helter skelter

this weekend was a big mish-mash of activities. i spent it with my family and we were all over the place. but what else is new? i have to apologize before i start though, because i won't be able to add any more pictures to my blog until after i get home. my laptop died this weekend, so i have nowhere to upload pictures to at the moment. but i promise to put them up as soon as i can once i have my own working computer again! anway, my weekend:

we started out on thursday afternoon, right after i got out of class, and drove up to the north of england. not gonna lie, i slept most of the way, but what i did see of the countryside was beautiful. are you tired of me saying that yet? sorry, my descriptive abilities when it comes to landscapes are apparently pretty limited. anyway, after about three and a half hours of driving, we stopped at chatsworth house, home to the duke of devonshire. it's also the house they used for pemberley in the 2005 pride and prejudice movie. yeah. so i was totally preparing to freak out as we drove up to the house and... the entire front was covered in scaffolding. womp womp. seriously one of the most disappointing moments of my life. i didn't cry though. i'm not quite that ridiculous.
we did get to tour the inside of the house though, and it was super cool. the duke and duchess have a pretty extensive art collection, and it's displayed all throughout the house. the sculpture gallery elizabeth and her aunt and uncle walk through in the movie? totally an actual room in the house.

also, there's a huge suite of rooms on the second floor that the first duke prepared for a royal visit from the king and queen (i don't remember which ones) - though they never actually came - which is super swanky. have you ever seen tooled leather wallpaper? it sounds ridiculous and weird but it was actually really cool looking. i mean, who even comes up with the idea to do that? interior design geniuses, that's who. also, i'm pretty sure every single ceiling in that house had a mural painted on it.

insane. but so stinking cool. after touring the house, we hopped back in the car and drove another two hours to liverpool, where we checked into our hotel and fell asleep watching "america's got talent." (what country are we in again?)

friday morning we got up bright and early and drove to blackpool, about an hour away, to spend the day at pleasure beach, a giant amusement park. in case you're thinking to yourself, "that's a really weird thing to do on vacation in england," well, you're right. but you have to know that my brother is a huge roller coaster enthusiast and he is determined to ride every roller coaster in the world over the course of his life. so we went to pleasure beach to help him achieve that goal.
british amusement parks are weird. this one was actually much more normal than "gulliver's land," where we went on our last trip to england, but it was still just a little strange. it was kind of like six flags, but there was no consistent theme, and it had a little bit of that creepy carnival feel to it. also, british roller coasters are definitely inferior to american roller coasters. much more shaky and kind of painful to ride. but we had a lot of fun and jack was absolutely beaming all day, which of course made all the ride-induced bruises worth it.

on the way home, we stopped at a pub in a tiny town for dinner, and i ate my third steak and ale pie of the week. guys, i think i might have a problem. they're just so good! i don't know who started that nasty rumor that english food is bad but it is just a straight up lie. eat steak and ale pie tonight. your belly will thank you.

saturday was the best day of my entire stay in england. maybe - no, definitely - one of the best days of my life. saturday was beatles day.
first, story time: when i was two years old, my mom came home from a business trip to find me crying my eyes out and my dad trying to console me, to no avail. when she asked what on earth had happened, he told her that i'd just asked him if we could go to a beatles concert someday, and he'd had to tell me no because the band had been broken up for over 20 years (he didn't bother telling me john was dead, that could really only make things worse). i promise you this is a true story. at two years old, i was already that devoted to the beatles. they've been my favorite band since before i could talk, and i've only become a bigger fan since. so now hopefully you'll understand how big of a deal saturday was for me.
we started the day at "the beatles story," the museum that walks you through the band's entire history. it starts before they even met each other and goes all the way up to the present, highlighting all their time together and each of their solo careers. i'm not gonna lie, the end was pretty depressing (did they really have to break up? did that crazy guy really have to shoot john??) but i really enjoyed it overall and it was really informative. each room in the museum was a recreation of an important place in the band's history, like the cavern club (where they played all the time before they got famous) and abbey road studios, and of course they played beatles songs throughout. i ate it right up. and bought myself a mug to commemorate the experience. of course.

after the museum, we had to rush to catch our tour of john lennon's and paul mccartney's childhood homes. yes. their homes. we got to tour the insides of the houses they grew up in. the houses they lived in when they first met. the houses where they wrote their first songs. un. freaking. real.
we started at john lennon's house, called mendips. he lived there with his aunt "mimi" from age 5 to age 23. it's pretty tiny by american standards, but according to our tour guide, it's actually quite large for an english home.

oh, but get this - the guy who gives the tours lives in the house. weird right? i just don't think i could do that. but he obviously really loves what he does and is really serious about preserving the houses (he's caretaker of paul's house too) just as they were in the 1950s, when john and paul were growing up in them. john lived in the smallest bedroom i have ever seen, upstairs at mendips, and his house is where he and paul originally began playing together. i got to stand in his living room, where the quarrymen (john, paul, and george's band before they formed the beatles) used to practice. i'm still in utter disbelief.
from there, we went down the road a ways to paul's house, 20 forthlin road.

it was also tiny, but seemed bigger to me because instead of narrow hallways everywhere like at john's, all of the rooms just led right into each other. paul's bedroom was also unbelievably small, but i'm sure he doesn't have that problem nowadays. paul's house was where he and john did a lot of song writing in their early days - they actually wrote the song "i saw her standing there" in his living room. and i got to be there. seriously?! God is way, way too good to me.
in case you hadn't noticed, i'm not very good at articulating how experiences like this make me feel. mostly because they make me literally speechless at the time; at most, all i can usually get out is "wow." but my mom said something after we finished our tour that i think summed it up pretty perfectly: "it's always really exhillerating when you get to be somewhere where genius has been." precisely, mom. thanks for helping me out with that.
after the tour, we got back in the car and headed to york, simply for the sake of seeing another english town, i think. when we got there we checked into our hotel, which was the cutest b&b i've ever seen, and set out to find a place to eat dinner. that turned out to be a much more difficult task than we'd anticipated, and after trying three different pubs that didn't serve food after 3 pm, we finally found one with a dinner menu. phew. after enjoying dinner and a scrumptious sticky toffee pudding for dessert, we went back to our hotel and watched harry potter and the goblet of fire until we all passed out.

sunday morning we went to church at york minster, the city's giant cathedral. i've always wanted to go to a service at an ancient cathderal like that, and it was a really cool experience. first of all, you haven't realy heard a choir til you've heard one in a cathdral. wowza. it was heavenly. and then just being in that setting, with the stone carvings of saints and angels everywhere and huge stained glass windows on every side of you... it's just incredible. that's what church should feel like. also, to my family's pleasant surprise, the service was almost exactly like a lutheran service, so we didn't even feel that out of place. after church we loaded back into the car one last time and headed back to oxford. we spent a lot of time in the car this weekend, but on the bright side, i finally finished dracula! it's a terrible book, don't read it. (except everyone else in my class loves it, so maybe you shouldn't listen to me.) also, we did some pretty rad stuff this weekend, so that's an even brighter bright side.

while it was really fantastic to get to spend the weekend with my family, it also made me really homesick. i really love oxford and i really hate thinking about the fact that this is my last week here, but at the same time, there's a big part of me that's ready to go. i miss mexican food. and free refills. and my bed. and my friends. and a million other things that make texas home, that oxford just doesn't have. so it's going to be a very bittersweet ending, but i think it's coming at just the right time.

today was a fairytale

this week got off to a really phenomenal start.

first of all, MY FAMILY IS HERE!!!! they got in on sunday and i'm so excited! they came straight to oxford from the airport and we went to lunch and then i showed them around town a little bit.
then we came back to my room where my dad passed out in my bed. sorry pops, jet lag gets the best of us all.
this week they're staying in a town about half an hour away from oxford and doing their own thing, but we're meeting up again tomorrow to travel together for the weekend. yay family!!

monday we took a class trip to stourhead, which i'm sure you've never heard of. it's an estate in southwest england with a huge house you can tour and a giant park and gardens you can hike around. it was, of course, beautiful. but also pretty good exercise. big bonus.

i had been looking forward to this trip more than any other one we had planned. like, i was ridiculously excited about it. and surely now you, knowing how much of an outdoorsy person i am, are very confused as to why on earth i would want to go there so badly. let me explain: pride and prejudice (the 2005 keira knightley version) is my favorite movie. i've seen it at least 100 times. i could probably quote it in my sleep. you only think i'm exaggerating. anyway, my favorite scene is mr. darcy's first proposal to elizabeth. and the place where they filmed that scene? it's at the temple of apollo. in stourhead. yeah.

um... you're kidding me right? i got to go there?! i got to stand in the same place where keira knightley and matthew mcfadyen brought my favorite part of my favorite book to life. seriously? it was incredible. i got chills. you're probably judging me right now, but i really don't care. i was blissfully happy.

aside from the temple, the gardens were really beautiful and different from the other gardens that we've seen. i mean, there were still the glassy lakes and towering trees but there was also a waterfall and lots of stone bridges and caves. it was really cool. we also toured the house, which was gorgeous, like all the other grand estates we've seen, but it had a much more homey feel to it than the others, which i really liked.
so that was monday. monday was a really good day.

tuesday... tuesday was a fairytale. totally surreal. i'll try my best to do it justice.
yesterday we went to london. my favorite city in the world. excellent. we went straight from the tube to see parliament and big ben because we like to embrace our tourist status. there's really no point trying to hide it anyway. so we did our touristy thing and snapped some sweet pics.

we also walked over to westminster abbey but didn't get to go inside because the line was outrageous.

then it was time to head over to buckingham palace. to take a tour. a tour of buckingham palace. un. real.

as i walked inside i couldn't stop thinking to myself, "i'm inside buckingham palace." inside buckingham palace. i honestly felt like a princess while i was walking through it. i mean, how could i not?
here are some fun facts for you: the palace has 775 rooms. 240 bedrooms, 78 bathrooms, 19 state rooms... it's enormous. and a lot of it is actually underground. also, during the blitz in world war II, the palace was hit 9 times. pretty crazy, right?
so the palace? it's unbelievable. my jaw literally dropped every time i entered a new room. there was no photography allowed inside, unfortunately, but let me tell you, there's some serious opulence in there. each of the state rooms has a different color scheme, determined by whatever color silk dresses the walls. everything is gilded. there are multiple (massive) chandeliers in every room. all of the ceilings have intricate designs carved into them. it's extravagant for sure, but it never felt like too much. it was just amazing.
then there was the giant cherry on top: inside the palace, there's an exhibit about the royal wedding. featuring kate middleton's wedding dress. the dress. the most iconic dress in the world. it was there, in the flesh (in the lace?).  
i got to see kate middleton's wedding dress.
i died. i walked into that room and i died. stop judging me. you just have to understand how much i love 1) kate middleton, and 2) her wedding dress. it is exquisite. so, so much more beautiful in person than in pictures. and shoot, that girl is tiny. the waist of the dress was the circumference of my wrist. okay, exaggeration, but it was itty bitty. kate's veil and tiara were on display along with the dress and they too were gorgeous. big surprise.
several other royal wedding pieces were on display as well, including kate's shoes and earrings, a replica of her bouquet, and a replica of the wedding cake. wow. that was the most intricately decorated cake i have ever seen. and i want it at my wedding.

i eventually had to tear myself away from the dress (to prevent security from doing it for me) and join the rest of my group in the quest for indian food. i had never actually had indian food before, but apparently london's pretty famous for it, so we headed over to brick lane, which we were told is the best place to go, and chose the first place we saw. we were starving. our waiter was kind of pushy and rude, but the food was really really good. i give chicken tikka massala two thumbs up. after dinner we made our way back to paddington station and hopped the train back to oxford, exhausted but so very happy.

the blessings just keep coming. i am seriously in awe of all of the incredible experiences i've gotten to have while studying abroad, and how many more there are to come. God is just so good, all the time. i am so so grateful for all of the opportunities i've had in the last month. i just wish i could share it with you guys! i miss you all a whole lot. but i'll see you so soon! i fly home in a week and a half. bittersweet. until then, all my love from across the pond!

journey to the homeland

i have to let you know up front that this post will do no justice to just how incredible my weekend was. it's impossible to put into words. but i'm going to do my best.


this weekend, i went to SCOTLAND. finally! it's been a life-long dream of mine to go there. i am half scottish, after all. it's about time i made my pilgrimage.
i spent two days in edinburgh, and they were seriously two of the best days of my life.

at 7:07 friday morning, i boarded a train with my friends emma, mary, rachael, and faryal, and we set off on the six and a half hour journey to edinburgh. let me tell you, trains are the way to go if you're traveling around the uk. they're so much faster than buses and the scenery is just stunning. we arrived in the city at around 1:30 and went straight to our hostel, which turned out to be probably the best place we could have possibly stayed. it was in a really cool, really old building and it was right in the city center, so we were well within walking distance to everything we wanted to see and do. and this hostel definitely had character - every room had a name, as did every bed. we were put in "the virgin room" and my bed was called "Jesus." appropriate? maybe not. but still hilarious.
after checking in and dropping off our backpacks, we set out to find a place to eat. about a block away from our hostel was grassmarket square, home to all sorts of shops and restaurants. we grabbed some sandwiches at a little cafe that looked straight up at edinburgh castle, and then headed up the hill to tour the castle.

guys, castles are awesome. we need to get some of these in the US. well, okay, some other than the disney variety. but for serious, edinburgh castle is so stinking cool. first of all, it's a castle. i know i've said that already but i just really want the magnitude of that to sink in. second of all, it's on a giant cliff, so it overlooks the entire city and has some of the best views i've ever seen. edinburgh is a coastal city, so from the castle you can see the entire city with the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. so. cool.

we decided to take a guided tour through the castle so we could learn about it's history, since none of us really knew anything about it. also because the tour guide had a really great scottish accent, but mostly the first thing. i'm not gonna lie, i don't remember much of it, but i do know that it was originally constructed in the 1100s and only one of the original buildings is still standing. also, when oliver cromwell declared himself lord protector, he came in and turned the whole thing into essentially a military base, transforming everything that was used for any non-military purpose into barracks or something else functional for his purposes. and king james VI of scotland (james I of england) was born in the castle. and... that's about all the history i've got.
the castle houses multiple museums, including the scottish national war memorial (not exactly a museum but close):

 

inside the memorial, there are books that hold the names of every scotsman (or woman) who has died in combat since the first world war. it was really beautiful inside, but cameras weren't allowed. we also went into the royal apartments, where the monarchs would stay when the castle was still used as a residence. it was in the apartments that james VI was born, in the tiniest bedroom ever. queen mary could not have been comfortable in there. today, the royal apartments are also where the crown jewels of scotland are on display, so we got to go see them. once again, no cameras allowed. but basically the crown jewels consist of a crown, a sword, and a sceptre. all of which are heavily bejeweled and beautiful. of course. 

after seeing the jewels, we went down into the castle vaults, which were used to hold prisoners of war in the 18th and 19th centuries. they had actual cell doors on display that had carved graffiti all over them from the prisoners who were kept there, which were really cool. historians have actually studied the graffiti and have been able to decipher what each of the carvings are, and by doing so have been able to figure out when a lot of them were made and even who made them (or what country the prisoners were from). that might not sound very impressive, but i thought it was pretty awesome.

we wandered around the rest of the castle for a while longer, but it started to close pretty soon after we left the vaults, so we made our way out and started down the royal mile, the street that runs from the castle down to the palace of holyrood house, the queen's residence in scotland. the royal mile is a really cool street, full of scottish souvenir shops and pubs and lots of street vendors. what i really loved about it - and all of edinburgh, really - was that though it was obviously a big tourist destination, it didn't feel very touristy. it just felt like a regular street in a regular city, where people live and work and live their everyday lives. we walked all the way down the royal mile and intended to turn off and go hike arthur's seat, the highest peak in edinburgh that overlooks the entire city, but our plans changed a little bit when we reached the palace...

i don't know if it was really publicized in the US, but there was another royal wedding this weekend. the queen's granddaughter, zara phillips, got married. in edinburgh. and the entire royal family was there. staying at holyrood palace. so... we might have done a little royal stalking. when we walked up to the palace, there were a couple of paparazzi waiting outside the gates, and several policemen stationed all around the palace. the paparazzi told us we'd just missed the royals leaving for a party, but the police told us they'd probably be back in about an hour. now, you really need to know something about me before you can understand just how much i was freaking out upon receiving this information: i am in love with prince harry. like, celebrity crush to the extreme. and i want to be princess kate's best friend. for serious. so, like i said, i was FREAKING OUT. we decided to go ahead with our hike because arthur's seat is basically across the street from the palace, but we did it a little faster than we might have otherwise. the views from up there were really really amazing. 

after our hike, we went back down to the palace to await the royals' return. the police totally encouraged it, which i thought was really funny. they even told us where to stand to get the best view. after about half an hour, the gates opened and...

I SAW PRINCE HARRY, PRINCE WILLIAM, AND PRINCESS KATE. IN PERSON. REAL LIFE. 100 YARDS AWAY FROM ME.

(kate's in green and the two men behind her are william and harry.)

i cannot articulate how ecstatic and overwhelmed i was at the moment. it was surreal. and the craziest part was that we had no idea they were even going to be there when we got to edinburgh. it was completely serendipitous. and definitely one of the best moments of my life.

after the five of us each got our heart rates back to normal, we went to find a place to eat, hoping to find some good authentic scottish food. we decided on a pub down the street from our hostel called the castle arms. i got a steak and ale pie and oh my goodness it was delicious. if you've never had one, you need to. after dinner, we really wanted dessert, so i went back up to the bar to order some sticky toffee puddings (also ridiculously delicious), where some english guy tried to hit on me by insulting my clothes and insisting that because i'm from texas, i must have voted for bush. that was a fun conversation. thanks but no thanks, mike.

after dinner we decided to check out the edinburgh night life. we'd heard it was a big party city, but every bar we passed was filled with mostly middle aged men. awkward. we stopped in a few places but didn't stay anywhere too long, until we were directed to a club called "espionage." it was hot and crowded but there were people there our age so that was a plus. and they had karaoke... so i sang. for a club full of strangers. in a foreign country. who am i?! in case you're wondering, i sang "umbrella" by rihanna because, well, why not? it was actually really fun and believe it or not, it's way easier to do karaoke in front of strangers than people you know. but we were all exhausted at that point, so we called it a night pretty soon after my little performance.

saturday morning we started the day with a trip out to rosslyn chapel, right outside of edinburgh. the chapel isn't super impressive from the outside, but the inside is amazing. it's (i think) entirely made of sandstone, and it seems as though every inch of stone inside has been intricately carved into some design or figure. it's been worn down some over time, but it's still really beautiful. unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but here's the outside:

we got a great tour of the chapel and got to walk down to the ruins of rosslyn castle. the castle is in a beautiful glen and walking down there i couldn't help but think "i need to live here." the view was just breathtaking.

i mean, come on. how can you not want to live there?? so so pretty.

after leaving the chapel we went back into the city and had lunch at the elephant house, the cafe where jk rowling first began writing harry potter. we all totally geeked out. it was awesome. but the place was actually really cute - they had elephant figurines and art everywhere - and the food was really good. i highly recommend it. from there we walked back up to the royal mile to do some souvenir shopping. i got a scarf of my family tartan! my family's in the maccallum clan, in case you were wondering. (and macalister and macphee, but i couldn't find those anywhere.) that was one of my main goals in going to scotland, so i'm really excited about it. we eventually made it all the way back down to the palace, where a giant crowd had gathered to try to catch a glimpse of the royals as they left for the wedding. we worked our way through the masses as much as possible and got as close as we could and waited. and we saw them! well, we saw their cars. we weren't really close enough to see who was in any of them, but it was still really fun to be in the middle of all that excitement. congrats to the royal newlyweds, zara and mike!

it was then time to make our way back to the train station and start the trek back to oxford. the trip home didn't go nearly as smoothly as the trip there, but i won't go into detail. let's just say i have a bone to pick with sir richard branson. you can ask me about it later if you're really curious.

this weekend was without question the best weekend of my life. i love edinburgh. i think it's my new favorite city in the world. at least it's giving london a good run for it's money. 

i can't believe how incredibly blessed i am to have had this experience. God's grace just really blows my mind. thank you Lord for everything i just wrote about and more.

i hope you all had fantastic weekends too! you're great and i love you a lot.