading to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. More than anything else we saw that weekend, I was excited about this. How long have I studied Shakespeare? Hell, I’ve been planning on getting his words tattooed to me for years! To stand at the base of the building where all of his plays were performed was simply amazing. Unfortunately, we couldn’t go in - there was only an hour left before the building closed - so we continued to walk along the Thames. It was one of the most beautiful, surprising walks I’ve ever been on. We passed the London Bridge, wharfs reportedly haunted by the ghosts of spurned lovers, and even an historic ship - Sir Francis Drake’s galleon, The Golden Hind, is literally hidden away between two office buildings in a narrow strip of water. At one point, we passed under a bridge and were accosted by a man dressed as the Grim Reaper, apparently stationed there as publicity for his Haunted House attraction, which is housed inside the bridge and beneath the surrounding hill.

We went into the next tube station we saw and took it to Westminster, where we got out briefly to see Big Ben at night. We stepped above ground just as it started ringing and marveled at it for quite a while, as it is perhaps more beautiful at night than it is by day. Funnily, all three of us ended up saying how it reminded us of the Disney movie The Great Mouse Detective, which climaxes with the hero and villain battling it out from Big Ben’s clock surface. Disney had gotten it right though - Big Ben was instantly recognizable as the same clock surface from the movie, even years and years after we’d last watched it. The London Eye was quite a sight too, shining beyond the river, lit up in blue. Once we’d taken enough pictures, we got back on the tube and headed home, but what a great way it had been to end a great weekend. I had loved the city of London long before I’d ever stepped foot in it, but I loved it even more once I’d left.

Additional photos of Bath taken by my friend Christy.

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:21:00 -0600

Bath Abbey

Royal Circle

Royal Crescent

Additional photos of Bath taken by my friend Christy.

11.12.11 Bath

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:43:00 -0600

The kids in my study abroad program have an in-joke between us, one that may not be funny to anyone else, but is certain to send any IFSA kid into a round of chuckles (or uproarious laughter, depending on the level of drunkenness). This in-joke started up during orientation week, when a rather disgruntled program coordinator let it slip that the program had booked a hotel room for Brown Student-turned-Oxford-visitor Emma Watson for the duration of orientation week, one which she had failed to show up and claim, despite the fact that her tuition bill had already covered the cost. The joke, then, made its rounds every time IFSA paid for us to have a meal or hop on a water taxi or something of the sort and Emma Watson wasn’t there (she never was). At dinners, whenever the bill was handed to the program coordinator, someone would inevitably raise his or her glass and say, “Thank you, Emma Watson, for paying for our delicious meal.” By the time October was over, I’d had several meals paid for by “Emma Watson’s” tab. And at the beginning of November, Emma Watson paid for an entire day trip.

The IFSA offices are located in London, so therefore all of the IFSA-sponsored trips originate there, at their offices in Notting Hill. This proved disastrous for us Oxford kids, as getting to London by IFSA’s mandated 8:30 leaving time for the trip to Bath meant taking a 6:15 bus from Oxford’s city center. Because none of us lived in Oxford’s city center, that meant we had to meet up at a bright and early 6am. But the setting gets better: the night prior to the Bath excursion, Catz had
had one of its infamous entzes. This one was “things you’re afraid of” themed; my memory of the event is hazy, but I remember Barack Obama getting into a fistfight with Margaret Thatcher, a gorilla having a blackout in the middle of the dance floor, and a heated argument between vampires as to who was dating Bella Swan. I do, however, clearly remember the aftermath of that night - meeting up with my two friends in the dark, deserted streets of Oxford and limping into town, a steadying arm on one friend as she lurched through the streets, slurring about having slept in the wrong room.

The sunrise over Oxford’s misty fields was, at very least, a beautiful sight, but by the time we’d gotten to London, the three of us were feeling quite green (though one more so than the others). We met up there with friends from other colleges and got some much needed breakfast at a corner bakery, where the six other girls kindly ignored our sad states. Then it was another bus ride, a two hour sojourn into the historic town of Bath.

The entire day for me was marred by the events of the night before - everyone, not just us three - was crabby due to the early waking time and many of the London students had stumbled to the bus right from whatever party they’d been to the night before. The whole day was set to a backdrop of bitching, complaining, and a healthy dose of in-fighting and high school drama. Despite all of this, I loved the city of Bath.

The thing that strikes me most, looking back on it, were the beggars and street performers. In the States, we’re used to shoddily dressed souls asking for change from a seat against a graffitied building. Sometimes, the stranger will have a guitar as he strums and mumbles some lyrics while staring pointedly at his open guitar case. In Bath, the main square had an opera singer. She’d brought an amp with her and stood in the middle of a flock of pigeons with a cup in front of her as strangers passed to and fro. No one seemed to think her out of place. When she’d finished, a celloist took her spot. In front of the city’s medieval cathedral, a classical guitarist sat. He didn’t have an amp, but what he lacked in equipment, he made up with talent. No one paid him any attention as he bent over his battered guitar, nimbly playing the Flight of the Bumblebee. No one paid him any attention because, twenty feet away, a crowd had gathered around a balding middle aged man with a speaker system and headphone-mic who’d mounted a ten-foot unicycle. On the ground, a random passerby stood nervously holding a lit torch as far from her body as she could and, when prompted, she handed it to him and fled back into the crowd. He then proceeded to juggle fire from his lofty perch, all the while feeding jokes to the crowd below through his mic. Aside a small crowd of Japanese tourists, the rest of Bath passed by, unphased.

IFSA had arranged for us to visit the Roman Baths from which the city had gotten its name. I probably wouldn’t have visited them unless ~~IFSA~~ Emma Watson was paying, but in the end, I was glad I did. The guides give you headsets to narrate your walk through the museum and, though it was nowhere near the superb level of the Westminster guided tour, it was very informative. Once again, I found myself with that sense of panicky incredulousness at everything I was seeing - twelfth century no longer seemed impressive as I passed by statues made in 1000 B.C. and read little pieces of gossip written on tin and discarded for archaeologists to find. The Roman settlement had been built over for years and years, so by the time I’d gotten to the actual spa, I’d traveled through several floors of exhibits. At one point, I took a picture of my shoes toeing against the water, as I’d wanted a reminder that I’d been there, standing on something that had been well-traversed three thousand years before I’d been there. The advanced level of the Roman society was incredible - I passed by murals that had been on buildings whose height was destined not to be matched for thousands of years, saw the remnants of ancient aqueducts and heating systems powered by slaves and steam alone. I stared at ancient waterlines left behind from systems that had degraded over the years and gawked at pools still filled by the same power source that had gotten them running three thousand years before.

And when I stumbled out of the Roman baths, I was in for another treat, as I then meandered streets I recognized from film sets and as the backdrop to novels like Jane Eyre. We hadn’t much time, so my stroll was nowhere near as long as I’d wanted, but we did have time to see the absolutely stunning Royal Crescent (link), a semi-circle of Regency-era buildings atop a hill, overlooking a gorgeous view into a park full of frolicking children and well-manicured lawns. I don’t remember much of the ride home - I fell asleep almost as soon as I’d gotten onto that bus back to London - but I do remember making a mental note to thank Emma Watson for the lovely day if I ever saw her. She had no idea what she’d been missing out on.

Additional pictures of that day by my friend Gaby,...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:33:00 -0600

Johnny and Izzy Westbury

Izzy Westbury, Union President, at right

Izzy, Johnny, and Bruce Robinson

Additional pictures of that day by my friend Gaby, Oxford’s Student Union photographer, and random paparazzi.