Catching Up Part 2: They get snow here?!?

That's right, they do. Or at least they did this year. I missed most of it while I was home for Christmas, but the "arctic blast" as the headlines called it started two days before I flew home and made for adventures getting home for most of us.

The snow started in earnest on Friday, when our essays were due. So I went off in the snow to print my paper and turn it in and by the time I got out, there was REAL SNOW on the ground!

 So Rachel and I went to play in the snow in Museum Gardens. We made a friend :)

A maintenance (that word is tricky to spell...) guy popped out from behind King's Manor and offered our snowman a construction hat but it was too big for his head :(

Then there was general frolicking in the snow and I swung by Borders to pick up some ridiculously cheap books. Border's UK went out of business just before Christmas so the entire store went an additional 10% off every day until closing. When I was there they were down to 70% off and everything was going FAST.

So here's an artsy collection of York in the snow. Haven't seen it since a few days after I got back because it all melted.

You might not be able to tell but the snow was coming down HARD. So it was kind of nice to get inside for the CMS Christmas Party. All the papers were in and free food- who could pass that up?

I had my first mince pie at the party. Mince pies are apparently a treasured Advent tradition here. I can't say I really care for them though. It is basically mushed up fruit plus raisins and spices in a pastry. I guess the closest American parallel would be fruit cake, which I also am not a fan of. And no, the "mince" in mince pie does not refer to ground meat in this case. I spent a long time explaining that to several people who were very confused :)

Anyway, the snow messed with a lot of people's travel plans all over the place. (Especially because it was almost simultaneous with the Nor'easter that hit the mid-Atlantic in the US.) I actually really really lucked out with my travel arrangements.

I didn't fly out until Monday morning (Dec. 21st) so by that time the UK was starting to run on schedule again. People traveling over the weekend had some problems because the trains were really delayed as they tried to get the tracks cleared. And then the storm hit at home over the weekend and flights to Philadelphia and DC were all over the place. Anyway, here's my getting home story.

Sunday night I book train tickets. It cost like 15 pounds (Blogger hates my pound signs, sorry) less to take the 6 am train to the Manchester Airport instead of a 7 am one, so I went the cheap route. So I arranged for a cab to pick me up at 5:30 (no way was I walking the 25 minutes to the train station in the snow with a suitcase). I get up at like 4 in the morning to shower and finish packing. Then around 5, I check my flight status. I was flying US Airways and connecting in Philadelphia. Philadelphia got lots and lots of snow over the weekend. Flights to Philly on Sunday were pretty much all delayed or cancelled. US Airways has you enter in a flight number and either "today" or "tomorrow" for flight status. So I put in my flight number and Today and it shows up "CANCELLED." I immediately begin freaking out. But I figure, well, I've already paid for the train ticket, might as well go down to the airport and beg/plead my way onto a flight going SOMEWHERE in the United States and figure it out from there.

So I get to the train station and get my luggage stowed. I'd requested a forward-facing window seat near a luggage rack. They gave me a rear-facing aisle seat near a luggage rack. Oh well. I learned that I don't get motion sick on trains while seated backwards if it is so dark out that you can't tell what direction you're going. Anyway, about five minutes into the 2 hour train ride, my iPod freaks out: screen freezes blank lit-up white and I can't get it to turn off. I have since looked up how to force it to shut down, but at the time nothing I pushed did anything. I was forced to just leave it on in my purse until the battery drained out. Only took it like 12 hours..! I was stuck with no music for the whole trip. I was not a happy panda. Anyway, 2 hours later I collect my stuff and trundle off across all the moving walkways to the airport proper and find the US Airways Reservations help desk.

The blonde girl behind the counter finally stopped ignoring me and asked if I needed anything, to which I mumbled something incoherent about flight and canceled and Philadelphia and me plane yes please? She was all "Oh, well, there's one leaving today around 1:00, you'll need to wait in the queue to see if there are seats available." And I was like, "Humina what? But I thought today's flight was canceled?" "Oh no, yesterday's flight was canceled. If you were originally scheduled for today's flight, you're fine you'll just need to check in," she said, pointing halfway down the terminal towards the US Airways signs. So off I trundle with stuff in tow and find the "Philadelphia 1:00" sign where a woman sends me ALL the way back to where I had been. That was the end of the line. The only people that got to use the special, clear lane where the buggers that managed to check in online before US Airways disabled web check-in for the flight.

Now unlike pretty much every other airport I've been in, Manchester didn't really care about the stupidly long line of people trying to check in for this flight. (Think 2 full A330 flights trying to all get seats on one flight. Oh, and they had to reschedule everyone's connecting flight out of Philly because the transatlantic flight was delayed.) Instead of keeping the line/queue in an orderly fashion, they just let people stand wherever, so the line just went straight back across the terminal, blocking access to basically every other airlines' check-in desks. And for some reason every single person decided to cut through the line to the other side right in front of me no matter how far up the line had moved. The British gentleman behind me told me I was too nice to them. And I thought Americans were supposed to be the pushy ones! I think travelers everywhere are basically the same- harried and not terribly interested in being polite.

Anyway, 3 hours later, I make it up to the desk and get tickets and a rescheduled flight to DC from Philly. By the time I make it through security, I had about 20 minutes to grab breakfast/lunch before my flight was supposed to board. So I grabbed a "bacon breakfast roll" which is exactly what it sounds like- a roll that they shove some bacon in and microwave- and scurry off to the gate, where, surprise surprise, boarding has been delayed. By the time I'd finished my sandwich roll thing, they were ready to board. So everyone hurries up and sits down to "make up the delay" and then we sit there until 3, at which point I begin to worry about making my rescheduled connection, since I had a 2.5 hour layover time to go through customs and immigration and if we were leaving 2 hours late... that was going to be tight. But you know, worry about those things when you get to them.

As an aside, if you're looking at international airlines, I've ranked the airline food from some of the carriers I've flown.

1) Aer Lingus. Both the chicken and the lasagna are yummy, everything was recognizable and free Baileys. (granted, this data is a few years old at this point.)

2) US Airways. The pasta dinner entree was pretty good, and REALLY good panini type sandwiches for "lunch".

3) British Airways. Decent tea, yummy breakfast scones, dinner was ok. Weird British sandwiches for lunch. Although that goes for Britain in general. Really, is ham and cheese too boring for you? They do however inundate you with free alcohol if you're into that kind of thing.

4) KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. They told me I was eating chicken. The package said bbq chicken. That was neither chicken nor bbq as far as I could tell. You know its bad when the pile of peppers and corn is better than the meat. (Says the no-veggies girl.) I have no idea what was in the salad (some kind of meat and beans and other things I couldn't identify), you grabbed your own roll off a tray (that puts other people's germy hands too close to my food for my comfort) and I don't even remember what we got for breakfast because the dinner was that funky. Good inflight entertainment selection though.

Anyway, back to the point. Watched Postgrad on the in-flight entertainment, that hit a bit too close to home for comfort. At least I'm not working at my dad's luggage store. At least my dad doesn't HAVE a luggage store. Slept a bit. The plane lands and then proceeds to rumble over snow drifts and ice. That was the bumpiest part of the ride! Got off the plane in a mad rush because I had 45 minutes to make my connecting flight. I get to Immigration and of course I pick the line with the fewest people in it and it ends up being the slowest line EVER. But I get through it and then find I have to wait for my bag to redeposit it on another conveyor belt. Luckily my bag wasn't the last one. Unluckily I had to get clear across the Philadelphia International Airport.

The airport staff getting my bag said I'd be fine, just take the shuttle at the A gates. The shuttle wasn't running out of the A gates- too much snow. I had to run down to the C gates (at which point I'm halfway to my gate anyway...). So I get on the shuttle and we bounce along off-road style over snow and ice that still hasn't been cleared the tarmac and I'm deposited at the gate just as they start to board. So all 12 of us get on the itty bitty plane to DC and then wait some more. Then we roll off to the runway. And wait some more. Finally we take off. The row in front of me has a mom and one two-year old twin while dad had the other one across the aisle. Now maybe I'm crazy, but I would have stopped trying to feed the kid in front of me after the first time he threw up. But not her! Determined mom! Vomit kid! Thank goodness it was a short flight. And thus I got home for Christmas because I always pick the cheapest travel options. If I'd gotten a later train or paid extra to fly home sooner, I'd have had a lot more problems.

And I came home to this:

That WAS over 2 feet of snow. It had kind of melted a bunch by the time I thought to take a picture. But you can kind of tell how much it was by using the mailbox as a reference.

Luckily the flight back to the UK wasn't so bad, although I flew back the day after I spent the day curled up on the couch with a fever. And I didn't get to sleep thanks to the baby sitting on the lap of the woman next to me that kept kicking me the entire flight. And then I got the last train to York that afternoon (weather problems struck again apparently. I didnt know, I was asleep as soon as I got back to my room).

Alrighty, so now we're basically caught up! I should do something exciting so that I have something to write about.

In the meantime, you can check out this:

http://www.york.ac.uk/medieval-studies/york-1190/

I'm assisting with the conference prep work. I'm putting together the book stalls so if you're a publisher and you want to come sell books, let me know! ;)

Catching Up, Part 1 (Castle Howard)

I know, I know, long time no post. Things got a bit crazy at the end of the semester. So in the first of several catch-up posts, I bring you Castle Howard, the filming site for both film/tv versions of Brideshead Revisited, and despite the tourists that come crawling through, still the family home of the Howard family, including their two small children, Merlin and Octavia. Apparently rich British people give their kids weird names just like rich Americans.

Public transportation makes getting to the Castle a bit... complicated. One can take a bus to one of several small nearby towns, and there is a bus twice a day from one of them to the Castle and then back again in the afternoon. To do that, however, we'd have had to leave super early in the morning, so we opted for a later bus that the Yorkshire Tripplanner suggested would put us within walking distance of the Castle. It did not. So we ended up taking a cab, but it worked out and we were able to catch the bus back to town in the afternoon. We went one weekend in December because they were all decked out for Christmas; there was even a Father Christmas giving presents to kiddies that came.

You know you're getting close when you reach an Egyptian Obelisk in the middle of a roundabout near the castle's entrance and then you get to walk through a courtyard of gift shops before you even buy your entrance ticket. Once on the grounds, we were greeted by freely-wandering peacocks and the option to walk the ~500 yards to the Castle proper or to take a Christmas train thing that had a surprisingly long line (excuse me, queue.) We opted to walk so we could stop by the gardens on our way in. I'm sure the gardens are quite the sight to see in the spring/summer when things are in bloom, but even in winter it was kind of cool to see; very Secret Garden- it is walled in with hedgerows separating off sections.

Inside the Castle, you are taken through several historically-preserved rooms, as well as the set for some kind of bedroom death scene in Brideshead Revisited that was constructed in a burnt out wing of the Castle. I had to chuckle because the employee stationed in the set room was very concerned when I took a picture. "You realize this is just a film set? No historical value whatsoever?" Yes, yes, I was aware. Thanks. The house was all decked out for Christmas with trees and wreaths and garlands all over the place. Even the statues got decked out for the occasion.

Somehow I don't think that was what the artist originally intended. Here's a shot of the the interior of the dome in the central lounge-type room.

And here's the Atlas fountain.

That thing is huge by the way. This photo was taken from the previously mentioned Brideshead Revisited wing on the second floor of the castle. As a side note, if you ever want bulb-type Christmas tree ornaments, hit up the Castle gift shop. Every colour, size, texture, etc you can imagine, they have.

I think this dining room was my favorite of the decorated rooms.

I can't even begin to imagine living in that huge castle with tourists coming in and out all the time, but the Howards seem to do a good job keeping it a family home; family pictures decorate pretty much every available surface, which is pretty cute. After seeing what was open to the public inside the house, we took a less-than-direct hike up to the Temple of the Four Winds folly. Rich Brits with too much money/time on their hands in the 1800s built follies- decorative buildings in the style of Greek/Roman temples, Chinese temples/gardens, Egyptian pyramids, etc. 

The Temple of the Four Winds is one such folly in the style of Roman temples and is situated on a bluff with quite a view of the river and bridge plus the Yorkshire moors.

All in all, a good trip. The Castle/grounds combo ticket is a bit pricey, but worth it at least once. You can also buy tickets to just see the grounds, which might be worth it in the summer time to check out the gardens. There were also other follies/the lake to check out that we didn't have time for, what with the crazy bus schedule. It was also nice to get away for a day before week 10 and mad paper-writing began.

I forget what I've written about the grading system here, but basically, we don't get a grade for any of our classes/classwork. We get graded on three papers (which are written under the supervision of our professors from our module classes) and on our final dissertations. Even our language classes are just graded pass/fail on the basis of an exam we take the first week of summer term. It is a bit strange really. On the bright side, there are no classes during the last week of term; they just give us the time to write. The papers we turn in have only our testing identification number- no names- and are graded according to a rubric anonymously by two professors and by a third mysterious figure with no connection to the university, who is meant to ensure that grading by the professors is fair. Grades should be coming out shortly, so we'll see how that goes. Next catch up entry: Yorkshire/England gets snow for the first time in forever, just in time for most of us at the CMS to try to get home to the States for Christmas.