Intermediate Post

The last two weeks we’ve been mostly out of town, so no internet cafes to update the blog. Unfortunately those are the days when we do the most. So for a while my posts will be really behind, because I’m trying to cover it all. And uploading pictures is a bit hard, too. Sorry I can’t seem to get up text and pictures in the same post…

Bath and Wells Cathedral

Wednesday we were in Bath. It had been pretty good weather so far in the week so I guess that should have warned us; it rained allllll day in Bath. The sky kept up a constant drizzle from morning to night, and the icy wind didn’t help. Luckily we found enough things to do that it wasn’t so bad.

We started at the Fashion Museum in Bath – a pretty cool attraction. They had a special exhibit on The Supremes that was fun, and then they had all their other pieces in the basement, tracing certain trends and such. It was interesting. In one of the first rooms, they had some real corsets and crinolines for visitors to try on. Ouch.

After the fashion museum, we went to The Circus and The Royal Crescent, settings for more than one Jane Austen scene. We also stopped at The Jane Austen Centre, an overpriced tour of something rather dull that none of us felt like paying for. But we did look around their gift shop and I got a picture with Jane…

I had to squint so the rain wouldn't get in my eyes The Royal CrescentME and the Royal Crescent
We drove over to Wells Cathedral for Evensong, but because England hates us, Wells had given their choir the night off, so there was no service. Oh well. We wandered around for about an hour or so, and I think Wells was one of my favorite Cathedrals/Churches/Abbeys we’ve visited. The paintings on the ceiling were gorgeous, and the architecture was a little more unique.
Up the neve, from the center all the way to the backA close up of the painted ceilings - aren't they gorgeous?
After Wells, we drove back over to Bath and toured the Roman Bath Museum as a group. It was fascinating, with so many rooms to look through, artifacts they’d discovered, and stories to hear. I think Dad, Jeff, and Ben would have particularly enjoyed seeing how the baths worked and how the Romans arranged things. You guys need to come see it : )
Really cool shot of the bath, the pavilion, and Bath Abbey in the backgroundWanna take a swim?Once went over the door to the baths. Much cooler than this picture makes it look
That ended our day in Bath, and as we pulled out of our parking lot, the rain let up. Figures.

P.S. I didn’t hear the mice for four days straight, then woke Wednesday to the pitter-patter of little feet. I hate this house.

Gadfield Elm and Stratford

Tuesday we piled into the van and drove to Gadfield Elm, the first LDS chapel in Great Britain. The land was bought by the church and the chapel has been restored. It sits by itself in the middle of some farmland. It was beautiful, if a bit chilly, and we looked around a bit before driving a little further to a little pond on Benbow Hill Farm, also owned by the church, where Wilford Woodruff performed the first baptisms in Great Britain. They were doing some clean-up from a big storm, so that’s why the tree is falling in the pond.

Outside of the chapel
Inside the chapel. So beautifully simple.Benbow Hill Farm Pond. Originally much bigger. And cleaner.We made a couple quick stops at Tewkesbury Abbey (the best mulberry trees!) and Gloucester Cathedral (where they filmed much of Harry Potter). Those were fun to visit, and had so many cool things to see. I don’t get tired of seeing Cathedrals and Abbeys : )

Tewkesbury Cathedral

In Gloucester Cathedral!

The girls in the hallway. You can't tell, but they're in the process of re-enacting a scene from Harry Potter six, which we've seen....was if four times by then? It's now six.
We spent the rest of the day in Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace and home of Shakespeare. Seeing that place was a real dream come true for me. We toured his parents’ home – where he was born – and then the church where he attended and part of him is buried. Grotesquely enough, only half his remains are in Stratford. The other half of him is buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Weird. But I’m glad I got to see him here, since Westminster wouldn’t let us in without paying an exorbitant amount of money. The grounds surrounding the church were just beautiful as well. We wandered around there for a while, admiring the old cemetery and the view of the river.

I'm in Stratford!

Shakespeare's childhood homeIn front of Shakespeare's houseStratford's church and cemeteryPart of Shakespeare's remains are buried here in the Stratford church, up by the altar. On the wall to the left of his grave, where they put a statue and a tribute to himJust sitting around in the cemetery
Most of the places to tour closed at about 5, so a few other girls and I spent the hours between 5 and 7 stopping by the grocery store to get dinner and chatting while we ate. Then we met our whole group at the Courtyard Theatre to see As You Like It. I was able to sneak one picture of the stage before it started, though it isn’t very good. The play was quite funny and well-acted, costumed, set, everything. We enjoyed it a lot. Every seat in the theatre was a good seat with a great view of the stage. Brilliant : )

The stage before the play started. A really bad picture, but one nonetheless. Straight in front is the audience on the left of the stage (I'm on the right of the stage), so the stage itself projects out from the right, with a beam of light shining across it.
Then came the long drive home to Cardiff.

St Fagan's

Monday was actually sunny – miracle of miracles – and we spent most of the day at St. Fagan’s Museum, an “open air museum” of several old buildings from Welsh history. It’s kind of a hard concept to explain, but believe me, it was really cool. It was basically a big park with all these cool buildings you could walk around. My favorite part was the castle and gardens. They were so beautiful. Hopefully the pictures will give you a good idea.

Me in front of the big "castle" and gardens

With a lightpost, walking between exhibitsIn the gardens of the "castle" - I felt like I was in The Secret Garden!The "castle" that really looks more like an Elizabethan Great HouseStatue in the gardensIn the gardensThey had a whole section of marigolds :)Thatch roof!

Cardiff Castle

Thursday night and we spent visiting with another study abroad group from BYU. Their group was from the linguistics department, and they were traveling all around Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England studying variations on the English language. They had some stories for us and we taught them a Welsh folk song and it mostly made me thankful I chose this program. They spend most of their time traveling, their group is bigger and a little less cohesive, their professors weren’t nearly as cool as Tom, and they seemed to have a lot more schoolwork to complete. Nonetheless, it was great to see some fellow BYU students and spend the evening at McDonalds…it was the only place big enough to really hold us all : )

Friday morning we went to Cardiff Castle with their group and had a pretty fun time. The castle was originally built in Norman times, then fell into disrepair and was rebuilt in the Gothic revival of Victorian times by the same guy who built Castell Coch. The furnishings were much the same as Castell Coch’s, but Cardiff Castle was much bigger. It was a cool site and I took a few pictures, though not as many as I would have liked because in some of these sites they get pretty touchy about allowing photography. So if I only have pictures of the outside of a place, I apologize.

Cardiff Castle keep, the oldest part of the castle

View from the top of the keep, courtyard in front, castle to right, Cardiff city in the background
A statue in a park in Cardiff. I was trying to mimick it and look sad, but I started laughing instead :)

Second London Trip

Tuesday we had class and ran errands and tried to get to bed early because we were headed to London again on Wednesday. I got to bed about 10:15 – a miracle for me – but had a hard time falling asleep. I couldn’t get my brain to turn off, and then I started stressing about getting to sleep because I knew I had to get up at 5 am. In the midst of my tossing and turning, I heard a little scratching noise and I froze. I was convinced I had imagined it. Then I heard it again: the distinct sound of little claws clicking on the wood floor under my bed. That’s right. I have a mouse living under my bed. I could hear it scurrying around, looking for something to nibble on, and I was too terrified to move.

Important to note is the fact that I am not normally afraid of mice. They don’t make me scream and run or jump on chairs or anything silly like that. But to hear that sound under your bed, late at night, alone, when everyone else is asleep, and your lights don’t work, is quite a petrifying experience.

I think it took me twenty minutes to get up the courage to grab my flip flops and run down to the kitchen, where I knew we had some poison under the sink. I grabbed the packet and ran back upstairs, sleep completely forgotten. I opened it, slid it under my bed and hurriedly climbed back under the covers. And shivered.

But I could still hear them (I don’t actually know how many there were). And the sound was driving me absolutely insane. So about 12:30 when our front door opened and I could hear some of the girls talking, I ran downstairs, anxious for any way out of that bedroom. Two of my roommates had gone to a late showing of Harry Potter and were just getting home. I told them my sob story of the scary mice under my bed and they were just as horrified. So we grabbed our blankets and pillows and slept on the couches of the Welsh house. I got probably 2-3 hours of sleep before we had to be up again to catch the train. It was going to be a long day.

The group I was with had plans to go to Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, the Tower of London, and finish the day with Les Miserables at Queen’s Theatre, to which we had bought tickets two weeks before on our first day in London. Well, everyone in the program started at the Museum of London and then we split up, so we opted to do the Tower of London first since it was pretty close and Westminster was on the other side of the city.

We paid to get into the Tower, and it was well worth it in my opinion. We spent almost three hours touring the rooms and the shops and seeing the crown jewels (my favorite part!). When that was over, we ducked into a souvenir shop to grab a few things, then got on the tube to see when Westminster did their Evensong (the way to get into a cathedral for free). By the time we got there, we had only an hour and a half until we had to be back for Evensong, so we raced over to Kensington Gardens to see if we could see anything cool in that time frame.

It turns out that we couldn’t. We grabbed some food because we were all starving by this time, and ate it as we ran back to the tube station and got on the right line but going the wrong direction so we had to get off and turn around and ride another twenty minutes and then run to Westminster in time to get really great seats…at a non-choired (I made up that word) Evensong. Just our luck that the one night a week that they do a spoken-only service happens to be the night we’re there. Dandy. And they didn’t even open up the halls so we could see anything cool. No Poet’s Corner for us! I was pretty disappointed. The only monuments we could get to were to people I’ve never heard of before. And then I felt bad for not knowing who they were. Way to be a downer, Westminster.

Between Westminster and Queen’s Theatre, though, we had some time to get a real dinner. And by real dinner I mean McDonald’s. And it was packed, so we had to eat our burgers out on the street. Awesome. By the time we got to the theatre, I was ready for the day to get better. I had been tired and hot and hungry nearly all day, surrounded by twelve million people intent on running me over.

Well it definitely got better. I had never seen Les Miserables before, and this production was the way to experience it. Our seats were way up on the top tier, but we still had a pretty great view of the stage. The stage itself was pretty small, but they made good use of it by employing a big turntable contraption that must have been a nightmare during blocking, but in production was genius. The singing was absolutely amazing, the acting was fabulous, the sets and costumes perfect. I’m a big fan. I cried more than once, and pretty hard, too. Worth every single penny I paid to see it.

After the show, we all dried our tears and made our way back to the main tube station to meet with everyone else. Surprise surprise, our train to Cardiff got delayed. We didn’t leave Paddington Station until after midnight, but at least this time the train took us all the way to Cardiff. We got into the central train station at about 2:15 and started on the two mile walk home. But the day was not over.

Our route happened to take us through downtown Cardiff, where we were witnesses to all the “drunken revelry” that I’ve never really quite experienced in the States, much less in a country famed for its liquor-holding citizens. For the most part people left us alone, making fools of themselves without any regard to who was watching. But we got to Queen Street and a group of guys caught sight of us, walking en masse, fully clothed and carrying backpacks. I guess that tipped them off. Here is a sample of what followed:

“Jack, look, foreigners!”
“Oh, foreigners!”
“Ah, a school group! Nos da!”
“Maybe they’re Spanish! Buenos Dias!”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” (This yelled while doing some corruption of a jumping-jack, achieved with surprising agility considering the offender was SLAMMED)
Chorus of “Buenos Dias!”
“Jack, you plonker, I don’t think they’re Spanish!”
“German? Guten taaaaaag! Guten taaag!”
“Mate, they’re not Germans.”“Then what could they be? Guten taaaaaaaaaaag!”

We had to wait until we were two blocks away before we finally let out the laughter. If drunk people only knew how dumb they looked.

We got home and I slept so soundly that if the mice came out again, I never knew it.

Museum of London. I am skeptical that London is actually burning...
In front of the Tower of London. Sorry it's so dark.The Ivory Tower part of the Tower of LondonIn front of the Tower BridgeThe part of St Paul's Cathedral that didn't have scaffolding on itThis pedestal was just begging for a statue pose... I realize it's not the most flattering pose, but oh wellI'm in Kensington Gardens!In front of Westminster AbbeyWestminsterBig BenSitting in Paddington Station, waiting for our train to Cardiff

More Cardiff

So here’s a little bit more about our living arrangements:
Our entire group is split up between three houses: the Family House (also known as the house on Cyfarthfa) which has our program director Tom, his wife Katy, and two of the history students; the History House, which has seven history students (including me) and Tom and Katy’s daughter Zoey; and finally the Welsh House, which has the five students studying Welsh. The History and Welsh houses are on the same street, so we all get together and hang out a lot in the evenings and afternoons and whenever we’re free.

On days when we don’t travel, we have class. The Welsh students go over to Cyfarthfa with Tom, and Katy comes to the History house and we watch movies about the history of Wales. And usually make our own running commentary. We have learned that something important happened in 1066, but none of us can ever remember exactly what it was. Apparently it means a lot to the Brits. I dunno.

Monday and Tuesday of this last week were spent in class and then we had our afternoons and evenings free. We’ve done some exploring of Cardiff and going to internet cafes and watching movies on computers and talking until the early morning hours. Our entire group is just wonderful. We’ve grown pretty close in the last few weeks since we spend every waking hour together. We have running jokes about Tom’s jokes and Hannah’s vegetarianism and Camilla’s propensity toward getting lost and Shannon’s shoe obsession that are growing too complicated to explain : )

Cardiff is a pretty colorful city. We live in student housing north of Cardiff University, so there are lots of college-aged people and businesses marketed toward that age group. There are lots of Middle-Eastern and Indian people that open up Halal Butcher shops (which are apparently like kosher is for Jewish people…I think), and “American Fried Chicken” and fish and chip shops and kebabs and pizza. We don’t go hungry, that’s for sure.

We also don’t go without chocolate. I thought I liked chocolate back home, but WOW, the chocolate here is ten million times better. They can make it creamier and with a lot less wax because it doesn’t have to work for such a broad variety of climates like it does in the States. It’s amazing and I’ve never eaten so much chocolate as I have in the last three weeks. It’s embarrassing.

I’m also getting used to the whole driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road thing. Not that I’ve been driving here, but my first few days were a heart attack waiting to happen; I kept thinking that cars were going to collide because they weren’t going the right way. You would think that after a few of those incidents I’d get the idea, but believe me, it’s a recent development for me to feel comfortable watching cars drive down the road.

I also love their lingo. “Cheers,” whenever you leave a café or museum or anything. “Ta-ta” is a common parting word. And the waiter isn’t being smart-alecky when he calls you “love.” It’s pretty fun to watch their reactions to our accents, especially when Shannon turns on her Texas drawl. But we’ve learned a few words to stay away from, too. You never refer to the bottom half of your wardrobe as your “pants.” Apparently that word refers to men’s underclothing. You call them “jeans” or “trousers” or anything but “pants.” And the rest of what I’ve learned…well…that’ll just be on an ask-and-tell basis, haha.