Yes, I know it's been two weeks since I posted. My apologies! Things suddenly picked up here as I started having basketball games, formal events, and visitors on top of the usual reading and essays. But let's start back at the second half of the week I had off a few weeks ago.
I saw Kyle off on Sunday night, did some resting and reading on Monday and Tuesday, and left for London to see Laura Getz on Tuesday afternoon! There is a bus called the "Oxford Tube" that leaves Oxford every 12 minutes, picking you up at any one of five or so stops. You just buy a general ticket, and then you can get on at any stop you'd like in Oxford and off at one of five stops in London. It takes about an hour and 40 minutes, which is longer than it takes on the train, but you get the added convenience of being able to leave when you're ready and getting on and off in a number of places. I was a little nervous about taking the bus by myself the first time I went to London, but the ride turned out to be uneventful, aside from me checking my bus map and my London map about every third minute. Hopefully I will be comfortable enough with London and with the transportation system by the end of the year that I won't need to do any paranoid map-checking anymore.
I got off the bus at the Victoria stop around 4:30, so my first views of London were in the near-dark. Luckily, the bus stop was on a busy street and near lots of tourist attractions, so things were well lit and I didn't feel unsafe at all being by myself. I got turned around a little bit when I got off the bus and started walking in the wrong direction, but I used my map skills and got going the right way pretty quickly. I had two hours or so until I was supposed to meet Laura at the Royal Theatre Drury Lane in the West End, so I figured I would give myself a little walking tour. Buckingham Palace was the first stop, and that was easy to find - all I needed to do to get there was walk straight up the road on which I got off the bus. The Palace is beautiful at night. In the pictures I've seen of it during the day time, there are always lots of people crowded around it, but at this time of the evening, there were only a few people around. There is a huge monument to Queen Victoria in front of it and both the Palace and the monuments were all lit up with spotlights. Everything glowed as it started to rain lightly. I was glad I was there by myself - there's a large square blocked off to cars in front of the Palace, so I just stood in front of it for awhile, drinking in the sights and sounds of a new city.
When I was ready to move on, I crossed the street with the intention of heading down to the houses of Parliament to see them and Big Ben. There are several streets which fork out from the plaza in front of the Palace, so I wasn't sure which one to take. I knew in any event that I needed to cross the street, but there aren't any crosswalks from the plaza directly across the street. I didn't see where any were, and in the dark by myself, I didn't want to risk wandering around too much to find them, especially if it meant I would look like I didn't know where I was going - which is fine in the day time and in groups, but not at night by yourself. So I decided to wait for a break in traffic and run across the street, which surprisingly didn't require too much waiting at all. I got safely across the street and on the sidewalk and figured I'd better look at my map to make sure I knew where I was going. But when I reached in my pocket, my map wasn't there. I looked back across the street frantically and saw my map lying in the middle of the road, being run over by car tires. I knew I needed it - I had no idea how to get to where I was supposed to meet Laura without it. I tried to think of ways I could easily get another map or make do without it, but I determined pretty quickly that I needed that map. So I made a mad dash back across the street to get it. It wasn't the smartest thing to do, and my map was sort of wet and smushed, but it was a map, and the inside part, the part I needed, was untouched. Victory! I ended up walking up the mall instead of going down to the houses of Parliament, ending up in Trafalgar Square. The fountains were all lit up with purple lights and there were still many, many people out and about - very different from in front of the Palace. I wandered toward the theatre where our show was, passing lots of the theatres on the West End. I think I need to see about six or seven more shows now, including Avenue Q and Les Mis, which aren't on Broadway anymore.
I got turned around again once I made it to the general vicinity of Drury Lane. I'm used to American cities set up on grid patterns with good signage - it's pretty much impossible to get lost in Philadelphia, if you ask me. But London isn't like that at all, of course. It's a European city with twisty streets, none of which are well-marked. The street signs don't hang from the traffic lights or sit on top of poles on corners - they are attached to the sides of buildings (and not every street is marked). But thankfully, I had my map and cell phone, and Laura had her map and cell phone, so we eventually found each other. (Later, Laura showed me her book that includes an index of all the streets in London with maps; apparently even Londoners don't know where everything is. That made me feel better about getting a little lost.) Laura was with her friend Becca from church in London, so the three of us went to Covent Garden and found a nice little Italian restaurant. I was so happy to get off my feet and come in from the cold and wet! We had a very nice dinner, then we took the short walk to the theatre to see Oliver! (the exclamation point is part of the title of the show). I love Oliver!, and this was a really fun production. Fagin was played by a man named Omid Djalili; people kept asking me when I told them I was going to see Oliver! if he was going to be in it when I saw it. I had no idea who he was, but it turns out he's been in a bunch of movies, including the third Pirates of the Carribbean. He was very entertaining, playing games with the audience and drawing out his scenes with funny asides and little musical interludes. Sally was also played by someone relatively famous, though she's famous for winning a television competition to get the part, I believe. The kids in the show were great, especially this one very small boy who imitated everything that Fagin did and almost stole a few of the scenes. The Royal Theatre Drury Lane is very old, and the stage is very deep, so they did a lot of cool perspective things with the set, especially for the street scenes. It was so interesting to be in London and see a show that's set in London - to think about how a city sees its own past. All in all, it was a great night!
Laura and I went back to the apartment she's staying in and chatted for awhile and made our plans for the next day. She showed me all of the guide books she's bought from her favorite places - I think she could start her own library about the history, art and architecture of England! On Wednesday morning, we went to see the Handel house. G.F. Handel lived in London in a nice little town house for a pretty long time toward the end of his life. There's now a society for the preservation of the house, and you can pay a few pounds to take a tour of it and learn about his life. Did you know that Handel went blind? There are volunteers in every room of the house to answer questions, and the woman in the first room likes to surprise visitors with that fun fact, apparently. Laura and I learned all about Handel's time in London, and I can now say that I've stood in the room where the Messiah was composed! Handel finished what is probably the greatest choral work of all time in only 23 days. The house itself isn't exciting architecturally or anything, but there was lots of good information, and Laura and I really enjoyed it. After we finished, we went back to Laura's apartment, had some lunch, got our things together, and got on the bus back to Oxford.
Highlights of our visit in Oxford and much more to come!
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
First Half of a Week Off
Today is a great day to stay inside and not venture out into the elements. Usually if it's raining here, it just rains kind of lightly and straight down; today we're having something more like a rain storm, so there's plenty of wind to accompany the rain. Fortunately, I need the motivation to stay inside today because I have lots of reading to do - finishing Shakespeare's second version of King Lear and reading a bunch of criticism so I can write an essay for Monday. I've been mixing a lot of fun with work this past week, so now it's time to hunker down and churn out some school work. I didn't have any tutorials this week as my tutor was away, so I got to do some visiting and being visited.
First, Kyle, one of my friends from Penn, came over from his study abroad program in Spain to visit. He got in very early in the morning last Friday (and by early, I mean approximately 4 am). He dropped his phone in the airport on the way over and it wasn't working right, so we had to find each other in the middle of the night without the ability to communicate. I went and stood out on the street in front of Pembroke, hoping that I would see him and getting funny looks from the people who were still eating at the food cart that parks outside of college in the evenings. When I hadn't seen him after about 20 minutes, I went inside to see if he had maybe emailed me or something to tell me that his plans had changed, but I didn't have anything from him - so I went back out. This time, I saw someone standing on the side of the road just down from Pembroke and called out "Kyle!" just in case it was him, which it was, thank goodness. He told me he was thinking about stretching out on the park bench near where he was standing in the next few minutes if he didn't seem me. Good thing we found each other!
After I had basketball practice on Friday morning, we had a regular Penn reunion. It turns out that our friend from the Penn Band, Katie Palusci, was also in Oxford that day. She's studying abroad in Milan but was, like Kyle, traveling for the weekend. So we met up with Katie, as well as with my friend Naomi, who is at Oxford Brookes for the term, for lunch at a really good Thai restaurant. My friends at Oxford and I like to go out for ethnic food when we can, since we eat so many meat-and-potatoes meals in our dining hall. After we finished, Kyle, Katie and I went to meet Zhana, another student from Penn at Oxford, and her boyfriend to go punting on the River Cherwell, which feeds into the Thames. You can rent punts - flat, wooden boats - on the river by the hour, so we decided to try our hand. This is how punting works: up to four people can sit in the boat, while one person stands at the back with a long pole. The pole is long enough to reach to the bottom of the river, and the boat takes its momentum from using the pole to push off the river bed, kind of like a gondola. One of the people sitting also has a little oar that's used as a rudder to help steer the boat. Punting is a very simple concept, but it isn't so simple in execution, as we discovered. It's really hard to keep the punt moving straight ahead, and we ended up getting turned around a couple of times and also bumping into the bank of the river. But by the end of our hour and our little loop around a big island in the river, we pretty much had the hang of it. We had a really good time trying to figure out how to maneuver the punt, and we enjoyed the scenery of Oxford and the fall foliage, even though it was a gray day and by the time we were finished, it was getting rainy. After our punting adventure, we took some time to warm up and run errands, then met again for dinner. We just went out to a pub, but it was so nice to just sit and chat with friends and share a meal with no time restrictions or really anything else to worry about. We saw Katie off then everyone came back to my room to talk and hang out.
Saturday morning I sang in a wedding in our college chapel. Apparently it's becoming more and more common for alumni and staff of the college to get married in college. There were 8 of us from the larger choir in the wedding choir, 2 on each voice part; we sang Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up" as well as an arrangement of Amazing Grace. Each of us got paid 45 pounds for about 2 hours work - not a bad hourly wage! The wedding was short and sweet, we sang well, and everyone seemed like they were having a good time. I think the groom works at Pembroke - the couple didn't seem like they were too much older than me, which scares me every time I think about it. In the afternoon, Kyle and I had a walk around Christ Church meadow and did some general hanging about Oxford. For dinner, we went to hall at Christ Church! They filmed the dining hall scenes of Harry Potter there, and since Pembroke's hall isn't open on Saturdays, we are invited to their hall for dinner. Actually, Christ Church's hall doesn't look too different from Pembroke's, though they do have gilded ceilings and more portraits on the walls of their famous alumni. But it was fun to say we'd been there, and it was a good opportunity to introduce Kyle to my Oxford friends. When we were done with dinner we took it easy and went to Len's for awhile to meet everyone who was hanging out there and have a cheap drink.
Sunday is sort of a day of craziness for me, with Christian Union breakfast, church, and then chapel choir all afternoon, but I actually got to enjoy it all last Sunday as I didn't have the usual essay due Monday to worry about. I felt a little bad that I had to leave Kyle mostly to his own devices during the day, but he came to evensong, choir drinks, and dinner with me in the evening. Evensong turned out to be a very somber affair - it was Remembrance Sunday, which is kind of like Veteran's day in the U.S. We sang an atmospheric anthem by Herbert Howells, and there was a moment of silence for remembering the troops. After the moment of silence, there was supposed to be a trumpet call, but we didn't have a trumpeter, so instead we sang a setting of a poem with music by our very own organ scholar, Sam Baker. I can now say that I have sung in the UK premiere of a brand new choral work! It was very well done, and all the music made for a very special, if heavy, service. After drinks and dinner, during which we mostly talked to a grad student in the choir who is studying the bioengineering of spider silk, Kyle and I came back to my room for some skype chats. First, we talked to my mom and brother, then Zhana came over and the three of us talked to Landon, John, and Stephen back at Penn. It was so cool to all talk at once - it felt like we were in the same room. This of course was home-sickness inducing, but what can you do?
Kyle's bus left Oxford at 1 am, so we stayed up chatting, then some of the girls from my hall walked with me to take him to the station so I wouldn't have to walk back alone. I slept in Monday, got some reading done, went to basketball practice, generally had a lazy sort of day. Tuesday I did schoolwork in the morning, then in the afternoon I hopped on a bus and went to visit Laura Getz, my dear friend from Central PA! More on that later, in the interest of keeping this post of a manageable length.
First, Kyle, one of my friends from Penn, came over from his study abroad program in Spain to visit. He got in very early in the morning last Friday (and by early, I mean approximately 4 am). He dropped his phone in the airport on the way over and it wasn't working right, so we had to find each other in the middle of the night without the ability to communicate. I went and stood out on the street in front of Pembroke, hoping that I would see him and getting funny looks from the people who were still eating at the food cart that parks outside of college in the evenings. When I hadn't seen him after about 20 minutes, I went inside to see if he had maybe emailed me or something to tell me that his plans had changed, but I didn't have anything from him - so I went back out. This time, I saw someone standing on the side of the road just down from Pembroke and called out "Kyle!" just in case it was him, which it was, thank goodness. He told me he was thinking about stretching out on the park bench near where he was standing in the next few minutes if he didn't seem me. Good thing we found each other!
After I had basketball practice on Friday morning, we had a regular Penn reunion. It turns out that our friend from the Penn Band, Katie Palusci, was also in Oxford that day. She's studying abroad in Milan but was, like Kyle, traveling for the weekend. So we met up with Katie, as well as with my friend Naomi, who is at Oxford Brookes for the term, for lunch at a really good Thai restaurant. My friends at Oxford and I like to go out for ethnic food when we can, since we eat so many meat-and-potatoes meals in our dining hall. After we finished, Kyle, Katie and I went to meet Zhana, another student from Penn at Oxford, and her boyfriend to go punting on the River Cherwell, which feeds into the Thames. You can rent punts - flat, wooden boats - on the river by the hour, so we decided to try our hand. This is how punting works: up to four people can sit in the boat, while one person stands at the back with a long pole. The pole is long enough to reach to the bottom of the river, and the boat takes its momentum from using the pole to push off the river bed, kind of like a gondola. One of the people sitting also has a little oar that's used as a rudder to help steer the boat. Punting is a very simple concept, but it isn't so simple in execution, as we discovered. It's really hard to keep the punt moving straight ahead, and we ended up getting turned around a couple of times and also bumping into the bank of the river. But by the end of our hour and our little loop around a big island in the river, we pretty much had the hang of it. We had a really good time trying to figure out how to maneuver the punt, and we enjoyed the scenery of Oxford and the fall foliage, even though it was a gray day and by the time we were finished, it was getting rainy. After our punting adventure, we took some time to warm up and run errands, then met again for dinner. We just went out to a pub, but it was so nice to just sit and chat with friends and share a meal with no time restrictions or really anything else to worry about. We saw Katie off then everyone came back to my room to talk and hang out.
Saturday morning I sang in a wedding in our college chapel. Apparently it's becoming more and more common for alumni and staff of the college to get married in college. There were 8 of us from the larger choir in the wedding choir, 2 on each voice part; we sang Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up" as well as an arrangement of Amazing Grace. Each of us got paid 45 pounds for about 2 hours work - not a bad hourly wage! The wedding was short and sweet, we sang well, and everyone seemed like they were having a good time. I think the groom works at Pembroke - the couple didn't seem like they were too much older than me, which scares me every time I think about it. In the afternoon, Kyle and I had a walk around Christ Church meadow and did some general hanging about Oxford. For dinner, we went to hall at Christ Church! They filmed the dining hall scenes of Harry Potter there, and since Pembroke's hall isn't open on Saturdays, we are invited to their hall for dinner. Actually, Christ Church's hall doesn't look too different from Pembroke's, though they do have gilded ceilings and more portraits on the walls of their famous alumni. But it was fun to say we'd been there, and it was a good opportunity to introduce Kyle to my Oxford friends. When we were done with dinner we took it easy and went to Len's for awhile to meet everyone who was hanging out there and have a cheap drink.
Sunday is sort of a day of craziness for me, with Christian Union breakfast, church, and then chapel choir all afternoon, but I actually got to enjoy it all last Sunday as I didn't have the usual essay due Monday to worry about. I felt a little bad that I had to leave Kyle mostly to his own devices during the day, but he came to evensong, choir drinks, and dinner with me in the evening. Evensong turned out to be a very somber affair - it was Remembrance Sunday, which is kind of like Veteran's day in the U.S. We sang an atmospheric anthem by Herbert Howells, and there was a moment of silence for remembering the troops. After the moment of silence, there was supposed to be a trumpet call, but we didn't have a trumpeter, so instead we sang a setting of a poem with music by our very own organ scholar, Sam Baker. I can now say that I have sung in the UK premiere of a brand new choral work! It was very well done, and all the music made for a very special, if heavy, service. After drinks and dinner, during which we mostly talked to a grad student in the choir who is studying the bioengineering of spider silk, Kyle and I came back to my room for some skype chats. First, we talked to my mom and brother, then Zhana came over and the three of us talked to Landon, John, and Stephen back at Penn. It was so cool to all talk at once - it felt like we were in the same room. This of course was home-sickness inducing, but what can you do?
Kyle's bus left Oxford at 1 am, so we stayed up chatting, then some of the girls from my hall walked with me to take him to the station so I wouldn't have to walk back alone. I slept in Monday, got some reading done, went to basketball practice, generally had a lazy sort of day. Tuesday I did schoolwork in the morning, then in the afternoon I hopped on a bus and went to visit Laura Getz, my dear friend from Central PA! More on that later, in the interest of keeping this post of a manageable length.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Fall in Oxford
I WILL get back on a more regular posting schedule, I promise.
Staying busy around here hasn't been a problem, that's for sure. Some highlights, in no particular order:
The weather around here has been totally bizarre in the past week or so. Tuesday, for example, it was beautiful and sunny when I woke up. When we left for lunch and lecture around 11am, it had started to drizzle. By the time we had finished lunch it was pouring, but when we left the English building after our lecture the sun was almost blinding. Within an hour it was raining hard again, but when I went outside later there was not a cloud in the sky! Very strange, but we've managed to make the most of the nice days, or nice hours within not-so-nice days. For example, on Saturday, Rachel, Robin, Bryan and I went out for a Thai lunch and then to the Oxford Univeristy botanical gardens. Entry is free for students, so we figured, why not? It turned out to be a very nice afternoon, and the gardens were beautiful. The gardens are a nice size, small enough to walk around in an hour. There are plenty of blooming plants to see, even in late fall, and the big old trees they have in the garden were showing absolutely gorgeous colors. The four of us had fun just sort of wandering around, taking silly pictures, and generally enjoying being outside. Our favorite part was either watching people trying to punt on the river or exploring the greenhouse, which has all sorts of exotic plants - I don't think I ever realized that pineapples grow in the ground. On a similar note, I wandered around Christchurch Meadow for the first time last week, on a brillaint fall day. I had just finished a paper and needed to get out of my room, so I went for a walk around the big loop. Christchurch is the college right across the street, and they have their own meadow right next to the college, complete with river views and cows. Yes, cows, living in the middle of the city of Oxford. Anwyay, there's a nice dirt trail you can walk or jog around the perimeter of the meadow - I think the trail's about a mile long. There were lots of people out, some picnicking, some just sitting on benches enjoying the sunshine. You don't have to be a Christchurch student, or even an Oxford student, to enter the meadow during the day, so I ran into all sorts of tourists, people taking pictures, and a large group of French schoolchildren. I wish I'd had my camera, because it would have been great to get some pictures of all the fall foliage on a sunny day.
In basketball news, there isn't really any news. We still haven't had another game, mostly due to scheduling troubles - the university really doesn't like to give us court time! We've still been having practice twice a week, which is getting more and more enjoyable as I get to know the team and get in better shape. I finally feel like I'm playing more at the level I want to play, not just struggling to get up and down the court for lack of air. We're getting antsy to have a game though. It's hard to just practice and practice and practice all the time and never test our skills against an opponent, which always helps a team (and its players) understand what it needs to work on.
Something I've been meaning to explain for a long time and haven't: Pembroke has its own college grace, which is to be read before every formal meal. Apparently, the students used to say it together, but instead of having everybody learn it now, one person reads it. For this year, that person is me! The chaplain asked for a volunteer in choir on the first Sunday, and I raised my hand without really thinking about it. He told me that no one would care how I said it, so I just use my Latin training mixed with years of singing church Latin to come up with my own pronunciation. My reward is that I'm reimbursed for all the meals at which I say grace, which is every Tuesday and Thursday, since I eat in a separate room with the choir on Sundays. Not a bad deal, and how many people can say they read Latin grace in front of their whole class at college on a regular basis?
That being said, I would like to prove that not everything is old-school at Oxford. Last Monday we went to a concert with the band Passion Pit at a club on the other side of Oxford. Lots of loud guitars, thumping bass, screaming teenagers, annoyed adults, people smashed together... all the things a pop/rock concert should be. The first opening band was good, being the suppliers of the loud guitars. The second opening act was... interesting. The performer was sort of a dj, remixing other people's pop songs into funky techno beats, but singing the lyrics himself and doing ridiculous dances. A couple times I wondered if the audience was enjoying the music, or enjoying making fun of him. His last song was the song that the children sing during the party in the Sound of Music ("There's a sad sort of ringing from the clock in the hall..."). He introduced it as a song for anyone in the room wearing knee socks, and invited anyone who knew the words to sing along. So I sang along, though I wasn't wearing knee socks, but really, it was just strange. Passion Pit, the main act, was pretty good - I know a couple of their songs from listening to XPN - but they were having technical difficulties all through the night, which began with it taking an hour for them to get their stuff set up after the previous act. All in all, we had a good time.
Ok, that's enough for now. This weekend Kyle is coming from Spain to visit me, and I'm singing in a wedding with the choir on Saturday. Next week is an off week, since my tutor will be away - I can't wait for a break from mad essay writing (I have one due today that is just bad, but sometimes you just hit a wall, you know?).
Staying busy around here hasn't been a problem, that's for sure. Some highlights, in no particular order:
The weather around here has been totally bizarre in the past week or so. Tuesday, for example, it was beautiful and sunny when I woke up. When we left for lunch and lecture around 11am, it had started to drizzle. By the time we had finished lunch it was pouring, but when we left the English building after our lecture the sun was almost blinding. Within an hour it was raining hard again, but when I went outside later there was not a cloud in the sky! Very strange, but we've managed to make the most of the nice days, or nice hours within not-so-nice days. For example, on Saturday, Rachel, Robin, Bryan and I went out for a Thai lunch and then to the Oxford Univeristy botanical gardens. Entry is free for students, so we figured, why not? It turned out to be a very nice afternoon, and the gardens were beautiful. The gardens are a nice size, small enough to walk around in an hour. There are plenty of blooming plants to see, even in late fall, and the big old trees they have in the garden were showing absolutely gorgeous colors. The four of us had fun just sort of wandering around, taking silly pictures, and generally enjoying being outside. Our favorite part was either watching people trying to punt on the river or exploring the greenhouse, which has all sorts of exotic plants - I don't think I ever realized that pineapples grow in the ground. On a similar note, I wandered around Christchurch Meadow for the first time last week, on a brillaint fall day. I had just finished a paper and needed to get out of my room, so I went for a walk around the big loop. Christchurch is the college right across the street, and they have their own meadow right next to the college, complete with river views and cows. Yes, cows, living in the middle of the city of Oxford. Anwyay, there's a nice dirt trail you can walk or jog around the perimeter of the meadow - I think the trail's about a mile long. There were lots of people out, some picnicking, some just sitting on benches enjoying the sunshine. You don't have to be a Christchurch student, or even an Oxford student, to enter the meadow during the day, so I ran into all sorts of tourists, people taking pictures, and a large group of French schoolchildren. I wish I'd had my camera, because it would have been great to get some pictures of all the fall foliage on a sunny day.
In basketball news, there isn't really any news. We still haven't had another game, mostly due to scheduling troubles - the university really doesn't like to give us court time! We've still been having practice twice a week, which is getting more and more enjoyable as I get to know the team and get in better shape. I finally feel like I'm playing more at the level I want to play, not just struggling to get up and down the court for lack of air. We're getting antsy to have a game though. It's hard to just practice and practice and practice all the time and never test our skills against an opponent, which always helps a team (and its players) understand what it needs to work on.
Something I've been meaning to explain for a long time and haven't: Pembroke has its own college grace, which is to be read before every formal meal. Apparently, the students used to say it together, but instead of having everybody learn it now, one person reads it. For this year, that person is me! The chaplain asked for a volunteer in choir on the first Sunday, and I raised my hand without really thinking about it. He told me that no one would care how I said it, so I just use my Latin training mixed with years of singing church Latin to come up with my own pronunciation. My reward is that I'm reimbursed for all the meals at which I say grace, which is every Tuesday and Thursday, since I eat in a separate room with the choir on Sundays. Not a bad deal, and how many people can say they read Latin grace in front of their whole class at college on a regular basis?
That being said, I would like to prove that not everything is old-school at Oxford. Last Monday we went to a concert with the band Passion Pit at a club on the other side of Oxford. Lots of loud guitars, thumping bass, screaming teenagers, annoyed adults, people smashed together... all the things a pop/rock concert should be. The first opening band was good, being the suppliers of the loud guitars. The second opening act was... interesting. The performer was sort of a dj, remixing other people's pop songs into funky techno beats, but singing the lyrics himself and doing ridiculous dances. A couple times I wondered if the audience was enjoying the music, or enjoying making fun of him. His last song was the song that the children sing during the party in the Sound of Music ("There's a sad sort of ringing from the clock in the hall..."). He introduced it as a song for anyone in the room wearing knee socks, and invited anyone who knew the words to sing along. So I sang along, though I wasn't wearing knee socks, but really, it was just strange. Passion Pit, the main act, was pretty good - I know a couple of their songs from listening to XPN - but they were having technical difficulties all through the night, which began with it taking an hour for them to get their stuff set up after the previous act. All in all, we had a good time.
Ok, that's enough for now. This weekend Kyle is coming from Spain to visit me, and I'm singing in a wedding with the choir on Saturday. Next week is an off week, since my tutor will be away - I can't wait for a break from mad essay writing (I have one due today that is just bad, but sometimes you just hit a wall, you know?).
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
In and Out of Oxford
Sorry I haven't posted in awhile. I'm getting "stuck in," as they say, and I keep running out of time to write a post. Ok, no more excuses, just action-packed adventure:
It's been a busy week and a half since I last posted. I turned in two essays on Monday, and I have another one due tomorrow. That's a lot of writing in one week. In non-academic news, I've been spending a lot of time in the Master's Lodgings recently. The Master and his wife have a house in college, so they often have students over for events. Last week, they had all of the visiting students over for drinks and canapes. The Bursar and some other important college people also came, so it was a good opportunity to put faces and personalities with names. I had some lovely conversations. The Master asked a lot of questions about how we were finding Pembroke and what we thought about all the tradition. We all agreed that we really like formal halls and things of that nature. Yes, it takes an hour of your night three times a week, but you really get to know the other members of your class. And it's nice to sit down together and have a good meal on a regular basis, instead of eating and running or heating and eating in your room, or whatever. Obviously, my class at Penn is much bigger than my class here, but I wish we could all get together like that on a regular basis. After NSO, we really don't do any activities together as a whole class (or when we try, it's a disaster - see waiting outside for an hour for Sophomore Skimmer and not even getting in) until we have alumni day and class reunions. Back to Pembroke, we also went to the Master's last night for a recital. Twice a term, the Master hosts a student musical recital - anyone can sign up to participate, and anyone is welcome to come and hear. I didn't perform last night, since I didn't bring any music with me and didn't really have time to find any, but all the performances were very good. We had a few people sing, someone played the cello, someone sang and played his guitar, etc. A few highlights: one of the fellows played a recorder arrangement of a Handel piece that he did himself in his university days; Sam Baker, one of our organ scholars, played a suite of dances for piano that he composed; and Manos, one of our music performance majors, played a Chopin Ballad that was absolutely stunning. I can't wait to sing or play in the next recital!
On Saturday, the Tufts office in London ran a bus to Stratford upon Avon for a day of Shakespeare. "Non-Tufts friends" were cordially invited, so I went along. The bus left from London and picked us up in Oxford on the way there. Saturday morning was raining and not looking very promising for a nice day. I was tired on the bus, and we got stuck in some heinous traffic on the way there - it took us an hour to go the last ten miles. But by the time we got there, the weather was clearing up and I was in a much better mood. First we went to Shakespeare's wife's cottage. Her name was Anne Hathaway, and her family lived outside of town in a 12 room cottage that was actually considered a good-sized house at the time. It still has a thatched roof and all the original walls, made of timbers filled in with some sort of organic material. The house is filled with Elizabethan furniture, including the ACTUAL SETTLE where Anne and William courted. That's one of the funny things about Stratford - we don't actually know that much about Shakespeare's life, so everything that we can prove to be his is a big deal. The tour guide kind of reminded me of the old historian in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who gets mowed down when the Medieval knights ride through the filming of his documentary. He liked to give the linguistic roots of some of the phrases we use today, like "turning the tables" (one side of the table top was polished and for display only, the other side was rough and used for doing everything else). After we finished at Anne Hathaway's, we went to Shakespeare's birthplace, back in town. There's a sort of museum leading up to it with a series of videos explaining Shakespeare's life and his importance to our culture - very cheesy. They have a signet ring on display with the initials WS, which MAY be a ring worn by the bard himself, since it was found outside the parish church in Stratford (and as if no other man in town had the initals WS). The house itself is pretty similar to Anne Hathaway's house, but has the addition of a glove-making workshop where Shakespeare's father worked. One of the coolest things about it was that so many famous authors, performers, and personalities have walked through the house at some point - one of the rooms of the house is devoted to all the people who have visited over the years. After we left "the birthplace," we wandered around Stratford to find something to eat, since it was almost 2:30 by this time. So many things in the town are named after Shakespeare or his plays: Much Ado About Toys, the As You Like It Cafe, etc. It turned out to be a beautiful afternoon, so after we ate (during which we had an intense discussion about whether Shakespeare actually wrote his own plays or not), we walked down to the river just to be outside. There's a monument to Shakespeare with statues of some of his most famous characters, so we made funny faces standing next to them and took pictures. Then we got back on the bus to come home, but instead of getting stuck in traffic on the highway again, we took the scenic route through the Cotswolds. The sun was shining, the trees were beautiful, and the villages we drove through were adorable. All in all, it was good to get out of town and out of college and do something a little different.
No set plans for the weekend yet, but I'm sure we'll find something to do. We haven't gotten the opportunity to do a lot of the touristy things in Oxford yet, so maybe we'll visit the castle or something. Hopefully I'll get back onto a more regular posting schedule.
It's been a busy week and a half since I last posted. I turned in two essays on Monday, and I have another one due tomorrow. That's a lot of writing in one week. In non-academic news, I've been spending a lot of time in the Master's Lodgings recently. The Master and his wife have a house in college, so they often have students over for events. Last week, they had all of the visiting students over for drinks and canapes. The Bursar and some other important college people also came, so it was a good opportunity to put faces and personalities with names. I had some lovely conversations. The Master asked a lot of questions about how we were finding Pembroke and what we thought about all the tradition. We all agreed that we really like formal halls and things of that nature. Yes, it takes an hour of your night three times a week, but you really get to know the other members of your class. And it's nice to sit down together and have a good meal on a regular basis, instead of eating and running or heating and eating in your room, or whatever. Obviously, my class at Penn is much bigger than my class here, but I wish we could all get together like that on a regular basis. After NSO, we really don't do any activities together as a whole class (or when we try, it's a disaster - see waiting outside for an hour for Sophomore Skimmer and not even getting in) until we have alumni day and class reunions. Back to Pembroke, we also went to the Master's last night for a recital. Twice a term, the Master hosts a student musical recital - anyone can sign up to participate, and anyone is welcome to come and hear. I didn't perform last night, since I didn't bring any music with me and didn't really have time to find any, but all the performances were very good. We had a few people sing, someone played the cello, someone sang and played his guitar, etc. A few highlights: one of the fellows played a recorder arrangement of a Handel piece that he did himself in his university days; Sam Baker, one of our organ scholars, played a suite of dances for piano that he composed; and Manos, one of our music performance majors, played a Chopin Ballad that was absolutely stunning. I can't wait to sing or play in the next recital!
On Saturday, the Tufts office in London ran a bus to Stratford upon Avon for a day of Shakespeare. "Non-Tufts friends" were cordially invited, so I went along. The bus left from London and picked us up in Oxford on the way there. Saturday morning was raining and not looking very promising for a nice day. I was tired on the bus, and we got stuck in some heinous traffic on the way there - it took us an hour to go the last ten miles. But by the time we got there, the weather was clearing up and I was in a much better mood. First we went to Shakespeare's wife's cottage. Her name was Anne Hathaway, and her family lived outside of town in a 12 room cottage that was actually considered a good-sized house at the time. It still has a thatched roof and all the original walls, made of timbers filled in with some sort of organic material. The house is filled with Elizabethan furniture, including the ACTUAL SETTLE where Anne and William courted. That's one of the funny things about Stratford - we don't actually know that much about Shakespeare's life, so everything that we can prove to be his is a big deal. The tour guide kind of reminded me of the old historian in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who gets mowed down when the Medieval knights ride through the filming of his documentary. He liked to give the linguistic roots of some of the phrases we use today, like "turning the tables" (one side of the table top was polished and for display only, the other side was rough and used for doing everything else). After we finished at Anne Hathaway's, we went to Shakespeare's birthplace, back in town. There's a sort of museum leading up to it with a series of videos explaining Shakespeare's life and his importance to our culture - very cheesy. They have a signet ring on display with the initials WS, which MAY be a ring worn by the bard himself, since it was found outside the parish church in Stratford (and as if no other man in town had the initals WS). The house itself is pretty similar to Anne Hathaway's house, but has the addition of a glove-making workshop where Shakespeare's father worked. One of the coolest things about it was that so many famous authors, performers, and personalities have walked through the house at some point - one of the rooms of the house is devoted to all the people who have visited over the years. After we left "the birthplace," we wandered around Stratford to find something to eat, since it was almost 2:30 by this time. So many things in the town are named after Shakespeare or his plays: Much Ado About Toys, the As You Like It Cafe, etc. It turned out to be a beautiful afternoon, so after we ate (during which we had an intense discussion about whether Shakespeare actually wrote his own plays or not), we walked down to the river just to be outside. There's a monument to Shakespeare with statues of some of his most famous characters, so we made funny faces standing next to them and took pictures. Then we got back on the bus to come home, but instead of getting stuck in traffic on the highway again, we took the scenic route through the Cotswolds. The sun was shining, the trees were beautiful, and the villages we drove through were adorable. All in all, it was good to get out of town and out of college and do something a little different.
No set plans for the weekend yet, but I'm sure we'll find something to do. We haven't gotten the opportunity to do a lot of the touristy things in Oxford yet, so maybe we'll visit the castle or something. Hopefully I'll get back onto a more regular posting schedule.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Stress-busting and pub-hopping
I had my second Shakespeare tutorial today, which meant my first essay on Shakespeare was due. I was sort of struggling to write it, but in the process of writing my first two essays, I think I've learned a lot about how to study here. For my Milton essay, I hardly employed any critical help at all - it was hard enough just trying to narrow down something to say about Paradise Lost, since it's such a deep and complex text. By the time I was about half way through my essay, I felt like I was fishing around for information and evidence, and sort of floundered. For my Shakespeare essay, I wanted to correct that mistake by reading and using plenty of criticism. My professor gave me a reading list of things that she thought would be helpful, but it was a pretty big list. Really, I could read about Hamlet and Othello for the rest of my life and still not have read everything there is to read about those plays. At some point, you just have to stop reading and start writing. Finding that line can be tricky, but it's always better to stop sooner than you think you should, or else you'll keep saying, "well, if I just read a few more pages of this, maybe a thesis will pop into my head; maybe if I just get that book out of the extremely complicated and hard to navigate library system it will say something that sparks my interest." But obviously, you'd never write a paper then. Moral of the story: use criticism, but cut yourself off. You can't be afraid to just write!
On that note, I also realized today that I'm not getting a grade on every essay that I write. At Penn, one essay for a course could be worth 25% (or more) of my grade for the whole course. So I'm used to perfecting every sentence of my essays because of their incredible worth in terms of my overall grade. But here, I will write 6 essays for my Shakespeare class just this term. And as my Shakespeare buddy pointed out, the essays are really and opportunity to work out your thoughts. Oxford students don't get graded on their essays, they get graded on the huge exams they take at the end of the term. My grades are mostly dependent on my essay writing, but I still won't get a number grade on every essay. I'll get a lot of feedback and advice instead. And tutorials are an opportunity to ask as many questions as you possibly can and have the best discussion you possibly can with your tutor. So they're not really stressful either - they're the best opportunity I've ever had to build up a rapport with a professor. Yes, these past two paragraphs have been me explaining how I've gotten over the stress I've been feeling the past couple of days (and maybe partially explaining it away), but I feel like they're important realizations to have come to.
On a lighter note, this weekend was a lot of fun. I gave the Latin grace for the first time at formal hall on Thursday and I didn't get ridiculed for it! A bunch of people actually came up to me and told me that they thought it was really cool, so I'm really excited to do it for the rest of the year. Thursday and Friday nights were both fairly quiet - we mostly hung out in the college bar and went to bed early. "Len's" is the college bar; it's right next to our hall and it's just a little room with a bar, 2 long tables and a juke box. But everybody sort of congregates there in the evenings, so it's always fun to go and socialize. Saturday was our "fresher's photo," as you can see from the picture below. All the undergraduate and graduate freshers, as well as visiting students, met on Chapel Quad for a huge group picture. Then we ran around for probably and hour afterward finding all our friends and taking pictures, dressed all up in our full sub fuscs. After the photo extravaganza, I went to the Eagle and Child pub with the rest of the Penn people at Oxford. We hadn't seen each other yet because we're all at different colleges. For the record, the Eagle and Child is the pub where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their literary society, the Inklings, met every week! They have a bunch of Lewis and Tolkien paraphernalia on the walls now. I almost died and went to heaven, I think. To that end, there is so much stuff to see and do around here, and I feel like I haven't had time to be a proper tourist. Maybe I'll have to work on that in the next few weeks. Sunday was full of church and essay writing. I went to a different church this Sunday - more traditional service, but it was entirely students, which I'm not sure I like. I find so much comfort in seeing people of all ages at church. I'm having a lot of fun with evensong at the chapel, not surprising given my love of singing and all. Hopefully I'll be able to continue balancing going to church in the morning and in the evening.
First Milton tutorial is tomorrow at 9 o'clock - wish me luck!
On that note, I also realized today that I'm not getting a grade on every essay that I write. At Penn, one essay for a course could be worth 25% (or more) of my grade for the whole course. So I'm used to perfecting every sentence of my essays because of their incredible worth in terms of my overall grade. But here, I will write 6 essays for my Shakespeare class just this term. And as my Shakespeare buddy pointed out, the essays are really and opportunity to work out your thoughts. Oxford students don't get graded on their essays, they get graded on the huge exams they take at the end of the term. My grades are mostly dependent on my essay writing, but I still won't get a number grade on every essay. I'll get a lot of feedback and advice instead. And tutorials are an opportunity to ask as many questions as you possibly can and have the best discussion you possibly can with your tutor. So they're not really stressful either - they're the best opportunity I've ever had to build up a rapport with a professor. Yes, these past two paragraphs have been me explaining how I've gotten over the stress I've been feeling the past couple of days (and maybe partially explaining it away), but I feel like they're important realizations to have come to.
On a lighter note, this weekend was a lot of fun. I gave the Latin grace for the first time at formal hall on Thursday and I didn't get ridiculed for it! A bunch of people actually came up to me and told me that they thought it was really cool, so I'm really excited to do it for the rest of the year. Thursday and Friday nights were both fairly quiet - we mostly hung out in the college bar and went to bed early. "Len's" is the college bar; it's right next to our hall and it's just a little room with a bar, 2 long tables and a juke box. But everybody sort of congregates there in the evenings, so it's always fun to go and socialize. Saturday was our "fresher's photo," as you can see from the picture below. All the undergraduate and graduate freshers, as well as visiting students, met on Chapel Quad for a huge group picture. Then we ran around for probably and hour afterward finding all our friends and taking pictures, dressed all up in our full sub fuscs. After the photo extravaganza, I went to the Eagle and Child pub with the rest of the Penn people at Oxford. We hadn't seen each other yet because we're all at different colleges. For the record, the Eagle and Child is the pub where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their literary society, the Inklings, met every week! They have a bunch of Lewis and Tolkien paraphernalia on the walls now. I almost died and went to heaven, I think. To that end, there is so much stuff to see and do around here, and I feel like I haven't had time to be a proper tourist. Maybe I'll have to work on that in the next few weeks. Sunday was full of church and essay writing. I went to a different church this Sunday - more traditional service, but it was entirely students, which I'm not sure I like. I find so much comfort in seeing people of all ages at church. I'm having a lot of fun with evensong at the chapel, not surprising given my love of singing and all. Hopefully I'll be able to continue balancing going to church in the morning and in the evening.
First Milton tutorial is tomorrow at 9 o'clock - wish me luck!
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Sub-fusc
For those not on facebook, here is a picture of me in my full sub-fusc: gown, ribbon tie, and all. Today we had our "Fresher's photograph," in which we all dressed up in our official academic attire and stood together for a class picture. Very Oxford.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Week One
I am spending today relaxing because it has been quite a week already! I think I mentioned that I spent most of Monday reading and focusing on schoolwork. My tutorial partner for Shakespeare, Will, wanted to work on Hamlet and Othello because he had a busy weekend leading up to our tutorial on Monday and he already knew those plays fairly well already. I read Hamlet in high school (well, sort of) but I'd never read Othello before. So I spent Sunday night after choir and hall reading Othello and Monday morning rereading Hamlet. At 2pm I had tutorial (professor, one other student, and me in a room, discussing the reading), and we spent the whole hour talking about Hamlet. I really appreciated this: in high school, we often spent our time arguing over the tragic flaw of the hero or just trying to get our heads around Shakespeare's language. But in tutorial, we got past all of that stuff to talk about more in-depth things, such as the layers of Hamlet's personality and his ability or inability to control himself and makes choices for himself. Parts of it were a little awkward, like when Madeleine, our tutor, would ask us to find an example of a something and we would sheepishly flip through our pages in silence until someone spoke up. But I feel like Will and I worked together pretty well - taking turns breaking the silence, etc - and Madeleine is really good at what she does. She's small and soft-spoken but great at asking that well-placed question that pulls the discussion in a new direction.
Tuesday I spent the day rereading books one to four of Paradise Lost for my tutorial today. I read all of PL over the summer, but I wanted to read for detail so I could start work on my essay that was due today. Yes, I had an essay on PL due today before I ever had a class about it, and without any lead-up from Milton's other works! I told Landon that it was kind of like throwing us into the ocean to be eaten by Leviathan (a reference that Milton makes in PL when describing Satan). By Tuesday night I was feeling pretty stressed about it. Madeleine gave us a list of approaches we could use to begin discussing/writing about the poem, but Milton so jam-packed his epic poem with references and big questions that those didn't really help narrow things down in terms of essay topics. I finally decided to just stop thinking about it and go to bed, and I actually woke up with a fairly decent topic floating on the top of my brain. But then I got down to writing my essay and got really frustrated. I just didn't feel that it was up to my personal standard, and if wasn't up to my standard, how was it going to be up to my tutor's standards? Thankfully I had a good opportunity to get away from it and think about something else - my basketball team had a game in Birmingham, an hour and a half away, at 4 pm.
The game was good! We didn't win, but we hung in until the last 3 or 4 minutes, when we started to get tired and make stupid mistakes. We played pretty well for only one practice together, I thought. I actually started the game, being the tallest girl who could make it, but I got taken out after a couple of minutes for making a stupid foul. I was in and out for the rest of the game. I felt ok about the game personally, but I realized that I need a lot of practice. Intellectually, I know how to run a zone defense, but I haven't actually run one for probably 2 or 3 years, and as usual, theory and practice are two different things. We have practice tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to really working on my skills so that I can get my body, as well as the quick-thinking part of my brain, back in the game. I thought the funniest thing about the game was its location - all the basketball games I've been to in the past two years have been at the Palestra, "cathedral of basketball," at Penn. This game was in a poorly lit gym with another game going on in the court right next to us, which meant lots of confusing whistles. There were about the same number of fans at this game as there would be at a women's basketball game at Penn, though, i.e. 10-12. The bus ride home was a good chance to chill out and not think too much about anything, and we drove past some lovely countryside and a fair number of sheep and cows.
When we got back to Oxford after the game, at about 8 pm, I walked back from the gym, where we got off the bus, to Pembroke by myself (most of the girls on the team have bikes). I mentioned something to the other girls on the team about not wanting to walk home in the dark by myself, but in the words of one of my teammates, Oxford is "ridiculously safe." I keep forgetting that I'm not in the big city where bad things actually happen after dark. I stopped to get a burrito (not as good as in the States, for the record), then came home to work on my essay. Once I started working on it, I felt a lot better about it than I did when I left it for basketball; I realized that I actually had decent ideas, I just needed to add a few sentences here and there to pull them together. At about 11 o'clock, I decided to just go to bed and get up this morning to work on it - my secret strategy, since I always think much better in the morning.
I woke up this morning with an email from Madeleine saying that she was sick and we wouldn't be having tutorial today. I was frankly glad to just finish up my essay and email it to her; it took the pressure off, at least a little. Sam and Zoe, two of the girls on my hall have been eating breakfast together every morning at 8:15 - great motivation to get out of bed. I joined them this morning, which, along with tutorial being postponed, set a really good tone for the day. I promised myself I would relax today, since I was so stressed Tuesday and yesterday, and I did so by running a significant number of errands. I needed: a sweatshirt to wear to basketball practice, so I got a Pembroke college hoodie; a water bottle for basketball; groceries, etc. I also did laundry and a lot of cleaning up around my room, including washing all the dishes and mugs that I got at the JCR's jumbo drop the first day I got here. Tomorrow I have basketball at 8:30 am, so I'll be up and ready to get some good work done, whereas I would normally just bum around on a Friday. I have my first paper for Shakespeare due Monday, so I want to reread Othello and try to get some critical reading done. That way I can finish my research Saturday and write my paper Sunday and Monday morning. Hold me to it, ok?
Tuesday I spent the day rereading books one to four of Paradise Lost for my tutorial today. I read all of PL over the summer, but I wanted to read for detail so I could start work on my essay that was due today. Yes, I had an essay on PL due today before I ever had a class about it, and without any lead-up from Milton's other works! I told Landon that it was kind of like throwing us into the ocean to be eaten by Leviathan (a reference that Milton makes in PL when describing Satan). By Tuesday night I was feeling pretty stressed about it. Madeleine gave us a list of approaches we could use to begin discussing/writing about the poem, but Milton so jam-packed his epic poem with references and big questions that those didn't really help narrow things down in terms of essay topics. I finally decided to just stop thinking about it and go to bed, and I actually woke up with a fairly decent topic floating on the top of my brain. But then I got down to writing my essay and got really frustrated. I just didn't feel that it was up to my personal standard, and if wasn't up to my standard, how was it going to be up to my tutor's standards? Thankfully I had a good opportunity to get away from it and think about something else - my basketball team had a game in Birmingham, an hour and a half away, at 4 pm.
The game was good! We didn't win, but we hung in until the last 3 or 4 minutes, when we started to get tired and make stupid mistakes. We played pretty well for only one practice together, I thought. I actually started the game, being the tallest girl who could make it, but I got taken out after a couple of minutes for making a stupid foul. I was in and out for the rest of the game. I felt ok about the game personally, but I realized that I need a lot of practice. Intellectually, I know how to run a zone defense, but I haven't actually run one for probably 2 or 3 years, and as usual, theory and practice are two different things. We have practice tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to really working on my skills so that I can get my body, as well as the quick-thinking part of my brain, back in the game. I thought the funniest thing about the game was its location - all the basketball games I've been to in the past two years have been at the Palestra, "cathedral of basketball," at Penn. This game was in a poorly lit gym with another game going on in the court right next to us, which meant lots of confusing whistles. There were about the same number of fans at this game as there would be at a women's basketball game at Penn, though, i.e. 10-12. The bus ride home was a good chance to chill out and not think too much about anything, and we drove past some lovely countryside and a fair number of sheep and cows.
When we got back to Oxford after the game, at about 8 pm, I walked back from the gym, where we got off the bus, to Pembroke by myself (most of the girls on the team have bikes). I mentioned something to the other girls on the team about not wanting to walk home in the dark by myself, but in the words of one of my teammates, Oxford is "ridiculously safe." I keep forgetting that I'm not in the big city where bad things actually happen after dark. I stopped to get a burrito (not as good as in the States, for the record), then came home to work on my essay. Once I started working on it, I felt a lot better about it than I did when I left it for basketball; I realized that I actually had decent ideas, I just needed to add a few sentences here and there to pull them together. At about 11 o'clock, I decided to just go to bed and get up this morning to work on it - my secret strategy, since I always think much better in the morning.
I woke up this morning with an email from Madeleine saying that she was sick and we wouldn't be having tutorial today. I was frankly glad to just finish up my essay and email it to her; it took the pressure off, at least a little. Sam and Zoe, two of the girls on my hall have been eating breakfast together every morning at 8:15 - great motivation to get out of bed. I joined them this morning, which, along with tutorial being postponed, set a really good tone for the day. I promised myself I would relax today, since I was so stressed Tuesday and yesterday, and I did so by running a significant number of errands. I needed: a sweatshirt to wear to basketball practice, so I got a Pembroke college hoodie; a water bottle for basketball; groceries, etc. I also did laundry and a lot of cleaning up around my room, including washing all the dishes and mugs that I got at the JCR's jumbo drop the first day I got here. Tomorrow I have basketball at 8:30 am, so I'll be up and ready to get some good work done, whereas I would normally just bum around on a Friday. I have my first paper for Shakespeare due Monday, so I want to reread Othello and try to get some critical reading done. That way I can finish my research Saturday and write my paper Sunday and Monday morning. Hold me to it, ok?
Monday, October 12, 2009
Getting Settled
I did a TON of work today: I figure I deserve a break, and I might as well spend it productively by writing a blog post.
So I survived the rest of Freshers Week! I can't say enough that it was totally weird going through all the orientation/get-to-know-you stuff again. One of our last official Fresher's Week events involved a pub quiz. Pembrokians have a "local," i.e. a local pub, in addition to the college bar. The local, called The Blenheim (pronounced Blenhm, for those of you who would otherwise by likely to use a more proper German pronunciation), is just around the corner from college. They have a full menu, so the night of the pub quiz, some of us went there before hand to eat (I had really tasty chili). When everyone else who was participating in the quiz showed up, we split into teams. It turns out that pub quizzes are exactly like what Philadelphians would call Quizzo: a team game of random trivia with several rounds. Ian, the guy that runs the pub, read out the questions and we answered as a team. Quizzo has three non-standard rounds - each team has to pick a round to count for double points, a pictorial round, and also a round in which all the answers connect in some way. At the Blenheim, there's still a connection round and a pictorial round, but there's also a round in which teams have to identify songs or other quotes (in this case, the quotes were snippets from Looney Tunes). My team fared very well, and though we didn't win, everyone got a bag full of free stuff including playing cards and beer t-shirts.
Freshers week is for getting to know the other students at your college and orientation events, but it's also for university-wide recruitment for sports teams and other clubs. There was a huge university-wide Freshers Fair late in the week, which was open to all Oxford students. We all went to the examination schools, big open halls sort of in the center of town, to peruse the hundreds of booths. It was sort of overwhelming - the halls were hot and packed, and the sheer amount of information available was mind-boggling. There were political clubs, musical groups and societies, language clubs, wine-tasting societies, sports teams on any number of levels, environmental groups, volunteering opportunities - really, anything you could think of. I put my name on so many email lists, I don't even remember all I signed up for. The fair was on Thursday; on Friday, my friend Anna from Tufts said that she had talked to the people at the basketball table and was going to tryouts on Saturday. I thought she meant basketball tryouts for Pembroke and agreed to go. When we met on Saturday morning, I discovered that she meant University basketball tryouts, but I was all dressed and ready to go, so we just headed for the courts. Now you have to realize that I haven't played competitive basketball since middle school. I played intermural ball all through high school, but as Maggie pointed out to me, my attendance record at Penn's gym is less than stellar. So I was sort of panting my way through drills and scrimmages, but somehow I managed to make the final cut! We're divided into two teams, the Blues, or varsity team, and twos, a junior varsity equivalent. I'm on the twos, but still, it's not bad for not having played in awhile. I have a lot of shaping up to do, but it should be good fun, as we get to travel to other universities for games. Our first "match," as they call it, is Wednesday in Birmingham, three hours away. We've only had one practice, so we'll see how it goes, but it should be a fun trip, and I'll get to see places in England I probably wouldn't have gone otherwise.
After basketball tryouts, Anna, who ended up making the Blues, and I went down to Pembroke's boathouse for an open day. The rowers were grilling out and giving people who had never rowed before an opportunity to try it out. I was pretty exhausted by the time we got there, but I had a hamburger and then gave it a go anyway. The took us into the boathouse and put us on rowing machines to teach us the basic motions, then put us straight in a boat and took us out on the river. I was fine on the rowing machine, but I ended up between two men who knew what they were doing in the actual boat, so I didn't exactly pull my weight. Actually, I got yelled at a lot by the cox. I think, therefore, my place is as a proud and enthusiastic spectator. But that's ok - I can now say that I've tried it, plus it was a lovely day on the river. The river is bordered on both sides by a park, so there were lots of people out having picnics in the brilliant sunshine. It's actually been sunny a fair number of the days I've been here, which I think is probably giving me false hope about the climate.
In addition to playing basketball, my other main activity here will be singing in Pembroke's chapel choir. Pembroke is one of many colleges at Oxford that has its own chapel. Ours is quite small, but very beautiful, with intertwining vines on the ceiling, exquisite stained glass, a marble altar and a big, old organ. The choir is run by our two organ scholars, who are here to study and write music as well as studying organ performance. The choir, about 30 members, rehearses from 3:30 to 5:30 every Sunday, with a short break for tea and cake mid-way, then sings the evensong service in the chapel. It's a very traditional Anglican service with sung responses, hymns, readings and a short message by the chaplain. After the service and a glass of sherry, the choir goes to formal hall with all the other first years, except everyone who participates in the service sits together in a small side room. The evensong service stood in stark contrast to the church I went to Sunday morning - St. Aldate's, right outside of college. It's an old church, but they've reoriented the sanctuary to be more conducive to a very modern style of worship. A very professional worship team led us in a series of praise and worship songs, then a guest speaker gave a talk about why Christianity makes philosophical sense (as opposed to other theories, like those produced by Kant, for example). It was a fun service, though VERY different from what I'm used to at home. There's another church really close by that apparently does things a little more liturgically, so I'll have to check that out next week. The contrast between the morning and evening services really struck me - I enjoyed them both, in different ways obviously. There's a part of me that loves that half-hour long, emotional worship set, but also a part that cherishes the quiet, intimate evensong service.
My actual academics began today - funny how they feel almost like a sidenote to everything else that's gone on in the past week. I had a great time in my first Shakespeare tutorial today - an hour with a professor and another student, hashing out the personality of Hamlet. Good stuff! Next up - Othello. But I do have a Milton essay due on Thursday, so I'll have to get down to work on that tomorrow. All in all, my first day of actual school at Oxford went well and I'm looking forward to getting adjusted to this whole tutorial thing.
So I survived the rest of Freshers Week! I can't say enough that it was totally weird going through all the orientation/get-to-know-you stuff again. One of our last official Fresher's Week events involved a pub quiz. Pembrokians have a "local," i.e. a local pub, in addition to the college bar. The local, called The Blenheim (pronounced Blenhm, for those of you who would otherwise by likely to use a more proper German pronunciation), is just around the corner from college. They have a full menu, so the night of the pub quiz, some of us went there before hand to eat (I had really tasty chili). When everyone else who was participating in the quiz showed up, we split into teams. It turns out that pub quizzes are exactly like what Philadelphians would call Quizzo: a team game of random trivia with several rounds. Ian, the guy that runs the pub, read out the questions and we answered as a team. Quizzo has three non-standard rounds - each team has to pick a round to count for double points, a pictorial round, and also a round in which all the answers connect in some way. At the Blenheim, there's still a connection round and a pictorial round, but there's also a round in which teams have to identify songs or other quotes (in this case, the quotes were snippets from Looney Tunes). My team fared very well, and though we didn't win, everyone got a bag full of free stuff including playing cards and beer t-shirts.
Freshers week is for getting to know the other students at your college and orientation events, but it's also for university-wide recruitment for sports teams and other clubs. There was a huge university-wide Freshers Fair late in the week, which was open to all Oxford students. We all went to the examination schools, big open halls sort of in the center of town, to peruse the hundreds of booths. It was sort of overwhelming - the halls were hot and packed, and the sheer amount of information available was mind-boggling. There were political clubs, musical groups and societies, language clubs, wine-tasting societies, sports teams on any number of levels, environmental groups, volunteering opportunities - really, anything you could think of. I put my name on so many email lists, I don't even remember all I signed up for. The fair was on Thursday; on Friday, my friend Anna from Tufts said that she had talked to the people at the basketball table and was going to tryouts on Saturday. I thought she meant basketball tryouts for Pembroke and agreed to go. When we met on Saturday morning, I discovered that she meant University basketball tryouts, but I was all dressed and ready to go, so we just headed for the courts. Now you have to realize that I haven't played competitive basketball since middle school. I played intermural ball all through high school, but as Maggie pointed out to me, my attendance record at Penn's gym is less than stellar. So I was sort of panting my way through drills and scrimmages, but somehow I managed to make the final cut! We're divided into two teams, the Blues, or varsity team, and twos, a junior varsity equivalent. I'm on the twos, but still, it's not bad for not having played in awhile. I have a lot of shaping up to do, but it should be good fun, as we get to travel to other universities for games. Our first "match," as they call it, is Wednesday in Birmingham, three hours away. We've only had one practice, so we'll see how it goes, but it should be a fun trip, and I'll get to see places in England I probably wouldn't have gone otherwise.
After basketball tryouts, Anna, who ended up making the Blues, and I went down to Pembroke's boathouse for an open day. The rowers were grilling out and giving people who had never rowed before an opportunity to try it out. I was pretty exhausted by the time we got there, but I had a hamburger and then gave it a go anyway. The took us into the boathouse and put us on rowing machines to teach us the basic motions, then put us straight in a boat and took us out on the river. I was fine on the rowing machine, but I ended up between two men who knew what they were doing in the actual boat, so I didn't exactly pull my weight. Actually, I got yelled at a lot by the cox. I think, therefore, my place is as a proud and enthusiastic spectator. But that's ok - I can now say that I've tried it, plus it was a lovely day on the river. The river is bordered on both sides by a park, so there were lots of people out having picnics in the brilliant sunshine. It's actually been sunny a fair number of the days I've been here, which I think is probably giving me false hope about the climate.
In addition to playing basketball, my other main activity here will be singing in Pembroke's chapel choir. Pembroke is one of many colleges at Oxford that has its own chapel. Ours is quite small, but very beautiful, with intertwining vines on the ceiling, exquisite stained glass, a marble altar and a big, old organ. The choir is run by our two organ scholars, who are here to study and write music as well as studying organ performance. The choir, about 30 members, rehearses from 3:30 to 5:30 every Sunday, with a short break for tea and cake mid-way, then sings the evensong service in the chapel. It's a very traditional Anglican service with sung responses, hymns, readings and a short message by the chaplain. After the service and a glass of sherry, the choir goes to formal hall with all the other first years, except everyone who participates in the service sits together in a small side room. The evensong service stood in stark contrast to the church I went to Sunday morning - St. Aldate's, right outside of college. It's an old church, but they've reoriented the sanctuary to be more conducive to a very modern style of worship. A very professional worship team led us in a series of praise and worship songs, then a guest speaker gave a talk about why Christianity makes philosophical sense (as opposed to other theories, like those produced by Kant, for example). It was a fun service, though VERY different from what I'm used to at home. There's another church really close by that apparently does things a little more liturgically, so I'll have to check that out next week. The contrast between the morning and evening services really struck me - I enjoyed them both, in different ways obviously. There's a part of me that loves that half-hour long, emotional worship set, but also a part that cherishes the quiet, intimate evensong service.
My actual academics began today - funny how they feel almost like a sidenote to everything else that's gone on in the past week. I had a great time in my first Shakespeare tutorial today - an hour with a professor and another student, hashing out the personality of Hamlet. Good stuff! Next up - Othello. But I do have a Milton essay due on Thursday, so I'll have to get down to work on that tomorrow. All in all, my first day of actual school at Oxford went well and I'm looking forward to getting adjusted to this whole tutorial thing.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
OXFORD
And so the adventures begin again - I have officially arrived at Oxford! I landed at Heathrow at 6:30 Sunday morning, a little shell-shocked, I have to say. I did sleep on the plane, but not as long as I would have liked (especially since they woke us up at 4:30 local time to serve us coffee and breakfast). My luggage was easy to find, and I didn't have any trouble finding the bus station at the airport, once I realized I needed to get to the "Central Bus Station," which happens to be quite a walk from the terminal at which I arrived. I met some other visiting students as soon as I got to the bus, though they weren't headed to Pembroke, and I even saw another Penn student, my friend Karla, on the bus! The ride to Oxford wasn't long (about an hour, I think). I couldn't believe how much the countryside between London and Oxford looked like home - rolling hills, grass just starting to turn brown, similar trees at about the same state of changing. It was kind of nice to feel familiar with the territory right away.
I arrived at Pembroke at about 9:30, and I was greeted right away by very, very nice people. You enter the college at the "Porter's Lodge" (really just a kind of foyer) to meet the Porter, a man who is in charge of all the keys and things. I got my keys and was escorted by some members of the JCR, a committee of second year students who help everyone get moved in and adjusted, as well as planning events and entertainment. We went with my luggage to my room, in the Macmillan building, commonly called "the Mac." It really reminds me of English House, for all you Penn folks, and for the uninitiated, of my dorm freshman year. The Mac is a building built in the late 1960's, I would think; it's a rather low, brick building. My single room is a good size. It's kind of a square, with the fourth wall being a wide window. The wall opposite the window is a closet and a sink. Otherwise, I have a bed, a desk, and two chairs, as well as a spinny computer chair. (Pictures to come). There are 14 girls on the hall and we share a bathroom (and on that note, I don't ever want to here another person at Penn complain about facilities - we have two showers for the hall, one of which doesn't work, and both of which are in closets with wooden doors that prevent ventilation).
Since I arrived, things have been kind of a blur. There are so many new things every day! First of all, people. In addition to all the English students, there are about 40 visiting students at Pembroke this term - 12 of them from Tufts, 3 from Cornell, 3 from Georgetown, and on down the line. I'm the only Penn student at Pembroke this term, though there are 7 of us at Oxford. I was adopted right away by the Tufts folks, who took me to their introductory meeting and on their "accomodations" shopping trip. There's a Target-like store right around the corner from Pembroke called Primark that sells duvets for 7 pounds and that sort of thing. Oh, before I get too far, a word about another new thing - the university system here. Oxford is the university and the name of the town, but the schooling at Oxford actually happens in 30 or so colleges, Pembroke being one of them. Pembroke, for example, only has about 350 students, but it has its own facilities and administration. The University is the umbrella organization above the college, and it has research, library, office, etc. facilities for students and administrators. There are many students groups and clubs at the college level, but also at the university level, and there are strong rivalries between the colleges.
Another new thing - words. I thought that the main differences between American and British English were matters of slang, but I've found that this is not exactly the case. There are a lot of everyday things that go by different names in England than they do in the States. For example, I call a knit article of clothing that you wear on your top half a "sweater." Here, unless it's a cardigan, it's called a "jumper." The kind of dress that I would call a jumper is called a pinafore here. A particular source of amusement among the girls on my corridor is my use of the word "dish soap." They call it "washing up liquid," and can't get over my term for soapy stuff you use to clean dishes. We've also had many a good laugh about accents - Sam, the girl who lives a few doors down, keeps trying to say "awesome" the way I do (it sounds cool apparently). Of course all the American students are obsessed with English accents, so I think it goes both ways.
This week has been taking up with a blinding number of information and introduction sessions, plus all the usual social activities that go along with new student orientations. The visiting students got in a day before the rest of the freshers, so the JCR took us to a posh cocktail bar. The first night everyone got in we had our first "bop," or social event. It was a "Pembroke pride" bop: our college colors are navy and bright pink, so everyone dressed up in their brightest blue and pink and craziest outfirts and we had a silent disco. At a silent disco, they bring in headphones that are attached to some sort of wireless network and play music into the headphones; there are two different stations of music, that way everyone gets to listen to music they like, and those who want to talk can hear each other perfectly. Last night we had a "name bop," where everyone dressed up to represent their name (I went as Elle Woods from Legally Blonde). The other thing we did last night was have our first formal dinner with our subject tutors. We all got dressed up and put on our "commoners gowns" (academic robes) then met our professors over champagne. When dinner was served, we went to the hall, where we have all our dinners. We had a three course meal including wine and guinea fowl for the entree. I sat near our two head tutors for English, who were discussing who was meaner. They agreed that one was worse on paper and the other in person, and the one who was worse on paper told this anecdote: one paper was so bad that she couldn't keep reading and wrote in the margin, "trump, trump, trump, this is me trudging up the stairs to throw myself out the window," then with a little line down to the bottom of the page, "thud, I've landed." I'm a little scared for classes now...
I meet my tutor for the first time this afternoon. It's a gorgeous day fall day to day - cool and beautifully sunny. Yesterday was a more typical dreary and rainy day, so I'm sure I'll be getting used to the English weather soon enough. More stories and pictures to come!
I arrived at Pembroke at about 9:30, and I was greeted right away by very, very nice people. You enter the college at the "Porter's Lodge" (really just a kind of foyer) to meet the Porter, a man who is in charge of all the keys and things. I got my keys and was escorted by some members of the JCR, a committee of second year students who help everyone get moved in and adjusted, as well as planning events and entertainment. We went with my luggage to my room, in the Macmillan building, commonly called "the Mac." It really reminds me of English House, for all you Penn folks, and for the uninitiated, of my dorm freshman year. The Mac is a building built in the late 1960's, I would think; it's a rather low, brick building. My single room is a good size. It's kind of a square, with the fourth wall being a wide window. The wall opposite the window is a closet and a sink. Otherwise, I have a bed, a desk, and two chairs, as well as a spinny computer chair. (Pictures to come). There are 14 girls on the hall and we share a bathroom (and on that note, I don't ever want to here another person at Penn complain about facilities - we have two showers for the hall, one of which doesn't work, and both of which are in closets with wooden doors that prevent ventilation).
Since I arrived, things have been kind of a blur. There are so many new things every day! First of all, people. In addition to all the English students, there are about 40 visiting students at Pembroke this term - 12 of them from Tufts, 3 from Cornell, 3 from Georgetown, and on down the line. I'm the only Penn student at Pembroke this term, though there are 7 of us at Oxford. I was adopted right away by the Tufts folks, who took me to their introductory meeting and on their "accomodations" shopping trip. There's a Target-like store right around the corner from Pembroke called Primark that sells duvets for 7 pounds and that sort of thing. Oh, before I get too far, a word about another new thing - the university system here. Oxford is the university and the name of the town, but the schooling at Oxford actually happens in 30 or so colleges, Pembroke being one of them. Pembroke, for example, only has about 350 students, but it has its own facilities and administration. The University is the umbrella organization above the college, and it has research, library, office, etc. facilities for students and administrators. There are many students groups and clubs at the college level, but also at the university level, and there are strong rivalries between the colleges.
Another new thing - words. I thought that the main differences between American and British English were matters of slang, but I've found that this is not exactly the case. There are a lot of everyday things that go by different names in England than they do in the States. For example, I call a knit article of clothing that you wear on your top half a "sweater." Here, unless it's a cardigan, it's called a "jumper." The kind of dress that I would call a jumper is called a pinafore here. A particular source of amusement among the girls on my corridor is my use of the word "dish soap." They call it "washing up liquid," and can't get over my term for soapy stuff you use to clean dishes. We've also had many a good laugh about accents - Sam, the girl who lives a few doors down, keeps trying to say "awesome" the way I do (it sounds cool apparently). Of course all the American students are obsessed with English accents, so I think it goes both ways.
This week has been taking up with a blinding number of information and introduction sessions, plus all the usual social activities that go along with new student orientations. The visiting students got in a day before the rest of the freshers, so the JCR took us to a posh cocktail bar. The first night everyone got in we had our first "bop," or social event. It was a "Pembroke pride" bop: our college colors are navy and bright pink, so everyone dressed up in their brightest blue and pink and craziest outfirts and we had a silent disco. At a silent disco, they bring in headphones that are attached to some sort of wireless network and play music into the headphones; there are two different stations of music, that way everyone gets to listen to music they like, and those who want to talk can hear each other perfectly. Last night we had a "name bop," where everyone dressed up to represent their name (I went as Elle Woods from Legally Blonde). The other thing we did last night was have our first formal dinner with our subject tutors. We all got dressed up and put on our "commoners gowns" (academic robes) then met our professors over champagne. When dinner was served, we went to the hall, where we have all our dinners. We had a three course meal including wine and guinea fowl for the entree. I sat near our two head tutors for English, who were discussing who was meaner. They agreed that one was worse on paper and the other in person, and the one who was worse on paper told this anecdote: one paper was so bad that she couldn't keep reading and wrote in the margin, "trump, trump, trump, this is me trudging up the stairs to throw myself out the window," then with a little line down to the bottom of the page, "thud, I've landed." I'm a little scared for classes now...
I meet my tutor for the first time this afternoon. It's a gorgeous day fall day to day - cool and beautifully sunny. Yesterday was a more typical dreary and rainy day, so I'm sure I'll be getting used to the English weather soon enough. More stories and pictures to come!
Thursday, July 9, 2009
The End of Classes!
I am officially finished with school for the summer semester! Who knew six weeks in Italy would fly by so quickly? (Well, I guess I kind of figured, but now that they're actually gone, it feels different.)
I just finished my last exam - Art History. I studied for it and I think I did well, but I was pleased to discover as I prepared that I didn't actually need to study that much. I think I retained a lot from our many visits - seeing things in person and in context really, really helps. And I actually learned something, instead of just memorizing. Woohoo! I feel the same way about this class as I've felt in the past about my music classes: knowing a little bit about one period in history (in any art) gives you so much context for all other arts. Knowing how to listen carefully to symphonies helps me pay close attention to detail when I look at paintings. And knowing the basics of Renaissance art and how visual art in general developed illuminates even modern art for me.
The rest of today is for relaxing. I have one more Italian class, but we actually finished all our assignments yesterday. Then tonight, Penn is hosting a dinner for all of us. We're leaving the city to go to a villa for a catered affair. Should be wonderful! Friday is for shopping and a last bit of sightseeing, as is Saturday. Then Sunday I fly back to the States! Florence to Munich, Munich to Washington, then my dad is going to drive me home. The whole time change thing is going to be weird, since I'm actually fully adjusted to Florence time. And my flights are 10.5 hours in duration (plus a tiny layover), but I arrive in Dullus only 5 hours after I leave Florence.
More pictures and stories from my trip will follow next week when I have time to write posts.
I just finished my last exam - Art History. I studied for it and I think I did well, but I was pleased to discover as I prepared that I didn't actually need to study that much. I think I retained a lot from our many visits - seeing things in person and in context really, really helps. And I actually learned something, instead of just memorizing. Woohoo! I feel the same way about this class as I've felt in the past about my music classes: knowing a little bit about one period in history (in any art) gives you so much context for all other arts. Knowing how to listen carefully to symphonies helps me pay close attention to detail when I look at paintings. And knowing the basics of Renaissance art and how visual art in general developed illuminates even modern art for me.
The rest of today is for relaxing. I have one more Italian class, but we actually finished all our assignments yesterday. Then tonight, Penn is hosting a dinner for all of us. We're leaving the city to go to a villa for a catered affair. Should be wonderful! Friday is for shopping and a last bit of sightseeing, as is Saturday. Then Sunday I fly back to the States! Florence to Munich, Munich to Washington, then my dad is going to drive me home. The whole time change thing is going to be weird, since I'm actually fully adjusted to Florence time. And my flights are 10.5 hours in duration (plus a tiny layover), but I arrive in Dullus only 5 hours after I leave Florence.
More pictures and stories from my trip will follow next week when I have time to write posts.
Monday, June 29, 2009
A Few More Pictures
Proof that mom and I climbed the duomo!
Feast day of St. John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence. They open the main cathedral doors (a rare event) and the Baptistery's Gates of Paradise for a procession. The red fleur de lis on the flag is the symbol of Florence.
Burano, the Venetian island where they make lace. Very colorful houses, very leaning bell tower.
Venice!!
Back in Florence, I'm a little bit obsessed with the Arno.
Mom and I at Piazzale Michelangelo. We had a great visit!Monday, June 22, 2009
Elba
I have so much to report and I’m weeks behind... maybe I'll try to give the reader's digest version, though that’s generally impossible for me.
This weekend we went to Elba, the island off the west coast of Italy where Napoleon was exiled. It is an absolutely beautiful place, dotted with little beach towns though mostly covered with semi-tropical vegetation and windblown rock faces. We left Florence at 5:30 Friday morning so we could spend the whole day in Elba. We had a 2.5 hour train ride to the port town of Piombino and then an hour by ferry to the town where we were staying, Portoferraio (literally, "iron port"). We walked up a steep hill to get to our hotel, which had a direct view of the sea. The room where I stayed with my friends Indiana and Gabriela even had a little balcony that looked right out on the Tyrrhenean Sea, complete with a table, chairs and an umbrella. Naturally, I started both my mornings in Elba gazing at the water. After we got checked into the hotel and settled we went straight to the beach. Elba has a million little beaches, some of which you can only get to by boat or by hiking down one of the cliffs, so it wasn't weird for our hotel to share a private beach with a few other hotels. The beach was rocky, but the water was warm and the day was cloudless. After a couple of hours my friends Zach and Federico got a little bored, so they rented Vespas and rode to the next town over to see about renting a boat. They called us to say that they would come pick us up at the beach if we would go get something to eat and bring it with us.
Thus began the boating adventure. We had passed a little market on the way to the hotel, so we walked back down the hill. But by the time we got there, it was lunch time and the market was closed. So Indiana and I went on a grand tour of Portoferraio to find a market that was open. We ended up following signs to the Coop, a big Italian grocery chain. It wasn't very much different from an American grocery chain, but of course we didn't know where we were going, so we ran all over to find the things we wanted. We had already told the boys to meet us at a certain beach with the boat, so we hurried there as fast as we could after we finished our shopping. But when we got to the beach, we saw Zach swimming in to talk to the lifeguards. The guy at the boat rental place had told Zach and Federico that they could cut the boat’s motor and row into shore at any beach, but this was apparently not the case at public beaches such as the one we were standing on. One option was to dump a bunch of our stuff on the beach and swim out the considerable distance to the boat, but we all had our cameras and phones, so that idea was vetoed. We spent a couple minutes in complete frustration and some of our group opted out in the process, but soon enough we were on a paddle boat that the lifeguard let us use (for free) to get out to the motor boat with all of our stuff. Federico and Indiana took the pedal boat back to shore, and then swam out to meet the rest of us. Once we got on the boat, the rest of the afternoon was beautiful. We went almost halfway around the island and got to see a bunch of the small towns and beaches, as well as some beautiful sailboats. I got to drive the boat for awhile and was even promoted to First Mate! We put our anchor down for a little while and jumped off the boat into the sea – the water was so clear you could see to the rocky bottom. I have no idea how deep the water was; all I know was that it was much deeper than a swimming pool and I’ve never been in water that deep in my life.
Getting back to shore was not the problem that getting off of it was, and we went back to our hotel, took showers, and went out to eat. I had a great “frutti di mare” appetizer with all different sorts of fish and shellfish, prepared in ways I’ve never seen before. My mussels were cooked traditionally, but my tuna salad had very unique herbs in it, and there was some sort of meat with a sweet sauce and raisins that was absolutely heavenly. My plate even had some octopus on it, I think, which was really good. I had pasta with seafood in it for dinner, but some of the others had the fish of the day, which was brought out on a big cart before it was cooked for them to choose the exact fish they wanted. I would have had no idea what to do, but they got it taken care of and it was some of the best fish I’ve ever tasted. After dinner we agreed to get up pretty early the next morning to head out on a kayaking adventure across the island: we would get up, rent Vespas to go to the other side of the island, then spend some time on one of the sand beaches and take a guided kayaking tour.
Similar to the boating incident, said kayaking adventure didn’t quite occur as planned. Those who were originally planning to go woke up at 8 am as we had planned and went to breakfast. But by the time we had gotten everything together and were ready to head out to the auto rental place to get our Vespas, some other people were awake and interested in coming with – which was fine, but it sort of ruined our organization. So we ended up running down the big hill of our town to the rental place to get there before 10 o’clock and then changing vehicles and driving partners several times. In other words, it was mass chaos for about 20 minutes, which I didn’t handle very well (I don’t deal well with broken plans, as some of you may know). But just like the boating chaos, we finally got it figured out and I ended up on the back of an ATV with my friend Gabriela. The rest of our original group was able to stay together on Vespas, as we originally planned, and we had a beautiful ride to the other side of the island. By the time we got there the kayaking tours were actually full for the day, but we rented paddle boats, played on the beach, had a huge piece of watermelon for lunch, and just generally chilled. To get back to Portoferraio we decided to ride around the island instead of across it. It ended up being a 2 ½ hour drive, but it was a beautiful, cloudless day and the wind in my hair felt wonderful. The road around the island is right along the coast, so we had gorgeous views of the sea the entire ride. I didn’t want to get off the ATV – I wanted to ride and ride forever.
After the ATV adventure came the dinner adventure. We walked to the historic city center to visit the house where Napoleon spent his exile (not too exciting, but beautiful gardens) and then looked around for a place to eat. We read a bunch of menus, but we finally stopped at “Gambero Rosso” (“Red Shrimp”) because their menu was completely in Italian and completely hand-written, meaning they cooked whatever they happened to get fresh that day. We sat down outside and the owner, Giancarlo, who was also our waiter, immediately started joking with us. In total, dinner took us close to four hours, between all the courses we ordered, all the joking around, and all the time spent waiting for our mussels, but it was a great four hours. I think it’s one of those things that’s just hard to describe if you weren’t there – there are so many little stories, like Giancarlo bringing out a live lobster before he cooked it for Gabriela and telling us it was named Hugo – but I will remember the night for the rest of my life. Giancarlo gave us free appetizers and a huge discount, and told us at the end of the night that we were cute. We sat together well at the table, just enjoying each others’ company and talking, he said. It’s an “art” that young Italians have lost, at least according to him. All in all the night just had that magical quality to it that makes something memorable.
Ok, that’s a brief recounting of last weekend’s adventures… I will try to post soon about this week/weekend and my mom’s visit.
This weekend we went to Elba, the island off the west coast of Italy where Napoleon was exiled. It is an absolutely beautiful place, dotted with little beach towns though mostly covered with semi-tropical vegetation and windblown rock faces. We left Florence at 5:30 Friday morning so we could spend the whole day in Elba. We had a 2.5 hour train ride to the port town of Piombino and then an hour by ferry to the town where we were staying, Portoferraio (literally, "iron port"). We walked up a steep hill to get to our hotel, which had a direct view of the sea. The room where I stayed with my friends Indiana and Gabriela even had a little balcony that looked right out on the Tyrrhenean Sea, complete with a table, chairs and an umbrella. Naturally, I started both my mornings in Elba gazing at the water. After we got checked into the hotel and settled we went straight to the beach. Elba has a million little beaches, some of which you can only get to by boat or by hiking down one of the cliffs, so it wasn't weird for our hotel to share a private beach with a few other hotels. The beach was rocky, but the water was warm and the day was cloudless. After a couple of hours my friends Zach and Federico got a little bored, so they rented Vespas and rode to the next town over to see about renting a boat. They called us to say that they would come pick us up at the beach if we would go get something to eat and bring it with us.
Thus began the boating adventure. We had passed a little market on the way to the hotel, so we walked back down the hill. But by the time we got there, it was lunch time and the market was closed. So Indiana and I went on a grand tour of Portoferraio to find a market that was open. We ended up following signs to the Coop, a big Italian grocery chain. It wasn't very much different from an American grocery chain, but of course we didn't know where we were going, so we ran all over to find the things we wanted. We had already told the boys to meet us at a certain beach with the boat, so we hurried there as fast as we could after we finished our shopping. But when we got to the beach, we saw Zach swimming in to talk to the lifeguards. The guy at the boat rental place had told Zach and Federico that they could cut the boat’s motor and row into shore at any beach, but this was apparently not the case at public beaches such as the one we were standing on. One option was to dump a bunch of our stuff on the beach and swim out the considerable distance to the boat, but we all had our cameras and phones, so that idea was vetoed. We spent a couple minutes in complete frustration and some of our group opted out in the process, but soon enough we were on a paddle boat that the lifeguard let us use (for free) to get out to the motor boat with all of our stuff. Federico and Indiana took the pedal boat back to shore, and then swam out to meet the rest of us. Once we got on the boat, the rest of the afternoon was beautiful. We went almost halfway around the island and got to see a bunch of the small towns and beaches, as well as some beautiful sailboats. I got to drive the boat for awhile and was even promoted to First Mate! We put our anchor down for a little while and jumped off the boat into the sea – the water was so clear you could see to the rocky bottom. I have no idea how deep the water was; all I know was that it was much deeper than a swimming pool and I’ve never been in water that deep in my life.
Getting back to shore was not the problem that getting off of it was, and we went back to our hotel, took showers, and went out to eat. I had a great “frutti di mare” appetizer with all different sorts of fish and shellfish, prepared in ways I’ve never seen before. My mussels were cooked traditionally, but my tuna salad had very unique herbs in it, and there was some sort of meat with a sweet sauce and raisins that was absolutely heavenly. My plate even had some octopus on it, I think, which was really good. I had pasta with seafood in it for dinner, but some of the others had the fish of the day, which was brought out on a big cart before it was cooked for them to choose the exact fish they wanted. I would have had no idea what to do, but they got it taken care of and it was some of the best fish I’ve ever tasted. After dinner we agreed to get up pretty early the next morning to head out on a kayaking adventure across the island: we would get up, rent Vespas to go to the other side of the island, then spend some time on one of the sand beaches and take a guided kayaking tour.
Similar to the boating incident, said kayaking adventure didn’t quite occur as planned. Those who were originally planning to go woke up at 8 am as we had planned and went to breakfast. But by the time we had gotten everything together and were ready to head out to the auto rental place to get our Vespas, some other people were awake and interested in coming with – which was fine, but it sort of ruined our organization. So we ended up running down the big hill of our town to the rental place to get there before 10 o’clock and then changing vehicles and driving partners several times. In other words, it was mass chaos for about 20 minutes, which I didn’t handle very well (I don’t deal well with broken plans, as some of you may know). But just like the boating chaos, we finally got it figured out and I ended up on the back of an ATV with my friend Gabriela. The rest of our original group was able to stay together on Vespas, as we originally planned, and we had a beautiful ride to the other side of the island. By the time we got there the kayaking tours were actually full for the day, but we rented paddle boats, played on the beach, had a huge piece of watermelon for lunch, and just generally chilled. To get back to Portoferraio we decided to ride around the island instead of across it. It ended up being a 2 ½ hour drive, but it was a beautiful, cloudless day and the wind in my hair felt wonderful. The road around the island is right along the coast, so we had gorgeous views of the sea the entire ride. I didn’t want to get off the ATV – I wanted to ride and ride forever.
After the ATV adventure came the dinner adventure. We walked to the historic city center to visit the house where Napoleon spent his exile (not too exciting, but beautiful gardens) and then looked around for a place to eat. We read a bunch of menus, but we finally stopped at “Gambero Rosso” (“Red Shrimp”) because their menu was completely in Italian and completely hand-written, meaning they cooked whatever they happened to get fresh that day. We sat down outside and the owner, Giancarlo, who was also our waiter, immediately started joking with us. In total, dinner took us close to four hours, between all the courses we ordered, all the joking around, and all the time spent waiting for our mussels, but it was a great four hours. I think it’s one of those things that’s just hard to describe if you weren’t there – there are so many little stories, like Giancarlo bringing out a live lobster before he cooked it for Gabriela and telling us it was named Hugo – but I will remember the night for the rest of my life. Giancarlo gave us free appetizers and a huge discount, and told us at the end of the night that we were cute. We sat together well at the table, just enjoying each others’ company and talking, he said. It’s an “art” that young Italians have lost, at least according to him. All in all the night just had that magical quality to it that makes something memorable.
Ok, that’s a brief recounting of last weekend’s adventures… I will try to post soon about this week/weekend and my mom’s visit.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
It's a Small World After All (I just didn't think I'd realize it this soon.)
After spending Sunday evening with Penn kids, I've spent most of the last few days with Kyle. He is, like the recent graduates I saw this weekend, on a eurotrip and spending a few days in Florence. Monday night we met up for the first time, grabbed some pizza, then went to the train station to pick up his friend Sara, who will be traveling with him for the next few weeks. I was telling him on the way to the train station that I couln't wait to randomly run into someone I knew on the street, since my meeting with him was my second planned event with friends in Florence. After we got Sara, we all went back to their hostel to look at Kyle's pictures and let Sara rest a bit. We decided to get gelato and left the hostel. Kyle had lead the way there, so I was a little turned around and we soon realized we'd gone the wrong way. We were headed back in the right direction soon enough and I was just starting to get my bearings when I saw a girl on the street who I thought looked like my friend Leah Abrams from Italian and English classes at Penn. I was almost past her when I realized it WAS Leah Abrams. She and her friend were only in Florence for that night and the following day, and we ran into her on a back street at 10:30 pm! Crazy.
Tuesday I met Kyle and Sara for lunch at my favorite sandwich shop, then after I was finished with afternoon class we walked to the Piazzale Michelangelo. It used to house Michelangelo's statue of David, though only a replica stands there now as the original has been moved to the Academia. The Piazza is on the top of a hill south of center city, so visitors have a panoramic view of all the important Florentine sites. It was a beautiful day, and we could see forever, even out to the rolling hills of the countryside. On the way down we walked along the old stone walls of the city for a bit and then sat in a little garden for a few minutes before heading to dinner. I saw Kyle and Sara for the last time at lunch today - they should be on their way to Siena as I type this.
Also, I think I should say a few things about the city of Florence and the culture in general, since I've only talked about specific places.
1. Streets: All of the streets in Florence are cobblestoned. The cobblestones are big slabs of rock, not small bricks like in the United States. This definitely matches the overall look of the city with all of its gothic and Renaissance buildings. So the cobblestones look nice, but there are two problems with them: a) they collect dirt. Whenever I wear sandals, I have to scrub my feet at the end of the day because they are black. The city owns many street cleaning machines that wash down the streets every night, which brings me to problem b) Polished stones are extremely slippery when wet. It's hard to walk wearing rubber-soled shoes after it rains or right after the street cleaners come through. I actually fell down and bruised my tailbone last week wearing sandals on the cobblestones. Ouch.
2. Streets part 2: Most of the streets in Florence are very narrow and therefore one way. Their cars, like European cars in general, are much smaller than American cars, but it still can't be easy to navigate the tiny, twisty streets. Only the small portion of the current city that was the original Roman camp is organized on a grid. The city's sidewalks are narrow too, so most people walk in the middle of the street. Everyone runs out of the way when they hear a car approaching. But there are also thousands and thousands of Vespas in the city, which are impossible to hear coming until they've almost run you over. Vespas don't have to obey traffic laws as far as I can tell, though there aren't many traffic laws, as far as I can tell. There are certain streets that are fully lined with Vespas parked within inches of each other. I would NOT want to drive here.
3. A few more food observations: There are a million places to eat! Florence is now a very toursity city, so every other storefront is a restaurant or "bar." I put "bar" in quotation marks because an Italian bar is a place to eat, not necessarily a place to drink. Many have large counters where you can choose your sandwich, pizza variety, salad, etc., then sit down to eat it (though you can even sit down and order in some of them). Most also serve coffee and espresso drinks as well as water and alcohol. Usually these places don't have menus, just things in a case to choose from. This is because they change what they offer based on what they have available and what's in season. I've been eating as many meals as I can with tomatoes because everywhere I've gone they've been incredibly ripe, read and juicy. Everything served here is extremely fresh. Many places serve cheese for an appetizer: one restaurant we went to served a variety of cheese with honey and fig jam to spread on top. I have never had better cheese in my life than I've had in Florence. The only issue with such a wide variety of food choices is that there are an overwhelming number of places to go. We've started asking our teachers and the hotel concierge where to go, though sometimes we just wander around until we find a place that looks good.
Still trying to firm up plans for the weekend, though we're taking a group field trip to Assisi tomorrow. I've heard that it is one of the most spiritual places in the world, so I'm really looking forward to it.
Tuesday I met Kyle and Sara for lunch at my favorite sandwich shop, then after I was finished with afternoon class we walked to the Piazzale Michelangelo. It used to house Michelangelo's statue of David, though only a replica stands there now as the original has been moved to the Academia. The Piazza is on the top of a hill south of center city, so visitors have a panoramic view of all the important Florentine sites. It was a beautiful day, and we could see forever, even out to the rolling hills of the countryside. On the way down we walked along the old stone walls of the city for a bit and then sat in a little garden for a few minutes before heading to dinner. I saw Kyle and Sara for the last time at lunch today - they should be on their way to Siena as I type this.
Also, I think I should say a few things about the city of Florence and the culture in general, since I've only talked about specific places.
1. Streets: All of the streets in Florence are cobblestoned. The cobblestones are big slabs of rock, not small bricks like in the United States. This definitely matches the overall look of the city with all of its gothic and Renaissance buildings. So the cobblestones look nice, but there are two problems with them: a) they collect dirt. Whenever I wear sandals, I have to scrub my feet at the end of the day because they are black. The city owns many street cleaning machines that wash down the streets every night, which brings me to problem b) Polished stones are extremely slippery when wet. It's hard to walk wearing rubber-soled shoes after it rains or right after the street cleaners come through. I actually fell down and bruised my tailbone last week wearing sandals on the cobblestones. Ouch.
2. Streets part 2: Most of the streets in Florence are very narrow and therefore one way. Their cars, like European cars in general, are much smaller than American cars, but it still can't be easy to navigate the tiny, twisty streets. Only the small portion of the current city that was the original Roman camp is organized on a grid. The city's sidewalks are narrow too, so most people walk in the middle of the street. Everyone runs out of the way when they hear a car approaching. But there are also thousands and thousands of Vespas in the city, which are impossible to hear coming until they've almost run you over. Vespas don't have to obey traffic laws as far as I can tell, though there aren't many traffic laws, as far as I can tell. There are certain streets that are fully lined with Vespas parked within inches of each other. I would NOT want to drive here.
3. A few more food observations: There are a million places to eat! Florence is now a very toursity city, so every other storefront is a restaurant or "bar." I put "bar" in quotation marks because an Italian bar is a place to eat, not necessarily a place to drink. Many have large counters where you can choose your sandwich, pizza variety, salad, etc., then sit down to eat it (though you can even sit down and order in some of them). Most also serve coffee and espresso drinks as well as water and alcohol. Usually these places don't have menus, just things in a case to choose from. This is because they change what they offer based on what they have available and what's in season. I've been eating as many meals as I can with tomatoes because everywhere I've gone they've been incredibly ripe, read and juicy. Everything served here is extremely fresh. Many places serve cheese for an appetizer: one restaurant we went to served a variety of cheese with honey and fig jam to spread on top. I have never had better cheese in my life than I've had in Florence. The only issue with such a wide variety of food choices is that there are an overwhelming number of places to go. We've started asking our teachers and the hotel concierge where to go, though sometimes we just wander around until we find a place that looks good.
Still trying to firm up plans for the weekend, though we're taking a group field trip to Assisi tomorrow. I've heard that it is one of the most spiritual places in the world, so I'm really looking forward to it.
Monday, June 8, 2009
A Long Post for a Long Weekend
I’m writing at the end of my first full week, and weekend, in Italy. Classes are gearing up and we’re starting to get into the swing of things, which is good because I wasn’t doing so well without a routine. I always forget how much of a creature of habit I am.
Penn in Florence only runs classes Monday to Thursday, so all our weekends are long weekends. Thursday afternoon after class I was attempting to do some homework in the hotel lobby, since that’s the only place in the hotel we have internet. A side note before I start my story: we are staying in a hotel for the entirety of the six weeks. There are only about 40 rooms in the whole hotel, so Penn in Florence is using about 2/3 of the available space. The two brothers who work the front desk are about our age and they love to joke around with us and help us find the best things to do in Florence. I understand why Penn is building a relationship with this particular business – we provide them with consistent booking and they give us great service. Anyway, back to my story. I was quickly convinced to stop working and take a walk because it was beautiful and sunny outside; this “walk” turned into a complete evening out. We (Zach, Federico, Gavriela, Keira and I) wandered around for a while, got gelato, then went to take a break by sitting on one of the bridges. We ended up sitting on the bridge for two hours and watching the sun set over the River Arno. I’m not very good at sitting still, but in this situation I was perfectly happy to sit and talk and enjoy the sunshine. After the sun went down we decided to eat dinner and ended up going to a really cool place that serves typically Tuscan food. I had a pepper stuffed with cheese and a nice plate of pasta, plus bread, wine, and Limoncello, a sweet after-dinner drink (Lemon flavored, of course). Our waiter loved that we spoke to him in Italian and didn’t mind that we asked lots of questions, so he gave us the after-dinner drinks for free. The food in Tuscany in general is simple and fairly healthy. My Italian textbook taught me that this has been a relatively poor area for hundreds of years, so the food culture developed around what farmers could grow and raise and preservatives were rarely used. Tuscany is known for its olive oil, so there’s no need to put expensive (at least traditionally) salt in bread when there’s better flavoring available.
That was Thursday; Friday, a big group of us left for Cinque Terre, on the Lirugian coast (about 3 hours southwest of Florence by train). The Cinque Terre (literally, 5 lands) are 5 small Italian villages on the sea. We stayed in Riomaggiore, which is one of the bigger villages and the entry-point to Cinque Terre. The group booked a hostel for the two nights we stayed – each person only paid about 70 euro total. The hostel we stayed in is actually someone’s summer home, as far as I could tell from the family photos displayed around the apartment. The owners must put the hostel association in charge of renting the apartments to visitors, just as families in the Outer Banks allow realty associations to rent out their houses in the summer. The place where my friends Katie and Michelle and I stayed was really nice – newly renovated bathroom and everything. The only downside to staying in this particular place was the long walk to get it. All the villages are set on the cliffs next to the sea and we were staying at the highest point in Riomaggiore. There were probably 200 stairs plus various other walkways to get to our apartment. But the view was totally worth it. The higher up you are, the better view you have of the sea and the cliffs. The villages are surrounded by terraced farms where the villagers grow olives, lemons and other things, and you get a better view of those with altitude, as well.
The first day we were there we ate lunch, checked into our hostel, then changed and headed for the beach. The only sand beach (though I’m fairly sure the sand is imported) is at the 5th town, Moterosso, a 20 minute and 1.20 euro train ride from Riomaggiore. The air wasn’t very warm, but the water was, so we got to have a nice swim. It was great to hang out on the beach! The guys and girls in our group had made plans for the weekend separately, so the guys headed back to the hostel and the girls went to dinner. Liguria is famous for its pesto, so I had pesto lasagna for dinner – no meat, just lots of cheese and lots of pesto. After dinner we strolled around town and found a place to walk down to the bottom of one of the steep cliffs where the water smacks hard against the rocks. It was an absolutely beautiful night, and I would have been happy to sit there for a couple of hours and just listen to the wind and waves. But we headed back to Riomaggiore so we could wake up early in the morning.
Four of us got up in time to leave for a hike at 8:30 am. The villages of the Cinque Terre are connected by a train and by roads, but also by hiking paths. Between the first two towns, the path is cut into the rock of the cliffs and is relatively flat. It only takes about 20 minutes to walk between the first two, but the trail keeps you close to the sea and affords you a great view. The second leg is a little harder, changing elevation a little bit. Leg two ends with 385 or so stairs organized into switchbacks. I’ve never climbed so many stairs at one time in my life! There isn’t much to see in the second town, so we continued on right away, partially guided by a Native American man who was a little bored and eager to help us. We had the typical Penn State vs. Penn confusion – I guess it can happen anywhere. The third leg starts to change elevation a lot. We traveled up all the stairs on one side of the town only to go down just as many on the other side. The first set was made of brick, but all the other stairs we climbed were mud and stone cut out of the cliffs. It had rained in the morning, and rained a little bit while we were on our way, so it was very slippery! We were surrounded by vegetation, which is strangely tropical for the latitude. There are lots of bright pink flowers and even some cacti, though those might be planted instead of natural. All the while we had beautiful views of the towns we were heading toward and away from, as well as the sea and the forest. I’ve never seen anything like it. We stopped at Village 4 to get lunch and do a little shopping; we were worried that if it kept raining we wouldn’t be able to hike the last and hardest leg. But it stopped raining while we were eating and the sun even came out a little, so we headed for the fourth leg. There’s hardly any flat surface on the fourth hike – we were constantly going up or down stairs or dirt ramps. On the last leg the trail is very narrow in some places. There’s barely enough room for one person to pass, let alone people going in opposite directions. It’s a little scary when you’re on a foot wide path up against the side of the cliff with nothing but some trees on your other side to catch your fall into the sea. But we all made it safely, and it felt so good to start the final descent into Monterosso, a series of hundreds of stairs. We went into the sea again and looked around town, which has a lot of little boutique shops where you can buy jewelry, souvenirs and scarves. Our evening adventures back in Riomaggiore included a late night walk down to the beach under a full moon.
We got up early Sunday morning to head back to Florence. Some of us stopped in Pisa on the way. We’d been told that we didn’t really need more than an afternoon to see Pisa, so we figured we’d check it out. Everyone knows about the leaning tower of Pisa... Well now I can say I’ve been there, though it wasn’t really very exciting. It’s a tower, and it’s leaning. The tower literally puts Pisa on the map – there is nothing else to do there (except go in a museum about the tower). The city itself isn’t very big and it isn’t very nice. Florence has much more interesting architecture and is much more lively. The leaning tower itself isn’t as big as the tower in Florence, and really, if you think about it, the only reason anyone even knows about it is not because of an architectural feat, but an architectural screw-up. We didn’t really feel like paying 15 euro and waiting an hour and a half to climb the tower, so we just kind of looked around the tower complex, which includes a huge cathedral and a baptistery. I wanted to poke around the church, but there was a mass going on, so we really only got to step inside. It looked like there were some incredible frescoes on the walls, but we couldn’t get close to them. I think the baptistery cost money too, so we just headed back to Florence. I’m glad I got to go and see the tower in person, at least.
We got back and I finished my homework for Monday, then I heard from some of the guys I know who just graduated from Penn(Matt Curtis, John Bninski, Josh Veit, Terry Wang). They are eurotripping and Sunday was one of their days in Florence. We went out to dinner and then to my favorite gelateria – I know, it’s crazy that I already have a favorite gelateria. But this place is right next to the river, and we got to watch the sun go down. I’ve already seen the sunset several times, but I don’t think I will ever get tired of watching it. The colors are spectacular, and the reflection of the city on the water is perfect because the Arno is so still. It was a great night. I was missing my usual Penn crew a little bit this week, so this rendezvous was perfectly timed.
We’ll only have three days of class this week – Thursday is a group day trip to Assisi. Who knows where else we’ll end up over the weekend…
Penn in Florence only runs classes Monday to Thursday, so all our weekends are long weekends. Thursday afternoon after class I was attempting to do some homework in the hotel lobby, since that’s the only place in the hotel we have internet. A side note before I start my story: we are staying in a hotel for the entirety of the six weeks. There are only about 40 rooms in the whole hotel, so Penn in Florence is using about 2/3 of the available space. The two brothers who work the front desk are about our age and they love to joke around with us and help us find the best things to do in Florence. I understand why Penn is building a relationship with this particular business – we provide them with consistent booking and they give us great service. Anyway, back to my story. I was quickly convinced to stop working and take a walk because it was beautiful and sunny outside; this “walk” turned into a complete evening out. We (Zach, Federico, Gavriela, Keira and I) wandered around for a while, got gelato, then went to take a break by sitting on one of the bridges. We ended up sitting on the bridge for two hours and watching the sun set over the River Arno. I’m not very good at sitting still, but in this situation I was perfectly happy to sit and talk and enjoy the sunshine. After the sun went down we decided to eat dinner and ended up going to a really cool place that serves typically Tuscan food. I had a pepper stuffed with cheese and a nice plate of pasta, plus bread, wine, and Limoncello, a sweet after-dinner drink (Lemon flavored, of course). Our waiter loved that we spoke to him in Italian and didn’t mind that we asked lots of questions, so he gave us the after-dinner drinks for free. The food in Tuscany in general is simple and fairly healthy. My Italian textbook taught me that this has been a relatively poor area for hundreds of years, so the food culture developed around what farmers could grow and raise and preservatives were rarely used. Tuscany is known for its olive oil, so there’s no need to put expensive (at least traditionally) salt in bread when there’s better flavoring available.
That was Thursday; Friday, a big group of us left for Cinque Terre, on the Lirugian coast (about 3 hours southwest of Florence by train). The Cinque Terre (literally, 5 lands) are 5 small Italian villages on the sea. We stayed in Riomaggiore, which is one of the bigger villages and the entry-point to Cinque Terre. The group booked a hostel for the two nights we stayed – each person only paid about 70 euro total. The hostel we stayed in is actually someone’s summer home, as far as I could tell from the family photos displayed around the apartment. The owners must put the hostel association in charge of renting the apartments to visitors, just as families in the Outer Banks allow realty associations to rent out their houses in the summer. The place where my friends Katie and Michelle and I stayed was really nice – newly renovated bathroom and everything. The only downside to staying in this particular place was the long walk to get it. All the villages are set on the cliffs next to the sea and we were staying at the highest point in Riomaggiore. There were probably 200 stairs plus various other walkways to get to our apartment. But the view was totally worth it. The higher up you are, the better view you have of the sea and the cliffs. The villages are surrounded by terraced farms where the villagers grow olives, lemons and other things, and you get a better view of those with altitude, as well.
The first day we were there we ate lunch, checked into our hostel, then changed and headed for the beach. The only sand beach (though I’m fairly sure the sand is imported) is at the 5th town, Moterosso, a 20 minute and 1.20 euro train ride from Riomaggiore. The air wasn’t very warm, but the water was, so we got to have a nice swim. It was great to hang out on the beach! The guys and girls in our group had made plans for the weekend separately, so the guys headed back to the hostel and the girls went to dinner. Liguria is famous for its pesto, so I had pesto lasagna for dinner – no meat, just lots of cheese and lots of pesto. After dinner we strolled around town and found a place to walk down to the bottom of one of the steep cliffs where the water smacks hard against the rocks. It was an absolutely beautiful night, and I would have been happy to sit there for a couple of hours and just listen to the wind and waves. But we headed back to Riomaggiore so we could wake up early in the morning.
Four of us got up in time to leave for a hike at 8:30 am. The villages of the Cinque Terre are connected by a train and by roads, but also by hiking paths. Between the first two towns, the path is cut into the rock of the cliffs and is relatively flat. It only takes about 20 minutes to walk between the first two, but the trail keeps you close to the sea and affords you a great view. The second leg is a little harder, changing elevation a little bit. Leg two ends with 385 or so stairs organized into switchbacks. I’ve never climbed so many stairs at one time in my life! There isn’t much to see in the second town, so we continued on right away, partially guided by a Native American man who was a little bored and eager to help us. We had the typical Penn State vs. Penn confusion – I guess it can happen anywhere. The third leg starts to change elevation a lot. We traveled up all the stairs on one side of the town only to go down just as many on the other side. The first set was made of brick, but all the other stairs we climbed were mud and stone cut out of the cliffs. It had rained in the morning, and rained a little bit while we were on our way, so it was very slippery! We were surrounded by vegetation, which is strangely tropical for the latitude. There are lots of bright pink flowers and even some cacti, though those might be planted instead of natural. All the while we had beautiful views of the towns we were heading toward and away from, as well as the sea and the forest. I’ve never seen anything like it. We stopped at Village 4 to get lunch and do a little shopping; we were worried that if it kept raining we wouldn’t be able to hike the last and hardest leg. But it stopped raining while we were eating and the sun even came out a little, so we headed for the fourth leg. There’s hardly any flat surface on the fourth hike – we were constantly going up or down stairs or dirt ramps. On the last leg the trail is very narrow in some places. There’s barely enough room for one person to pass, let alone people going in opposite directions. It’s a little scary when you’re on a foot wide path up against the side of the cliff with nothing but some trees on your other side to catch your fall into the sea. But we all made it safely, and it felt so good to start the final descent into Monterosso, a series of hundreds of stairs. We went into the sea again and looked around town, which has a lot of little boutique shops where you can buy jewelry, souvenirs and scarves. Our evening adventures back in Riomaggiore included a late night walk down to the beach under a full moon.
We got up early Sunday morning to head back to Florence. Some of us stopped in Pisa on the way. We’d been told that we didn’t really need more than an afternoon to see Pisa, so we figured we’d check it out. Everyone knows about the leaning tower of Pisa... Well now I can say I’ve been there, though it wasn’t really very exciting. It’s a tower, and it’s leaning. The tower literally puts Pisa on the map – there is nothing else to do there (except go in a museum about the tower). The city itself isn’t very big and it isn’t very nice. Florence has much more interesting architecture and is much more lively. The leaning tower itself isn’t as big as the tower in Florence, and really, if you think about it, the only reason anyone even knows about it is not because of an architectural feat, but an architectural screw-up. We didn’t really feel like paying 15 euro and waiting an hour and a half to climb the tower, so we just kind of looked around the tower complex, which includes a huge cathedral and a baptistery. I wanted to poke around the church, but there was a mass going on, so we really only got to step inside. It looked like there were some incredible frescoes on the walls, but we couldn’t get close to them. I think the baptistery cost money too, so we just headed back to Florence. I’m glad I got to go and see the tower in person, at least.
We got back and I finished my homework for Monday, then I heard from some of the guys I know who just graduated from Penn(Matt Curtis, John Bninski, Josh Veit, Terry Wang). They are eurotripping and Sunday was one of their days in Florence. We went out to dinner and then to my favorite gelateria – I know, it’s crazy that I already have a favorite gelateria. But this place is right next to the river, and we got to watch the sun go down. I’ve already seen the sunset several times, but I don’t think I will ever get tired of watching it. The colors are spectacular, and the reflection of the city on the water is perfect because the Arno is so still. It was a great night. I was missing my usual Penn crew a little bit this week, so this rendezvous was perfectly timed.
We’ll only have three days of class this week – Thursday is a group day trip to Assisi. Who knows where else we’ll end up over the weekend…
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
First Impressions
I am now in Florence, Italy! It was a long trip over - three hours on the tarmac at Dulles because of thunderstorms. My connecting flight to Florence was supposed to leave only an hour after I landed in Frankfurt, so needless to say, I missed that. I was thinking before I left that the only thing I was scared of for my first trip alone was missing my flight. But I was perfectly capable of handling the situation with the help of a friend I ran into on the plane and my recollection of the Frankfurt airport from my trip to Germany. Maybe I just needed a little bit of a test to gain some confidence in my own traveling abilities. And the best part was that we got bumped up to business class on our flight to Florence because those were the only seats left on the plane. I got shrimp cocktail for lunch on an airplane!
I already starting to get to know the city after a few days. Florence is extremely walkable; nothing is more than 15 or 20 minutes from our hotel on foot. The big tourist attractions are a stone's throw from our hotel. We are literally 30 seconds from the duomo, Florence's main cathedral, finished in the 1300's. I slept too late the first night and my roommates went out on their own, so I went out on my own too. I sat in the duomo for probably 45 minutes, just trying to take in all the architecture and people-watching. The building itself is incredible, from the height of the dome and the paintings decorating it to the intricate patterns in the floor's marble. Today I went inside the Baptistry, also. The Baptistery is right in front of the cathedral and it was actually completed before the cathedral itself. It has an octagonal shape, which our art history instructor told us was to represent the 7 days of creation plus the day of resurrection. The brochure in the Baptistery itself says that the 8 sides represent the 7 days of the earthly week and the eternal day at the second coming. Either way, the 8 sides are reminders of rebirth at baptism. The textbook we're using for art history explains how important public art was for reminding the people daily of their faith and explaining Bible stories to those who couldn't read - a tradition I think is lost on modern people in general. The Baptistery also has Byzantine-style mosaics on its dome. The single dome tells 6 or 8 Bible stories and also has a depction of Christ's judgment. The background of each panel is done in gold tiles - it is truly a sight to see.
I'm doing ok with my Italian. I'm trying to understand/read/speak as much as possible, but it's hard. All the waiters and shopkeepers speak English; even if you order in Italian, they usually answer in English. My Italian professor told us to ask people to speak to us in Italian, and if they don't, to leave. There are a million places to eat and shop in Florence, so we're not supposed to waste our time at a place where the help won't speak to us in Italian. We'll see if it works!
A dopo,
Ellen
I already starting to get to know the city after a few days. Florence is extremely walkable; nothing is more than 15 or 20 minutes from our hotel on foot. The big tourist attractions are a stone's throw from our hotel. We are literally 30 seconds from the duomo, Florence's main cathedral, finished in the 1300's. I slept too late the first night and my roommates went out on their own, so I went out on my own too. I sat in the duomo for probably 45 minutes, just trying to take in all the architecture and people-watching. The building itself is incredible, from the height of the dome and the paintings decorating it to the intricate patterns in the floor's marble. Today I went inside the Baptistry, also. The Baptistery is right in front of the cathedral and it was actually completed before the cathedral itself. It has an octagonal shape, which our art history instructor told us was to represent the 7 days of creation plus the day of resurrection. The brochure in the Baptistery itself says that the 8 sides represent the 7 days of the earthly week and the eternal day at the second coming. Either way, the 8 sides are reminders of rebirth at baptism. The textbook we're using for art history explains how important public art was for reminding the people daily of their faith and explaining Bible stories to those who couldn't read - a tradition I think is lost on modern people in general. The Baptistery also has Byzantine-style mosaics on its dome. The single dome tells 6 or 8 Bible stories and also has a depction of Christ's judgment. The background of each panel is done in gold tiles - it is truly a sight to see.
I'm doing ok with my Italian. I'm trying to understand/read/speak as much as possible, but it's hard. All the waiters and shopkeepers speak English; even if you order in Italian, they usually answer in English. My Italian professor told us to ask people to speak to us in Italian, and if they don't, to leave. There are a million places to eat and shop in Florence, so we're not supposed to waste our time at a place where the help won't speak to us in Italian. We'll see if it works!
A dopo,
Ellen
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
An Introduction
In 1878, Henry James created the literary archetype of the "American girl abroad" with the publication of a novella called Daisy Miller. The work took its name from its leading lady, a young American girl from Schenectady, New York, who travels the European continent with her mother and brother. Wherever she goes, Daisy challenges the strict social conventions of upper-class European conservatives. Instead of sitting in parlors, she goes out to see and experience the things that interest her, never afraid of having a real adventure and meeting a host of fascinating people along the way. Her peers question her motivation for breaking so many norms: is Daisy just a naive American girl who doesn't know any better, or does she consciously choose to push boundaries?
Just as James's novella chronicles the European travels of Daisy Miller, this blog with chronicle my European travels. I'll be in Florence for six weeks this summer, taking courses in Italian and Art History. Then I'll be at Oxford for the academic year 2009-2010. Though I don't plan to meet my untimely end in the Coliseum or send the whole of Roman society into an uproar as Daisy Miller does, I will be an "American girl abroad" in her spirit, exploring new cultures and finding my way around a different continent. How will almost a whole year abroad change my life? Daisy found herself so transformed that returning to the States was inconceivable for her, a sentiment very much on my mind as I prepare to leave for Italy at the end of the week.
Stay tuned!! I hope to be updating this on a fairly regular basis with pictures and stories from my travels.
--Ellen
Just as James's novella chronicles the European travels of Daisy Miller, this blog with chronicle my European travels. I'll be in Florence for six weeks this summer, taking courses in Italian and Art History. Then I'll be at Oxford for the academic year 2009-2010. Though I don't plan to meet my untimely end in the Coliseum or send the whole of Roman society into an uproar as Daisy Miller does, I will be an "American girl abroad" in her spirit, exploring new cultures and finding my way around a different continent. How will almost a whole year abroad change my life? Daisy found herself so transformed that returning to the States was inconceivable for her, a sentiment very much on my mind as I prepare to leave for Italy at the end of the week.
Stay tuned!! I hope to be updating this on a fairly regular basis with pictures and stories from my travels.
--Ellen
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