Blogs are supposed to be angsty, so...

I finally met with my assigned adviser this afternoon. She's nice, and she does kind of religious institutiony type things, so she's a great person to talk to for advice on that kind of thing. And her basic reaction to the discussion of what I'm interested in and think I want to pursue for my thesis and potentially beyond was something along the lines of "wow that's really interesting. but you know you can't really do that in the States, right?" Her take on the fact that pretty much EVERY SINGLE PROFESSOR in the US focuses on the Mediterranean/Spain/Italy is that it isn't cool/politically correct to focus on England. Too much WASP animosity. The modern trend is to decrease association with English heritage and to instead embrace other identities like Irish, Italian, whatever. Plus history is an easy department to force to be multicultural by employing people who study "minority" kinds of areas. And there's no student demand for courses on England. Which I actually disagree with. I think there is a lot of frustration amongst college kids about the lack of courses on Western Europe. That was true at BU and its been true at all of the schools people here went to for undergrad. I think there is actually a void that universities are neglecting to fill, its just that there is no incentive to fill that void by hiring another medievalist. Ok, end rant. Sorry.

So basically her suggestion was to either do a PhD here and get a job here or find a really great adviser in the States and go really broad comparative. She did a PhD here and had planned to go back to the States to teach but was basically laughed at when she said what she focused on. So her options were to come here or to reinvent her academic interests and focus areas.

All of which is, you know, super fantastic. I'm so excited to not have employment options. Grar. So I'm supposed to think about doing a thematic comparative study of religious institutions across England/France/Sicily and perhaps Spain. Not that there's anything wrong with that in particular, I just have basically no background in Sicily or Spain. Although, Frederick II is basically my favorite historical person EVER and he was sort of Sicilian. Try wikipedia-ing him, he's pretty much awesome. Crazy, but awesome.

And I can't stay here, if only because my stomach rebels every time I eat pretty much anything that isn't bread, crackers, Nutrigrain bars, yogurt, rice or cereal. So basically prepackaged boxed items. PB+J has been ok, lunch meat and cheese sandwiches are not. Ditto grilled cheese, so I know its not the lunch meat. Actually, pretty much anything involving cheese is not. I think I just can't handle crazy British cheddar cheese or something. Except that I can eat the chips with cheese from the place down the street. Ok, so make that anything involving cheese from the local grocery store. Now I realize that you can have an adjustment period for food and whatnot in a foreign country, but it has been almost a month at this point, so I don't know. On the upside, only eating like 1.5 meals a day and walking around everywhere/ up 3 flights of stairs to my room means my jeans are at the point where I need to obtain a belt. Or just shrink them in the dryer that is apparently notorious for running hotter than it says it is and therefore shrinking all your clothes.

So basically this amounts to I have a year to kind of re-evaluate what I want to work on and then apply for grad schools for entrance 2011. Of course that also means I'll have to find a job for that year. And apparently I shouldn't go with the woman at BC because I really need to try to move away from political/legal stuff around the Conquest because that won't let me go broad-based comparative. Which is kind of disappointing because BC does pretty intensive "professor training" (teaching you how to develop a curriculum, how to lecture, basics for courses you're likely to have to teach like Western Civ) and they do tuition remainders and a pretty nice stipend for all their grad students. Plus it is sort of in Boston, which I already know and am familiar with. So now I have like no plan for my future and my stomach hurts. Great day. Now I'm going to watch tv and avoid reading. I've got tomorrow off; I'll do it then.

Also, I am officially allergic to dish soap. All kinds of dish soap. It makes my hands very not happy with me.

Whee, Time Change

Britain switched out of daylight savings time today, which meant that I actually woke up at 9:45, not 10:45 (somehow quarter to 10 just sounds like I was more productive/on the ball than quarter to 11... maybe that's just me.) This also means that for the next week, I will only be 4 hours ahead of Eastern time. Just in case any of you were wondering when a good chance to catch me on skype would be. I'm also open to AIM if you don't use skype and want to stay in touch, but I just use AIM express for the express (haha) purpose of tracking down certain people. So take this as the perfect opportunity to get in touch with me if we haven't caught up in awhile, since now I'll be going to bed around 8:30 pm Eastern time so you don't have to interrupt your dinners :)

In other news, the weather was bleh today, so I basically didn't leave the house. I also didn't get nearly as much work done as I should have. But... it'll work out. And now I'm off to read Bede until I fall asleep. Also, I need a Halloween costume for the Halloween party my house is throwing. Preferably something that I can put together fairly easily/cheaply from thrift stores. Comment with any brilliant (or not so brilliant) ideas you have!

Illuminating York Festival

The Illuminating York Festival is an annual event in which, basically, the city puts lights on things. Now, this may sound kind of lame, but it is actually kind of cool. They illuminate various (mostly historic) stuff with various colored lights and hold different exhibitions and some museums offer special "torchlit" (that's by flashlight for us Americans) tours. To the right is an example- a section of the Medieval wall running around St Mary's lit up in blue & green. It is kind of cool because they hold this the weekend before and the weekend of Halloween, so you can go get your spook on with mood lighting! They also do several, well, lightshows for lack of a better word. One, entitled Vespertine, was projected onto one of the courtyard walls at King's Manor (that's where I go to school!) and focused on nocturnal wildlife.

Here's a section from the show featuring predators after a hedgehog. There was also this weird thing in a square where they projected laser patterns down at the ground from a crane way up above. The crane also had a camera and the feed was projected onto a screen, so you saw the crane's perspective of all the little people playing in the light patterns. It sounded really cool on the festival website, but was actually just kind of eh. But, there WAS the world's coolest etch-a-sketch.

This is just the tail end of one artist's session, but basically, people draw on tablet things and it is projected onto the Multangular Tower (which you might remember from a previous post.)

Most of the really fun historic building/museum stuff doesn't happen until next weekend, but hopefully I won't come down with swine flu like everyone else and will be able to go and tell you all about it.

On a complete side note, if you have not yet received a postcard, I swear it is coming, but the UK postal service is on strike, so nothing is being sent out of the country right now. If you would like a postcard and have not yet told me so, please let me know and get me an address to send it to either by facebook or email if you don't feel comfortable posting it here (I wouldn't blame you.)

Today I had the fun experience of talking to Amanda (hi Amanda!) who's in Japan. Fun times with time differences. Also, hearts to everyone who's kept in touch; its nice to have pals from home to talk to :)

First Full Week of Classes

Congratulations to me, first week of classes is done. Since classes are now in full swing, this is pretty much how I spend most of my time. Reading articles/books/etc in my spiffy new York sweatshirt on the bed because if I sit at my desk under the eaves I smack my head into the stupid cross beam every time I stand up.

I think the biggest difference between undergraduate and graduate classes (and I think my fellow grad students will agree) is the amount of reading. We have to read A LOT for every class. It is also different because there's not list of course books that you are expected to go out and buy. In the UK (apparently this is true for both undergrad and graduate courses), they don't expect you to purchase pretty much any books (with the exception of language grammars and dictionaries). Instead, the expectation is that you will get everything from the library. This would be great if I wasn't a 40 minute walk away from the big campus library. King's Manor does have its own library with some stuff in it, but they a) don't have everything that the main library does, and b) only have 1 copy if they have it, so unless you are super aggressive about checking out books before everyone else in your class, no such luck.

All of my classes are once a week seminars, which means that every week I get to track down new loads of books and articles from either the main library, the Minster library, KM library, or the internet. This has led me to question whether it really is more convenient to live in city centre near my classes since I have to trek up to campus for the library all the time or to visit history professors' office hours. I think it is a toss up- whether you live on campus or in city centre, you get to do a lot of walking back and forth. Unless you are made of money and take the bus a lot.

Speaking of money, I have some! I can pay my tuition! Huzzah! Course, according to the online currency converter, my $15,000 USD should have been just over 9000 BPDs, but it came out to 8800 which kind of puzzles me, but at least I have money and will not be kicked out of college.

Here's a brief rundown of what I'm learning about this term.
1) Medieval Latin. The Latin placement test put me into Beginners Plus, which kind of made me sad because I thought I knew more than someone just barely better than someone who knows zero Latin. But after the first class, I heartily agree with that placement. Beginners Plus is ACTUALLY basically Intermediate but with a quick review of all of the grammar structures. I think this works out well because the amount of Latin I remember from the last time I took it is, well, not super (it was better before I went to Italy last spring break. That got Italian all stuck in my head and now I'm thoroughly confused about what is Latin and what is Italian), and because I've only ever worked with classical Latin, so this gives me a chance to run through some of the ways the language changed in the medieval period and in some of the vocabulary that was invented, particularly to describe church related things that classical Latin just didn't have words for. Medieval Latin is a bit nicer because the sentence structures more closely resemble modern English structuring, but they get tricky and do things like write an "ae" ending as just "e." And lets not even go into the abbreviations they used in manuscripts. But I actually like the class, which is good. The teacher is this cute older English woman who's very no nonsense and figures that we can't help our ignorance because teachers today were often taught in the 40's and they didn't care about things like grammar back then. She's pretty funny.

2) Paleography. For you non-medievalists, this is the study of manuscripts, writing, and books basically. We learn how to read different scripts so that we can make sense out of primary resources and actually read all the medieval manuscripts still around. We also learn about standards in form and technique for various types of documents (i.e. a charter is usually written on parchment with specific dimensions, etc.) Right now we're basically just doing an introduction to the field, but later we break into groups to study in depth the documents and scripts used in a specific time period or document type (for example, books are often written in different scripts than documents, which were typically written for the king/court where speed of production was necessary.) The class is taught by an American/Canadian- someone told me she was American, but she went to school in Canada so I'm not sure- who has managed to develop a tinge of English accent. With the exception of one professor who still sounds very American, most of the North American professors have developed a strange hybrid accent. I'm going to come home and not know how to speak properly! I'll be calling things shops instead of stores, and weekENDs instead of WEEKends.

3) Old English. Taught by a PhD student who lives in my house (makes for a handy resource when stumped by homework!), so far all we've worked on is pronunciation. Because with the exception of a few words, it is not anything like modern English. Well, to be precise, we're learning West Saxon, but that was the dominant dialect of Old English in literature/documents after Alfred the Great.

Stolen from Ellen:
Alfred is Good
Alfred is Great
To read his Life
I just can't wait.

Sorry, medievalists humor. This is what happens when you put us in a house together... Anyhoo, it is definitely interesting. I actually think my Italian background is helpful here, which is strange since Italian is a romance language and OE is West Germanic, but I'm used to enunciating all vowels in a word. I don't know if I'll ever get the different "th" sounds, but its only the first week. And after this class I might be able to read through some of Beowulf in the original. Pretty snazzy.

4) Core Module. This is a class all Med. Studies MA students have to take. But, they break it down into various groups, so it isn't like a big lecture class full of all 20 of us or anything. The first few weeks, everyone is either taking Approaches to Archaeology, Intro to Art History, or Reading Published Medieval Texts. This is designed to introduce us to a discipline we don't have much background in. I'm taking Reading Published Medieval Texts, which is sort of a hybrid literature/history thing. I haven't done much with medieval literature, so I figured it'd be a good section to take. In a couple of weeks, everyone will be switching to one of three case studies which we will then look at through various interdisciplinary approaches. This is all designed to help us think and work with multiple disciplines, since that's kind of the point of doing an interdisciplinary masters program.

5) Saints and Sanctity. This class looks at early Medieval religious developments- specifically looking at the rise and development of saints cults. It is definitely interesting. But we kind of got tsk tsked by the professor after the first session. Apparently class was slow and he felt he led discussion too much. I didn't think it was particularly slow, and I don't know how we were supposed to do anything about him leading discussion, since the whole class was basically him posing questions, us discussing them, then him posing some other ones. I'm sure we would have been happy to pose our own questions if he hadn't been clearly leading discussion. But whatever. I'm sure it'll straighten itself out over the next couple weeks.

So yeah, that's what I do. Fun stuff.

Frolicking in the Country and Other Adventures

Sorry, I've been bad about updating when I say I'm going to update. But in my defense, I've become way busier in the last few days. So in no particular order, here's some of what I've been up to.

The Quest for Eddie Izzard Tickets

This all began when either Ellen, one of my housemates, or I quoted Eddie Izzard in conversation, had a mutual "You like Eddie Izzard?!?" moment, and I remembered that Eddie Izzard was on tour in the UK this October & November. Thus we decided that we should go. Brad, another Med. Studies person also expressed glee/interest, so we figured we could get a group together to take the train to one of his shows (he's not coming to York proper unfortunately. Mostly because there isn't really a large venue he could come to.) However, purchasing tickets proved problematic. We couldn't seem to get all of us in the same place at the same time, so Ellen and I just decided to buy tickets ourselves so at least we could go.

For his show in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on Thursday the 29th, there were three seats available on Ticketweb in the second section back from the stage. Like, ridiculously good seats to be on sale this close to the date. Catch was, you had to buy the group of three; they wouldn't sell just two of them. But literally while we were looking at them and comparing available seats for the Friday show, they disappeared. We figured we'd missed our chance. So we turned to that dreaded evil, Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster, however, will only mail your purchased tickets to your billing address. Neither of us had changed our billing address to the UK. So rather than have the tickets sent back to the states, we decided we'd walk down to the local Tourist Info center which is also a ticketmaster retailer. So we go down, standing in line while the woman working there made hotel reservations for various people, etc. Finally the computer frees up so she can look at tickets for us. Except that their ticketmaster access password was declined. And so was the one at the TI down at the train station. They were going to try to get that fixed yesterday (our ticket adventure was on Saturday), but we didn't want to chance waiting that long. So we grabbed ice cream from the truck across the street- full fat cream makes for WAY better ice cream- and trudged back home and up the three flights of stairs to our rooms. But as luck would have it, the three seats were back on ticketweb! So we deliberated for all of 10 seconds and just bought the three. We figured we'd sell one to Brad or somebody.

The tickets are still being sent back home to Virginia, but we called them and they said that we should call back three days before the event and they could put a set for will call at the arena box office. Score. Except that over the weekend Brad came down with swine flu. So we might have to find some other Eddie aficionado to come with us. But YAY! He's totally my favorite comedian like ever. And this show, Stripped, is supposed to be a two hour, "stripped" down version of the entire history of the world. Should be good fun. If any of you Americans are interested, he is taking the show on a 6 city tour in the US in January. I know he'll be in Boston, Chicago, NY, and I think LA, but I'm not sure what the other two cities are. 'Course, tickets are like $70 which is way (EDIT: more! apparently I wasn't paying attention and accidentally put less) than I paid!

Frolicking in the English Countryside. Kind of.


On Friday, me & two housemates walked the 40 minutes to campus for a mandatory fire safety briefing. Typical don't burn stuff down and don't walk along the River Ouse in the city centre if you're blithering drunk talk. While it is kind of bothersome trekking out to campus (alternatively spending 2.50 to ride the bus there and back), campus is pretty.

There's a big man- made lake that everything is built around, so there's bridges connecting various portions and providing shortcuts. There's also lots of cute ducks, not so cute geese, and some kind of funky looking black swans. Supposedly they're the last pair of black swans in England. Plus, lots of pretty willow trees. Anyway, on the way back, we decided to try an intriguing path that led through a field. Didn't really know where it led, but we figured we'd go see. It was a nice afternoon. So we walked along Walmgate Stray as it is called, back towards the city. Walmgate Stray is literally just a small paved walk/bike way through some fields and past some cows. I mean literally past some cows. Like, there is no fence separating you from the cows.

See? Of course, when you come out of the field, you walk through an infantry base. It's kind of bizarre, you literally step out of a field and into a very military-looking zone. Big concrete buildings with chainlink fences and barbed wire.

Then you walk along the river for a while and eventually come out in town and then back at my house. They run a couple different YorkBoat cruises down the river that look really cool. There's the daytime one with historical commentary, and evening one with music & captain's banter and various meal cruises as well, but a) I don't think that's the kind of thing you can really do by yourself without being weird, and b) I have to hoard my money until I finally get more!

The Epic Saga of How the UK Refuses to Take My Money
Long story short, it makes the most sense to pay my housing and tuition fees from a UK bank account. Long story short, after much harassment, I finally have a UK bank account. Here's where the story gets long again.

To wire money to my account, I get charged like $60 from both my US and my UK banks. This obviously sucks. The UK bank, Lloyds, which is incidentally the ONLY bank in the UK that won't charge International students 5-8 pounds per month for the privilege of having an account, told me I could write a check no problem, it would be processed in 6-8 days, and I'd only get charged their 30 pound currency conversion fee. So I write them a check for an ungodly amount of money (goodbye, college fund...) and figure I'm all set because now I'll be able to do a direct debit to pay for my school fees. Well, not exactly. Yesterday, I received a phone call from the bank. Turns out it will take them 6-8 WEEKS to get me my money. Do I still want to go ahead with it or shall they send the check back to me? Yeah, no, that won't work at all, since my fees are due on the 30th. Accommodation was supposed to be due the 24th but I called the fees office and got an extension since the bank was being difficult. Now of course, this was not my favorite thing to hear, so I promptly decided that it was a chips/gravy/cheese for dinner night.

So now I'm back to wiring money. Of course, my US bank requires me to fill out a paper form, sign it and send it to them to initiate a wire transfer. Oh, and since my dad is listed as a joint account owner, he has to sign it too. Which means that I had to fill it out, sign it, send it to my dad so he can sign it and send it to the bank. Ahhhh. Dad somehow worked it so that I could sign it, scan it and email it to him, have him sign it and get the process going quicker, and then the original paper copy would get there as soon as various mail deliveries were made. Sounds good, right? Well, that leads me to...

The Quest for the Holy Scanner (it is like the Holy Grail, only more technologically advanced.)

Now, I had planned ahead and brought one paper copy of the wire transfer form with me. So I had filled that out already. But Dad wanted me to send him multiple signed forms so that if I have to transfer money again, we can cut out one leg of the mail delivery wait. Which makes sense, but is easier said than done. Off to campus I went today in search of a printer and scanner. So first I went to the library to print out a clean copy of the form, fill it out, make copies, and sign it. This of course necessitated paying for print quota and then buying a copy card. Wooooo. Then it was off to one of the PC Classrooms scattered around campus in search of a scanner. Two rooms have them. One in Langwith, and one in Alcuin. (York is on the residential college system, which means that each college is made up of 4-5 buildings linked by covered pathways around a central courtyard and provides dorm rooms, as well as office/classroom space. Departments are also housed in various colleges.)

I figured I'd try my luck in Langwith because they were supposed to have 2 scanners, while Alcuin just has one. So I made my way over to Langwith and promptly got very lost. The room was listed as Langwith 117, but when I went up to the first floor, the numbers only went up to 112. I went back downstairs and asked the porter. He directed me through a set of double doors, across a courtyard, and into the next building and up the stairs there. After making a brief confused detour through the cafe which was also through a set of double doors, I found the room. No scanner. But according to a poster on a bulletin board there, there was ANOTHER PC room in Langwith and that was where I needed to be. Fantastic. Of course, 138 was not on that floor. I thought, well, numbers seem to go up the further away from the central building you get... So I tried the next building over and sure enough, found it.

Problem. Each scanner is hooked up to ONE computer. One was not being used, so I tried that. Except that it won't accept logins. The guy on the next computer over was all "Yeah, that one doesn't seem to be working properly." The other computer was being used. The girl using it said she was almost done and then I could have it, so I used another computer while I waited. Score! Finally! Scanned and emailed. Victory. Of course, the program to scan text wasn't working, but I got it scanned using a Corel graphics program, so all is well that ends well.

So those are some of my recent adventures, not including class and Lords of Misrule, which I'm still kind of on the fence about. While it seems like it would be lots of fun, and the people are all really great, I just don't know that I want to commit the time to it. They're running Beowulf for three nights plus a dress rehearsal during the last week of term, i.e. when final essays are due. And I know that I'll procrastinate no matter what, and I just don't think that it would be wise for me to commit to not having any time in the evening that whole week to work on things. So I'm kind of thinking that I'll volunteer to work on props, but not actually be in the production/have to show up all the time.

I've also been trying to plan for after this year. I've come to the conclusion that I really just can't go straight into a PhD program when I finish here. My dissertation is due September 25th, and American programs all start end of August/early September, so I just don't think it will be feasible. Plus, most want 3 recommendations, and I can't ask professors that I've only known for 2 weeks at this point to write a rec for a December or early January deadline. So, I'm thinking that I'll take a year off and work and try to take a couple language classes. That way I can concentrate on applications after I finish my masters and have ~3 months to get those done. I've also been searching for a program/adviser that would be a good match.

I've run into the problem of having to chose between a really well-recognized program and an adviser with interests similar to my own. Notre Dame has probably the best Medieval program going on right now, with a bunch of California Schools- UCLA, USC, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley- also offering a really good program with a lot of success in placing graduates in jobs. This is good. However, none of the professors at  these schools are really doing the British Isles / France in the period I'm looking at. If they study the British Isles, they tend to do super early Medieval period. Not what I'm interested in. If they do my time period, they work on the Mediterranean or Muslim/Christian/Jewish interactions and Crusades. I can't win.

But in some other schools, I've been able to find a few scattered professors that are generally interested in social/religious history of the High Middle Ages, which is at least the area and time period I want. I did find one person at BC that does Ango-Saxon/Anglo-Norman stuff, is interested in history/archaeology as sources, and does some stuff with religion. She's far and away the closest match I've found interest-wise, but I don't know if I'd be better off studying under her or at one of the bigger/better/shiny-er programs. But hey, I've got a year to figure it out, right?

Lazy weekend

So today's highlights include eating baklava procured Friday at the "Continental Festival: Bringing the Tastes of the Continent to York" that's happening this weekend down town, reading Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, taking an hour-long bath while reading Peter Brown, and convincing Hulu that I am geographically located within the United States. Shh, don't tell. This of course required a few hours spent catching up on my American tv shows. Yay 30 Rock! Also, I'm really digging FlashForward; hopefully that will continue to be good. Bones is <3 of course, now if only Booth & Brennan could admit it! But far and away, the best show this season has to be Glee. Awesome music and hilarious characters combine to make for a thoroughly entertaining hour of television. And now I'm going to go make Uncle Ben's ready rice and a salad and read the Life of St Martin.

Later this evening when I've moved pictures over from my camera, I'll share my adventures in the British countryside and close encounter with some cows. Bet you can't wait ;)

Beginnings

I'm really sleepy, so I'm going to bed basically right now. But, I felt like I should at least write a short entry. The picture is part of the King's Manor complex. It isn't the oldest/original building on the site (that actually holds the library and porters lodge among other things). But the Centre for Medieval Studies is headquartered in this building. I had sort of my first class today. Real classes start next week, but I went and met the professor, got what passes for a syllabus here, and had a mild heart attack at the amount of reading. If I were feeling more industrious, I'd take a picture of just what I'm supposed to read for next Thursday to show you. Also, its like a 10 person class (which, to be fair, the professor was not expecting. There's only about 6 of us registered through CMS to take it, but Medieval Lit and Medieval History folks registered later and showed up today as well) and the university's various libraries generally have about 1 copy of the books between them. Now, the professor could have put things on reserve as part of their key texts program, which keeps one copy at the library and it can only be checked out for a 4 hour period, thus allowing multiple people to use an item without one person checking it out and keeping it for weeks. But no, we're to work together and communicate to share readings. Yeah that's going to end well. I think graduate training, more than anything else, is meant to teach us how to fight to the death for rare books at the library! I did manage to track down copies of 2 books (but there's a whole lot more. A whole lot. Like, it took an entire page to write down everything we're to read for next week.) but some of the other major works for next week are already checked out. So I'm hoping that whoever has them is going to be a nice person and like me plans to read what they've checked out quickly and return it promptly so other people have a chance to read it.

In other news, I put in a Tesco order with a couple other girls to be delivered tomorrow. Hooray for groceries to my front door with little effort on my part! But online grocery shopping is kind of hard when you don't know the brands and products. For example, it took us about 20 minutes to figure out how to search for laundry detergent. You don't search for laundry detergent. Or laundry soap. A search for just "laundry" mostly turned up laundry tablet things. I wanted liquid so that I could hand wash things since 1 load of laundry costs 2 pounds to wash and another 2 pounds to dry (that's like $7!). They also do this thing here where they call fabric softener "laundry conditioner" and it is totally not clear on the bottle what laundry conditioner does. We finally figured it out, but it was just rather comical that it was that complicated to find laundry detergent.

Tonight was also the audition/interest meeting for Lords of Misrule. This semester's play is Beowulf. Several of the other new MA's and I agreed that it sounded fun but we weren't sure about the time commitment. So we "auditioned" for a small or non-speaking part and said we could help out with some of the crew stuff like sets/costumes/props. We'll see how that goes.

We're also trying to organize a trip to see Eddie Izzard's new show Stripped. He's a really funny comedian and he's doing a UK tour basically right now. There's shows about an hour away by train next Thursday and Friday and tickets aren't too bad, so we're trying to get a group together to go. I hope it works out because that would just be so much fun.

And now, as previously mentioned, I'm sleepy and going to bed. Goodnight!

A Voyage of Self-Discovery

I feel that I made a very important discovery today. Not only have I made great strides in self-sufficiency (see the previous post) but I have found my people. And they are medievalists. Having never been around a large crowd of such people before, I had no idea how fantastic it is to be in a room full of people that GET IT. We can all geek out together. It is pretty much awesome.

We had the departmental welcome party today, which had the potential to be more than just a  little bit awkward and horrific. But it was pretty much not! I would say that roughly 60% of the people there were just as shy and socially awkward as I am. We were able to mingle around and discuss how much we hate these kinds of events with awkward chit chat that means nothing and will be forgotten in a few minutes, etc. and talk about historical things that tend to bore the entire rest of the world. I FOUND MY PEOPLE! We're all socially awkward but we can be socially awkward together! It was also pretty amusing because the North Americans outnumbered the Brits. The couple of British students that I know were pretty amused by the fact that they were generally the only Brit in a conversation circle. The program has LOTS of Americans and Canadians, 2 Europeans that I've encountered, some British students, and a couple of Aussies. I'd say that Americans are probably about half the program which seems strange to me since we ARE in England...

Anyway, I'm pretty much exhausted and not making much sense anymore, but I felt the need to share that I'm not the only crazy person out there. Academics are my friends :) Plus, we have pretty awesome theology conversations after a pint or two at the pub!

(On a side note, I FOUND KOPPERBERGS! Also, Bulmers/Magners makes a pear cider now, and a lot of pubs here carry both Magners and Bulmers labels. I'm puzzled by this because Bulmers is supposed to be for domestic distribution in Ireland and Magners for everyone else. I'll have to do some further investigating...)

EDIT: 10/16/09- I got to the root of the Magners/Bulmers confusion. There is a British cider company named Bulmers (which is actually part of the reason why Irish Bulmers is labeled as Magners outside Ireland) who just happens to use a very similar-looking label and also offers regular and pear cider. Mystery solved!

Accomplishments

Today I killed a spider all by myself and without shrieking. I'm very proud.

The daily rundown

Today:

York Minster Library Tour. Picked up volunteer application. Lots and lots of really old, cool stuff.
No Latin exam results.
Long walk to campus. Campus library tour/info session. Visit to Campus Info Centre, Accounting Office, Physics Building, random wandering around. Discovered there's a big hedge garden, complete with funny-shaped bushes. Saw lots of ducks and geese.
Yorkshire Cream Tea (yum scones with Yorkshire cream & strawberry jam) care of the Centre for Medieval Studies (hereafter referred to in this blog as CMS)
sleepytime...

The Pound + "Induction"

In today's installment of my British adventures, I thought I'd discuss money. Specifically, the British pound in all its glorious nonsense. Here you see a 50, 20, and a 5. I didn't have a 10 handy, sorry. While the paper currency is kind of pretty and colorful- the 20 is purple and the 50 is red- I'm constantly annoyed that the bills are different sizes. Ok, I get that that might make them more instantly recognizable, say, if you can't be bothered to look at the money in your wallet. Or if you're blind. Not trying to hate on the vision impaired. But the 50 doesn't fit in a lot of wallets, and it makes for a very awkward folded up mess if you try to stick money in your pocket.

And now for the coins. Don't even get me started on the coins. I'm sure I'll figure them out eventually, but it is SO annoying to have like 2 pounds (in weight) in your pocket/wallet. The coins on the left are 1 pound. I didn't have any 2 pound coins handy, but they're a bit bigger and have silver bits. Next, that stupidly large coin is 2 pence. 2 freaking pence. The coins on the far right are 1 pence. Two of those only takes up slightly more space than one 2-pence coin, so is there really any reason to have them? Especially because I always seem to have ton of the stupid things around. Next to the 2 pence is the 20 pence coin. Again with the British and their superfluous coinage. Then the 10 pence. There's also a 50 pence coin that I don't have at the moment. It is bigger than the 2 pence, silver, and edgy like the 20 pence. I do like that the Queen is older and wrinklier with a double chin in newer coins and younger and, well, prettier in older coins. Good to see the Brits are at least realistic.

So that's British money. Every 5 pounds is about comparable to $8.50, which makes me cringe every time I buy something. A lot of things are much more expensive here than in the states, especially food (although not alcohol, go figure.) But I'm pretty much willing to go along with that because social services (especially health care and prescription coverage) are pretty much awesome here. No fees for visiting a general practitioner and no charge for prescriptions. You just pay a flat 7.50 pound dispensing fee to the chemist where you get your prescription filled. And, no dealing with stupid retarded health insurance companies (here's looking at you Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. See if I EVER get you again.)

Anyway, today was Induction Day for the Centre for Medieval Studies. Oh my gosh, I'm so glad I'm here. But more on that in a minute. First, some reflections on how the UK education system differs from the US.

1) US schools are way, way, WAY more on top of things.
2) US schools are way, way, WAY more on top of things.
3) The grading system. Apparently we should expect to get much lower grades than we're used to. Here, we should be pleased if we receive a 75. I'm not so sure about this, but we'll see how it goes. Basically, they have much higher expectations for what deserves an "A". "A" work should be basically publishable, according to the CMS. Also, "A's" are not really expected. "C's" are totally fine, and a "B" is really good. Also, they don't use letter grades, just percentages; I'm just using corresponding letters for ease of explanation.

So today we showed up at King's Manor as instructed at 10:30 am. We were given a short tour of the Manor by a current PhD student and then had 1.5 hours to kill in the little cafe. So we used our free drink vouchers and got coffee/tea/hot chocolate and sat around for a looong time. Then we got our pictures taken for a wall of students type thing. That took about 2 minutes. Then it was back to the cafe for lunch and killing another 1.5 hours. We, like most people, had lunch and then went to a local pub to hang out on their back patio and chat.

Then we got to congregate in the same room where Northern England was governed from during the 1500s. Pretty cool. We listened to the standard welcome address, introduction of the faculty around that day, got a list of our advisers, and learned about our various skills module options. Which I thought was funny, since we'd already had to sign up for those, but oh well. Then we got tea and cookies. I love how Ireland/the UK has tea breaks. It makes me so happy. Anyway, then we all got to take the dreaded "informal Latin test."

Designed to help divide people up into various skill levels of Latin, I think the test served more to frustrate everyone there because at least all of the people I talked to were like me and hadn't really used much Latin in a couple of years and were at least a bit rusty. The test consisted of a Medieval Latin passage we were to translate. It would've been helpful if I knew ANY medieval vocab, but at least I knew that Rex Childebirthe was a king and not something to do with dinosaur childbirth. And then we heard about all the different discussion/reading/research groups we can join, lectures that go on throughout the semester, and the Lords of Misrule, the CMS's very own medieval theater group. This term, the play is Beowulf. Apparently anyone who is anyone participates in some way with the Lords, so I suppose I'll have to go to the interest meeting/auditions on Thursday.

So in addition to taking an extra skill module (we're really only supposed to take 2, but I'm stubborn, so...), I plan to try out the Late Anglo-Saxon Reading Group, the Medieval Religion Research Group, the Anglo-Norman Reading Group (although that doesn't start until next term), the Medieval Manuscripts Research Group, and various lectures by Patchwork and the Political Culture Research Group. And that is only a fraction of the available interest groups. That in a nutshell is one of the big reasons why I chose York; because the program is pretty big (there are about 35 MA students this year), there are a lot of options and available resources that you just don't get in smaller programs. In case you couldn't tell, I'm really excited and I can't wait for classes to start next week. This week is pretty much just class briefings, which I think are like those silly first lectures where you go and meet the professor, get a syllabus and textbook list and then skedaddle off. Tomorrow I'm going for a tour of the York Minster library and then a tour of the main campus facilities used by us Kings Manor folk, which from what I can tell is pretty much just the library. But more on that later. :)

Adventures in Cooking

So today, for the first time, I tackled actual cooking. I've been mostly eating frozen dinner-type things, sandwiches, cereal, that kind of thing. But I'd picked up some pasta at the Costcutters grocery on campus and decided that I was going to attempt macaroni and cheese. Because they don't really know what that is here, so if I wanted it, I had to make it the hard way. After doing some recipe comparison online, I figured that if I combined cheese, butter, and milk I should at least get something close to what I was going after. A lot of the recipes called for ground mustard. They don't have that here. Ditto anything resembling fresh herbs unless you go to a special produce market and even then they might not stock what you're looking for. Shredded cheese? Yeah, don't have that either. So, I basically was improvising. Butter doesn't come in sticks with the tablespoons helpfully marked. Instead, you just get a hunk of butter in a box. Lots and lots of guesswork went into this mac and cheese adventure.

I ended up cooking the pasta and then in a separate pan, melting butter with some milk, 2 kinds of cheddar cheese that I had to cut up by hand and some Boursin cheese (which I had never heard of, but a recipe I read used it and they happened to have it at my local Sainsbury's) with salt and pepper and a bit of flour to thicken. It was pretty funny in the kitchen because there were about 4 Americans who thought that I was either a genius or crazy, and a South African who was completely in awe of this whole process. "She's doing something that involves fancy cheese. Wait, now there's 2 kinds of cheese in that pot! I don't know what's going on but I know I want it... Three! Did you see that? She put 3 kinds of cheese in a pot! Although I don't know what you're doing with that pasta. Just eat the cheese. Anything with cheese has to be delicious." Us Yanks tried to explain that the pasta helped to deliver the cheese to your mouth but I think he was a bit skeptical. Heaven forbid we introduce him to fondue!

Anyway, once all the cheese was melted, I mixed in the shells and then baked it in the oven on some temperature that I think approximated 350 degrees until the cheese on top was beginning to get brown and crispy. And it was absolutely delicious. Yum. Of course, I have a ridiculous amount of leftovers, so I'll be eating mac and cheese for a few days, but I have proven that passable mac and cheese CAN be made in the UK with basically no familiar products. I'm going to count that a good day.

Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings, oh my!

Ok, first of all, I must start this entry with perhaps the best things ever: Custard Creams. Now, you might be thinking, gee, those are just cookies. Whoop-di-doo. You would be wrong on two counts. 1) These are "biscuits." For a fun (read, frustrating) time, try to explain American southern-style biscuits to a Brit. Here biscuits are sandwich cookies. Something like a chocolate chip cookie would be considered a "cookie." 2) These are delicious. Biscuits are often eaten with tea, and this is really the best way to enjoy them. Yum. :D

Ok, now that I'm done gushing about the fact that I found custard creams in England, let us move on to what I've been up to the for the past few days. I went with a couple of my housemates to the Jorvik Viking Centre. Now, to get an idea of what this entailed, imagine the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World if you've ever been on it. For those of you who haven't, they stick you on a moving boat thing and you ride through various scenes filled with moving animatronic pirates. Got that picture in your head? Now picture the pirates with matty blonde/red hair dressed as Vikings and positioned in a scene of York in the year 876. Now add the smells of excrement, livestock, fish, and ironworking. That's pretty much the Jorvik Viking Centre in a nutshell. Of course, they also have some more traditional museum-y type exhibits once you get off the ride. Now, while it was probably fairly authentic, I could have done without the man in the "privy" (read, hole surrounded by a chest-height fence) moaning and emitting foul odors. But maybe that's just me...

Moving on! Then we did the whole Minster kit and caboodle. A "Do Everything" Pass will allow you to wander around the minster proper and join a tour if you wish, visit the Museum/Crypt/Treasury located in the foundations of the Minster, and climb the 275 uneven stone steps up a tight spiral staircase to the top of the Tower. Of course, we found out on our way out that we could have gotten in for free with our U. of York cards. Oh well. Here's Constantine the Great (who was proclaimed Augustus at the site of York Minster) looking slightly less dignified than usual. Opposite him is a Roman column.

The column comes from directly under the Minster, which, incidentally, is the 5th incarnation of a minster church on the site. During the Roman period, the Roman fortress was located almost exactly where the Minster now stands (About a quarter of the Roman fortress is under the Minster's foundations). During repair work of the Minster foundations in the 60's, the Roman remains, including this column were discovered. Some of the original walls and some artifacts are now displayed in the Minster basement in the Museum. The column was re-erected on the Minster plaza. Good intentions, however, went awry. The column is actually standing upside down. Oops!

Anyway, back to adventures at the Minster, which is quickly becoming my favorite building ever. If you climbe 275 of these:

 you get to the top of the tower where you can see this! PS if the picture looks weird, its because I took it on the way down, not up :)

If you look just to the right of the tower on the left, you can just make out the ruins of St Mary's Abbey. I'm sparring you the close up photo I took in an attempt to not overwhelm this page with pictures.

You can also see these guys. Aren't they cute? :)

I'll put up a whole album of Minster pictures because I've got way too many to share here. Anyway, later that afternoon, we discovered the absolutely deliciousness of a strangely British (and apparently Canadian) food: fries (or chips here) covered with gravy and cheese. Sounds disgusting. I know. But so good. So good. Mmm.

Today, I went on one of the free walking tours of York offered by the York Association of Voluntary Guides. Our tour guide was a really cute older British lady. She took us around some of the Roman and Medieval sights, including the Museum Gardens. While I'd been in there, it was nice to hear some of the history not recorded on plaques or anything around the Gardens. For example, this is the Multiangular Tower, the most complete Roman tower standing. The city also placed several Roman caskets inside, which were discovered during the construction of a hotel elsewhere in the city. Here's a view from the outside that should show why it was named as it was.















We also saw an Anglo-Saxon tower built on top of older Roman walls, and took a walk along the medieval/Roman wall from Bootham Bar to Monk Bar.

Along the way, you get a nice view of the Treasurer's House, the Minster, and the Archbishop's House. From there we saw some of the city, including the oldest block of houses in the country. We ended up at the Shambles, the oldest medieval street preserved in the city. It was named because it used to be the butchers quarter, and the shops still have the meat hooks along the top of the shop windows. In Anglo-Saxon, "fleshammels" meant the street of the butchers. Today it and the surrounding area is fun to poke around, and has a hay market with fresh produce & cheap clothes to peruse.

Aside from poking around the city, I went to International Student Orientation yesterday. It was mostly a lot of pointless blathering by various people from various offices ("Hey, do you need to improve your English? Take our ESL classes!" "Plagarisim is bad!" etc.), but I did accomplish pretty much everything I will ever need to do on campus, so that was good. The school scanned my passport & visa so now the government won't come after me for coming into the country as a student and not showing up at school. I registered with the student health centre. I also got an introduction for banking privileges letter, took said letter to a booth set up by my chosen bank (the only one that DOESN'T charge between 5 and 10 pounds per month for the privilege of having a bank account) and opened up an account. I also got my very own University of York student card, so now I can start taking advantage of student specials. Woo!

Meanwhile, I've been brushing up on my Latin skills. Next week we have induction for the Centre for Medieval Studies and language placement tests, so I want to be able to remember SOMETHING about Latin :)

In US news, I'm completely upset that the Red Sox have gotten their butts handed to them by the Angels in games 1 & 2 of the ALDS. This is not acceptable. Dear Sox, please play better. Thank you.

I'll end this VERY long entry with a photo from that market I mentioned, must because I like it and I don't want to end with a rage about the Red Sox inability to hit a baseball.

P.S. Comments are totally welcome. Just sayin'. Especially if you spell like an American!

Some sightseeing

I finally got a chance to see some of the sights in the past two days. International student orientation is tomorrow and Saturday, with classes starting on Monday. So yesterday I wandered around the Yorkshire Museum and the Museum Gardens. The Museum was kind of cool (literally built on top of ruins of St Mary's Abbey, destroyed after the Dissolution care of Henry VIII and his quest for divorce/annulments.) Lots of Roman stuff, Anglo-Saxon stuff, and Medieval stuff, including the Middleham Jewel, which is pretty cool. I couldn't take pictures inside though, so if you're curious, there's a picture here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Middleham_jewel_1.jpg

The Gardens are really nice. Not as big or impressive as, say, the Boston Public Gardens, but it has super cool stuff like these ruins of the abbey. I'll be attending classes in King's Manor, which is right around the corner and was originally the house of the Abbot of St Mary's. After the Dissolution, it because the headquarters for the Council of the North.

After wandering around the Museum & Gardens, I took a walk along the medieval town walls, which are largely still standing. While you can't walk a complete circuit around the original city, long stretches are still standing; some parts are even the original Roman fortification walls, although most of the extant walls are post-Viking incursion. Fun fact: York has more miles of intact city wall than any other English city.

Here is Bootham Bar, one of the four gates into the medieval city. From here, you can climb up a stone staircase to gain access to the inside of the Bar and then on to the wall proper.

From the Bootham Bar section of the wall, you can get some pretty awesome pictures of the Minster. I'll try and put up some of my minster pictures on facebook because there are way too many for a few blog entries. Especially since today I went to the Jorvik Viking Centre and did the full Minster extravaganza- the Minster proper with guided tour, the Museum/Crypt/Treasury, AND the Tower, which required climbing up 275 uneven stone steps in a super narrow spiral staircase. Whew. But the view was totally worth it. But I'll save all that for the next entry. :)

York at Night

I know I said I'd give you the photo tour of my room, but I'm not anywhere near unpacked, so there's stuff all over the floor, and you really don't want to see that anyway. So some other time. Instead, I've got a few pictures to share from my nighttime stroll through my immediate neighborhood.

This is just a fountain and statue. I thought the picture came out pretty well, so you get to see it. Yaaaay. Ok, now for some more historically/culturally significant ones!

Here's my dad pretending to be cool by a medieval bar. Yes, that's right, a bar. In "medieval speak," a bar refers to a gate, while a "gate" refers to a street. Hence, Bootham Bar was once a gate along the perimeter wall of York, while Marysgate is really just Mary's Street. Many of the roads and intersections of medieval cities have preserved these names. Although these may be confusing for us modern folk, they make perfect sense if you know the history behind the names. Ok, I'll stop prattling on about my fascination with language change. Moving on!


Here we have a not very good picture of a plaque from the bit of original medieval wall right across the street from that arch pictured above. I'll try and replace this with a photo taken during the day soon. In case you can't make out the text, it reads:

"Roman Fortress: This plaque marks the site of the Porta Principalis Dextra or North Western Gate of the Roman Fortress of which the foundations as rebuilt circa A.D. 300 lie just below ground."

Pretty neat, huh? Bet you don't have Roman ruins under your feet. I also came across the Roman Bath Museum during my wanderings today; I'll have to go see what's there sometime.


This is part of a bronze model of city centre (i.e. the Medieval heart of York). Pictured is the York Minster, the second largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe, and the largest in England.

In case you were wondering, Cologne Cathedral in Germany is the largest. Fun factoid blatantly stolen from Wikipedia, Cologne Cathedral was the tallest structure in the world until the completion of the Washington Monument in DC.

Anywho, back to the York Minster. Considered the Heart of York (and only partly because the main stained glass window features a prominent heart shape), the cathedral is a treasure trove of medieval art and architecture and really something spectacular to behold. I haven't gotten inside yet because I've been running all over doing errands-- more on that in a later post perhaps-- but I wanted to at least check out the outside. I can see the very top from the end of my street, and it was illuminated by floodlights and was really, really cool. But a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Well, here's a few thousand then.

I'm HERE!

After a short flight to Philly and a much longer flight to Manchester, followed by missing 2 trains and then finally taking a 2 hour train ride to York, I'm officially here. And check out the train I took! The upholstery in Manchester airport is also purple. I knew there was a reason I wanted to come here!


Long story short, you should always just get on the train and worry about where you'll stow your luggage once you're on. You should also not sit in the handicap portion of the lead car if you elect to stow your massive amounts of luggage there. It is extremely uncomfortable. First class looked pretty spiffy, if you feel like spending some extra dough.

Now, you may have caught that reference to storing massive amounts of luggage. How much luggage does one girl need for a year? Well, if you're this girl and decide it is more cost effective to bring stuff with you rather than buy pretty much everything but clothes overseas, it takes about this much luggage...


It definitely made getting around more difficult, but I saved money and I didn't have to worry about getting clean sheets/towels, which I really am not up for right now. (I've slept maybe 3 hours in the last 30. Not so good.)

But, as I said, I'm HERE!


I still have a LOT of unpacking to do, but I'll try to show you all around my "interesting" pad tomorrow. Time for bed!