Hi! I am in England. Hee. The whole time I've had the surreal experience of walking into a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, everything from the church bells to the light-switches to the tea and scones.
Flew in last Thursday/Friday. Can't sleep on planes, even after a small bottle of (free) wine. There are 20-25 people in the program, about 20 of whom are girls. I know one girl from Xavier (amantedistelle), and am making friends OK, as long as I can manage to remember their names. Cambridge is really, really, medieval; in between all the really old colleges are really old buildings full of shops and stuff. They're all pretty modern on the inside (the shops, anyway). St. Catharine's was founded in 1473, which isn't the oldest in Cambridge, but then you think about it and say, "hey, that's older than America!" The dorms we're staying in are a highly modern 1936, but are surprisingly older-feeling than the ones at RPI. The bathrooms look as if they were haphazardly furnished, and there are fireplaces in the rooms (which are now blocked up and contain heating vents), as well as radiators. Mine is pretty big, though, bigger than my room at RPI or the lounge at home. Pictures later. All of Cambridge is very pretty; the colleges have perfectly manicured lawns and flower-beds everywhere. Also, all semesters should open with a formal dinner in the faculty dining room, involving champagne and two kinds of wine and servers pushing refills.
Classes are pretty good. My Shakespeare class, which was previously meeting in the JCR that smelled like old socks, has been moved across the street to The Copper Kettle, which has very good breakfast. My Medieval class is reading Ivanhoe in a week, which is very rushed; we're not really analyzing it at all, and it seems to be a history class with a book assigned so that it could be cross-listed as English. I'm one of only two (I think) graduate students, and it works in the same way as the Honors college, where you just write bigger essays. Both my classes do have weekly and final papers, which was a bit surprising. We have classes three mornings a week, and Thursdays are mandatory excursions to historical sites. The rest of the week we're free to wander Europe.
Last Friday we went to London and saw part of the National Portrait Gallery (I took notes on dress details; it was overwhelming to see all these pictures you've seen in books, there eight feet high on the wall in front of you). We had the afternoon free, and I went with a couple of others to the British Museum, which was mostly stifling hot. At noon they had two minutes of silence for the bombing victims. It was very moving to see, literally, the entire city stop: traffic froze, and the drivers got out and stood next to their cars, and it was eerily silent. In the evening we went to the reconstructed Globe Theatre to see The Winter's Tale. We had good seats (with rented cushions, even) in the gallery (I was tempted to drop things on the groundlings); I managed to understand and really enjoy the play without having read it first (we read it later in class, but a lot of people read it before going to see the play). We had a small adventure of navigating from the Museum to the Globe, partly on foot and partly by the Tube. My friends were highly appreciative of my map-reading and navigation skills (it was a craptastic photocopied map, with many streets not shown and even fewer labelled), and I was rather glad that I could navigate a brand-new city with no problems.
Of course, I really want to go back to London this weekend. We're going down again on Thursday, and I want to take the train back on Saturday or Sunday. I don't know if anybody else is going, though (a big group is planning on going to Paris then), and I don't have any reservations or tickets or anything. I am really really tempted to just go by myself anyway, except for two things: getting robbed or something, and not having reservations at a hostel (I probably can't afford a hotel). I'm going to look into it, but I have no idea if I'm attempting something simply careless, or something monumentally idiotic and dangerous. The thing is, we barely got to see anything in London; I just want to go see and take pictures of all the regular touristy places, which are lacking in sketchy dark alleys, but probably full of pick-pockets.
I'm spending this weekend in Cambridge trying to get ahead on homework. I'm also listening to all the bells ringing the hours and services and peals (some for no reason that I can tell, but it usually sounds very nice). I want to try to go to various services, especially if there is singing. Mostly I want to get my Ivanhoe reading and notes out of the way, in preparation for the longest book I'll be reading the whole trip: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Highly amusing fact of the day: Ashby-de-la-Zouche, location of the tournament in Ivanhoe, is also the location of the manufacture of Jaffa Cakes, which are the best biscuits ever.