becoming jane, part two

lindsay freund, you might want to be sitting down for this.

on tuesday, i went to jane austen's house.
her actual house. the one where she wrote all of her novels. i got to go inside of it.
dreams do come true.

 

our visit was to chawton, the town where jane lived with her mother and sister for the last eight years of her life. our first stop was at the chawton house library - the house jane's brother, edward, lived in that has been turned into a library of books by female authors from the 17th thru 19th centuries. 

history lesson: the austen's weren't very well off, so edward, the third son, was adopted by some wealthy cousins of theirs, the knights, so that he could be the heir to their estate (apparently this was very common at the time). so he grew up edward knight and inherited three properties from his adopted family. after his biological father died, his mother and sisters needed a place to live, so he offered to let them live on one of his estates, and they chose chawton. fun story, right?

anyway, chawton house has been really well preserved over the years and is now being used as a library, open to the public. it's a gorgeous house, with beautifully carved wood paneling and giant fireplaces in almost every room. and they host events there all the time... including weddings. start saving now, papa! just kidding. kind of.

after touring the library, we set off for chawton cottage, where jane lived. 

i had goosebumps as i walked through the house. it was almost surreal. i mean, she lived there. she actually lived there. she wrote all of her novels at this table:

how freaking cool is that?! i don't have anything else to say. i'm just in awe.

after leaving chawton cottage, we had one more stop to make. it was sort of a bonus treat because it wasn't part of the original itinerary, but we made time to go see...

jane austen's grave! she's buried in winchester cathedral, which is not too far from chawton, so we made a quick stop to go see it. her tombstone says: 

"in memory of jane austen, youngest daughter of the late rev. george austen, formerly rector of steventon in this county. she departed this life on the 18th of july, 1817, aged 41, after a long illness supported with the patience and hopes of a christian. 

"the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her, and the warmest love of her intimate connections. 

"their grief is in proportion to their affection, they know their loss to be irreparable, but in their deepest affliction they are consoled by a firm though humble hope that her charity, devotion, faith, and purity have rendered her soul acceptable in the sight of her Redeemer."

amen.

wednesday was very chill. everyone was pretty worn out from our constant traveling over the last week, so most of us decided to just hang out in oxford and get some work done. a group of about eight of us took lunches to university park and had a little picnic. it was so cute! and really nice to get to enjoy the beautiful weather - it's been sunny and cool here all week. i know you really don't care what i ate for lunch, but i gotta tell ya, i tried a hard-boiled egg and spinach sandwich and it was good. you should probably try it sometime.

after our picnic, a few of us decided to check out blackwell's bookshop, a highly-recommended bookstore just down the street from wadham. y'all... this place was magical. six floors - six floors - of books. old ones, new ones, skinny ones, fat ones. there were books everywhere. it was fantastic. i literally feel like i could spend a solid week in that store and still not want to leave. a little part of me hopes that's what heaven looks like.

last night, we went to see the globe's traveling production of as you like it. i was really interested and excited to see it because i studied the play in my shakespeare class last semester and saw it performed at UT, so i wanted to see how the two productions would compare. the stage was outside in the quad at the bodleian library, right down the road from wadham, and it was a pretty small venue, which kept the performance very intimate. it was a good show, but i think i preferred the one i saw in texas. 

ridiculously good things have happened this week. i visited jane austen's house. i discovered a giant, beautiful bookstore. and i'm still reading the last two chapters of jane eyre over and over and over again. (it's so good, y'all. so, so good.)

i hope that ridiculously good things have been happening to you this week too! and i love you all a whole lot.

out of place

in every place i've been since arriving in england, it has been painfully obvious that i'm an outsider.
for one thing, i have an american accent. dead giveaway.
but usually people can tell i'm not from here just by looking at me. maybe it's the nike shorts? just kidding! i only brought two pairs and i rarely wear them in public. (if you see me on a regular basis, you'll understand how significant that is.)
english style is very different from american style; they just have a completely different look about them that i'm not sure i can really describe. and i definitely don't have that look.
no matter where i go here, it's clear that i don't belong. not that i'm not welcome, just that i'm a bit of a square peg in a round hole.

yesterday, though, i felt by far the most out of place that i have since arriving here. and it wasn't even because i was american.
tatum, emma, mary, and i decided to use our free afternoon to see warwick castle, about an hour away from oxford by train. it had been highly recommended by everyone we'd asked about it in oxford, and we all really wanted to see a castle, so we were super excited about it.

looks like a regular old castle from the outside, right? well, about that...

warwick castle is no longer just a castle - it's a theme park. primarily aimed at 3 to 10 year olds. surprise!
it was absolutely nothing like what we were expecting. to me, it seemed like a really bizarre mix of medieval times, the wax museum, and six flags (without the rides). it was just... weird. there were a bunch of different "exhibits" i guess you could call them, all filled with wax figures of the people who used to live at and visit the castle. i was not too thrilled with that. there's a reason i haven't been to the wax museum since my first grade field trip where i ran out crying... let's not talk about that. anyway, this wax figure junk takes up almost all of the castle interior; very little of the actual historical castle interior remains. there are a few rooms inside that have been preserved, but it wasn't much.
the castle grounds have all sorts of crazy activities to do. for small children, of course. they did have sword fighting and jousting demonstrations, and we got to see them launch a giant fireball with a massive trebuchet, but aside from that, there wasn't much for us to do. oh! but we did get to climb to the top of one of the castle turrets. that was pretty cool.

like i've said before, i am completely enamored of aerial views. and this was no exception.

overall, the trip to warwick castle made me feel uncomfortably out of place. the four of us were probably the oldest people there who weren't accompanying small children. there just wasn't a whole lot for us to do. and honestly, i was really disappointed in the lack of authentic, historical castle stuff there was to see. i've never been to a castle before - we just don't have any in the US - so i was super pumped to see one, but what i got fell far below my expectations.

it wasn't a day wasted though! we got some delicious scones on our way out of town and we rode through some seriously beautiful countryside on the way there. it definitely wasn't my favorite adventure so far, but it was still an adventure, and i'll take that over a day in a dorm room any time.

moor fun than this pun

this weekend, the whole program took a trip up to yorkshire, in northeastern england, to really submerge ourselves in the history of gothic literature.
two things to know about yorkshire: the accent is ridiculously hard to understand, and it is freezing cold and windy there 24/7. or at least it was this weekend, which made for some quite harrowing adventures.
okay, "harrowing" is a stretch but this weekend was chock-full of gothic creepiness so i'm just trying to set the mood.

our first stop was haworth, the town where the bronte sisters grew up. after a super exciting five hour bus ride, we arrived at our hostel in the little town and, i kid you not, it looked exactly like the addams family house. yeah. you can probably guess how thrilled i was to be staying there. but it was actually pretty nice inside. only marginally creepy, and much less sketchy than the hostel i stayed at in brighton last weekend.
after checking in, we all headed into town for dinner. like i said before, haworth is a little town. but when i say "little," i really mean "this town is so small, we had to call ahead and let them know we were coming so they would be prepared for the huge influx of 40 visitors." i'm serious. we had to split ourselves up into three groups for reservations at three different restaurants because there wasn't a place that could hold more than even half of us at one time. but the town was precious!

i have a huge thing for cobblestone streets. it's most likely due to my childhood obsession with mary poppins; from what i remember, there are a lot of cobblestone streets in that movie. they just add so much character - almost a kind of welcoming warmth - to the towns they meander through. but maybe that's just me. anyway, haworth was really cute. i had dinner that night with my friends mary, emma, and tatum, and dr. moore (jane austen prof) and dr. barton (gothic prof's wife). it was a really fun night and oh my goodness the food was delicious! i even ate my vegetables! carrots AND potatoes. that's a big deal. for serious, yorkshire food is really top notch.
after dinner we made our way back to the hostel and since it was such a nice night, we sat outside and talked for a while. dr. moore gave us life and career advice, which was both super helpful and super confusing. long story short, she has me thinking about going into publishing again, but i'm not entirely sure that's what i want to do. but i'm not entirely sure that anything is really what i want to do so... guidance please. thanks friends.

the next morning we got up and set off for our great adventure across the moors. we were supposed to make a six mile hike to see the house that supposedly inspired emily bronte to write wuthering heights, but we didn't quite make it there. the professors, who were leading us (and were the only ones with maps), got a little confused about a mile into the hike and we got a bit off track. we found our way back to the trail pretty quickly but never reached our planned destination - but according to the professors, the house is nothing special anyway and probably doesn't actually have anything to do with wuthering heights.
the moors though... wow.

the views were absolutely spectacular. england is so so beautiful. God, you did a really phenomenal job over here. thanks for sharing such an incredible part of Your creation with me.

the hike was definitely my favorite part of the weekend, but it was not a perfect experience. i love cold weather right? so of course i don't bother to bring a jacket with me on a hike through the english countryside when the sun is barely out and it's hardly over 60 degrees. uh, yeah... it was chilly. and the wind up there blows with a vengeance. thank goodness my friend molly had an extra jacket with her that she let me borrow or i would have been pretty miserable.
also, i'm not exactly known for having great coordination. so that girl that slipped and nearly fell off the side of the mountain we were hiking? yeah, that was me. of course. how i was never voted "biggest klutz" in high school, i really don't know.

after our hike we had about an hour to poke around in haworth before leaving for our next yorkshire destination, so we made a quick trip to the bronte parsonage museum. the museum is inside the actual house that the bronte family lived in and is still furnished with most of their stuff. it was really cool. but very small and very crowded, so i had to get my severely claustrophobic self out of there pretty quickly. after leaving the museum, we boarded the bus again and set off for osmotherley, where we stayed for the night. osmotherley is tiny. really, really tiny. the entire town is made up of about two city blocks. only slightly exaggerating. it is an itty bitty town. so once again, we had to call ahead and prepare the town for our arrival. we split up for dinner again; i ate with about 15 others in a pub called "the golden lion." (hey adpi! there's lion stuff all over this country. you should all come here.) it was delish. after dinner, i was completely exhausted, so i pretty much went straight to bed. i'm sure i missed out on the crazy osmotherley party scene... yeah.

the next morning we got up and set straight out for whitby, the final stop on out whirlwind yorkshire tour and the setting of some major scenes in dracula. i still haven't read the book, but apparently some pretty creepy stuff happens there. guess i'll find out soon enough. whitby was the quaint, adorable seaside town i was hoping for on my trip to brighton. it was small but full of life and just so cute! i wanted to stay there forever. kind of. it was also FREEZING. and the wind was just outrageous. i know, i know, you're all reading this from texas, where it's been over 100 degrees for over 20 consecutive days, and you all hate me right now. but i know very few of you like the cold either, so give me a break. please?
whitby is known for two things: dracula and jet jewelry. jet, as i learned this weekend, is not actually a stone, but is formed when decaying wood is put under extreme pressure. interesting. anyway, they sell the stuff everywhere in whitby, so most of the girls in the program came back at the end of the day with pretty black jet rings or necklaces. the real reason we were in the town though was, of course, for its dracula connections, so we all climbed the 199 steps to st. mary's church and whitby abbey, where apparently a bunch of important stuff happens in the book.

the abbey was built in the medieval period and is now just a ruin, but it is still so beautiful. even in it's decay, it appears sturdy and commanding. you can tell it had a real presence in the town back in it's glory days.
the abbey and the church are on top of the west cliff of whitby and overlook the whole town. the view from up there was really fantastic.

in case you haven't picked up on it yet, i really love views from high places. they just take my breath away. every time.

after spending a few hours in whitby, we once again boarded the bus and headed back to oxford. i spent the entire five hours reading jane eyre. oh my goodness. this book. it is phenomenal. i literally could not put it down. i know this is probably really confusing to some of you, since you've probably heard me declare at least once since reading it for the first time in the 8th grade that "i hated it with a fiery, burning passion," or something along those lines. i really don't know what was wrong with me back then, because i am absolutely in love with this book. i finished it last night and already want to read it again. if you've never read it, please please do so asap. if you don't like it, i'll buy you ice cream. just please check it out, for me, your giant book nerd friend.

i had a really fantastic time in yorkshire. it was really different from oxford and all the other places i've visited in southern england, which was really fun to experience. if you ever get a chance to go there, do it. and bring a jacket.

day tripper

here's the great thing about the oxford program: classes are over by noon, and there are no classes on fridays.
it's pretty fantastic.
and it allows us to do a ton of exploring around oxford and other parts of england.
when am i ever going to get this opportunity again? never. so i'm doing my best to take advantage of it.

yesterday a few of us decided to take a day trip to blenheim palace, home to the duke of marlborough and birthplace of winston churchill. it's about half an hour from oxford by bus, so we walked to the station after class and caught a ride. it was definitely the best thing i've done this week.

i know i've said this about every place i've been, but blenheim was really beautiful. i mean, it's a palace, so how could it not be? it was originally built for the first duke of marlborough after he won the battle of blenheim, and every duke of marlborough has lived there since. winston churchill, grandson of the 7th duke, was actually born there, completely by accident (he was six weeks early). and he proposed to his wife there! in the temple of diana on the palace grounds:

so sweet. and fun fact: winston churchill and princess diana were distantly related! he was the grandson of the 7th duke and she was the daughter of the 8th earl spencer... i'm not exactly sure what kind of relations that makes them, but they're both in the spencer family. pretty cool, huh?

we toured the inside of the house, which was, of course, spectacular. the library reminded me of the one in beauty and the beast. i wanted to stay there forever. but i'm glad we moved on because as beautiful as the palace was, the grounds were far superior. have you seen the 2005 pride and prejudice movie? if not, then you need go watch it right now. but i felt like i was walking around in that movie for a full hour and a half. it was magnificent. seriously. there were lakes and hills and huge trees and it was just wonderful.

if you ever come to england, please go here. it will nourish your soul. honestly.

after wandering through the gardens for a while, we went back into the palace to tour the upstairs. huge mistake. what they didn't tell us was that the upstairs was no longer the actual house, but a sort of guided tour through the history of the house and each duke who's lived there, complete with a cheesy video tour guide and animatronics. it was awful. but once we got in, we had no choice but to go all the way through, which took about a half hour. and then we got outta there as fast as humanly possible.
by that time, the palace and gardens were starting to close, but we still had a little time to check out the pleasure gardens - home to the second largest hedge maze in the world. needless to say, we all instantly lost about ten years of maturity and wasted no time getting into it.

it was really fun, and we surprisingly didn't take very many wrong turns. after finding our way out, tatum and mary went into the butterfly house while emma and i waited outside (sure they have pretty wings, but butterflies are still bugs, and bugs are gross). after they came back out to meet us, we realized that tatum had accidentally brought a little friend with her:

the poor thing was hurt and couldn't fly, so we found him a nice tree to hang out in. we named him winston. it seemed fitting to the location.

i honestly don't know how yesterday could have been better. maybe if we'd gotten free ice cream or something, but aside from that, it's hard to think of any possible improvements.
blenheim is wonderful. you should go there. the end.

history

i've seen a lot of old things this week. a lot. england's pretty big on this "history" stuff.
but if there's anything i've learned on this trip so far, it's that i am very much my father's daughter, and he's all about history. so i'm a pretty big fan too.

it rained on monday, so we decided to stick with indoor activities for the day. we started out with lunch at shakespeare's, a little place a couple blocks away from wadham. and by "lunch," i mean "milkshakes." yeah. shakespeare's specializes in shakes of every flavor imaginable, with literally over 100 different items available to mix and match for the perfect milkshake. they also have preset flavors that are named after shakespeare plays. i ordered the "macbeth:" oreos, dark chocolate, and more oreos on top. heaven in my mouth.
after finishing our shakes in approximately .2 seconds, because they were just that good, we headed over to the natural history museum. the front room of the museum was very cool; there were fossils and minerals and model dinosaurs everywhere. but the back room... yowza. i think it was actually a separate museum - the pitt-rivers - but it was housed in the same building. anyway, the pitt-rivers is the museum that displays all the things that the british stole from the countries they colonized way back in the day. oh. my. gosh. there was SO. MUCH. STUFF. i honestly don't even know how to begin to describe to you just how much stuff was in this room. rows and rows and rows of glass cases, all packed with hundreds of artifacts. and there were three floors of this. it was overwhelming to say the very least. there wasn't very much organization either, so for the most part we were left to our own devices to try to figure out just what exactly we were looking at. and this will probably sound strange, but just being in that room, looking at all of that - it physically exhausted me. by the time we finished looking around, i was literally dragging my feet across the floor, struggling to stay upright. so i went straight back to my room and took a two and a half hour nap. yes.

tuesday was an adventure day. after classes, we once again boarded a bus with sack lunches in hand and set off for london. our first stop was highgate cemetery, one of the first formal cemeteries established in london, to prevent the entire city from being wiped out by corpse-bred diseases. yeah, sometimes history isn't so fun. we made this particular stop because according to my gothic novel professor, it has something to do with dracula? but i haven't read dracula yet so the significance was lost on me. but highgate also happens to be where karl marx, george eliot, and herbert spencer are buried. so we went to visit them. and in case you were wondering, people still leave flowers on marx's grave. i thought that was interesting.

if you know me at all, you know i was just thrilled to spend my afternoon wandering through an old graveyard. (if you don't know me at all, that was sarcasm.) i just felt really strange walking around, looking at all these graves of people that i didn't know, and not having anyone in particular to visit myself. it seemed somehow disrespectful to me.
one thing i did enjoy about walking around the cemetery, however, was reading the epitaphs. those words are just so purposeful, and to me they seem so full of life, despite being there to commemorate the dead. one of my favorites simply read, "beloved." i think that's beautiful. so simple but obviously from the heart. and i took a picture of this one because i wanted to remember it:

thank you Jesus for reminding me that death is not nearly as grim as old, dreary cemeteries make it seem.

after leaving highgate, we had a few free hours in london, so a small group of us tagged allong with dr. moore and made our way to the tate modern art museum. the tate is housed in a huge old warehoue right on the thames river, and it makes for a very different atmosphere than any other museum i've been to. there were some really cool pieces on display, including one by chinese artist ai weiwei that appeared to be a massive pile of sunflower seeds, but each seed was actually hand-crafted from porcelain and hand-painted to look like a sunflower seed. there were thousands of them. i don't know much about art, but that was pretty incredible. unfortunately, the museum closed about an hour after we got there, so we didn't have nearly enough time to see all that we wanted to. but we were all starving by the time they herded us out, so we walked down the street to a greek restaurant for dinner. it was fantastic. definitely the best meal out i've had since getting here. and we got so much! pita, hummus, tzatziki, tahini, chicken kebabs, lamb, chickpea salad - we devoured it all in minutes and shoot, was it delicious.
after dinner it was time for the main event of the day - seeing all's well that ends well at the globe theater. the globe. so freaking cool. i mean, i know it's not the original, but it was rebuilt to look exactly like it, and it's in the same place, so that's gotta count for something right? the theater is really cool: there's no roof, so it's very open, but it's not very big, so it still feels intimate.

the play was really good and really funny; i enjoyed it much more than last week's macbeth experience.

after the play, it was time to board the bus again and head back to oxford. i'm always sad to leave london, but this time wasn't so bad because i know for sure i'll be going back.

by the sea

what's the best way to celebrate the end of the first week of classes in oxford?
taking a weekend trip to brighton, of course!

early friday morning, my friends emma, karen, mary, and i headed to the oxford bus station to begin our 4 hour journey to brighton, a seaside town on the southern coast of england. one and a half hours from oxford to london, two and a half hours from london to brighton. we did a lot of sitting on buses that morning.

when we got to london, we had about an hour before the next bus to brighton departed, so we decided to see how much of the city we could explore in that time. buckingham palace was about a ten minute walk from the bus station, so we headed that direction. good call.

we got to the palace just in time for the changing of the guard! it was really cool.

i appreciated it much more this time than the last time i saw the changing of the guard, when i was 14 and thought i was too cool to care about it, and hadn't slept in approximately 24 hours. but this time, i was almost giddy with excitement, probably mostly due to the fact that we had no idea it was going to happen when we decided to check out the palace. it was just perfect timing. thanks God. unfortunately, we didn't get to stay for the whole ceremony because we had to catch our bus. so we went back to the station and two and a half hours later, we were in brighton!

the first thing we wanted to do was see the royal pavilion, so we walked straight there. the pavilion is the palace that king george IV built as his seaside getaway when he was regent, acting as king for his ailing father. and i have to say, it is absolutely nothing like what i expected. it was so, so much better.

a little taj mahal-esque, right? as beautiful as it is on the outside, it is ten million times better on the inside. it was the most extravagant and immaculate place i've ever seen. i was absolutely in awe walking through it. the entire house is decorated in the chinese style. the chandelier in the dining hall is held up by a dragon on the ceiling. a dragon. insanely cool. unfortunately they don't allow any photography inside, so you're either going to have to just imagine it or go visit for yourself. i highly recommend the latter. it is more than worth the trip.

after leaving the pavilion, we made the two mile trek to our hostel to check in and shed our backpacks for the rest of the day. we walked along the beach the whole way and it was beautiful. people were relaxing on blankets and in chairs all along the pebble beaches, and the ocean sparkled in the sunlight. it was such a gorgeous day.

 

you know how i do dumb things sometimes? well, this weekend was no exception to that. i decided, since we were only bringing backpacks as luggage on our trip, i would only bring one pair of shoes with me, in order to save space. mistake. of course the shoes i brought were flat sandals. of course. why would i bring shoes with any arch support on a trip where we were planning to walk everywhere? my feet really hate me right now. 

anyway, we made it to our hostel and checked in. i had pretty low expectations, having never stayed in a hostel before and only hearing very uncomplimentary things about them in the past, but it wasn't too bad. it smelled vaguely of play-doh, which i didn't really understand, but that was probably the worst thing about it. after checking in, we took a bus back to the city centre to find somewhere to eat. we figured since brighton is right on the water, they probably have some pretty great fish and chips. so we chose a restaurant overlooking the ocean that claimed to have "world famous fish and chips" and grubbed down. it was delish. of course, i don't like chips, but the fish was great. after dinner we walked down the pier to see what it was all about. 

the pier was basically a combination of nickel ranch and the state fair midway. awesome. but it was freezing and everything was really expensive, so after emma tried one arcade game and mary rode one carnival ride, we headed back to the hostel and called it a night.

by some miracle, we managed to be in england for a whole week without it raining on us. but saturday broke our lucky dry streak; it rained all day. the rain itself wasn't too bad, but the wind was killer, so we tried to spend as much time as possible inside. after taking advantage of the hostel's free breakfast - white bread for toasting and corn flakes - we checked out and went back to the city centre, where we decided to look around the art and history museum. it was really, really cool. it had so many different kinds of exhibits; every room was something new and interesting. furniture, egyptian artifacts, burmese and aftrican art and clothing, the history of brighton, british pottery, fashion through history, 18th century political cartoons - the museum had a little of everything. after exploring that, we worked our way through town to a store called "vegetarian shoes." karen is vegan and had been wanting some of their vegan doc marten-like shoes for a long time, so we made sure her wish could come true while we were there. then, after wandering around in the wind and rain for far too long, we found a place to eat lunch, and then went to check out the brighton aquarium - which we promptly left after finding out the admission fee was 16 pounds. no thank you, i can spend $35 to see an aquarium in dallas. at that point we had two hours til we had to catch our bus back to london, so we decided to go back to the royal pavilion for tea and scones in the tearoom. great decision. i really think i need more scones in my life. we hung out and read there until it was time to go, and then began the 4 hour trip back home. cheerio, brighton!

it was a fun trip, but i have to be perfectly honest: i didn't love brighton. the beach was beautiful and the royal pavilion was way cool, but the actual city just seemed kind of dingy to me. but i went in with really high expectations, thinking we'd find an adorable, quaint seaside town right out of the 1950s, which of course destined me for a let down. i think the reason i was disappointed was that everywhere else i've gone since getting to england has just blown me away, because they've all been big tourist attractions, so there's a ton of work put into making the towns look spectacular all the time. brighton is just a town. just a normal, residential town on the coast. it's not putting on a show for it's thousands of expectant visitors or trying to impress anyone. so in comparison to bath and stratford, which thrive on tourism, it falls short of the mark. but that's just my opinion.

overall, it was a really fun weekend, and even though i didn't fall in love with brighton, it was definitely a worthwhile trip.

becoming jane

i took extra care wednesday night to ensure that my camera battery was fully charged for the next day. because thursday... ohh thursday. it was hands down the best day yet.

after classes, we grabbed our sack lunches (hey 3rd grade) and boarded the bus to bath, one of my probably top 5 favorite places in the world. maybe top 7. i'll figure out final rankings at the end of the trip. anyway, bath:

before we got into the city, we stopped at prior park, a giant private park and garden that overlooks the whole town.

it was pretty stinking cool. we had about an hour to wander around, but that wasn't nearly enough to see the whole thing. what we did see was pretty great though.

 

and it was good exercise. two thumbs up for prior park.

after leaving the park, we headed into bath, where dr. moore, my jane austen professor, led us (or those of us that were interested) on a walking tour of the city that focused specifically on places jane austen and her characters spent their time. can you say overjoyed? because that's what i was. it was really fun and interesting to be able to put real images with the places i'd been reading about all week. most of the places dr. moore pointed out were from northanger abbey, since almost the entire book is set in bath, but we stopped at a few places mentioned in persuasion and we even got to stop at...

jane austen's old house! freaking. out. i touched the building and almost cried. okay that's a major overexaggeration, but i was still really stinking excited.
by far the best part of our tour was our hike up beechen cliff, where catherine and mr. tilney go on (essentially) their first date in northanger abbey. which means nothing to you because you haven't read it. it's okay, no one really has. but it's a good one. much better than mansfield park. i recommend it. anyway, the thing about beechen cliff is that it's a really steep climb, but the view from the top will literally take your breath away. that is, if you have any breath left by the time you get to the top.

seriously, seriously cool.
we hiked back down and had a little while to explore on our own before we had to be back at the bus, so i went with two other girls to get ice cream. naturally. i don't really understand why, but england has more ice cream and chocolate shops than anywhere else i've ever been. significantly more. i'm a fan. and that was a great way to finish off a really great trip.

the day wasn't nearly over though. i don't know if you know, but a pretty important movie came out on thursday night. well, technically friday morning, but just go with me here. so this movie, it was a pretty big deal. and i wasn't about to miss out on my last chance to ever see a midnight premiere of HARRY POTTER. oh my gosh y'all. i just... i'm still speechless. my childhood literally ended with that movie. i was simultaneously euphorically happy and immensely depressed. i cried throughout almost the entire thing, and then for a good half hour after it was over. talk about an emotional roller coaster. but oh my goodness it was fantastic. i already want to see it again. and then again. and again.

so thursday... well, i think you understand now.

real life hogwarts

um, this afternoon was a little bit unreal.

after classes, a group of us decided to go tour Christ church college. because parts of it have been used in filming harry potter movies. and it's a beautiful old college and cathedral. but let's be real - it was mostly the harry potter thing.

the only thing i could say as we walked into each room or corridor was "shuuuut uuuup!" (a la kelsey flynn). it was unreal. i was literally in hogwarts.

i just... i don't even know what to say.

oh but guess what else? the dining hall at Christ church is what they based the great hall in the movies on.

spectacular.

okay, i'm done drooling now. Christ church college is actually really beautiful (big surprise), and it has it's own cathedral, which is gorgeous.

i could literally spend hours in any given cathedral if you let me. i just think they're stunning; i've never seen one i didn't like. stained glass, vaulted ceilings, columns, sculpted stone, carved wood - i love it all. i've found myself particularly taken with stained glass in each of the churches we've been to this week. i just think it is an extraordinary example of people using their very unique and uncommon God-given talents to glorify the Lord. i feel like that is often taken for granted, but it's such a beautiful thing.

one more fun fact about Christ church college: it's the college where lewis carroll taught when he met the dean's daughter alice, who inspired him to write "alice's adventures in wonderland" and "through the looking glass." so there's alice in wonderland stuff all over the town, but especially at Christ church. the characters even appear in one of the stained glass windows in the dining hall (she's the tiny blue thing in the bottom left corner of the top left window):

look at that, you learned something new today! maybe. if you already knew that, gold star for you.


i hope your wednesday was as wonderful as mine! and that you enjoyed my accidental alliteration.

mushrooms for breakfast

y'all. england is wierd.
their lightswitches are upside down. up = off, down = on.
they use military time and the metric system. confusion.
they put butter on ham sandwiches. what?
and they eat mushrooms for breakfast.
like i said: weird.

i guess it's a good thing i love mushrooms.

what i really never realized about england is that the culture of the nation is completely different than the united states'. i mean, we speak the same language, we can't be that dissimilar, right? ha! wrong.
it's been really interesting to pick up on the little things that make the english culture so unique. of course, i am a sociology major, so i'm kind of trained to notice that stuff. one huge thing i've noticed is the difference in the culture of work here, especially in restaurants (or dining halls): rather than following the philosophy that "the customer is always right," their ideals are more along the lines of "this is my job and i'm going to do it properly, so please don't hinder me from doing that." our group was late to our first dinner here because when we were told it was served at 7:15, we assumed that meant we could show up anytime between 7:15 and 7:30 and hop in the food line, like at any american university. not so much. when they said "served," they meant it literally, and our servers weren't too pleased with us straggling in long after they were supposed to have finished their jobs. we haven't made that mistake again.
oh, and if you ever do visit the UK, make sure you've signed the back of your credit card and that your signature looks exactly like it does on your driver's license, or the seemingly sweet lady at the grocery store checkout counter might give you a hard time and almost not let you buy your groceries. not that that happened to me or anything...


anywho, we started classes on monday! so far i'm loving mine. i'm taking a 19th century gothic novel class and a jane austen class. so far they're both great and i really like my professors. it is a heck of a lot of reading though. every night. but i'm not complaining, they're great books. right now we're studying "northanger abbey" in my gothic class and "persuasion" in my austen class - both written by jane austen. yeah. i'm kind of in heaven.

monday was an absolutely beautiful day, so after a quick grocery trip (where i may or may not have been lectured on identity theft by the cashier), a group of us went to read in the park. one really fantastic thing about england? there are no mosquitos! instead, there are spiders. everywhere. but they're tiny and harmless so i'll take it. after reading for a couple hours, i went for a run around the park with my friends tatum and emma. i can't even tell you how nice it was not to be sweating before we even started running. texas, i love you, but i'd love you so much more if you didn't have such an affinity for 100+ degrees temperatures. that night we went out to the king's arms, the pub right next door to wadham. everyone decided to try a pimm's (a very english cocktail) because apparently you just have to when you're in england. it had about half a cup of fruit floating in it, though, so i opted out of that particular "oxford experience." the pub was fun though, and it was nice to see what the town is like at night, when all the tourists have gone.

tuesday we took a trip to stratford-upon-avon, where shakespeare lived. we stopped at anne hathaway's cottage just outside of the town for a tour of the house and gardens.

i'm going to tell you something about myself that you definitely already know: sometimes i do dumb things. like forget to charge my camera before i go on cool trips to places like stratford. yeah. so this is as far as i got - about 6 steps into the garden - before my battery died, and thus i have no more pictures. i know. fail.
the cottage was really cute and it was very cool to see how people lived back in the day (aka the 16th century). the doorways were tiny. as in, came up to about my eyebrows. but i managed not to bump my head once! i don't know if you're impressed, but i sure am. it was a big personal victory. aside from that, the house very much struck me as, "this is a bunch of stuff we've collected that very possibly belonged to people who very possibly knew/were related to someone famous." i was a tad underwhelmed. but the gardens were really beautiful. there were tons of flowers, a lot of which i'd never seen before.
after our tour, we went into the town of stratford and had a few hours to wander around before going to see the royal shakespeare company's production of "macbeth." it's a very cute little town, but it is packed with tourists. a group of us made our way toward holy trinity church, where shakespeare and his wife are buried, and along the way we stopped at what we originally thought was shakespeare's birthplace; turns out we just can't read signs - it was his son-in-law's house. another one of those "someone famous may have been here at some point hundreds of years ago" places. i wasn't too impressed. maybe i'm a historical landmark snob?
we got to the church and it was beautiful. stained glass, high arched ceilings, everything you imagine when you think of old european cathedrals. it turned out that not only was shakeapeare buried in that church, but he was baptized and married there too. and apparently he had the 16th century version of a shotgun wedding? scandalous. from the church we went in search of somewhere to eat, and we stopped at a pub called the windmill inn. this is where i got the ham and butter sandwich. and no, i was not aware that there was butter on it when i ordered it. it actually didn't taste half bad. but i don't think that's an eating habit i'm going to get into.
after dinner, we headed toward the theater to meet the rest of the program for the play. somehow, i ended up with a ticket on the very front row... all by myself. as prone to feeling awkward as i am, i was definitely not okay with that, so i traded seats with our grad assistant. good call on my part because y'all, this play was gruesome. there was so much fake blood on the stage by intermission that the crew had to come out and mop. and then there were all these creepy dolls hanging from the ceiling? i didn't really understand what that was about but it was disturbing. i'm really surprised that i didn't have nighmares.

so the first two days of class were great, but wait til i tell you what i did today...