Category Archive

I have this half-written post somewhere about how I am not numbering my posts anymore, but clearly I have not gotten around to posting it–or anything else for that matter–in the past month. Perhaps I should have some sort of “at least once a month” guarantee which, if broken, gives you the right to come bang down my door and pummel me with whatever you’ve got to hand. However, it might not translate into practice very well because my door has an uncanny tendency to be on one side of the Atlantic half the time and on the other side for the rest. Odds are that it’s the people who are in America when I’m in the UK who actually want updates and who would likewise want to beat my door down with spatulas.

Well lucky for you, I am in the US right this very minute!

It was a trying process to get here though, and because we all know how fervidly I believe in the power of positivity, I am going to recount it to you. In agonizing detail. So you’ll feel like you were there.

My day started at the sunny hour of 4:30am GMT, when I showered, finished packing, and called a taxi. The taxi picked me up at 7 and dropped me at the delightfully classy St. Margaret’s Coach Station, where I waited until about 8:10 for my coach to deign to arrive. It turned out they actually only had about 10 seats on the coach to Heathrow and about 40 people with tickets, so they had to put most of us on a coach bound for Gatwick. This had to detour to drop us off, much to the delight of the Gatwick-bound passengers I’m sure. Being as parannoid as I am about time I had planned to arrive at the airport very early, so the fact that the coach took an extra hour to arrive wasn’t too bad for me. At about 11am we got to Heathrow and had to get on another coach to go to Terminal 4. Sheesh, I had no idea how far away from Terminals 1, 2 and 3 it was! It took us about 15 minutes! That’s practically in another county!

An hour in the check-in queue, an hour in the security queue (which wrapped around the outside of the terminal), and several vows to never fly at Christmas ever ever again later and I was standing around unbuttoning my fly for the nice security people. While they were touching me rather thoroughly I of course I apologized profusely for causing trouble by setting off their metal detectors for no discernable reason, which I think is proof positive that I wasn’t leaving the UK a minute too soon! I also apologized quite a bit to the woman who came up to me when I was pulling my boots back on to inform me that they were going to perform an explosives test on my toiletries. Apparently I was very suspicious looking yesterday. She took me off to the side where they have this little makeshift lab on a cart, and she squeezed bits of my toiletries out onto some paper strips. I guess they were supposed to change colors if I was packing radioactive material? Or something? I thought bomb components could be quite innocuous things when not combined, so I’m not sure how useful this testing is, but I guess it’s cool that they’re able to do it.

I then proceeded to kill a lot of time in the duty free shops. My flight was supposed to be at 2:45, but at around 2:30 they came out to tell us that it was canceled and we’d better go to the customer service desk to reschedule. We made a mad dash to the desk and when we got there were informed by the alarmed looking lady that our flight was delayed until 4pm, not canceled. Wherever could we have gotten such a silly idea? 3:30 rolls around and we go to board our flight, walk down the gangplank (what do you call the aeronautical equivalent? I don’t know) and into our awaiting…buses.

No one said anything, we were just loaded into buses like little, sheep-like sardines. We were then driven away from Terminal 4 and brought to British Airways shipping and freight area, where we boarded our plane.

And then the plane didn’t have sound on the entertainment system, so half our viewing options were only available in Spanish. Yo amo Hairspray!

And then there were about 10 immigration lines open for non-US citizens and only 4 for US citizens. This is an exact reversal of what it’s like in Europe, where EU people breeze through and non-EU people have to wait forever. Which, if you have to make some people wait forever, is as it should be. WTF America? Of course I got in the line for the VERY slow immigration officer, who wanted to chat with everybody and got nasty when people didn’t want to chat back and just wanted to get the fuck out of there. He moved 4 people in the time it took every other line (all 3 of them) to move 12+ each.

8pm EST (1am GMT) and I was finally home!

I think I might be substitute teaching or something to make a buck while I’m home, but for now I’m just delighting in my new mattress, spending US dollars and eating good food.

I was going to elaborate more, but I have to pack up this computer now and send it off to be fixed.

 

It’s been a very long time since I’ve updated. Sorry about that! But I come bearing pictures, so doesn’t that make up for it? You know it does.This past week marked the first where I felt like a real student again. I was running around all over the place and accomplishing things (that weren’t my readings) and hanging out with people and that? That is student life. I need to have downtime in my life as much as the next person, but this needs to alternate with periods of frenzied activity for me to be really happy. (And there are qualifiers on those activities. I have to have chosen them and I need to have the agency to back out of them if I want to. I’d never be happy if my insanely busy periods were dictated by someone else!)

I also went to London, specifically to the V&A and the Natural History Museum, on a “study visit” (aka class trip) on Tuesday (16 October). That was fun, but 3 1/2 hours on the coach there and 3 hours on the way back for a 5 hour stay in London? Not really something I want to repeat.

On Saturday (20 October…which marks one month in England!) I went to Oxford with my friend Jenna and the ISA (International Student Association). It was so much fun! I took enough pictures to run my camera down from a full battery. I’m not daft enough to try and post all of them here, but these are some highlights.The first thing we did was wander aimlessly while indiscriminately photographing everything from ivy covered buildings to especially picturesque public toilets. That may be a slight exaggeration but, as demonstrated by this gargoyle having a wee, only slight.

Of course we took all the usual tourist shots of the Radcliffe Camera, which was gorgeous.

The first genuine stop we made was at the Botanical Gardens, which Jenna wanted to see because of something His Dark Materials related. I’ve only just started reading the series so I can’t quite say what that is, but there was a bench. We photographed it. Maybe some of you get the connection.

The Botanical Gardens turned out to be gorgeous AND really good fun. First the gorgeous:

As for the fun part, the greenhouses were completely overgrown (in a good way). There were paths for you to walk around but they were entirely over-hung with plants. It was not a manicured North American garden! It made you feel sort of like you were cutting your way through an exotic jungle in the Amazon basin. I tried getting pictures of the path to show how it was all covered, but none of them came out right. Jenna took a picture of me amongst the foliage to demonstrate how ridiculous it all was, but I think it may have proved the ridiculous thing to be me! Or at least my outfit. Sometimes I suspect I might look like I’m in costume, but that’s just how I dress.

When we left the gardens we tried to use our youth and innocent airs to sneak into some of the Colleges. It worked at this one. Of course I can’t remember the name, but it had a fun staircase:

It did not work at Christ Church however. There was a scary man in a bowler hat who made angry faces at us and would have charged us money to enter. I’m a miserly sort so I contented myself with this picture of an outside wall:

We had lunch at the Eagle and Child Pub, which is where ‘the Inklings’ (J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, yadda yadda) met and chatted. They called it the ‘Bird and Baby.’ Oh the cleverness of them… I had fish & chips, because it is one of my missions for the year to eat fish & chips in as many famous pubs as I can. (I already had them at Ye Olde Trippe to Jerusalem Inn in Nottingham, which claims to be the oldest public house in Britain. Now let’s see if I can’t find an old pilgrim’s pub at Canterbury to go to this weekend!)

The last stop of the day, and the longest, was at the Ashmolean Museum. It was a very pretty, very old fashioned museum.

There were many interesting things to see there, but there was also this one object that I’ve since become a bit obsessed with. I’m going to do my first paper on it so I’ll try to keep the exposition to a minimum as it’s going to kind of be my life for the next two weeks. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a good, glare-free picture of it because of the way the case was laid out. I give you ‘King Powhatan’s Mantle’…

HOW EXCITING IS THAT?!

OK, I don’t actually expect you to be as excited about it as I am. But honestly? Did it really have anything to do with Powhatan? It was in a Cabinet of Curiosities before it arrived at the Ashmolean; did that affect how it was interpreted? How did it enter the Tradescant collection initially? Was it always considered a ‘treasure’? How is it interpreted differently here in England than it would be if it were back in the US? Exactly what sort of stealth operation would Bill Kelso launch if he were planning an international art heist to steal this? And, perhaps most importantly, what the heck were the folks at the Ashmolean thinking when they wrote the wall-text stating that this probably wasn’t really a cloak, but perhaps a temple hanging. You know all those famous Native American temples from the Chesapeake? Yea, one of those. (And I guess that’s one way the interpretation would be different in the US than it would be here…)

Enough of my blathering. The next update will probably be either paper wangst or more photos from my upcoming travels.

OK. Wow, this entry might be a doozy but I’m going to have to try and condense events as much as possible because I’m unsure that I’m ever going to have time for in-depth entries ever again! My schedule is frightening me that much.

I left off with me taking a taxi to St Pancras to get the train to Nottingham. Luckily for me the hotel called a driver who was a friend of theirs instead of an official taxi driver, so I was allowed to set my own price for the ride. The internet had informed me the usual price for this run was around £26, but I got away with paying £20. This is still a ridiculous price, but there you have it. I was one of the first people on my train so I managed to have a place to store my copious belongings. Late-boarders were not as lucky since there’s barely any storage space on Midland Mainline trains. This later proved to be a huge problem when it was Rebecca and I boarding in the middle of the train’s run from Nottingham to Leicester with 4 huge bags.

I met Rebecca at the Nottingham train station and we took (another) cab to her friend Lonnie’s apartment. Lonnie, who was someone I only knew about previously as Rebecca’s “heavy metal Pony friend,” was absolutely lovely and a really great hostess. While in Nottingham I got to see pretty much all the tourist attractions they’ve got, including Nottingham Castle (with its snazzy new exhibit about the Robin Hood BBC series. Unsurprisingly a terrible exhibit to accompany a terrible show! Although at least the terrible show is more entertaining than the terrible exhibit) and “the oldest pub in Britain,” Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem Inn. Later that night I got to meet some of Rebecca’s friends, including Hugh Laurie Part II.

The next day we futzed around until it was time to catch our train to Leicester. Another friend of Rebecca’s picked us up at the station and gave us a place to crash for the night. In the morning we walked all of the luggage several blocks to my dorm. It really wasn’t terribly far, but it seemed pretty far with all that junk in tow!

I’ll post more on aesthetic impressions another time, when I’ve got some accompanying pictures. All-in-all Nixon Court (my dorm) is better than I anticipated. Of course there are very few people on my course who live nearby, so that’s a bummer, but the rooms are nice enough. I don’t have a very social hall (another bummer) but I’m going to do something very revolutionary and attempt not to talk too much about people on this (very unlocked) blog because that always comes back to haunt me.

For the W&M readers amongst you I’ll give you a sense of where I’m living. I’m about as far away from the main campus as I was living at Ludwell, but sadly there’s no bus for the rainy days. My department is located a bit away from the main campus in an old building that probably used to be a private home or, dare I say, apartment? Oh College Apartments… So, basically, this is a very familiar living and campus situation!

I went to International Student Orientation, which was basically a waste of a week. The sessions were boring and only tangentially relevant, simply reiterating the (admittedly scattered) information off the website. I did meet some people from my course though, so that was nice. (And even though I only have good things to say about them I’m still cutting off here, as I endeavor not to talk about them!)

This week we had yet another registration, which consisted of getting our handbook and Study Guide. It contains the information about who is teaching each module, unit, session or tutorial. The timetable for when each of these sessions meet is found on Blackboard (oh, how I didn’t miss Blackboard!) and it’s a truly complex and confusing thing. Each session is marked with initials and group names indicating who has to attend it, so I went through and marked all my sessions. I’m a #, which indicates Museum Studies (as opposed to Art Museum & Gallery Studies), as well as in groups B, 2, Warrington, Lundy and Jupiter. So now we know who’s teaching each session and when they meet, but what do we have to do for each one? To figure that out you need to go into each professor’s folder on Blackboard and find the document that corresponds with the topic they’re teaching on each day. Your readings and assignments are in there! However, each professor does it a bit differently so it’s not really uniform.

So a lot of cross-referencing and information to synthesize even before you get to the information you’re learning! I’m very anal about to-do lists and schedules so I’m not sure how this is going to work out just yet. I think I’m going to try making myself a spreadsheet with meeting times and readings etc all in it. But there’s already reading to be done! Oy vey.

This wasn’t meant to be a complaint-filled entry by any means! I’m enjoying myself and the course looks fascinating. My professors seem brilliant and entertaining and I can’t wait to get started. I just wish I could mentally organize instead of having to do it all visually

It’s been quite awhile now and I’m actually currently settling into my university accommodation, but I’m going to attempt to do this all somewhat chronologically!

On Thursday I left from Newark Liberty International in New Jersey for a relatively uneventful flight to London Heathrow. The plane was nowhere near full, so essentially all of the middle seats were empty. At this point in the journey I was actually taking copious notes about events and my feelings and impressions, but I’ve since stopped. By that token I’ve also had enough time to both revise some of my initial opinions and simply decide to withhold others. I suppose I’ve always been rather keen on internal internal monologues. Especially when they’re about stupid things like OMG sandwich with butter!11!!!1!

Going through Passport Control was a breeze and I thought I might get to my hotel earlier than the anticipated 10pm because I decided to take the Heathrow Connect instead of the Tube. I had two giant, unwieldy bags with me, one of which should have been charged massive overweight fees for nearing 70lbs but for some reason wasn’t. I could hardly move it at all and certainly couldn’t heft it up stairs or over huge platform gaps. I can swing a 65lb child on my hip with ease, but I can’t move a 70lb bag. I guess it’s true about dead weight being/seeming heavier.

The Heathrow Connect is the slower, cheaper version of the Heathrow Express. It’s still ostensibly faster than the Tube, costs a bit less than a Zone 1-4 ticket, and leaves you off in Zone 1 at London Paddington station. From there I only had a few stops to my hotel on the Tube. Because it was for people coming to or going from the airport I figured there would be ample luggage space. On paper it was a brilliant idea. In practice the Heathrow Connect only came once an hour, every station I changed at had about 23909823 steps to schlep my suitcases up and down, and the Tube station was about a mile away from my hotel. Without the kindness of complete strangers who helped me carry my bags, to say nothing of the people who directed me to my hotel (and in some cases misdirected, but they were well-intentioned), I would have collapsed in a London gutter and died. Of course I would have been robbed of all my belongings first, but collapsing, gutters and death would have followed closely behind. As it is it was something of a miracle that I arrived at my hotel whole and with my luggage merely stylishly distressed.

I almost cried with happiness when I finally got to the Langland Hotel. The man behind the front desk explained to me that the toilet was in the basement and the shower was upstairs and I exclaimed “wonderful!” I was then shown into a room approximately the size of the bed it contained, which left me with very few options about where to put my luggage. There was free WiFi and a free breakfast every morning, so all-in-all it was fine. I’m really not a snob when it comes to hotels. The only reason I sprang for a budget hotel instead of a hostel was because I needed a secure place to leave my bags! The walls were paper-thin though, so I didn’t get much sleep. I spent most nights banging on my wall and shouting at the people in the next room that I could hear every word they were saying, so surely they could shut up at 3am? They were Americans, so don’t worry I wasn’t contributing to our poor international reputation.

I genuinely intended to wake up in time for breakfast on Friday, but I was tired enough to sleep right through it. I then went to get a mobile since I felt a bit naked without one. This is sad because I really hated them until about a year ago. I got a cute enough phone with decently cheap service, and thus far very good network coverage. My SIM card is Mobile World, which is sold by Carphone Warehouse and meant specifically for international calls, and it’s carried by T-Mobile. Considering how spotty their coverage is at home, I was amazed at the clarity of my calls. Even with the crap exchange rate my phone here, which is nicer, cost less than my phone at home and calling and texting prices are similar.

I spent the rest of the day on Friday at the British Museum, which featured such gems as a necklace made of bird heads, the Elgin Marbles and my favorite gallery in any museum anywhere, the Enlightenment Room. It’s an exhibit explaining the origin of the British Museum AND the thought processes behind Enlightenment era collecting aka wunderkammer and pseudo-science! It’s wonderful. (On a somewhat related note, I didn’t get to the Sir John Soane Museum. I was carrying my laptop around that day, so my bag was too large. Next time…)

 

 

Dear 18th Century-
I missed you. Let’s have babies.
Love, Kirsten

On Saturday I went to Westminster Abbey, as I’d never been. It was beautiful! I enjoy old graveyards normally, but this was simply exquisite. A lot of famous dead people, and some fairly hilarious memorials. My favorites were the 16th and 17th century ones where the statues of the deceased are reclined on their pillows, but not lying down as dead people ought to. Instead they are lying rather coquettishly on their sides, with their elbows resting on a pillow and their head supported by their hand. I wish I had been allowed to take pictures inside the Abbey proper so that I could demonstrate. Alas I could only take pictures of:

The oldest door in Britain! Don’t ask why that picture is so large. I re-sized it, but it seems that the oldest door in Britain is having none of it. You might be able to read the sign at this size.

The cloisters. Pretty!

There was loads more and I do have pictures, but I got sick of uploading and re-sizing them. You know how I know this? I wrote everything prior to this paragraph two days ago!

Without further ado…

After Westminster Abbey I went to St Pancras station to buy my rail ticket for the following day. I was also casing the route there to see if I would be able to make it on the Tube with my giant bags. There were too many stairs and there was construction, so the verdict was no. This meant the painful decision to pay for a London taxi the next day. I had originally planned on going to the Tate Modern on Saturday afternoon, but upon seeing the Tube ads about a Millais exhibit at the Tate Britain I decided to try that instead.

If anyone has ever managed to locate the Tate Britain from the Pimlico station stop, I’d love to hear from you. Not only did I wander in every conceivable direction, but I also saw many others doing the same. The signs for the museum just pointed sort of vaguely away from the Tube station so they were no help. Several of my fellow wanderers asked for directions and then struck off towards a variety of compass points. I’m sure some of them must have found the museum since I didn’t see them again, but at least one weary soul joined me on the Tube about a half-hour later.

All-in-all it was a very uneventful, even dull, trip to London. Parts of it were fun or interesting, but it was lonely traveling alone plus I was wildly jet-lagged the entire time.

Next up: The East Midlands

 

Here I sit at Newark Liberty International Airport, awaiting my 8:05am flight to London Heathrow. Annoyingly, the network here (which cost a pretty penny to get on) won’t let me access either gmail or LJ. Alas. I was going to take a picture with my web-cam to show you how very exciting the airport lounge is, but I looked like such crap that I nixed that option. You will just have to take my word for it that blue plastic seats and a tiny duty-free = gorgeous. Or at least as gorgeous as I look following my 2 hours of sleep last night.

I just exchanged $653 for 290GBP. This made me want to sob. I could have sworn the exchange rate wasn’t quite that bad…. In fact, I just checked online. It’s not, it’s just those stupid bureaux de change I guess. Well, I suppose it’s the credit card for me from now on!

I don’t know what else to say. I’m still not sure how moving my bags through the Tube is going to work, but I guess we’ll find out. Of course by then I will no longer have this Wi-Fi access, so you might have to wait a few days to hear about it. Hopefully there will be pictures next time.

To all my dear friends and family, I love you and will miss you fiercely. I don’t always show it and I almost never say it, but you’re all very important to me and I love you. Three months isn’t such a terribly long time, and the Atlantic is called “the pond” for a reason. Never mind that the reason is ironic understatement… Thank you for allowing me to go and have this experience of a lifetime and, in many cases, aiding and abetting me! I hope it turns out to be everything we hope it will.

When I said that there was a more clever entry to follow I’m sure you didn’t think I meant in a week. I’d also bet that you figured it would be a whole lot more clever than this.

————————————————————-

Visa - It’s Everywhere You Want to Be

ACT II

SCENE 1

KIRSTEN: Panic, panic, panic, there is no way that I have all the financial information I need. Alas, for tomorrow morning I will be unceremoniously kicked out on my rear and into the middle of 3rd Ave. But the humiliation will not end there! I will forevermore have to list my rejected visa application on all future visa applications.

The screen fades dramatically to black, while ominous music plays. Perhaps there is a Hitchcock walk-on, if the budget allows and the neighborhood necromancer has a bit of spare time.

SCENE 2

KIRSTEN: I will take a taxi so as to not tempt fate into making me late.

CABBIE: You’re from Staten Island? So am I!

KIRSTEN: How lovely. However, I’m too nervous to talk to you right now. I need to focus all my attention on deep breathing.

SCENE 3

CONSULATE SECURITY: You’re 45 minutes early…

KIRSTEN: Go me!

CONSULATE SECURITY: …so I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to line up outside the building until your appointment time.

KIRSTEN: Line up? Surely you meant to say queue.

CONSULATE SECURITY: No, I’m pretty sure I meant line up.

KIRSTEN: How disappointing.

CONSULATE SECURITY: I’m an American. So are you, in case you’ve had a brief lapse. We line up.

KIRSTEN: I appear to have gone momentarily deaf.

SCENE 4

LADY PILOT: Hi, I’ve been trying to book an appointment for weeks now but the online form has been giving me trouble. I’m a pilot and I can’t send my passport away for any length of time so I really need to get this done in person.

MAN: Oh. my. Gosh! I’m having the exact same problem! TWINS!

CONSULATE SECURITY: I’m not really sure this is my jurisdiction.

KIRSTEN: (aside) And to think, the situation could have been much more dramatic! I could be coming here without an appointment because the website hates me.

45 minutes later, our heroine is walking through security and LADY PILOT and MAN are being allowed to book an appointment in person. Justice prevails, thanks to CONSULATE SECURITY!

SCENE 5

KIRSTEN’S HEART: I’m actually on the verge of going into arrhythmia, so maybe you could do me a teensy favor and calm down a bit?

KIRSTEN’S ADRENAL GLANDS: NOT BLOODY LIKELY!!!!!!!11!!!!!!!11!!!!!!!1!

PHOTO-BOOTH: I am a cleverly placed courtesy to the forgetful amongst you, and I speak in a soothing British accent.

OTHER PEOPLE: are nervously silent

SCENE 6

VISA WINDOW DUDE: Next!

KIRSTEN: Crap.

VISA WINDOW DUDE: Hello! And what can I do for you today? A student visa? Wonderful! What school?

KIRSTEN: The University of Leicester.

VISA WINDOW DUDE: Excellent! I’ll just take your passport and your acceptance letter from you for a moment so I can make copies.

A moment passes. It is a very tense moment.

VISA WINDOW DUDE: Well that seems to be in order! I’ll just hold on to your passport so we can put the visa in, and you can collect it in an hour. Cheers!

In stunned silence, Kirsten puts her financial documentation away.

KIRSTEN’S HEART: Well thank God that’s over.

THE END

————————————————————-

So, you see, the whole thing was a bit anti-climactic. I don’t know why they didn’t check my financial documentation, though of course I like to think it was because I look independently wealthy. (It was probably more along the lines of “Well she’s not wearing a potato sack at any rate, plus this queue is rather long. Let’s hurry it up, then!”)

Once I picked up my visa I scurried home to make my travel arrangements because at long last I could. How liberating to finally be able to drop hundreds of dollars on airfare! I leave next Thursday, September 20th. I’ll be in London until the 23rd, then I go to Nottingham to meet up with my friend and old flatmate Rebecca who is just finishing up her MA there. On the 25th I am able to check into my housing at Leicester.

Oh yes, I am staying in campus housing. I didn’t plan on it initially because I didn’t want to be locked into a 42-week contract at extortionate rates, but in the end I was too chicken to just arrive and risk homelessness. Plus the rates and contract lengths were essentially the same, so I opted for a bit of security. Of course I opted at the last possible minute and had to send my application via FedEx to nip in under the deadline.

I finally got my housing assignment Wednesday night. I had just stumbled in from the bar (which is not really as debauched as all that, since Wednesday was my last day of work) so I didn’t get much of a look at it beyond the fact that I had someplace to live. On Thursday morning I checked my email and there was a message stating that because I hadn’t responded to my housing offer by the 11th (Tuesday) it was being rescinded! How long does the USPS hold mail at customs? I’m thinking it must be at least a week, because the speed of service between Leicester and New York has been atrocious.

Luckily, several phone calls and emails later, I was able to send in scans of my housing contract and I will no longer be homeless. Unfortunately for me, neither will I have hot water nor be anywhere near the Department of Museum Studies, but such are the rewards of flying by the seat of one’s pants. Additionally, my cold-water flat is on the ground floor and there’s a clause in my housing contract that I’m liable for any damage thieves do to my window when they smash it in to steal all of my belongings. Fan-frigging-tastic.

This entry might not do a good job of conveying it, but I’m actually really excited. Less than a week!