13. oh right, I have a blog. also: spring break!

I don't do well with mental transitions. You know how some people feel all rested and refreshed and ready to spring back into work after the weekend? I am not that person. I am the person who is in class glaring at everyone with red eyes on Wednesday because she can't process that it isn't still the weekend and stayed up to watch BBC iplay documentaries before realizing, at around midnight, that she hadn't done the reading because there was class tomorrow because Tuesday isn't Friday. Who knew? Thursday is, in fact, my only productive day of the week and then any show I watch on TV ever comes on Thursdays so after 8pm I'm useless again and then it is Friday so why bother? It's amazing I am even alive with how lazy I am. So that's kind of my explanation as to why I have not updated this in eighty-nine million years.

I am even worse after a vacation. I come home, unpack, draw up a list of what needs doing for the week...and then buy some chocolate, pull out an old novel I have already read three thousand times, and get nothing done for two weeks. My brain just absolutely refuses to accept that it is no longer vacation. So tonight I have decided to indulge it and actually write about my vacation. I kept a journal while I was traipsing around Europe because I am twenty-one and very, very white so a lot of this will be paraphrased from that. Also please imagine me as this guy while I am talking about traveling forever after this:
(note: “gap year” is a year between high school and college a lot of British students take off to travel around and backpack and become insufferable and never shut up about)


London
I took a bus to Leuchers with a dozen or so other St. Andrews students heading to the train station but my friends Claire and Kathleen in particular. We sat on the platform all out in the middle of nowhere, perched on our suitcases, having the sort of truncated, nervous conversations people have when they're wondering when their train will come and where their seats are and whether they've left anything at home. At one point I went to buy a little meat pie from a stand and the man behind the counter insisted I say hello to the Queen for him, “Tell 'er Frank says hello! That's Frank! You want diet coke? You don't need a diet! There's a smile! What a nice smile! Have a good trip!” This began a trend of everyone being incredibly effusive everywhere I went all Spring break.

The train from Leuchars to London was about six hours. I sat next to morose looking high school age boy who never looked up from his phone on which he texted furiously until getting up and walking away and then...never returning (wherever you are morose teenage seatmate I hope you have cut your hair and did not throw yourself off the train or something). I debated anxiously over whether to scoot over to his window seat for about half an hour, weighing the better view against the possibility that a conductor would suddenly appear, scream “THAT'S NOT YOUR SEAT” and chuck me out the window. Eventually I braved the inching over and watched out the window as we sped past hills and lakes and the sea until we were passing little suburbs with their neat boxy houses and gardens and then, finally, London. I hadn't thought much about London. It was mainly a way-station to Paris and Italy in my mind, a chance to start out with friends from St. Andrews, but as the train pulled into King's Cross and I looked up at the slightly shabby, stolid brick buildings of Islington I remember thinking: Oh, this is somewhere I could live.

King's Cross was smaller than I imagined it and more open to the outside. Pigeons flew and strutted everywhere and a news stand outside sold magazines in German. Fast food and ominously named “pirate” bookshops surrounded it and there were no street signs to be found. Nevertheless we eventually found our hostel, Clink Youth Hostel, which occupied a renovated jail a couple blocks away and settled in. (picture of bed)
The rest of the day is something of a blur. We wandered around guided by Kathleen's twin sister Elizabeth who is studying nearby before heading to the Tate, a museum of modern art in a building that Elizabeth described as “the ugliest thing I have ever seen” where we met up with our friend Tim and looked at surrealist pictures. Here is some advice: if you are really tired and out of it definitely go to a surrealist exhibit. Suddenly it all makes sense. After Tate we continued our surrealist kick by going to a restaurant called Sushi Yo! where you took a seat at a counter with a conveyor belt that ran around the whole garishly lit restaurant. Different meals whizzed by and you grabbed ones you wanted off the belt as they passed. More advice: if you are bad at decision making and want to lose weight eat all your meals here. I was so paralyzed by indecision I ended up eating almost nothing. After that we finished the night at a pub and then dragged ourselves back to the hostel to pass out. Just before I went to bed I switched in my American sim card and found a text from the day before saying my friend's water had just broken: as I was reading the message she'd delivered a baby girl all the way back home and across the ocean.


The next day was another blur as we rushed around the underground trying to see Important Things. The impression of London as somewhere livable remained though. I would live there if only to visit the lovely St. James park (right by Buckingham Palace) on sunny afternoons. Though the red-eyed ducks are a bit terrifying.

My last full day in London was spent with a friend from elementary school, Maxine, who is studying at University College London. We have a more relaxed, meandering day catching up and riding double decker buses and I'm struck by how different it is to travel with someone you know well enough to forget, if that makes any sense. I didn't have to think about what I was going to say to her or what impression I was giving off and so I was free to concentrate on what was around me like, oh say, the mugging and seizure I witnessed in the touristy shopping district. Yeah, violent times in London! Otherwise the day is sedate, pouring over ironwork in the Victoria and Albert museum, buying a jacket at Primark, and finishing it off in an Irish pub drinking Guinness and catching up with one of my oldest friends.

The final day I have a couple hours to kill before I board my train and so I spend them in the British National Library where I look over Freudian manuscripts, learn about Chopin's strange burial, visit the magna carta, smile at an original manuscript from Charlotte Bronte, trace the history of Alice in Wonderland in illustration, and accidentally commit petty theft. Yeah, uh, apparently no one notices if you walk out of the gift shop still holding a pen. Or cares really. When I noticed what I'd done I sprinted back inside, thrust the pen onto the counter, and apologized profusely. The cashier raised his eyebrows, nodded silently, and placed the pen back in the display. I slunk off to be embarrassing somewhere else. Somewhere else like McDonalds because oh my God you guys, do you what they have there? Cadbury Egg McFlurries. They are so, so good. I ate at least three while I was in London and each one sent me into a euphoric haze unmatched until gelato in Italy.

My new addiction satisfied I then boarded the train for Paris which I will write about tomorrow.

So there you are, I'm still alive! And writing about London rather badly because I just want to sleep! Better entries to come, I swear on the memory of Cadbury McFlurries.

Pictures: are on facebook. I am too lazy to put them here tonight, sorry!

09. I made you this lame video because I love you

So, yeah, the weather here? Kind of unpredictable. It's sunny! It's raining! It's snowing! It's...been two hours! But almost always it is windy. So here are some photos and a silly video I recorded while I was taking a walk in the rain.

My favorite beach and a street in the snow:



The ocean in the rain:




aaaand last of all another awkward video shot with my camera in which I am weirdly fascinated by how windy it is and nervous the whole time that someone will amble along and see me shooting it and muttering to myself:

03. grow up and blow away

I typed up a blog entry last night that basically went “um, my room is weird, I have my own bathroom and a queen sized bed and a temperamental radiator” except it took me almost a page to say it. I think this was because yesterday was a bit lonely. After a mostly uneventful journey (except for the part where I went through the security gates, started taking off my shoes, and then realized I had left my laptop with my father. Cue me sprinting back to the glass partition and jumping around wildly, waving my hands to get my parents' attention and then pantomiming typing while they stared the stares of parents who have just realized the child they're sending away to foreign country is mentally unstable and will be on the streets muttering to herself in about a week. “Laptop! LAPTOP!” I mouthed. People edged away from me (yeah, fun places to start acting crazy: post 9/11 airport security lines). My parents stared some more. Finally a security person took pity on me and went to get it.) I arrived at New Hall and found...no one. Evidently the woman who normally works at the front desk took a holiday. So I wandered around the biggest dorm in the world for awhile before a janitor found me and my giant suitcases rambling forlornly about the second floor and took me back downstairs where she dragged some woman in a blazer out of a back room. Blazer Woman gave me a packet of information mostly consisting of how not to set off the freakishly sensitive fire alarms (the shower apparently sets them off quite a bit) then let me “show myself up.”

There was nothing on the orientation schedule for that day so I unpacked, took a shower (in my own bathroom! That I share with no one!) and then took a nap only to wake up confused and lonely and jet lagged. This mood was not improved by internet troubles and trying to navigate St. Andrews which was planned by medieval architects. A word on medieval architects: do not let them plan your town. They have never heard of grids. I was too tired to properly appreciate anything except to note, with a gleam of hope, that there were half a million pubs and coffee houses and two bookstores before buying some honey cheerios (not honey nut in the UK, insert your own pun about lack of nuts in Europe here) and “orange squash” (super concentrated orange juice) at a chain grocery called Tesco's and scrambling home. The one person I talked to all day was a nice boy named Tom who showed me where the library was. I managed to kind of offend him a bit in the first couple minutes of our conversation thusly:
Him: So you're new around here?
Me: Oh, yes, just got off the plane today. I'm American...but I guess the accent gives it away?
Him: No, actually you don't have a very strong accent at all.
Me: Oh, um, good? Are you from around here?
Him: No I'm from England, but I guess my accent gives it away too.
Me: Actually I thought you were Scottish at first, I'm bad at accents.
Him: (laughing) How rude!
Me: I'm sorry! Was that? I don't know!
And then he laughed at me and told me no one can understand Scottish people and showed me where to turn for the library. I thanked him, he hesitated, I whirled around and raced off before realizing oh, wait, I was supposed to give him contact information there! This is how people make friends when they don't already know everyone on campus! The library couldn't fix my internet and all told I went to bed hungry (cheerios, they are not filling, but I hadn't yet found where to buy silverware or plates) and a bit dejected.

My mood was still low when I awoke this morning and went to the library tour which was mostly just confusing with a few other people who didn't talk to each other. Visions of spending the next four months completely alone drove me back to my room where I sent Jacque, a sorority sister who studied here the year before last, an e-mail basically going “AHHH ahhh AHHH!” and then moped about setting up my internet stuff until about 4:30 when I looked out my window and saw...a bunch of big grey lumps. What the hell? I thought and pushed open my window to look out at the blurry things which eventually resolved themselves into...ridiculously fat rabbits. Somehow seeing the St. Andrews campus answer to Knox's squirrels made me feel better and I forged on out determined to go get myself lost in Scotland.


The rabbits though you cannot really make them out.

I started out walking away from the town center and, now that I was rested, actually took time to look properly at what was around me instead of frantically searching for the library/a food source/a bank. You know in Galesburg or Albany when you come across something beautiful in the most unexpected place, a bunch of ivy growing over an old fence or a building with some of its original facade? Imagine a whole town built out of those bits and pieces and you have St. Andrews. It really is the most beautiful place I've ever been, the grass is greener, the air is cleaner, the sky at sunset is a prettier blue, the buildings are older and within walking distance of my dorm there is this:

The Atlantic Ocean!



The colors are really like this, I haven't edited these at all and I didn't even use a flash when I took them. It's just that damn pretty here.

I walked along the coastline till it got dark, taking out my i-pod earphones to listen to the waves and feeling better by the moment. I can't really express how lovely it is or how much better I felt after walking around and seeing this coastline as well as some old ruins and the harbor with its duck families (too dark by then for pictures) and thinking I get to see this every day for four months. There were plaques everywhere with history and commemorations for martyrs and...this:

Reads: "The memorable beach scene from Chariots of Fire was filmed here 1981" Clearly on par with epic religious struggles, political intrigue, and the grand scope of medieval history!

By the time I got back to Market Street (main street) it was pitch dark but I somehow stumbled on another supermarket where I bought some more groceries and actually found some silverware. I then returned to the dorm to an immensely helpful and reassuring message from Jacque and a message from the other Knox student studying here, turns out she is in my hall and so we are walking to the informational talks together tomorrow. So I'm staying up to talk to my mom and then going to bed tonight much happier than I ever was disoriented.

I leave you with this little video I made to test out my webcam and demonstrate the accent I am embarrassed to admit I have already begun acquiring after two days (though after an hour or two in my room it seems to have gone away). Also you may have to turn the volume up as I have sort of a quiet voice.



Amount of haggis consumed: None
Number of days in a country with socialized medicine where I contrarily remain healthy: 2
Times I have set fire to the kitchen cooking for myself: 0

I'm doing pretty good.