Bath Nostalgia

I didn't take outfit photos today but I felt like blogging, and I needed something to make me feel happy. So I thought I'd share some photos from the day I went to Bath with Shaun last year. It was a bit of a last-minute trip, as I was planning to leave England in September and I wanted to see Bath before I left. I'd heard it was beautiful, and I love Jane Austen, so we booked seats on a coach and off we went!

My favorite thing about Bath was the architecture. It really felt like we were in another time. We also had so much fun in the Fashion Museum, which was located in the old Assembly Rooms (where Jane Austen attended balls!), and then went for tea at the Jane Austen Centre. We did a bit of shopping, people watching, and generally relaxed in the touristy atmosphere. We didn't go to the Roman Baths, as tickets were £12 a pop and the line was a mile long, but I think I would have enjoyed the Fashion Museum more anyway!

But I'll stop talking now and let you see the pictures. I loved Bath and I hope I'll be back there again one day.

Excerpts From a Year Abroad

I'm nearing the end of my stay here in London. It's only three weeks and a few days before I pack it all up and head back to the States. There are a lot of conflicting emotions happening in my head, the dominant of which is stress. I only have a little over three weeks to finish my dissertation, write a critical essay about how hard it was writing a stupid novel, and put together some sort of presentation about my time doing work experience at Little, Brown. I also have to pack up all my stuff, get rid of the things I don't want or can't take back with me (my pillows and duvet, sob), and do as many awesome things as I can in the UK before it's thousands of miles and an ocean away.

Wow, just typing that made me super emo. Never mind. Let's talk about nicer things! Namely my favorite memories over the 11-ish months that I've been here so far. I have so many awesome memories that it's actually kind of impossible to pick only a few, but these are some of the bigger events and the things that really stick out to me. I might do more of these later but who knows. The first, the photo above, is from a couple weeks ago when I visited my friends Richard and Emma in Stockport (just outside Manchester). Richard drove me and some of his grad students around in the countryside, and I got to see where the Bronte sisters lived in Yorkshire. A really amazing, and totally English, weekend. I could have stayed there forever. It was truly one of the most magical few days I've ever experienced.

A (very cold) November weekend in Vienna. It was so fun to meet up with Rachel, who I'd only known on the internet until then, and who turned out to be super awesome! This is Rachel, her flatmate Samantha, and me at Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna, freezing slowly to death. We visited Christmas markets and drank mulled wine and wandered the streets of Vienna. It was so magical (lots of things are magical it turns out).

The orangutan/camel/llama hybrid from Hampton Court Palace. We laughed at it for ages. Seriously the best moment ever.

MARK GATISS. Enough said.

Spending Christmas with my super good friend Lily and her partner Angus. We stayed in a flat right below the Edinburgh Castle, and wandered the streets of Old Town, ate stew, drank pints, and spent cozy nights indoors watching weird British television. I also slammed my finger in a door, which was exciting. Lily hugged me and made me drink mulled wine afterwards, which totally helped.

Shaun and Lucy! I know they're not a memory, but meeting Lucy and becoming such close friends with Shaun was one of the best things to come out of moving here, hands down, no contest! I absolutely love these girls, and they're now two of my best friends. Every second with them is always tons of fun!

When Greg came to visit! Wow, what a perfect week and a half. We hadn't seen each other for over 7 months, and by the end of his stay it was like I'd fallen in love with him all over again, even more than I thought possible. We had afternoon tea at Chatsworth House (where this picture was taken), watched The Apprentice while it hailed and rained incessantly outside, ordered pizza, wandered around Walthamstow, and generally had a very very good time.

The traumatizing day in Lewes! This creepy dalmatian life-size furry doll thing accurately sums up the bizarreness of that day. Antiques, bad taxidermy, over-priced burgers at the Real Eating Co. (bastards!), rain, 3+ hours in a pub with drunken creepers, and at the end of it all... hysteria in the train station. So good.

Brenn's visit! Shaun's and my mutual friend Brenn (the reason we met in the first place!) came to visit us for a week in July. It was so fun to see her and share London with such a good friend!

Visiting Emily in Bonn, Germany. I've known Emily since college, and I haven't seen her since college either -- silly girl went off and joined the Peace Corps, and then moved to Germany to be with her German lover. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but I flew to see her for a short weekend (only one night) in Bonn, but it was so much fun to catch up, buy tons of Haribo from the Haribo shop, and visit Beethoven's birth house! We also saw the corpse flower the day it was set to bloom, but were a few hours too early to see it in full bloom. Regrets!

Being in London during the Olympics. Wow, what a seriously awesome summer to be in London, you guys! First the Diamond Jubilee, now the Olympics. So much British patriotism! Sadly I haven't been to any Olympic events, but the atmosphere in London is amazing, and watching the Opening Ceremony live on the BBC was seriously incredible. We could hear the fireworks from Shaun's flat! So cool!

Shaun and I are leaving on Saturday morning for Northern Ireland, where we'll stay two nights in a B&B in County Antrim along the coast. We're gonna see the Giant's Causeway, Dunluce Castle, and hopefully lots of green hillsides, rain-lashed cliffs, and pints of Guinness! I'm beyond excited, and hopefully if I'm not a giant pile of lazy, I'll make a post about it when we get back. We also recently went to Bath for a day, and I mean to post about it, but who knows if/when that will happen.

Anyway... I think I'll leave the sadsack goodbye post until just before I leave. But I do want to say some of my life's best, most memorable, and incredible experiences have taken place in the last 11 months. I can't begin to describe how grateful I am for every moment I've had here!

Lewes

A couple weeks ago, feeling the claustrophobia that only a stinky winter London can bring, Shaun and I went on a spontaneous(ish) day trip to Lewes, a village in Sussex. We'd been considering a blustery coastal trip to Dorset for a few days, but it's way stressful planning a last-minute weekend trip when you don't have many monies, so we decided to take a day trip instead. We picked Lewes because 1) it has a 15th century bookstore, and 2) it has a castle. Those were pretty much the only reasons. Also it had a garden, which was an appealing possibility until the rain started.

I'd say the highlight of the trip was the castle. By far. There were creepy wax figures hiding in tower rooms, hunched over by windows, backlit and eerie. I was unsure whether or not the first one was real. In fact now that I think about it, I believe there was only one wax figure. I must have imagined there were more in my horror-filled retrospective. One wax figure, though. In the entire castle. Why did they make ONE GUY, and then just sit him on a windowsill like Gollum? It makes no sense. Also, is it the Thing now for castles to have wax figures straight from Uncanny Valley, dressed up in historical garb? All the castles I've been to in the UK so far (all two of them) have had unsettling wax figures scattered around. I don't get it. In fact I don't want to get it, I just want it to end.

Also I'm a dick and not posting a photo of the wax figure out of laziness. HA.
















Lewes is a weird village. It has about five billion antique shops, a crap restaurant called The Real Eating Company (bad service, ridiculous prices, not enough ketchup, too many children, mandatory gratuity, but delicious food), lots of nice cars going about, and an astounding amount of really awful Victorian taxidermy. Lewes! Where dreams come true.

Stonehenge

This past Sunday I went to Stonehenge with Shaun. She'd been there before but I hadn't, so I found a bus tour that only cost about £30, including admission to Stonehenge. I hate trying to sort out public transportation. Finding the quickest route plus cheapest fares is a pile of annoying in my opinion, so this worked out perfectly! We only had an hour to walk around the stones and take photos, as well as buy food (which I needed desperately), which we complained about for a while, but it turned out to be a pretty reasonable amount of time to wander slowly in a circle out in the cold.










I've always wanted to go to Stonehenge. I think it's one of the top 10 places I'd love to visit before I die (not sure; I never made an actual list), but now I can cross it off! It was a bit different than expected, just because it is literally right off the road, so you look a bit past the grazing sheep and there's the motorway. I didn't find this to be much of a mood killer, though. Stonehenge is so beautiful that you could stand it in the middle of London and it would still be this glorious, mysterious thing.

I was disappointed that it wasn't dreary and grey when we went (like every other day in England ever, except the one day I go to Stonehenge), but it was oddly sunny. I had this vision in my head of Stonehenge emerging out of a druidic fog, but it turned out to be so gorgeous anyway. The shadows on the stones, and cast across the unearthly green grass made the whole experience just as magical as if it'd been foggy and misted with rain. As we made our way around the stones the sun started to set, and I got a few great shots of Stonehenge with the beginnings of a sunset behind it.

Getting out of the city for even a short while was just what I needed. We got to shiver and breathe the cold English air for an hour, which was perfect! I can't wait to do more things outside of London. I need to make a list of all the castles and villages I'd like to visit, because clearly, you can't explore England unless you're pretending it's still Medieval Britain.

Thoughts on England

When I first got here, I had no idea what to expect. I'd never been to the UK before. I mean, let's be honest, I probably had more of an idea than most Americans upon disembarking at Heathrow Airport. I was, and am, a self-professed Anglophile so I wasn't coming here expecting to be catered to as a special snowflake American by a bunch of men in bowler hats saying "pip pip, cheerio," or something. In fact I've often wished it would be better if I'd just been born in the England so I wouldn't have to deal with all of this "moving overseas" business. However now that I'm here, I've been feeling homesick and missing all things American, instead of immersing myself in the English culture. Which is frustrating, but I feel a bit differently after today.

Today I had a moment of complete and utter love for England. I was walking from the bus stop to the Uxbridge tube station, and passed a pair of well-dressed middle-aged businessmen, probably on their lunch break, and I felt this surge of affection for them. Not them as individuals, but as English men doing their English thing. And I thought, here I am, in England, the place I've dreamed for years of one day visiting, and here are two ordinary, unassuming businessmen wearing shiny black shoes and speaking to one another in their fantastic accents, just living. I went all the way to the tube station feeling like I'd been plucked out of the sky and placed exactly where I was meant to be at that moment. It wasn't anything outwardly special; it was people at the outdoor Starbucks kiosk, paying in pound coins instead of dollars. It was the cold blustery outdoor seating at Costa's, an old man with a cream-filled donut, the melodic intonation of British accents all around me, and this overwhelming contentedness that made me smile like an idiot.

The bus ride from Uxbridge station to West Ruislip was eye-opening for me as well. I looked out the left side of the bus windows, which for some reason I never look out of when I'm taking that bus, but I did today. I saw these amazing houses. Seriously amazing. If you're from England you'll be rolling your eyes, but coming from America where our oldest buildings are from like 1970 (I exaggerate... barely), just the architecture here is the most incredible thing. And these houses, they were so gorgeous: slightly dilapidated in a loving, mossy sort of way, and they seemed to edge the countryside as though they were about to lose themselves in it, yet remained clinging to the outskirts of London despite themselves. They were beautiful.

There's also this pub, The Old Fox, and today I noticed as we drove past that there's an old red phone booth next to the car park, behind some overgrown shrubbery, just before a little pond that looks half-choked with grass and undergrowth. The phone booth leans precariously toward the pond, and it's clear that nobody uses it anymore. But it struck me as absolutely the most lovely thing I'd ever seen. A lonely, leaning phone booth. It almost set me off crying, but maps of Scotland did that for me already this week. Gotta keep it in check, Meg.




London is a vast, overwhelming, sensuous, heady, loud, fast, indescribable city. It truly is. If you've been to New York, that is nothing. It's really nothing compared to London, at least for me. London is so old, and so full of history and life and color and culture and sound and taste, that I can hardly breathe thinking about it. It's more than a human should be able to take, and yet we do, every day, and we don't appreciate it for what it is: it's poetry. It's music, history, and every story in the world, happening right now. That's what cities are, they're a trillion stories and feelings and thoughts happening all at once, taking shape in their buildings and streets and the rivers that cut through them. London is as loud as a scream and as subtle as a sigh. I can't fit it all inside, and sometimes I don't want to. It's too much for me, and in the midst of all that noise, I need something to hold me steady. Like the old phone booth by the green-choked pond.

London, with its unending need to consume, made me forget where I am. I forgot that I hadn't been deposited alone in a roiling mass of voices and faces and stone and sounds. I forgot that American pancakes weren't the most important thing in the world, and that I couldn't get them in London which made me want them all the more. I forgot that I wasn't trapped in what seemed like a beautiful foreign prison. So many people, so many places, and not one basket of bottomless fries and free refills on my large diet Coke? Not one Big Gulp? Not a single Olive Garden bread stick? That's all I could think, and it was frustrating, because all I had was this great baffling city and nothing that I wanted. Nothing felt familiar to me and I needed something I could latch onto and call mine.

So I latched onto this phone booth, and those businessmen. They weren't just another tile in the London mosaic for me. They were individual, they were England, and I feel so relieved.

Lately I've been thinking about what originally drew me to England, before all of the fangirl nonsense and dreams of bumping into Benedict Cumberbatch on the street. Why do I feel such an affinity for a place I've never been to? Why here? I looked into day trips out of London, into the countryside, and that's what reminded me. It's the English countryside. The British countryside, really; I'll take it all: Scotland, England, Wales, all of it. I'll even take Ireland, thanks very much. It's these isles, the ridiculously green dampness of them, the rain, the sea, the crumbling castles and Stonehenge and Yorkshire and the Cotswolds and the Scottish Highlands. I've not been to any of these places yet, but I look at pictures of them, I look at maps of Scotland for godsake, and I cry. I wish I could explain why this place effects me the way it does, but perhaps you don't need me to. Maybe some of you understand, and maybe some of you have your own places that make you cry just thinking of them. But when I look at photos of old stone houses covered in moss and ivy, it's like the part of my brain that processes photos of Britain is mainlined to my heart, and it aches for these places. It aches for wet green hills, dark seas, crumbling houses and sheep grazing within rock walls. That's why I came here.

London is all-consuming, just like any great city should be, and I love it for this. But I need to get out; I need to see the country, the soil, the trees and the sky. I need to stand under the clouds and get soaked in English rain. (Amongst other cheesy things.) Really, though, that's all I want. I just want to get out of the city and see England.