Harry lives, that shall convert those tears by number into hours of happiness

Alright, so you'll see the significance of the title line in a minute.  But first we'll start with waking up in York and starting the day off by going to the York Minster.

So a minster is apparently a name for a cathedral.  And the York Minster is the biggest Cathedral in Northern Europe, and the third largest in all of Europe.  So this was pretty legit.  It also has more stained glass from the 16th century than any other cathedral in England, so we spent a lot of time looking at and hearing about the glass.  It was a pretty awesome cathedral, and all of the info about glass was actually interesting.  There was actually also some glass from the Norman times that they've also incorporated into the church, and they showed us how people in the past would mend the windows with this thick lead.  But I guess we've got a better way to mend the cracks now, so they're working on taking out the old repairs and putting the new ones in so that you can actually see the pictures in the windows instead of just colors with random black lines everywhere.  Oh, and guess what?  Constantine (yeah, like Constantine the Great who became Christian) was declared emperor there when his father died there.  Heck yes.

Here's Constantine looking like a total stud Emperor.

Yeah, so then we decided to get lunch out of the wind.  We went to this place called the Slug and Lettuce (yeah, no joke.  I would've gone just for the name) and I got this delicious duck wrap.  Um, yeah, I'd never had duck before, so I thought I'd branch out.  It was ultra delicious and I really liked it.  But then we did this awesome two for one dessert deal (yeah, that was the real reason we went there) and got THE most amazing dessert that I ever have had or ever will have in this life.  It was called the Cookie Cup Explosion, and our four person table basically exploded from all of the amazingness.  It was this delicious chocolate chip cookie with a brownie baked practically inside, and ice cream, and chocolate sauce, and these little chocolate covered honeycomb pieces and mint leaves on top and basically pure heaven.  And I'm SERIOUS okay?  It was the most incredible thing ever.

Ah, aren't we cute?

So after that most delicious dessert, we headed off to Edinburgh.  Big long bus trip again, nice nap, you get the idea.  We got into Scotland, (yeah, that's right people Scotland) where it was very cold and checked into our hostel.  Then we went to the Elephant House (after a little bit of getting lost and asking some nice Quakers for directions) which is where JK Rowling started writing Harry Potter.  We had lunch there, and it was delicious.

This is me eating a meat pie in the Elephant House.  I'm pretty stoked.

Oh, and of course the bathroom was totally decked out with graffiti and quotes from the different movies.  There was even a heart with Mrs. Laura Weasley written inside of it (yeah, I was excited.  Once again someone has done the graffiti for me.) And of course there was a list that started with the words Dumbledore's Army and followed with a list of numbered names.  So I signed up.  I think that I was number 137, but my picture didn't turn out so well.  On the opposite doorpost was a sign for the Order of the Phoenix, and seeing as I'm of age and out of high school, I signed up for that one too.  The best part though was the toliet.

How funny is that?

Yeah, so Elephant House was awesome and the food was actually pretty good too.  On the back of the bathroom door there was directions to a specific grave that's in the graveyard behind the pub.  

Can you read it?

If you can't read it, it says to the memory of Thomas Riddell Esq and down below Thomas Riddell Esq his son.  Um, yeah, it's Voldemort's grave.  It's a real person though.  Died in the 1800's or something.  Graveyards are excellent places to get names from, and I'm guessing that JK probably found some of her names there.  There's a McGonnagal and a Moody in the graveyard too.  It was neat.  Voldemort's officially dead though, so everyone can relax.  I've seen his tombstone.

Next we went over to this big fancy hotel with a name that I can't remember where JK Rowling wrote the seventh book.  Basically she was having writer's block, so she rented out this room (300 pounds a night) and spent three weeks writing the book.  She signed a bust in the room to identify the sight.  So we just went to the outside of the hotel, but it was still really cool.  The beginning and the end all within a ten minute's walk of each other.  Totally crazy.  We wrapped up the night with once again grabbing hot chocolate.  You can't blame me though because seriously it was really cold and really windy and there was a lot of wandering in the city.  But that was Tuesday, the second day of the epic trip.  Harry lives and it did indeed bring hours of happiness.

And then the power of Scotland and of York

Yeah yeah yeah, I'm finally getting around to it.  I'm going to tell you about my trip to the North.  This post is just for Monday, which was the first day of the trip and included Lincoln and York.

Alright, well, we all got up really early (breakfast was at 6:30) and ate breakfast, packed sack lunches, and loaded up the bus.  We drove for several hours before arriving at Lincoln.  The main two attractions in town were the castle and the cathedral.  We went over to the castle first.  Part of the castle was converted into a prison at one point, so we went in there.  It was kind of creepy.  We saw the solitary cells (this was a prison in the time where it was believed that long periods of time without human contact would lead to making better people) and the chapel where they would escort the prisoners into little tiny stalls where they could stand and see only the preacher.  It was kind of creepy.  But then we went and saw one of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta and a copy of the Forest Charter, which was really neat.  There was also this really cool old tower, Norman or something like that, up on top of this little mound, so we went up there and it was really beautiful.

This is the wall of the castle (they wouldn't let us walk on it because it was so busy) and you can see the cathedral towers in the background.

Then we wandered over to the Cathedral and peeked into it.  Unfortunately, they were going to make us pay to tour the cathedral, so we gave up on that idea and just looked at the part that we could see.  The stained glass reflecting on the floor because of the sun was really neat, and the gift shop was entertaining.  Sydnie, Amy and I bought a bar of delicious orange chocolate that we split.  Then we wandered about the town.  We found this really cool arch from like Norman or Roman times (seriously, at this point I can't remember) and this well that might have been dug as early as 65 AD and is still just sitting in the middle of town which was pretty cool.

Arches are fun!

Yeah, so then we were done in Lincoln and we piled back on the bus to continue onwards to York!  We checked into our hostel there and then went off to explore the city.  We walked up to the Shambles on top of the wall that used to surround the city.  It was built in Norman times, so yeah, pretty legit, mostly because we got to walk on top of it.

Our next stop, or several stops depending on how you looked at it, was the Shambles.  It's the old part of town with pubs and little shops everywhere.  The houses and shops are built just as they used to be built in London.  They start a normal distance apart, but the further up the stories go, the farther out into the street the houses are built.  After the Great Fire in London they stopped building them that way, because it made it too easy for the fire to spread.

See how easy it would be for the fire to just hop across?

We got fish and chips for dinner whilst in the Shambles and also stopped in at Poundland, which is the English version of the Dollar Store.  It was pretty exciting because it was in pounds and they had really cheap chocolate.  (I swear that we head to the chocolate section every time that we enter a store automatically at this point to see if they have any varieties that we haven't tried).  We also found this chocolate store (lots of small hand made chocolate store in all these little towns) with a real chocolate frog!  I almost bought one, but I knew that it wouldn't last.

Chocolate frogs!

Anyway, it was really cool.  Then that evening we went on a Ghost Walk.  These are things that they apparently like to do in Northern England, because I saw them advertised in several of the towns we passed through.  Basically they talk you for a walk around the town and point out important historical sites and then add ghost stories on top of it.  It wasn't super scary, although he made the whole group jump once.  The best part was his super cool Yorkshire accent.  The linguistic part of me was freaking out.  However, it was freezing cold (have I mentioned the insane wind yet?) so we went into this little restaurant and bought the most delicious hot chocolate I have ever tasted.  Seriously, it was so amazing.  Like whipped milk and cadbury chocolate and cinnamon and other unknown goodness.

So nice and warm, and ultra delicious.

 Yeah, so we set out from there and actually ended up on the completely wrong side of town.  We left the store and walked in the wrong direction apparently, so we ended up literally on the opposite end of the map that we have from where our hostel is supposed to be.  It's a good thing that there were five of us and everyone was doing a good job at talking about nice fun stuff and acting completely unconcerned about being lost, or else I probably would have been in danger of freaking out.  We all made it back safely though, and without even feeling like we were in danger.  And that was the end of the first day.

Does not divide Sunday from the week

Yeah, so I'm going to divide my two Sundays from the rest of the week.  I really need to blog about my trip to the North, but I figure that I'd better do this part now and the trip will just have to come later.  Next post, I promise.

Alright, so last week on Saturday I went to the Tate Britain for my Arts class.  It was a pretty cool museum with some really awesome Turner works.  Oh, and Sydnie and I went to the Science Museum that morning, which was pretty neat.  They had the Rocket and a whole display about clocks that was really cool.  They also had these big old plastic drape things that were everywhere in the plastic section.  We had taken pictures the day before peeking out behind trees near the Globe, so I took one peeking out from the plastic.

Very red, isn't it?

On the way back to the Center we stopped and bought delicious sandwiches, Ben's cookies (THE most amazing cookies that you will ever try) and then I bought a copy of Much Ado About Nothing to read on my trip to Scotland, because I'm going to see it performed.  Yeah, so that Saturday (the 21st) was pretty awesome.

On Sunday I was in with the Primary again.  I sat between the two troublesome kids and tried to keep them quiet and focused on the lesson.  It was absolutely exhausting.  I'd forgotten how much work little kids can be when they don't want to be helpful and it's the last hour of three hours of church in the afternoon.  But that night at the Center we had the most beautiful devotional.  I can't remember the names of the speakers (Brother and Sister Hughes, I just checked), but the woman was a member of the Relief Society General Presidency for a while, and so that was really cool.  She talked about how it is all of the small actions of little people that God can use to make us great.  It was a really amazing devotional, and precisely what I needed.

Anyway, then yesterday, the most recent Sunday, the 29th, it was stake conference.  However, a bunch of us thought that it would be a good opportunity to go to Westminster Abbey to attend a service there and to get a peek at the inside of it.  So Sydnie and I tried to go to the 11:15 service, but we got there barely too late.  So we went on a walk instead and then went to Evensong at 3:00.

We did the Inns of Court walk, and I suppose that I was the leader.  It was actually rather difficult because the Inns of Court are apparently not really open on Sundays or weekends or something because we couldn't get through the gates.  So we did a lot of walking around them and backtracking and looking through at what we should've walked past.  I feel like we saw everything on the walk though, and it was definitely more interesting the way that we did it.  We didn't get a group picture (hard with just the two of us and hardly any other people about) but we did find some nice statues next to a bookstore.

Me next to a penguin!  I took this picture for my siblings.

Yeah, so after we'd finished our walk we were pretty tired and it was getting onto lunchtime, but of course, it being a Sunday, we couldn't buy any food.  Our month-long Oyster cards had just run out, which means now I either have to buy weekly passes or simply pay every time that I take the Tube.  We didn't consider a little hunger to be enough to warrant a trip back to the Center and then back to Westminster, so I pulled a Tangerine and some digestives out of my bag and we ate those on a little bench in the park.  Then I pulled out Much Ado About Nothing, which I still had about two acts left in to read, and we read it out loud.  We were each at least five different characters, which made for some pretty interesting conversations, because sometimes you'd have a whole page of text to read, but three different characters on the same page.  It was really actually quite delightful.  I love Shakespeare!  And something about reading out loud and having all the words flow together, especially in insults and declarations of love, was really wonderful.  Probably one of my favorite parts of the day (especially because there were roses in the park that I got to take pictures of).

We went to Westminster after that, walking along the river through parks and past Trafalgar Square.  The Evensong was really beautiful.  Those big tall roofs with all that empty space in these Gothic cathedrals is absolutely beautiful acoustics for the music.  I'm really convinced that we need more beautiful singing at church.  The sermon was really good too.  The man was talking about the importance of using your resources to help the poor and he talked about Haiti and their history and how he was headed there next week to meet with other religious groups that are working with the people. It was a nice talk and it's always neat to hear things applied to the present day.  I hadn't heard a Catholic sermon before, so it was neat.

Yeah, so that pretty much sums up Sunday.  We had these absolutely delicious shish kabobs for dinner, but I won't bore you with the details.

Thou mightst as well say I love to walk

Alright, so this post is also about Friday, but I'm writing it up separately because it's just about the two walks that I did, so many of you mightn't find this particularly interesting.

The first walk I did was the Westminster walk.  I went with Amy C and Sydnie on this walk, and we actually did it in two stages.  We did about half the walk before we went on our tour at the Globe, and the second half we did after the tour.  Sydnie was the leader for the walk.

I really enjoyed the walk.  We walked through the sector of town that Amy called the "D.C. part of London" or in other words we walked past all of the government buildings.  We saw a car get pulled over by a police officer on a horse, which was probably the most entertaining thing I've ever seen.

The black car's the one he pulled over.

We also spent a lot of time at Buckingham Palace.  I'd been there before, during the wedding, but I hadn't been back since, so it was nice to get some good pictures and see it up close.  We asked these people to take our picture, and they ended up being from Park City!  As we were talking to them about Utah this other guy who was passing by was like, oh hey, I graduated from BYU!  So we go halfway across the world and are standing in front of Buckingham Palace and we run into a bunch of people from Utah.  Small world.

Unfortunately, all of the pictures that actually contained people (and therefore are the ones that you guys would be interested in) are on Amy's camera.  So I'm going to have to get those from her later.  I do have a picture of me in front of Big Ben though.

Big Ben is so beautiful.

Anyway, that was the first walk I did that day.  The second walk I did after dinner with a big group of people.  We did the Lambeth walk.  There was me, Emily L, Sydnie, Amy C, Emily K, Sarah J, Macy, Hannah and Miles Miller, Makenna, and I think perhaps a couple of others that I can't remember.  I'm not entirely sure.

It was a really nice walk though.  Emily L led us.  We found this really neat children's park and had a lot of fun playing in there for about a half an hour before the park closed.  The other really noteworthy place on the walk was, of course, seeing Parliament all lit up across the water.

See the lights?

It was a very relaxing sort of walk.  Pleasantly cool, neat park, a good stroll and so forth.  I think we're getting better at not getting lost on these things, so we now have much more of a chance to simply chat and enjoy ourselves.  Anyway, it was lovely.

All the world's a stage and all the men and women are merely players

Alright, onto Thursday!  And Friday morning.  These were the Shakespeare days!

Yeah, so Thursday morning and afternoon were taken up with classes.  But after dinner we went to the Globe Theater (reconstructed) to see As You Like It, which is currently my favorite Shakespeare play.  We had rather lousy seats, way off to the side with a big pillar that occasionally got in the way, but it was still really awesome.  I'd never seen Shakespeare performed before, and it just made the play so much more delightful.  I loved it so much.

Catherine and I in our seats at the Globe.

It was a really splendid show, and one of my favorite things that I've done so far in London.  The next day we went back to the Globe to take a tour.  They took us nearby to see the remains of the Rose Theater, which was the first one in the area and is now under water, and then across the street to the site of the original Globe, which now is a parking lot and a building of some kind, perhaps apartments.  We then went back to the Globe and went through the theater.  They were actually in the middle of a rehearsal for their next show, Much Ado About Nothing, so we saw a segment of that, and it was amazing!  In fact, it was so good that a bunch of us decided that we were going to go back and see it.  We bought groundling tickets for five pounds (which was the most exciting part) so we'll be doing it just like the poorer commoners of Shakespeare's time.

For all the ducks i' the river: go to, go to

Alright, so now we've finally reached Wednesday.  We went to Cambridge for the day via the train at King's Cross Station.  And you should all know what else is at King's Cross Station (or else I don't know how we became friends).  That's right!  Platform 9 3/4!  The actual platform thing that they have, which is not actually between platforms nine and ten, is under construction and won't be fixed until the Olympics next year, but they have a fake picture of a brick wall with a trolley coming out of it instead of the real brick wall with the trolley.

I put my purse in the trolley, so I'm pushing my own things through the wall!  The lighting's really weird though.

We didn't have much time there though because we had to catch our train to Cambridge.  Yeah, so we took our train ride through the countryside, which was nice, but I liked the countryside better by bus.  It was neat though, because we were able to joke about how we were taking a train from King's Cross station, which of course meant that we were going to Hogwarts.

Well, we got to Cambridge and bought delicious lunch (some random Mexican place that was really really good) and then a bunch of us went to the Christopher Wren library there where they have, among other things, a lock of Newton's hair along with his notes for his book about calculus, a Guttenburg Bible, one of the First Folio Shakespeare books, and the writings of Paul from 800 A.D.  It was really really neat, but they didn't let us take any pictures, so I'm afraid that I haven't any to share with you.  

After the library we met back up with our group to tour the King's College chapel and go punting down the Cam river.  In case you were wondering, Cambridge comes literally from the idea of a bridge over the Cam river.  Cam-bridge.

The chapel was really neat.  There were dragons and wolfhounds all over the half of it that was built during the Tudor reign, and then on the other half it was almost completely plain.  The best part was the ceiling though.  That was absolutely magnificent.  It was done by Christopher Wren (remember he's the one who built St. Paul's) and was really cool.   

Punting is done in these low boats and basically what you do is take a really long pole and push off from the bottom of the river with it and use it to steer.  It was really actually rather neat.  Which really means that it was my favorite part of the whole day.

Here we are in our boat.

We all took turns punting down the river.  The hardest part was getting the pole out of the water so that you could put it back in to get a good push off of it.  I got the hang of the steering fairly quickly, but it was really hard to do because without the proper velocity you've got to account for steering a different way, which is where I got into problems.  It was totally fun though, and I loved it.  There were tons of ducks in the river too, and they just swam along right next to us, close enough to reach out and touch (although I didn't).  There's a picture of my punting around here somewhere, but it wasn't on my camera.  If I find it I'll put it up.

After punting we stopped by the Cambridge University Press bookstore, which we were told is the oldest bookstore in the world.  I'm not sure how accurate that statement is, but they've definitely remodeled since then.  It was basically the Cambridge equivalent of the BYU Bookstore, top floor.  It had a neat spiral staircase in it though, and it really hit home to me that I was at Cambridge.  

Ta da!  Books!

Yeah, so after that we wandered around for a bit, bought some pasties for dinner, found a bathroom, that sort of a thing until it was time for the King's College Choir evensong.  For those of you who don't know (and I was recently among that number, so don't feel too awful) this is the men's choir that puts on an absolutely amazing Christmas concert every year.  How could we NOT go listen to them in person in the very chapel where they always perform?  

Evensong was really amazing.  Their voices just filled that chapel and I think it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.  Really just amazing.  It was the perfect way to end our time in Cambridge, because after that we headed back to the train station to catch a train home.

They are come to search the house. Shall I let them in?

So Tuesday was a day all about houses.  We rented a bus and drove out to see Hampton Court and Down House.  For those of you who don't know, Down House is the house of Charles Darwin and Hampton Court is essentially the English version of Versailles.  It was built by Cardinal Wolsey, but when he fell out of favor with King Henry VIII, the king took the house for himself and expanded it and built it into a palace.  It was used fairly consistently as a palace all the way through the reign of William and Mary.

Lorraine and I in front of Hampton Court!  Unfortunately, this is not the Hampton Court that we'll be living at next semester.  That Hampton Court is in Provo and not nearly so impressive.  Sigh.

Hampton Court was pretty awesome.  It was considerably less ornate than Versailles (notice the lack of gold trimmings on everything) but still pretty cool.  We had audio guides (again!) and just wandered through all of the different rooms for a couple of hours.  But then we went out into the gardens, and that was the best part, because we found the rose garden!  I think I just about died it smelled so beautiful.

See all of the absolutely gorgeous roses?

This was basically the best part of the whole day, in case you all were wondering.  I've discovered that I have an absolute passion for taking pictures of flowers, and lots of my pictures turn out fairly decent.  I have a friend here who takes pictures of every funny sign that she sees (I do a lot of that too) but my big thing is taking pictures of all of the beautiful flowers that I see.  When they're just sitting there looking so beautiful I can't help but take the picture.  And then I take pictures of whatever's around the flowers that I'm supposed to be looking at.  I think that winter was far too long for me.

Anyway, that was Hampton Court.  It was pretty awesome and it was really neat to imagine all of Henry VIII's six wives living there.  I've always really liked learning about the Tudor period of the British monarchy.  Oh!  And we found this cool arch on the way out that had basically the only gold decoration on the whole place.

See how cool this arch is?  All those gold leaves . . . 

Anyway, after Hampton Court we went to Down House, which is Charles Darwin's house.  Where he lived when he wrote the Origin of Species and all that.  Hampton Court was way cooler, but Darwin was pretty neat.  The downstairs of his house was decorated as it would have been when he lived there and upstairs was a museum of sorts.  We also went for a walk around the grounds.  I've decided that having a miniature woods in your backyard is a splendid thing to have and that I want one to walk in every day.

Here's Down House.  I didn't get a picture of me in front of it somehow.  But aren't the vines cool?

Alright, and that was the end of Tuesday.  I'll be posting soon about Wednesday, when we went to Cambridge!  Until then.

Music for the time doth change his nature

Alright, so this post is for Sunday and Monday.  Yeah, yeah, I know I'm way behind, but just be quiet for a minute.

Sunday was another one of those really nice, slow days where church didn't start until 2:00 and was in Spanish.  Yeah, I'm most definitely at the point where I'm done with this idea of afternoon church and of hanging around the center with only three other people in the whole building.  Although I'm still digging the idea of having the entire floor to myself to get ready, so I took the time to pull my hair up into a bun.  I'm starting to learn that if I want my hair down I'd better take a hairbrush with me because as soon as we go to take the Tube it's going to get messed up.

But this last Sunday was different because the branch president (almost put the president of the branch, a sign of too much Spanish thinking) asked Catherine and I if we could help out with Primary.  So we asked the Primary president what she wanted us to do and she said to come back third hour.  So we went to our normal Sunday school class where I was again asked to give the opening prayer (WHY?  I did that last week!  Did I mention that?  I was shaking last week when I sat down because I've never actually been taught how to pray in Spanish.  So I give very grateful prayers.) before we went to Primary.

Primary was very disorganized.  The biggest problem was that some of the children only spoke English and some spoke mostly Spanish with some English, and a couple spoke basically just Spanish and the whole thing was conducted in Spanish.  The teacher/primary president doesn't know English, so kids were translating for kids.  They also seemed to have a great lack of adults in the room and the kids were very bad at keeping quiet, but then again, it IS primary.  I sat with the group that only spoke English and helped translate the lesson for them (I was pretty proud of myself for being able to do that and they were pleased to see English scriptures because they couldn't read Spanish) and engage them in our small group activities.

I've never been in a place where the church is so new.  The teacher, who was the primary president, kept looking to me for confirmation about the things that she was saying (for example, that Oliver Cowdery also received the priesthood along with Joseph Smith) which was so totally unusual for me.  And after primary was over the other boy who was helping out in primary who seems to be about my age was asking me for suggestions about how to better organize the primary to get the kids to listen.  It was so completely intimidating.  I have a feeling that next week will be better though.

Monday was classes as per usual, but then the very best part of everything (I keep feeling that way about everything, but this time I really mean it) was when we went to see Les Miserables!

Here we are before the musical started.

Yeah, so basically it was absolutely incredible.  I've been listening to the music all week and it's constantly stuck in my head.  It was just so beautiful and emotionally engaging and . . . what more can I really say?  My life is forever changed?  Cause basically it is.  So freaking amazing.

I looked for the chalky cliffs

On the last day of our trip we started out with one last walk around Bristol.  We went hunting for pictures of Banksey, who's this unknown artist that apparently travels all over England (originating in Bristol and doing lots of pictures in London) and he paints on the side of random buildings, boats, and other old structures.  So essentially it's graffiti and most of it is quite strongly political, but it's so good that they never paint it over and instead work at preserving it.  The art just sort of magically appears in the night as well, which is why they don't know who Banksey is.  Yeah, so that was cool.

We checked out of our hostel and headed off to Wells.  There was a little confusion concerning the difference between Wells and Wales.  So just to get that out of the way, Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom (and has a dragon on its flag making it the coolest flag ever) while Wells is a small cathedral town (town that came into being because of the cathedral) in Somerset (that's a county), England.

So.  Wells.  At first I was thinking oh great, ANOTHER cathedral.  I forgot to mention this, but after Banksey a couple of us stopped off at the cathedral in Bristol to see what that was like.  Somebody said Queen Victoria said something about how pretty is was or something, so we took a look at it.  So the whole Wells cathedral thing was the second that day.  And so we walk in and I'm trying to be positive and interested.  But THEN . . .

I saw this clock.  

And you're all thinking, yeah, neat, so what?  Well, first of all this is the second oldest working clock in the world.  It's been running for over 600 years, which is totally insane.  It's the oldest working clock with the original dials, so you could say that it's the oldest working complete clock.  But the best part is what happens every quarter of an hour.  You can't really see in this picture, but on the platform above the clock are little wooden knights on horseback.  When the quarter hour hits, the little horses go around in circles and the knights joust.  One of them gets knocked backwards every time they go around, and then pops up as they circle behind so that he can be knocked off again.  He's been getting knocked off his horse every quarter hour for 600 years.  I can't help but fear for what that's doing for his self-esteem.  It was so cool that I watched it twice.

Yeah, so then we did our typical walk around the city, until just as we were leaving our professor's wife called us all to go look at this cute little street that seems to have been stuck in the Medieval Times.  It was pretty neat, but the best part was the sign that I found on the way back.

Can you see the name on it?  William Turner.

Yes, this was a Pirates moment.  Forget the Father of English Botany, William Turner's from Pirates of the Caribbean  and that's really all that matters.  It basically made this town just that much better.  

After Wells we drove down to the coast and visited Durdle Door beach.  It kind of reminded me of going to the beach at Tahoe because it was rather cold and exceedingly windy and the beach was all rocky, although the predominate color of rock was brown.  It was pretty cold, so when we got to the actual beach I didn't really want to sit there that long.  It was the sort of beach that made brooding very easy, but boy was it beautiful.  In order to actually get down to the beach we had to walk up and over this really tall and rather steep hill and then back down to the beach (the second slope was much more gradual).  I was reminded that it's been quite a few years since I've quit pointe, which means that my legs don't get the good workout that they used to all the time.  

Not the best picture of me, but you can kind of see the cliffs behind me.

This is a better picture of the cliffs.  They're white and chalky, you see?

It was a nice experience and a pretty decent beach.  I didn't put my feet in the water (sorry folks) because it was cold and I also didn't really want to get dirt and rocks and dust all over my feet because I wasn't really wearing the proper shoes for it.  I've been in the ocean before, unlike many of the people in our group, so it wasn't that big of a deal for me.  I mostly liked looking at the cliffs and the water meeting the sky and pondering.  I took a lot of pictures of the water actually.

And that concludes my trip to the west.  We headed back to London that night, and that's where we've been ever since.  Saturday was the National Portrait Gallery (see a few posts back) and you'll just have to wait to hear about Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.

Tell me how Wales was made so happy as to inherit such a haven

So now we're on the third day of my trip west, which brings us to Wales!  That's right people, like the country of Wales.  I was probably most excited about this part of the trip.  We went to Tintern Abbey in Wales, and it was really neat to see all of the road signs written in both English and Welsh.  Welsh is a really strange language and I wouldn't be able to even try to begin to figure out some of the words if it weren't for the fact that it was also written in English.

But the abbey was really neat.  I found a nice window that I climbed up to sit in for like fifteen minutes to just think and look around me and write.  There were all of these gorgeous tree covered hillsides around and beautiful clouds and blue skies (I swear we've had the very best luck with weather) and this great huge abbey that was so tall that you couldn't believe it.  The most interesting part was the smell, because it smelt really old but because it's been open to the fresh air the whole time it doesn't smell musty and stale like most old places.  Anyway, apparently we weren't supposed to get up on any part of the abbey because one of the ladies in charge came around and told us all to get down (there were several of us in windows).  Which was alright, because I wanted to circle the abbey in any case.

This is me at the front of Tintern Abbey, or Abaty Tyndyrn if you're Welsh.

It was just one of the most peaceful experiences that I've had and it was cool to go to the room where they copied scriptures nearly a thousand years ago.  Really I think it's been one of the best parts of the trip so far.

Anyway, after we left the Abbey we went to Chipping Campden, which is this absolutely adorable random town in the Cotswolds.  We bought these absolutely delicious sandwiches for lunch with really good bread (although to be honest I think the best sandwich bread I've had so far was in Greenwich when I bought a sandwich for lunch there.  Sandwiches are cheap, so we buy a lot of them) and just wandered around the town.

The town was absolutely beautiful.  There were sheep fields and all of the houses are made of this light limestone and have ivy and roses growing all over them.  And all of the houses have plaques on them saying what the name of the house is like "Molly's Cottage" or "Spring Corner" or other cute things.  Calling the Weasley's house the Burrow all the time makes so much more sense now.

See how the vines just grow right up the house?

I took an awful lot of pictures of roses on houses while in the town, but the house above doesn't have any.  I basically think that I want to move to this town and cover one of these adorable stone houses with roses.  I may have a bit of an obsession.

Anyway, then we drove up to another small little town (I didn't ever quite catch the name) and went on a "walk" through the countryside that was really a small hike.  And guess what?  We passed a MANOR on the way.  Yeah, a real English manor.  Complete with their horse pastures, a clock on the house, and deer hunting grounds.  It was really neat, and the countryside was so beautiful.  We just walked through sheep fields and looked out over the valley that was so green and beautiful.  Apparently there's just these trails all over Britain and you could basically walk anywhere in the country.

Actually, while we were in Chipping Camden we ran into these two nice elderly gentlemen who had just walked into town.  They had taken the last nine days to walk from Bath to Chipping Camden where we were, which is about 100 miles.  Um, yeah.  They would just walk for the day and stay in some small town, buy some food in the morning and fill up their water, walk some more that day until they reached the next town.  You know, just for fun.  It's like backpacking without actually having to carry everything that you need.  I think it sounds perfectly splendid.

Yeah, so then we went back to Bristol, and because it was Molly's birthday and we were her roommates whilst in Bristol, so we bought pizza and a small carrot cake and had a party in our bedroom.

Pizza!  We were, as I so cleverly said, eating American food, listening to Eastern music (I forgot to mention the really cool music that I bought in Bath), and sitting in England all just to have a birthday party.  Although I suppose that you could argue that pizza's Italian.

Anyway, it was a fabulous day filled with lots of walking, but really just so wonderful.  I fall more and more in love with England every day, particularly the English countryside.

In which so many smiling Romans bathed

So then we come to Wednesday, which was our day in Bath.  We started things off by driving into Bath and heading straight for the Roman Baths.  They gave us audio guides and we went through the museum they had there and the parts of the Roman temple that was right next to the baths (pretty cool to see the steps that led to the front door of the temple still very much visible hundreds and hundreds of years later) and then of course the hot spring and the baths.

Ta da!  The Roman bath, filled with water from the spring just as it was when the Romans used it.

We then went up to the restaurant upstairs where they let us try some of the spring water from the hot spring. It left kind of a weird after taste in your mouth, and none of us finished our glass, except for Tara who only did it when the lady told us that hardly anyone ever finishes their glass, so that hardly counts.  Then we went to grab lunch, and I got a Cornish pasty!  So that's another one to check off my list of foods that I must eat in England.

I was so excited that I took a picture!

And it was incredibly delicious.  Then we went into the cathedral that was right on the square there, which was pretty neat.  In one part of the church you could see straight down to the Norman foundations, which was really really neat.  So we had the Romans and the Normans all in one day, plus whatever time period built the current cathedral that's there.  

After that we basically wandered around the city.  We went up to the Crescent, which is this big arch of houses that they've built and is a pretty famous part of Bath.  Then we went down to the Jane Austen center and looked around for a bit.  You could take a tour of a recreated Georgian house there, but seeing as Jane Austen didn't live there and that it cost five pounds we opted out.  Instead we went up the street (following the nifty guide book that someone had) to the house where Jane Austen actually lived.  It's now a dentist's office, but we stuck our heads in and asked the receptionist if Jane Austen lived there and she was all like yes she did, and how about I close the door so that you can take pictures in front of it.  

Number twenty five!

We also went over to the Assembly rooms where they used to hold balls and play cards and stuff.  Same rooms described in one of Jane Austen's books, but it's one that I haven't read yet, so I don't actually remember the name of it.

So then we headed back to Bristol for the night to buy dinner and so forth.  A group of us decided to go see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because it was playing in the theater in town and it was relatively cheap, so we got tickets to go see that.  I'd heard all the music before, so it was neat to see it in person and get a clearer view of the storyline, although the voice of the doctor was not ultra impressive.  He was difficult to understand.  Lucy was awesome though.  Before the play we grabbed falafels for dinner, another fantastic food that I had never tried before.

I know, I know, another picture of me just about to take a bite of something.  And falafels are of Middle Eastern origin and not British at all.  So what?

Well after Jekyll and Hyde we just were all really tired, so we went back to the hostel and stayed up and talked for a few more hours before finally all showering and going to sleep.  By the way, did I mention that the ventilation in these hostels was awful?  One person would take a shower and the whole room would be humid for the entire night.  We'd have to leave the window open all night and all day, and it would only open about two inches to get air in.  No fan for the bathroom you know.  But besides that our hostels were really nice and the beds were really comfortable, and there was enough space to shave in the shower, which is more than I can say for the ones at the center.  

Yeah, so started the day with seeing how the Romans bathed and ended the day with my own version of bathing.  I guess that's full circle.

There's no profit. I prithee, to our rock

Alright, so I've decided that each day for our trip west deserves its very own blog post, so this one is all about Tuesday, and Tuesday was all about rocks.

Yup, that's right, we kicked things off in style by going to Stonehenge!  It was pretty cool, but we were reminded over and over again that we really have no idea what all the rocks are there for.  (There's no profit.)  And as there's only so many different ways that you can look at and photograph a group of rocks that you can't even get super close to we ended up taking modeling pictures because the wind was absolutely perfect for blowing hair around.  The surroundings were beautiful too, with great big clouds in the sky that caught sunlight in interesting ways and all these lovely green fields filled with sheep.

This is Sydnie and me at Stonehenge.

Anyway, yeah, Stonehenge was pretty cool just because it was Stonehenge.  But then we went to Avebury Circle, which is another Stone circle but like a bajillion times bigger than Stonehenge.  The stone circle there is like a quarter of a mile wide or something nuts like that.  We could touch the stones there, which is what made it so cool.  But what I actually liked the most was seeing the dovecote that was nearby.  I've read about them before when I read books with falcons in them mostly, and so it was neat to see one, particularly as it's so old (like several hundreds of years).  

Isn't it neat?  Well, I thought so at least.  Just be grateful that you're not getting all of my pictures of flowers on here.

Anyway, after Avebury we went to the Caen Lochs.  I'm not sure if I spelled that correctly, but oh well.  But they were basically part of the immense canal system that runs all over England, except that this part was a system of gates that you would use to get a boat up to the top of a hill.  It was the sort of thing that was really rather dull at first, especially as we were all groggy from long hours on the bus and it was the time of the day where you just feel tired and irritable, but the longer we were there the better it got.  We met this man who was taking his boat from Bath all the way to Northampton through the canals, so we helped him get through a couple of the lochs.  It was really neat actually to see how it works, because it was all really old and hand operated.  So I have opened and closed gates for a loch system!

After that we went to Bristol to stay in our Hostel.  We grabbed Subway for dinner (it was really the only thing that we could find open and selling food at 8:00 at night that wasn't a grocery store) and then wandered around Bristol for a bit.  We found this really rather neat old church that had been around for at least 400 years and got bombed out in the Blitz and left as a memorial.  The roof was missing and the inside was just gutted.  You can't find something like that in America.  

Here I am in Bristol by the canal or river or whatever the body of water in front of our hostel was.

What's here? The portrait of a blinking idiot

Alright, so I've got a week's worth of blogging to catch up on.  Thank heavens for Sunday mornings!  This post is going to a Monday and Saturday combined post.  All of the days in between those days I wasn't in London, so I'll catch up on what I've been doing in London first and then we'll talk about my trip to the West in my next few posts.

So Monday and Saturday I spent mostly going to the National Portrait Gallery for art class.

Here we are in front of the gallery.

The portrait gallery was pretty neat, although not as interesting as some of the other museums.  I only briefly went through the more contemporary portraits, but I didn't like them as much.  I knew that I wouldn't before I even went through them, but it was still disappointing so not really like them.  I felt like there was a lot more to see and think about with the older pictures, particularly when you had one person portrayed by several different artists.  Yeah yeah, I'm turning all philosophical and thoughtful again, so enough of that.

On Monday that's really all that we had time to do.  The museum and then pack that night for our trip to the west (with of course a stop at Tesco's to stock up on snacks).  On Saturday the museum was only a small portion of the day.  That morning I went to the market on Portobello Road and looked around for a bit.  It's mainly focused on antiques, so there was a lot of really cool old jewelery and clocks and cutlery and the like.

Then we had a splendid time eating lunch at the park by the Peter Pan statue in honor of Molly's birthday.  And I tried another new kind of candy!  This time it was a Catherine Wheel, which if any of you are as intimately familiar with the Harry Potter books as I am know, is something that Fred and George's fireworks are compared to.

See how exciting?  And they're black licorice, so it wasn't another chocolate candy that I was trying.

Oh, and Molly's British friend who's studying at the University of London came to the picnic too, so that was really fun because he was talking in a British accent and such.  I don't hear too much of that because at church, which is our main conversational contact with people from Britain, everyone is from countries where they speak Spanish so they have a Spanish accent and a British accent all rolled into one, which is interesting but hardly the real thing.  So it was fun to talk to someone who's actually British, because listening to conversations on the Tube just isn't quite the same.

After the lunch and the National Portrait Gallery Catherine and I went to the Courtauld Gallery.  Unfortunately, you have to pay to get into the gallery unless it's a Monday.  So obviously we decided to not go into the gallery and just return on Monday when we didn't have to pay.  We did however take some neat pictures at the courtyard that had water spouting out of it.

You can see the water shooting up.  Just the sort of thing that you want to run straight through and get absolutely soaking wet.  We didn't though, because it was just a little too cold for that sort of thing.

Well it was still just a tad bit too early for dinner and a tad bit too depressing to simply head back to the center to do homework, so we ran over to 221B Baker Street, home of Sherlock Holmes.  My guide book said that it was open until six thirty, but of course it was wrong and it's only open until six o'clock.  We spent fifteen minutes looking through the gift shop and taking pictures out front because they wouldn't let us into the museum.  I'll have to go back later.

Here I am in front of the door.  If you look carefully you can see the number above it.

Then that night I went for a lovely stroll in Hyde Park to catch up with Dezi, who's on the theater study abroad.  She made me terribly jealous as she told me about her plans to go to Madrid and her awesome day in Brighton.  At least I'm going to Scotland in another week!

What, will you walk with me about the town, and then go to my inn and dine with me?

Okay, so we didn't go to an inn to dine, but we did walk around the town!  Yeah, we're on to Saturday now, and I'm actually posting about the current day, which is kind of exciting.

So Saturday once again started out slow.  I did laundry and homework for the majority of the day, but my Utopia paper is pretty awesome.  I just need to do another run through/edit of it, but I think it turned out really well.  I actually could have written a paper twice the length of the one that I did, but two pages is the page requirement.  And that's actually taking into account the longer page lengths that they have in Britain.  Have I mentioned that yet?  The paper's a different width and length.  It's a little strange to be quite honest.

Yeah, so boring stuff.  But Lorraine and I went to Pret a Manger for lunch and I got a wrap that had avocados, which I totally miss all the time now that I'm not adding Creamery guacamole to my lunch all the time for twenty cents, so that made it especially delicious.  And I bought an apple, which was also really good.

But anyway, around three o'clock a few of us decided to go on the Soho to Trafalgar Square walk.  It was actually a really fun walk, mostly because we didn't really get lost along the way, and we made sure to read all of the really interesting tidbits about the places we passed.  Most of the other walks I've done that on it seems like it was just a bunch of churches, but this time it was people's houses.  There's always these little plaques on the house that say the person's name, when they lived in that house, and then what they're famous for.  For example, there was this gardener/landscaper that's apparently famous.  We had fun laughing at that for a while because he invented the ha-ha fence.  But the best was this sign.

We were wondering what they're going to do in the year 2189.  

We saw a bunch of cool stuff, but there were two main things for me.  One of which was Charing Cross Road, which has a whole bunch of bookstores on it and is also the location of the Leaky Caludron.  (That's the address given in the books, although it doesn't precisely say where it is).  Having seen a bunch of pubs all over the place nearby I can much more easily picture the Leaky Cauldron being on that street.  The other cool thing was Pollock's Toy Museum which is either the last or one of the last toy shops in England where all the toys were made by hand.  They've turned it into a shop/museum now, which was really neat, although we didn't go into the museum at that point because it costs five pounds and we didn't really have time for that.  But here's a picture!

See what a cool looking shop it is?

Anyway, at the end of the walk we bought these massive slices of pizza that were really delicious and then we got gelato, which was also delicious.  And I was the obnoxious customer who asked if I could split a scoop in half and get two flavors in a single scoop.  And they let me!  So I didn't have to pay extra to get the two flavors.  The idea didn't even occur to all of my friends, but then they didn't hear that question time and time again at the Creamery.

And that was today!  I've decided that these walks can be pretty fun if you do them when you've got lots of leisure time and actually pop into places along the way.  

And give some evening music to her ear

Okay, so I'm rolling Thursday and Friday all into one post because they weren't particularly eventful.  I had class Thursday morning and after class there was only an hour until dinner, so we stayed at the center and did homework.  But after dinner we went to this really neat concert at St. Martins-in-the-fields, which is a church on the edge of Trafalgar Square.  It's an Anglican church, and it was a candlelight Baroque concert.  I enjoyed it so much more than I thought I would.

We sat in these little wooden box pews on the side of the church with a window that had lit candles in the sill as we listened to some absolutely beautiful string music.  If I was really educated I'm sure I would've been able to tell you what the names of all the different pieces were, but I settled for merely recognizing the pieces and enjoying them.  It was just very peaceful and a great way to release stress.  All of this listening to good classical music this week is reminding me of how much it calms me down.  One of those by-products of doing years of ballet right after school every day and practicing piano for hours each week.  It was nice to just sit, listen to absolutely gorgeous live music, and let my mind wander around the church from candle to candle.  I think there's something to be said for artistic expression without words, as much as I love singing and writing.

Okay, well, enough of the musings of a tired mind.  We got gelato halfway through the concert and it was delicious.  I got dark chocolate and black cherry, which made a really excellent combination.

On Friday I was absolutely exhausted and slept straight in to 9:30.  It was a very slow morning, which I was perfectly alright with.  I'd stayed up very late Wednesday night because of some confusion with what the professor's sign up sheet said and what the syllabus said.  I was planning by the syllabus, but the professor had a different schedule, which led to a very stressful night and morning.  So it was nice to take Friday to recover and just wake up late, take a leisurely shower and take a really nice walk in the absolutely perfect weather to Tesco's or whatever the local store is.

Seriously, I think Friday was defined by the perfect weather.  I wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt all day, and walking out of the house felt like walking from one room to another.  Around twelve thirty a group of us went to the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) to do our Fine Arts homework.  I did sketching and we took two tours.

First we took the Theater tour, which was pretty neat mainly because our tour guide was the person in charge of the whole theater section.  He kept casually mentioning working with the guy who had the Globe Theater rebuilt and he showed us their copy of the First Folio (For those of you who are not Shakespeare-savy, the First Folio is the first real printed collection of Shakespeare's work and at least half of his plays were printed for the first time in it.  Yeah, I was quietly freaking out, and Amy and I went back and just stared at it for at least five minutes.) and all of these really cool costumes.

Then a couple of us hung around for a while so that we could take the general Intro tour.  We didn't technically need to, as only one tour was the requirement, but we thought it would be a really good idea because there was a lot of the museum that we hadn't explored.  I'm really glad we stayed to take it because there were some really rather neat things in the museum, and there was another Shakespeare reference!  It was actually an object referred to in Shakespeare, but still fairly cool.  I liked it a whole lot better than the audio tour in the National Gallery.

Anyway, after dinner a group of us were going to go on a walk.  The initial plan was to do the Westminister walk, and that was the plan all the way up until five minutes before we were supposed to leave, when everyone else decided to do the St. Paul's walk.  Well, I'd already done that walk, but as it beat sitting at home and doing homework I went along.  We got lost at different points in the walk this time, so it was nice to get all of the walk experience and also to see different detours.  We did it in the opposite direction this time, which made it a little difficult to keep things straight in my head, but no matter.  It was fun, and the weather was perfect, and it was just so pleasant.  I think I actually miss walking home from campus in the evenings, because every time I go on an evening walk I get really excited.

I did get a better picture of me with St. Paul's though.

And I'm standing just beyond Ye Olde Chesire Cheese in this picture, which is a pub that was frequented by Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson, which was pretty cool.  We missed that on my previous walk because we'd gotten lost.  I'm pretty sure that I'm on Fleet Street though, which some of you may have heard of before.