So yes, on Friday, the first day of my weekend, I voluntarily got up at 7 to run just like on schooldays, in order to be back at the dorm and ready to go at 9:20. Five of us went – Conor, Sarah, Patty, Lissa, and I. We took the Tube to Paddington Station, where we bought tickets for Oxford. There are a lot of great four-for-two deals on the trains here, and we’ve taken advantage of them before to go to Hampton Court and Salisbury, they can get you there for way cheaper. We bought a four-for-two package and one extra single adult since we had five people, and we divided the costs up equally – we all ended up paying about 12 pounds, which is to say ten pounds less than we would’ve each paid had we gone separately. Pay attention, this will be important later.

So, right, we found seats on the 10:20 train, which was pleasantly uncrowded, and we all took out our separate copies of Vanity Fair and tried to read them. Sarah got fifty pages done in an hour, which I find appalling because I managed twelve, but I think her pages are smaller and her print is bigger. What happened in the end, of course, was that we all fell asleep (which means that technically Sarah read fifty pages of that book in less than an hour, but we’re not going to think about that) and stumbled, a little logey, onto the Oxford platform at exactly 11:20. We found some free maps at the station, and we struck out – Conor had heard about a tower from which you could see the entire town, so we bent our steps that way. The first thing I saw was a statue of an ox. Like Oxford. I get it.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Lewis Carroll used asterisks to single, in the Alice stories, when things were going to take an especially unbelievable turn – right before Alice shrinks, for instance, and before she grows enormous. So in a variation on that, the above exclamation-point barrier signals the moment when things got amazing. More amazing than usual, I should say. Oxford is absolutely beautiful. I don’t know where to start – i suppose it is, kind of, how I pictured it. (That Oxford was actually a parallel-universe Oxford, but it looked a lot like this one. Never mind, it’s complicated.) Spires, domes, cobbled narrow streets with leaning buildings – wood and stone both – hedges and shady open fields. We walked uphill – we passed a door in a hedge overhung with a sign that said Conservative Club of Oxford, and I swear the air temperature changed when I went by, I got goosebumps – and wandered into a quadrangle framed by a series of stone buildings. The sign on the outside said Nuffield College. It felt a lot like one of our colleges back at Yale, actually, and I suppose it well might given that we stole the idea from them. It was perhaps a little more formal – a fountain, a long sort of canal with lilies – I wondered if this presented a hazard to tipsy revelers on weekends when school was in session – but a lot like one of our courtyards. Beautiful. Anyway, we kept going and we got to this place, Carfax Tower. The tower itself isn’t particularly old – 1818 – but apparently there’s been a tower on this spot since the tenth century, which is kind of cool. It was a beautiful clear day and after a short climb we came out on the roof. Oxford’s a very small city; you could see straight out beyond it, to rolling hills and water.

We broke for lunch – Patty and Sarah went to Pizza Hut, in honor of our great nation – and met back at the Carfax Tower corner. We wanted to see Christ Church College – according to a National Geographic article that I read when I was ten or eleven, this is the “epitome” of Oxford’s academic system (and therefore it was where I determined I wanted to go for undergrad, though it started to look like that was going to be as difficult to negotiate as getting to Parallel-Universe Oxford, given that there education system doesn’t really sync up with ours) – so we walked down a sunny street along the college’s outside wall, looking for an entrance. On the way we got distracted by “The Alice Shop”, a total tourist trap that was nonetheless interesting because, of course, it referred to Carroll’s Alice, Carroll having been a Christ Church professor and the inspirational Alice the daughter of the college dean, and we just read both of the Alice books for class. The store was what you might expect – lots of things you’re scared of knocking over, porcelain knickknacks and tiles. A sign claimed, however, that Alice Liddell (that’s the original Alice) had indeed frequented the shop as a girl, and bought her barley candy there. (This next to a stack of barley candy, priced at about $6 a box.) We browsed for a very long time.

Then we went looking for the Christ Church entrance again. We walked through a beautiful sort of outer courtyard but somehow missed the door in. Don’t laugh, I haven’t graduated from college yet. We came out on another street, near the Christ Church art gallery entrance, but the fellow there said the gallery hadn’t opened yet, and directed us to walk back around and actually go through Christ Church, by the conclusion of which visit the gallery would be open. We ended up, however, wandering off and getting lost in the stacks of a used bookstore. It was fun. I didn’t buy any books because Thackeray was lying heavy in my backpack.

Sooooo, we finally circled back around and got into the college – some don’t charge admission, but clearly people will pay to see this one – for a student rate. The cathedral was closed that day – tear – so we couldn’t see it (though they very nicely reduced our admission rates because of this), but we saw an incredible staircase that was actually used in the Harry Potter movies and took dramatic pictures of ourselves standing on it. Then we visited the dining hall, which dates from 1529, if I remember right – can you imagine? Eating every day in a place so old and storied? It actually reminded all of us of Commons, except with portraits of Henry VIII on the wall. High beautiful ceiling, long tables end-to-end, that sort of thing. There was something cooking, actually, and a menu on the table for that night, so I guess some sort of classes must still be running. Grad students don’t get vacations, right?

Anyway, then we found our way out to the quadrangle, which was enormous and beautiful – simple classical architecture, lots of green, fountains. I was kind of jealous, at which point Sarah decided I needed to be reminded that we go to school in a beautiful place too. Which is true. And if Oxford is the only place that makes you jealous, you’re doing pretty well.

We were excited for the art gallery, which we’d heard had some Reynolds and Gainsborough, and even some da Vinci. We’d thought our Christ Church tickets would get us in, but the old lady at the desk there said no.

Well, said Conor, the guidebook says the admission covers admission to the art gallery.

What guidebook is that? she asked.

Fodor’s.

Well, she said, it’s wrong, the gallery has always been separate. It’s to keep people out. We get schoolchildren who come in to look at the college, and they would just make noise in here. They’re not really interested.

But, she said, it was worth paying extra, because what was in there was “priceless”. So we shelled out fifty pence each – no great wound in the wallet – and went in.

There was a lot of medieval art. This made me happy. I like medieval art a lot. Mainly I like to stand in front of it and imagine the medieval artist standing there, painting it – I like to imagine what they were thinking, what they were worrying about, their superstitions and their beliefs. So I got kind of left behind, because I spent a lot of time in front of some 13th-century triptychs pretending to be medieval. I also noticed that, on the little cards that tell you about the paintings, the paint usually used in these works is “egg tempera”. Egg? Like made from eggs? The ingenuity! How did they do it? Wouldn’t it have been seen as a waste of eggs? Anyway, I spent even longer looking at the paintings trying to imagine the paint in egg form, and then I wanted to smell them to see if they smelled like eggs, which is hard to do subtly. I looked around and all the people in the gallery seemed to be engaged with other paintings so I leaned in really close to an enthroned virgin and child and took a whiff. Nothing. Bummer. Let alone eggs – didn’t smell like anything. Which you wouldn’t expect, after all those years.

The Reynolds, sadly, turned out to be one less-than-impressive portrait, and we couldn’t find any Gainsborough. There was one da Vinci sketch – I quite liked it, sort of a grotesque study of a face – and a few Raphael drawings that weren’t as interesting to me. Good times. And, I think I want to go to Oxford. If there’s anything that could encourage you to do grad school, it’s that place.

After that, we went to the Ashmolean Museum, billed as England’s oldest. The founding date proved to be 1845, which kind of annoyed me. Eighteen forty-five? England can do better than that. I know there were plenty of inquiring minds in the eighteenth century – I expect at least a 1700s establishment. Clearly there are museums in England that are lodged in much older buildings; I guess this is the oldest that has been in continuous operation as a museum? The collection was eclectic and interesting – some Greek and Roman sculptures, a huge array of ancient Egyptian artifacts from huge statuary and a complete shrine to tiny amulets, some pre-Raphaelite Rossetti paintings and drawings included the chalk sketch of a Proserpine now in the Tate, according to Sarah.

At this point it was around quarter to five and I decided to head back to London. The others were planning to stay until 10 at night, and I didn’t really want to do that. So I bade them all farewell – saw a Stradivarius violin on my way out – and headed for the train station, arriving at 4:58 for the 5:01 back to the city. I had a fun ride back, read more Thackeray and listened to a little English girl go on in her little English accent to an adult woman about how her father used to read her the Just So stories and she didn’t understand them at all. I got off at Paddington a little less than an hour later – we were running fast – and set my course for the Hammersmith and City Tube line. On my way out, this guy asks to see my ticket, which doesn’t surprise me, because they don’t always check your tickets at line’s end but sometimes they do. I hand it over without a flicker of anxiety. They went down the aisle during the ride and looked at the tickets – another thing they don’t always do – and the conductor smiled very nicely and punched mine and moved on. But this guy looks at my ticket and as I’m walking forward anticipating no trouble he says, Wait wait wait. This is four-for-two.

Yes, I say.

Where are your other three people? he says.

What? I shrug. They’re not here – I had to come back earlier than them.

No, he says, you can’t do that, you need to be with the other three people.

What? I say, I’ve never heard that before. We’ve done this before and we never had this problem. Which is true.

He gestures for me to come with him and we walk all the way back to the other end of the platform. I am kind of mad. I’ve never heard that you have to come back together, I say. We left together. I had to come back before them because I’m meeting someone – I’m late, actually. This isn’t true, of course but I am working myself up into a self-righteous lather nonetheless. This guy must be mistaken.

But we arrive at the little supervisor booth at the platform’s end and lo and behold, after I explain the situation, the guy inside says, Yes, you need to travel all together, your ticket isn’t valid and your friends tickets aren’t valid anymore.

I never heard that, I repeat, we’ve done this before – and here’s where things get bizarre, because yes I am frustrated, and yes I am tired and this seems like a silly rule and I just want to get back to my room, but I’m not terribly upset. I don’t want to buy an extra ticket, I feel guilty about screwing my friends over, but okay, I have money, it’s not an emergency. But for some reason, as I’m talking to this guy, I start choking up, and suddenly I am freaking crying in the middle of the station. At the same time I am thinking, this is absurd, I’m not sad. Of course the man in the booth is sort of alarmed, and he comes out and I try to explain to him through my freakoid convulsions that I don’t know why I’m falling apart and I manage something about it’s having been a long day (even though really it hasn’t, not in that sense), and he says, here, I’ll get you some water and is in general very civil even though he’s probably thinking, Who is this crazy girl, and how did she get through customs? He tells me to calm down and then asks me if I’ve got my friends’ phone numbers and I say yes and drink the water and hold on to the plastic cup very tightly and he tells me to call them and let them know that their tickets are invalid, and suggests that they buy a 37-pound three-person travel package. At this point, I take out my wallet and make a gurgling sound in lieu of “How much do I owe you?”, but he gets the message and says he’s not going to charge me, and I apologize and thank him, in full-on Miserable Wretch mode. But call your friends, though, he says, because I’m not going to let them through. He unlocks the gate for me and lets me through into the station and I walk straight for my Tube line trying not to look at the people around me, who probably are all wearing expressions that say “Who is that crazy girl, and why did that guy let her loose on us?”

Anyway, I take the Tube back to King’s Cross and manage to get Conor on the phone. I say I’ll help pay for the extra tickets they’ll have to buy, and he’s very nice and just thanks me for letting them know. Of course, the really sucky part is that all this could’ve been avoided if we’d known ahead of time – I could have come back with the adult single ticket, and they with the two-for-fours. But I get to my room and I chill out and read some more about Becky Sharp.

Later that evening I ran into Lissa and Sarah, who said that in fact they hadn’t bought the extra tickets on their way home, and they hadn’t had any trouble – there was no one looking at tickets on the other end when they got into Paddington, not even little ticket-scanner gates in operation. Go figure. So none of us was forced to make any extra expenditure, it’s all good.
I will admit that I’m not proud of the incident. I have compartmentalized it, along with my memories of myself barking like a dog in the middle of an argument when I was in third grade and of some ill-advised declaration of sentiment made more recently. I’ve heard guys complain that the police always let girls off the hook for speeding because girls start crying, and I’m thinking there’s maybe some truth in that, which sucks because I don’t want to be THAT kind of girl.

I want to be the kind of girl who goes to Oxford. That was the greater part of the day, and it was a great day, let’s stay on message.

We’ve had – how many? – um, four, I think, visits to London museums. They take the place of art history lectures with discolored slides, so they’re most welcome, and helpful. I went to the National Gallery on my own – did I mention that? Really, the only way to go to a museum, especially an art museum, is on your own – what, are you going to follow your friends around the gallery and spend the exact amount of time as them looking at the things they want to look at? See, I would, because I’m not assertive. But going as a class has its benefits as well, you hear from the experts in detail on a handful of works, and you can hang around afterward and get a better look at the paintings that interest you particularly. It was what I did after our visit to the National Portrait Gallery, when they took us through Reynolds but not the Tudors – all those iconic portraits of Queen Elizabeth, that one that they always show of Anne Boleyn, the Holbein Henry! Also got to see a new acquisition – purportedly a portrait of Lady Jane Grey, that I’d read an article about in the New Yorker. There are currently two portraits that might possibly be her, this one in London and then a miniature at YALE (yay, Yale, I love Yale), and there’s a degree of controversy in the whole thing. The thought is that this one at the Portrait Gallery is a copy of a slightly earlier painting (lots of things in the Tudor gallery are copies of paintings done earlier in the century) done from life. It says “Jane” on it (but like zillions of people were called Jane then), and apparently the Tudor costume suggests a person of very high rank, and is surprisingly accurate to the era (suggesting, again, that though it was painted after her death, it was copied carefully from a painting done during the subject’s lifetime.) The jewelry, which is frequently a giveaway as to the sitter’s identity, especially royal sitters, because there are catalogues of all the brooches and necklaces they owned – hasn’t been identified. There’s scoring across the mouth and eyes, like someone tried to deface it, which would be expected given Jane’s controversial history. The problem is – the reason there aren’t many known images of this woman – that her reign was so short, of course, so there was a fairly limited window during which a portrait might have been commissioned. Apparently this painting itself is controversial, not just because of the disputed identity but because some people think the Gallery shouldn’t have spent so much money acquiring it – it’s just a not-so-great painting. (I don’t know how they decide these things. Personally I’m not impressed with the portraits of Elizabeth, from an artistic standpoint, and it baffles me because people were producing much more lifelike portraits at the time; why does the queen look so flat? Although today at the Tate I read that Elizabeth wanted her paintings to be wholly without shadow – I don’t know why, just how she liked to be shown – so she chose an artist whose technique was particularly line-oriented, no shading.) I also saw the portrait of Mary Queen of Scots that was on the cover of the book my grandparents brought me back from Scotland, and the one painting of Shakespeare thought to have been done from life, and Catherine of Aragon and Catherine Parr and Catherine Howard – all good stuff. (But God, did early modern English only have like five given names? Catherine-Mary-Elizabeth-Jane if you’re a girl, and Thomas or Henry if you’re a boy – maybe Henry VIII didn’t even notice he was changing wives.) The interesting thing about the National Portrait Gallery, as my teacher explained, is that it doesn’t necessarily look for art of high quality – its primary function is as a repository for images of notable people. There are, naturally, disputes about taking in well-executed renderings of lesser-knowns. I don’t mind looking at crappy art. I mean, it’s interesting to compare – if there are several images of one person, maybe one good and two or three not so good – what are the salient features that all the artists, skilled and not, include?

Okay, I’ve rattled on about that – other things we’ve done? We went to the Foundling Museum, wherein orphans and children given up by their mothers were kept. Even in its day it was a sort of museum, because people used to come by on Sundays and look at the orphans, as a sort of excursion. Contrary to what you might expect, though, the orphans were by all accounts quite well-cared-for and well-brought-up and well-educated, so they started having to turn away some foundlings, and getting your kid into the Foundling Hospital, if you were an unwilling parent, became rather difficult. Like prep school, except with abandoning children. It was also like a museum – and continues to be – because it was governed, in part, by the 18th-century artist William Hogarth, who invited all his artist friends to be on the board of governors, provided they produced and donated a work to the hospital. So it’s full of paintings by Hogarth, Richard Wilson, sculpture by Rubiliac – all that stuff. We walked around, we saw exhibits about the children – many were given Hogarth’s last name – Hogarth himself never had any children – so there are a lot of people surnamed Hogarth now who go around thinking they’re related to Hogarth when they’re not. There was a list of orphans’ names – “Francis Drake” was particularly popular, an homage to the Elizabethan pirate, it would seem. One of them was called Catherine Speedwell. I think that’s a cool one. I’m saving that for a novel.

We also went, a few weeks ago, to the Soane Museum, an eclectic collection in what used to be the private home of a rather eccentric collector of the eighteenth century. It’s crammed with things, frame-to-frame across the wall; we even saw a room where what appears to be the wall can be pulled out in two parts, opening like a cupboard to reveal another wall of paintings and sketches, which in turn opens out to reveal an open two-level gallery – one can look down into a garden of statues. There’s a lot of Hogarth, tons of fragments of Greco-Roman pottery and sculpture, much fake among the real, I suspect. In the basement, among creepy shackles on the walls and unidentified vases, we found what was labeled as Seti’s sarcophagus, an immense limestone case covered in hieroglyphics. Next to it, on the floor, was the carved wooden inner sarcophagus. Just out. Carved by Nile-dwellers thousands of years ago, and out, in the open air, where someone could mistake it for a bench. What the heck? “This should be in a museum somewhere,” said one of my friends. “I mean, a real museum.”
Anyway! Today was the Tate. As usual, I was up and ran and did my little stomach-crunches and I was totally ready to go at 9:15, but of course the people I was going with weren’t quite together until 9:30ish, and then we had to walk to the Tube station – we’d been told it was a 30-minute Tube ride. It’s okay, we said to each other, maybe we’ll be five minutes late, it’ll be okay. But I thought we could make it. I believed in us. Paddle with a purpose, as they used to say to us in the Appalachian Mountain Club when we were out in the water and the sky was darkening. No need to panic, just paddle with a purpose. (Which some of us had to do all the time anyway, because some of us had a stupid lily-dipping canoe partner. Excuse me, would you like to use a spoon instead?) We actually had to let the first train go by in the Tube station because it was packed so full – we Houdini-ed our way onto the second one and changed for the Victoria line a handful of stop later – ran to the train, got on, pulled into the Tate stop at five to ten. It was, according to my guidebook, a five-minute walk to the museum. We got out, we followed the pointing signs. Made it. Beat the professors there.

Robin Simon – an art historian who’s written a number of books and is a friend of Martin Postle, our professor – took us in. He has actually conducted most of the field trips we’ve been on. We went through the lobby and into a long and beautiful gallery. Professor Simon seemed to be checking for something before he led us in there. “How often do they come?” he asked one of the guards. When he beckoned us in, he gestured to us to keep to the side. “Watch for runners,” he said.

He went on to tell us that he liked this gallery, its architecture was a good example of pared-down classicism, and so on – it’s great for display, though unfortunately it has to be empty now -

At that moment a lean and muscled man in spandex shorts and a T-shirt came sprinting through the entrance at the far end of the gallery. He ran past us, to the end of the gallery, and then left through that door.

“There’s one,” said Simon.

“What is this? What are they doing?” asked one of the more outspoken members of our class.

“It’s a work of art, dear,” said the teacher.

Another man came sprinting up – great form – reached the end of the gallery, and exited. We walked back into the atrium.

“This was done by a clown who won the Turner a few years ago,” said Simon. “He won it for a light bulb that he hung in a room. You would walk into the room, and occasionally the bulb would go on and off.”

“He’s a clown?” I asked.

“Well, I think he’s a clown,” said Simon.

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you meant a real clown.” I’m a quick one. The real-clown explanation would have been more satisfying, because it would have suggested that the artist was actually kind of mocking the art community. Whatevs.

The coolest part of the day – after some more Hogarth and Wilson – was seeing the conservators’ secret chambers. Not secret, actually, probably not called chambers, but that’s what I want to call them. We went around to another entrance of the museum and, with Professor Postle, met a young woman who works restoring and preserving the paintings. We walked down a bare hallway – “Watch out for runners,” said the woman, and indeed it appeared that we’d found the backstage area, a number of sweaty people with water bottles waiting to go on – and took an industrial elevator – a lift! – up to her studio, where she had two paintings mounted on either side of an easel, portraits by Reynolds. She explained the work – cleaning the yellowed varnish that earlier restorers had used to preserve the work, even wiping out additions made by misguided earlier preservers. It’s controversial and difficult to decide, of course – when is a work finished, what does it mean to restore it to its original state? If edits were made twenty years later, should they be taken out? She showed us X-rays and microscope enlargements of samples from the paintings. On another canvas, an unfinished Zoffany, she had completely erased the badly-done face that a later artist had put on one of the figures. Aiya – imagine the pressure! You have to be absolutely sure that what you’re doing is moving the painting toward its original condition. To actually wipe stuff out – well, it’s a lot of power and responsibility. Like Spiderman.
Anyway, that’s that for today. Hopefully that wasn’t too boring. I’m probably going to go to visit Oxford this weekend for the fourth of July, yay. And I will dress in red, white, and blue. Next week is the Bath trip. We’re getting around.

And here’s another plug. I don’t think they’re translating properly as links so just copy and paste it into the url bar.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxwOZl8ZMOA

So – Stonehenge. Yes, at 3 in the morning we were clustered around a little screened-off fire, we met some American guys our age who are in London doing an internship in aviation insurance, and we were talking. Two British witches came up to us. (I don’t call them this in a disparaging way, I just knew immediately that they were witches because that’s what they looked like. They were wearing long dresses and flowers around their heads.)

“Well,” said one of them, “who do you want for your next president, then?” She was smoking a joint and shaking pretty hard, which leant intensity to the question.

Obama, we said.

“No!” she said. “Obama’s going to invade Iran. And he’s a friend of Israel.”

“No,” said Alex, one of the aviation insurers, “I think you’re thinking of McCain.”

“Did you hear his speech?” said the witch. “His speech to that – AIESEC – or AIEPAC – AIPAC -”

We shook our heads.

“Well, I did,” she said darkly.

“But look at the options,” said Alex. “Even if you don’t like Obama, would you rather have McCain?”

The witch shook her head ambiguously and laughed. “McCain’s just an idiot. He’s just an idiot.”

Yeah, we said, so…

“But Obama’s just a puppet,” she went on, taking an impressive drag on the joint. “I wouldn’t vote for Obama.”

“A puppet?” said Alex. “I don’t think so…”

“The one you want,” said the witch, “is Ron Paul.”

The chances look slim for that, we said.

“It’s Ron Paul,” she said. “Trust me.” Which is an instruction I don’t generally follow when it’s given to me by someone clearly stoned out of her mind, but whatev.

At that point another British woman with long dreadlocks turned around and addressed the two witches. “Were you two part of the ceremony? Did I see you dancing at the beginning?” she asked.

The other witch, the one who hadn’t spoken, nodded, and the smoking witch said, “We were, but we got bored. It’s the druids that run the ceremonies. We’re not druids, we’re Wiccans.”

The dreadlocked woman asked what the difference was between a druid and a Wiccan.

“Well, we’d like to know, wouldn’t we?” said the witch. “We asked a druid and he didn’t know. Uuuuuuuh, he says, I’ll have to look it up, uuuuuh.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s all about hierarchy with the druids. That idiot calls himself Sir Arthur – it’s not what we’re about.”

At this point it had really gotten light, though of course there wasn’t much of a sunrise to see because it was still raining. Lissa and I decided to head straight to the buses – we figured Sarah, Conor, and Liz could find us later. We were wet. And we were closer to the bus pickup than we’d've been if we’d gone back to look for them. We trudged back across the fields, we calmed down an anxious guy (I think he was Swedish or something) who didn’t know where to find the buses, and we got one of the first ones out at 5:15. We rode back to the Salisbury train station and spent a few minutes puzzling over where our platform was – number 6, the sign said, was “accessible by subway”. Subway turned out to be literal – a way that was sub, an underground concrete walk. So we ran because it was 5:44 by this time and the train left at 5:45, we got there, we hammered on the doors but they wouldn’t open, and the train pulled away. Bummer. Of course, the tickets you buy are good for whenever, so we just waited for the 6:20 and took it back with the other three, who had gotten there by this time. There is online now a photograph of me slumped over in a train seat, Nicholas Nickleby on the table in front of me. We slept all the way back to London, we sleepwalked through the Waterloo station and onto the Tube that took us back to King’s Cross, we almost got hit by a car crossing the street, we got back to our dorm at 8 or 8:30. I took a warm shower, put on my
pajamas, and slept till three. It was nice. Worth it. We did reflect that it might have been nicer to have had a slightly quieter solstice experience – without the dancing and the shouting – but it was fun. Who knows what the originals were really like? Possibly raucous too.

Sooo – this week has been crazy-craze. Two essays due, one on Tuesday and one of Thursday, and I finished them both pretty handily, without having to stay up excessively late. Still no word on how I actually did on them, but one thing at a time. Finished Nickleby as well – loved it – and now on to David Copperfield, which is purportedly better. Slept 14 hours last night, for reals. At 8 I said, hey, I’m kinda tired, I’m going to take a nap until 9. At 10 Sarah and Lissa knocked on my door to ask if I wanted to go out with them and I realized – as you never do until you wake up – that I’d been sleeping the whole time, and they laughed and told me to go back to bed, which I did. And then I woke up this morning at ten. I am a champion. A CHAMPION.

I don’t know what’s in the offing for this weekend – I think maybe tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll just take a bus toward the Thames and walk along the river, see Westminster and Parliament and all that. (I think that’s near the river. Possibly I am wrong. I will consult a map.) Buses are cheaper than the Tube by a lot, and you get to see the city. Today, actually, it’s pouring rain for the first time since I’ve been here – luckily I escaped getting drenched during my run, it just started – so I guess I’ll do some serious Copperfielding. There’s been talk of inviting the Stonehenge boys to do the pub thing with us. We’re trying to branch out, meet people outside the program. A couple weeks ago, on an early pub foray, some girls made friends with Sean, a good-natured bartending student from Ireland who was very eager to get to know them and sounds as if they got him from central casting, as witnessed by emails that say things like “late night, head like a bodhran today”. Later analysis has revealed that perhaps Sean is younger than was originally thought – he invited some people out to celebrate his finishing certain exams, which a British acquaintance said are generally taken when one is 16 or 17, and said he planned to put a picture taken with some of the Yale-in-London girls up “on the bulletin board of [his] wild summer,” which sounded kind of high school-ish. Hayley and Erin were disappointed and insisted that maybe he was taking law school tests or something. Conor thought it was funny.

I actually had my own somewhat awkward friend-making encounter on the subway – I was looking at the map and this nice guy started talking to me about how it was confusing, and I said yeah, and he said he’d heard the New York system was very easy, and I said maybe, but it’s kind of horrible, and then he asked if I was Canadian. So then we started talking about why I was in London, and why I’d been in Trafalgar Square (the National Gallery) and how he’d just been there too – we must’ve missed each other! (No kidding? Zillions and zillions of people and I didn’t see you?) And how I was writing a paper on Gainsborough, and he’d always wondered what Mrs. Andrews was supposed to be holding in that picture. A question I was able to shed some light on, which I think impressed him. Anyway, he introduced himself very enthusiastically and clearly wanted to be friends or something, and we were taking the same subway as it turned out (NO, he was not sketchily following me, he told me which one he was taking before he knew mine), but I felt kind of awky-awkward (he was probably like in his late twenties) and I had to change at Leicester Square for another line so whatevs. Somewhere in London there is a nice guy named Ian wandering around thinking I am anti-social. Whatevs.

Oh, the sun’s coming out. Hey, I had this bizarre dream last night during my 14-hour sleep that incorporated basically all my friends from back home. Message me if you want to know what you were doing.

Oh, and here’s another thing for you to listen to, now that you’re done reading this. It’s my new anthem, this one. Tinny recording also, but that doesn’t cut the amazingness. And if you listen to this you’ll be ahead of my mother, because I send her these things and she sends back mean answers like, Blah blah blah, all her songs sound the same. Which is NOT true at all, but even if it were I don’t care because it would be one good-sounding song on repeat, I could totally listen to Regina do one song over and over again. Actually, scratch the hypothetical, I do that all the time.

So – the headline news is that I went to Stonehenge! For the summer solstice, 21 June. We left on Friday on the 5:50 train out of the Waterloo station. I got to see some green rolling English countryside. There was even an Old English sheepdog on the train, how perfect is that? I traveled with two other people from the Yale-in-London program and the friend of one of them, who had come over from a study program in France for the weekend. We went well-prepared. We were a little nervous about having everything we needed. The afternoon before, for instance, I went out and bought a sweatshirt. I have a track jacket that I love passionately – my first adult relationship, seriously – but it’s worn a little thin and I worried it wouldn’t be enough to keep me warm on a night predicted to drop into the forties. (My mother says it makes me look like a homeless person, but we don’t care about that.) So, like a dork, I bought a zip-up London sweatshirt, and wore it in London. I like it, it’s cute, I’m wearing it now. I also brought a rain jacket, which I almost forgot until my mother called me and asked if I had it, and I said OF COURSE, aiya I probably shouldn’t have admitted that here but I can always deny it later.

We got onto the subject of food – what everyone had brought – as we walked to the train station that day. The friend from France was starving and so we all brought out things to supply her.

CONOR: I have a kilogram and a half of dates and six apples.

ME: I have six apples and a few bags of dried fruit and a salad! [I also had a bunch of grapes but I didn't say it here because I didn't want anyone asking for them. I share very carefully.]

SARAH: I have two bags of Ritz crackers and a box of cookie-cake.

Cookie-cake was a big part of this trip – apparently it’s cookie dough, cooked in a pan like a cake and then cut up. Its production, and subsequent consumption, was a much-publicized affair.

We got to Salisbury an hour and a half after boarding – we could have stayed there for a while and explored, but we’ll be back on our Bath trip at the end of this program, and we wanted to get to the stones as soon as possible to grab a good spot. (I saw the spire of the famous cathedral, though.) We were able to get right on the first bus out to the circle. Still felt weird to be driving on the left side of the road. The bus dropped us a distance out from Stonehenge, a distance that turned out to be two kilometers, over hill and dale and through cow field, a trek that seemed particularly odd when we noticed that the road actually went right by the destination in question. It was raining softly and my shoes were very wet by the time we were there.

But we were there! It was hard to believe it was Stonehenge, Real Actual Stonehenge. Smaller than I expected, somehow, the circle itself, though the stones are huge – Real Actual Stonehenge. It’s such an iconic image that you can’t quite convince yourself you’re actually seeing the real thing, touching the lichen-spotted stones, standing withing them. I had thought there might be a small museum nearby, at least a few explanatory plaques, but there was nothing, it’s absolutely alone in the fields, like the druids must have seen it. Ordinarily it’s fenced off and you can’t get within a hundred feet of it, but for the solstice they open it up.

It felt very rock-concert. No, I haven’t been to a rock concert, but I imagine this is how one would feel. Rock concert or music festival, somewhere in between. On the way in there were vegan concession stands. When we got to the stones, the opening ceremony had already started – lots of people in capes and tunics, lots of long dreadlocks, one particular fellow in a wizard hat. Apparently an order of druids lives on in England, led by a man who calls himself Sir Arthur Pendragon (clearly not the original one), and they started off the festivities with a chant. It was about what you would expect – deference to the gods and goddesses of the different elements, exhortations to better stewardship of the Earth. Then there was music – some of which I recognized from my recording of medieval chamber tunes that I got in France – and a procession from the inner circle out into the fields. In the fields, there were other druids celebrating – a “Stonehenge newsletter” (“Really, has this been published every year for three thousand years?” said someone) alluded obliquely to some sort of schism among the druids. A schism! I love schisms. I just love saying the word “schism”. A druidic schism!

We ended up with a very good spot on the outside of the circle, right up against one of the stones, across from the separated Hele Stone, perfectly aligned to catch the rising sun in the morning. We spread out the mats we’d borrowed from the Paul Mellon Centre and sat with our backs against the stone, we watched the people go by. We actually met up with a lot of people from the Yale British Bulldogs internship program, which was really fun – they’d heard we were going and decided to come as well. They were very friendly – one of them thought he knew me, actually: “Didn’t we go on a picnic last summer?” No, not unless you were picnicking in Beijing, but nice to meet you. Someone took out a guitar and did some strumming.

And – well, a solstice celebration is pretty static from there on out, after you’ve found a place to sit. We sat, we talked, I tried to read Nicholas NIckleby because Conor, who wants to discuss the ending in our next literature class, had threatened me about it earlier. A guy came over and asked us if we were “selling anything illegal” – I don’t know why us, maybe it was the guitar case – an inquiry we had to answer in the negative. As the sun went down – long after 9 pm – we noticed an increasing number of little lights and little clouds around us, people indulging in the ancient druidic pursuit of smoking up. Hey, they don’t call it Stonehenge for nothing.

Within the circle, there was a lot of shouting and dancing and brief nudity, the last of which was addressed fairly quickly by the police on site. Some of us had hoped for a more quiet experience, but to some degree we were able to have it outside the circle. As it got colder, we congealed into an increasingly overlapping cluster of bodies, an arrangement that kept us remarkably warm. We balanced our umbrellas to rest over our heads – it was like a very small tent. We also attracted some interest from other people.

“Are you on acid?” said a British girl who was walking by.

Yeah, said Conor, whose head was I think on my chest at this point, we’re on acid.

“Really?”

No. But she was very excited and wanted to take a picture with us. Whatever. More warmth. It was cold, it was a little uncomfortable, we were feeling a little discouraged at around midnight, when there were four and a half hours more to go till sunrise. At one point I remember groping in the bottom of Sarah’s backpack to pull out handfuls of spilled Ritz crackers. And eat them – this was not just a cleaning exercise – with great enjoyment. Here, said Conor, can I help you clean? Pass it over here. Oh, I don’t know, I said, I think I’ve picked it pretty thoroughly.

I drifted off at some point and woke up at 2:48 alone and very cold – all my littermates had wandered off somewhere and I was shivering. In wilderness first-aid they taught us that hypothermia actually happens most commonly not on exceptionally cold days but in conditions like this – people being sedentary in wet, cool weather. So I got up, shivered some more, and eventually discovered that there was a fire burning a few hundred yards away. I found my compatriots and we trudged out there. There was a tight circle of people around the screened coals, though eventually I managed to get a spot right up against it, and things were so warm. So nice. We also met some other Americans (typical, right?), college students interning in an aviation insurance firm, when I got up to give Lyssa, another YiL friend, some time next to the fire. Stay right here with us, said one of the aviation insurance guys, touching the back of my jacket, you’re really warm right now.

You know what? I’m going to go running. More later. Coming up: the Weird Sisters and their thoughts on the American presidential race. All hail Ron Paul.

Also during the run, I was going up a hill when a young roller-blading British couple passed me and stopped at an intersection ahead. (By the way, what happened to roller-blading? I never see anyone doing it anymore in the States. It was fun, wasn’t it? I’ve probably way outgrown my old roller-blades by now. But I liked them, and that was back when I didn’t do sports.) So they’re trying to decide whether they’re supposed to go or not, according to the traffic flow -

WOMAN: Well, we would, wouldn’t we, if we’re like cars?

MAN: (patient) But we’re not like cars.
I thought that was hysterically funny. I don’t know why.

By the way, yes, I thought Pridge was pretty good in the end. A much more satisfying love story than Sense and Sensibility, though I think the latter is much funnier – the satirical edge is sharper. It’s present in P and P, but it’s much more liable to get swallowed up by the emotional side of the piece – I think readers are way more likely to get distracted by the somewhat idealized romance. It’s like how Brecht thought the audience should be constantly reminded to distance themselves from the action, and NOT get swept up in the emotion of it, because otherwise they wouldn’t recognize the play as a comment on society. Then again, strictly Brechtian theater never sounded like a lot of fun to me.

And one last rando thing (not a typo that I left the m off, rando is rando) – go here and listen to this:

LOVE this woman. I mean, there aren’t a lot of contemporary musicians who start a song with the line, “Oh, an incurable humanist you are.”

I’ve been enjoying a little downtime during this, our first weekend of the term. Today completed my first week in London – it’s gone fast, but it’s been full, so I’m left with the conflicting “Already? That’s all?” feelings that seem to be typical to situations like this. Yesterday, Friday (yes, the weekend is 3 days long and it’s super. Not that that’s new to me, since this past spring I didn’t have any classes on Friday either, but I can still appreciate it.), I got up a little late (but nowhere near as late as I’ve been known to get up; let’s say 10:30, which is usually predawn for me at home), ran, showered, and then decided to strike out on my own in the city, with the help of the London Planner, a periodical featuring notices of events around the city and, crucially, a few pages with maps of the city that one can examine discreetly while walking without having to unfold and hold it with arms spread wide (yoga instructors call this Tourist Pose). Maps are fantastic, as I later told my father. If you have one, you can go anywhere. Including Regent’s Park, which was where I went.

It’s incredible; it’s been a while since I’ve seen Central Park but I don’t remember it being like this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this in a city. It’s huge: expanses of grass, lush trees and flowers, fountains. It alternates between more French-ish, carefully manicured plants and walks and then more free-form woodsy grounds. I went up a hill and found a bench in a copse where I sat and finished Pride and Prejudice. I was there for more than two hours; I spent the second half of my time there wandering. You can walk out into the center and feel as if you’re out in the countryside. And, I add as both my parents were hasty to question me about it, it’s not isolated. There are people everywhere – young couples, families, soccer-playing youths – lying on the grass or strolling through or talking. It seemed like there were more than you’d ever see in an American park of the kind, though I don’t know what it’s like on weekdays – I was reminded of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. Regent’s Park is far larger than that, and different in design, but what seemed familiar were the people, everyone so relaxed. I went back again today and found an excellent willow tree. It bends over so far that it almost lies along the ground, though its branches still extend high into the air, and you can walk up along the trunk. There are plenty of well-shaped depressions for sitting, and I sat. Unfortunately, when I opened my backpack I discovered that I had forgotten Nicholas Nickleby, the next on my reading list – I could have sworn I’d packed it!
So I just sat. Which wasn’t bad in itself.

I’m back in the room now – there’s been talk of going to a pub in about half an hour, which I would be down with, but there’s also been talk of going to a nightclub in the far north of the city with the British Bulldogs kids (Yale students doing internships in London). I mean, I haven’t completely written off clubs, but they’re not really my scene, and it sounds like maybe the Bulldogs are made of stronger stuff than I – an email from one of them inviting us out promised that the sender would stay “until the club closes at 6 am”. I don’t think I’ve got the stamina for that. All-night arguments with the improv group yes, all-night papers yes, all-night Harry Potter reading yes, all-night standing in dark room with throbbing music not so much. Just sounds kind of…boring? We’ll see. The truth is, I’m a little anxious about the workload, and I’m eager to make a dent in Nickleby, which, I should mention, is quite compelling so far. Interesting echoes of Cervantes, in my opinion, though that may be totally off the wall – the little interpolated stories of travelers on the road, the narrative that so far follows a literal journey. My edition includes a preface by Dickens wherein he notes that, at the time he wrote the book, the grim “Yorkshire schools”, one of which is unflatteringly drawn in the novel, were quite common, and now have dwindled to “very few” as a result of his damning portrayal. Would it have happened like that nowadays? Almost an impossible question to answer, of course, given that the work of reformers like Dickens has ensured that a whiff of treatment an eighth as bad as that endured by the boys of Squeers’ school brings on an investigation and a lawsuit. But I don’t know…are people less affected by art now? We don’t have riots in the theaters anymore. Even as recently as Miller’s Death of a Salesman, according to my theater history professor, disillusioned businessmen were wandering dazed out of the theater, having to be corralled by policemen. I can’t see it happening now. Counterexamples solicited.

Whatevs. I eat too much dried fruit. If someone is monitoring my behavior, which, if not probable, is certainly technically possible given the ubiquitous closed-circuit television cameras in the street, they are undoubtedly mystified by my store-going habits. Today I went to 5 or 6 grocery stores, some little corner marts, some many-aisled supermarkets. I went looking for dried fruit, of which they are many varieties to be had but only certain varieties to be desired. Across the street and down a little from where I live is the first establishment that ever I visited, a week ago today, wherein I procured my first little box of dried fruit. On that day, they had in stock the Tropical Mix, which is my favorite kind because it includes banana chips, my absolute favorite type of dried fruit, though the fruit in its natural condition doesn’t do much for me. They stock Tropical Mix sporadically (maybe everyone else prefers it too) but can be counted on to have Calypso Mix, which contains dried cantaloupe, an ingredient coming up fast in my estimation behind banana chips. I now also go to Tesco, the budget chain supermarket of the UK, because I have found that they offer a dried fruit mix generous in banana chips. You might say to me, so, abandon the Calypso Mixes of the world and just go to Tesco. But the thing is that the Tesco coconut shavings – coconut shavings being almost as important as banana chips – are markedly inferior to the across-the-street Calypso Mix coconut, thus making it necessary for me to buy both and mix them together. Moreover, actual dinner-ish food can only be purchased at Waitrose, the more upscale (though reasonably priced) grocery store farther down the street, which boasts much better produce than Tesco or any of the smaller markets. I mean, you can pay 99 pence for bruised, shriveling mushrooms or you can walk an extra few hundred yards and pay 99 pence for spherical white ones, what are you going to do? Meanwhile I continue to investigate every market I pass for Tropical Mix, the Dulcinea to my Don Quixote.

So you see, I’m a busy person. Pubs? I’ll check my planner.

Update: Pubbed it!  Because I’m trying to be brave, it’s this new thing I’ve been doing for about a year, off and on, with mixed results.  This time it was a good, if mild, reward, for a mild risk.  We went to the Marquis Cornwallis, a pub right down the street from us, very convenient.  They carded me for my diet Coke, which I guess makes sense since it is a pub and even if you’re not drinking it’s reasonable that they require that you be of age if you’re in there.  Then again, when I consider that the drinking age here is like 16, I am maybe a little offended.  Not that it’s anything I’m not used to.  Like my brother’s friends moms at his prom: Oh, I didn’t know Sam had a sister!  And what grade are you in?  Fourth, lady, but I’m big for my age.

Anyway, pub quite pleasant.  Now for some Nickleby.

Peepsies! It’s been a very full first week here.

Classes started on Monday at ten; we have art history on Mondays and Wednesdays and literature on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s right, Fridays are free. FREE. Which means that for me, the weekend has started. I had trouble even motivating myself to write this. I am so relaxed.

Things were a little bumpy Monday morning – I went running at 7 and got through my morning exercises and ablutions with time to spare, so I went over to Bedford Square (wherein lies the Paul Mellon Center) a little early. This turned out to not be early enough. When I arrived, our coordinator Viv asked if I had a passport photo, which apparently – and I say emphatically, I never got the memo – was something we were supposed to bring with us to the first day. Not our passport, just a photo. Can I go after class and get one taken? You can go right now, she says. Just run down to the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road, they do pictures there, it’s about three pounds. The office secretary very nicely offers to go with me and show me where it is and the coordinator immediately says no, sorry, we need you here. But okay, I’m an explorer, I can deal with this, especially since the extremely English name Tottenham, coupled with Court, no slouch itself in the English-sounding department, makes me very happy. It’s about twenty to ten and, with a few false starts, I find my way with little trouble to the YMCA in question.

Since my mother is very big on YMCAs, I should note that this YMCA is exceptional. It does not look like any YMCA I have ever seen. It is huge – sleek design, dark and cool inside, huge reception desk, everything colored in candy tones. It looks like the entrance to a Disneyworld ride, and not one of the dinky ones like It’s A Small World. And a sign informs me that this is the first YMCA ever. EVER. Number one. Crazy – I didn’t know they started in England.

So anyway, I’m feeling good that I found it and even better that I’ve managed to do a little historical sightseeing, and I ask the woman behind the desk about photos, but she says no, we don’t do those, try Boots across the street or the Tottenham metro station.

Boots is a pharmacy chain in London, pretty well-known I guess, and pretty big, offering a lot of other stuff besides pharmaceuticals, but I don’t know this at the time, and in the hubbub of the World’s Oldest YMCA, I mishear and think I’ve been advised to take a photo at “the booths across the street”. Moreover, the Y is sort of on a corner and I will later discover that the “across” the woman at the desk meant is across a different street than the one I assume it to be – a street, in my defense, that is not the street I came in from. So I go back out and cross this wrong street and spend more time than I care to admit looking at the closed garagelike door of some big industrial building that lies directly across the street from the Y, going, Where are the booths? I ask at an Indian takeout place and the guy there says, “Um, try the shops?” What shops? “The shops!”

Okay, so on to Plan C, I go to the metro station, but the woman there tells me that they don’t have metro photo booths anymore. Well, I never really got why they had them anyway – like what, do you come home and go, Hey, sweetheart, here’s a few snaps of me on the morning commute – but clearly I wouldn’t argue with a few photo booths if they were to present themselves at this point. So I turn myself back around and heading up the street, I see Boots pharmacy, and in dazzling piece of inductive reasoning I realize that this is what the Y woman was talking about. I am a little sweaty at this point as this first week London has been, according to our teachers, uncharacteristically hot and sunny. I go into the pharmacy – No, we don’t take photos. Do you know someone who does? The electronics shop across the street. Despite the fact that Boots is also on a corner, I get the right across-the-street this time, and I go into the Sony store, where I’m told, after announcing my business, to wait. So I wait and start to feel kind of awkward, but whatevs, I’m okay hanging out with the four or five guys who seem to be running the shop together. They bring out the Polaroid and have me stand against a white shade by the door – it’s a bit of makeshift operation – and then we have more awkward waiting while the Polaroids develop, and then they present me with four small photos and charge me five pounds. I open the little folder that contains the pictures and I behold the face of Frenetic Photo-Oriented Wandering. It is nothing to blog about.

I march back to Bedford Square, twenty minutes late for class number one. Whoops. I am received with sympathy – I’m sorry, I should have just told you to come back if you couldn’t find a place, says the coordinator. But I give her my photos. Good thing I have them, right? Probably needed them to get some sort of international student I.D. or something like the one I had in France, gets you into all sorts of things for free, right? She pastes my picture above my name on a sheet containing other similar pictures of people in my class. It is a sheet that the teachers can look at on the first day, thus enabling them to know what you look like. That’s right. You yourself are presumably sitting there able to display your own sweaty visage, but this way, I guess, they don’t have to look up.

Anyway. So, Highly Important Picture taken. I don’t mean to grouse. Really, things have been fantastic here, absolutely unbelievable, and even my little peripatetic search for a picture place furthered my sense of the city.

I’ve been doing a lot of tourist stuff, and I am not ashamed. Already I think I’ve done more sightseeing than I ever did in China, and there’s more to come. Since we get out of school at 12:15, we’ve usually got the afternoon for outings (that’s right, like Mary Poppins), and we’ve done some great stuff. Monday was a teacher-guided, mandatory trip to the British Museum, which is across the street from where we study – seriously, two minutes to get there at the most – and we got to wander the Enlightenment Gallery, which is an eclectic collection: a sixth-century glass ball designed to ward off illness, an assemblage of beautiful polished shells, walls full of volumes from Balzac to Shakespeare, two mummified heads that caught me rather by surprise. We also saw the famous – and famously contested – friezes and statues of the Parthenon. I’m always amazed – maybe stupidly – by ancient representations of the human form, because, well, ancient interpretations of the body tend to look pretty much like us and our own ideas of ourselves. Again, maybe a dumb thing to be surprised at, because we’re the same species as they were, same musculature, same skeleton, same brain – but that in itself is kind of amazing to me. All those years ago. We had to leave for a little welcoming reception at the Paul Mellon center before we could see much more – or even spend decent time with the things we saw – but I’ll definitely be back. Admission is free,

On Tuesday we struck out on our own – I bought an Oyster card, which is like the French carte d’orange, enabling use of the subway and bus on either a debit or a time-based system – and went to the Tower of London, where we had a tour from a yeoman warder, which is what they call the guides there. The guides are, it seems, actually members of the British army, and they live at the tower. In the tower. So we saw it all – the green where Anne Boleyn and Jane Grey and Catherine Howard were beheaded, the gate where they came in, the chapel where Anne Boleyn is interred (and where, our warder said, his niece was married recently, which seems an odd choice of venue, symbolically speaking, if you’re hoping to embark on a happy partnership, but certainly a talking point, I’m sure), the staircase where the skeletons believed to be those of child-monarch Edward V and his brother, who disappeared into the tower in the fifteenth century, were discovered in the seventeenth, the room where Sir Walter Raleigh (a relative, so I’m told, so I hope because that would be frickin cool) was imprisoned rather genteelly, the building where they briefly held, I think for reasons of morale during the blitz, Rudolf Hess, the cringe-inducing instruments of torture in the dungeon, the sixty-inch-waisted armor of Henry VIII. I saw the Thames for the first time, too, and on a beautiful day, the light shining on the water. The whole place feels so peaceful and pleasant. You’d never guess. Maybe that’s why our yeoman’s niece was willing to have her wedding there – maybe she thought it would constitute a break with history, a reimagining of what people can be, the construction of a new history. Which I guess is kind of what marriage is, too.

Yesterday, we took a 35-minute train out to Hampton Court, the sprawling palace that Henry VIII confiscated from Woolsey when Woolsey fell out of favor and Henry realized that his cardinal actually had a bigger house than he. It was great – Hampton Court has been, if not number one, pretty high on my list of things I want to see, since, like a bunch of other Americans, I find the Tudors fascinating. (I will say that I found them so, and had done a lot of reading about them, prior to the Jonathan Rhys-Meyers incarnation of Henry VIII, which hopefully gives me a few points.) We saw an awkwardly funny dramatic interpretation of one episode of life at Henry’s court by an actor with an awkwardly funny codpiece – Thomas Seymour preparing to ask Catherine Parr to marry him, only to discover that the king has already set his sights on the lady. I experienced a wave of my old grade-school compulsion to shout out the answers but tamped it down. Don’t worry, Thomas, she outlives him and you two get together. Although that doesn’t go as well as you might think either.

We explored the grounds, got lost in a maze – a word on mazes. Mazes sound very cool. Mazes, seen from above, are aesthetically pleasing. Mazes, as featured in Harry Potter, are full of interesting things – mazes in most fiction tend to hold things worth going through a maze for, whether they be treasures or lovers or monsters to defeat. Mazes, in practice, are – I don’t know. Mazes. You go through, you can’t see much because if you could it would ruin the maze. You go this way, you go that way. Yay. The seven of us walked around in a line, occasionally reversing direction (“Oh, crap,” said one of my friends when she realized she was bringing up the rear, “I’m going to be the one who gets picked off.”) We found the center, we found our way back to the entrance.

The gardens were absolutely gorgeous – some more along French lines, the trees they called “tailles” at Versailles, shaped and sized, some a little wilder, as in a section labeled “Wilderness”. The yew trees, some of them dating back, as the signs said, to the early eighteenth-century reign of William III and Mary, were thick and twisty, planted in lines so that between them were straightaway views of fountains, arbors, statues. All the flowers were in bloom and the stalks were laden with glorious fragrant roses of all colors, (including one type that kind of looked like an egg, white around the edges and yellow in the middle). We stayed almost until six, when the palace closes – they still hold events and concerts there, and they were actually setting up for one that night.

So – we’re relaxing today, with plans to go to coastal Brighton this weekend, and to attend a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe next week. A little nervous about the essays to come, but I’m here to see England, not to write a thesis. And make no mistake, I am learning. Like the word re-up. I don’t think it’s necessarily a British word, I’ve heard it used a lot by my fellow American students, but I’ve just become aware of it and I am impressed with its versatility. It means resupply, basically, or refill – I have to re-up my cellphone minutes, you might want to re-up that Oyster card. I have to re-up my broccoli, other than that I have all the groceries I need for tonight. Good stuff.

Ooh, it just rained. That’s new. Maybe we’ll get that foggy good-for-the-complexion London weather. Yesterday, at Hampton Court, one of my friends said, “I hope it rains, because I brought my jacket.” Seems unpredictable, though. Like one of the security guards said in the neoclassical wing of Hampton, while telling us about the rumors that William III was “gay or homosexual”: “Some things you just never know.”

So, I’m in London! By far the most stressful part of Friday’s journey here was in Boston, the check-in (lines of sweaty people, bags not made much lighter by your mother’s forcing you to take Middlemarch out), the security business. Am I the only one who’s a total mess after security? I always have to sit down on the floor and put my shoes back on which takes much longer than getting them off because I have to untie them and tie them, and then I have to put my computer back in its case and it never fits right, and stuff all the odds and ends like contact fluid and change back into my carry-on bag – and I am the only one I see doing this! Does everyone else have a little travel elf who pulls everything together again after the X-rays? I swear, I’ve never seen anyone else squatting in a skirt in a semicircle of disorganized possessions. I always worry that while I’m dealing with all this they’re going to decide I’m suspicious after all and make me go through it all again, and this time confiscate my Ganesha statue or something. Last year I didn’t have any security problems on my flight from China to the U.S., and then when I landed at Newark and went to get my connecting flight to Boston, they took away my Water Babies sunblock, which made me sad because it was historically significant Water Babies sunblock in that it had come with me on other fun trips and been used by a number of people I had crushes on. This left me, I should point out, still in possession of several arguably more dangerous and sharp things, including my United Nations button, my pointy-headed Thai Buddha, and the safety pin of my peace ribbon. All of which could have done damage, had I been so inclined.

But I’m sorry, none of that has anything to do with this. The flight was nice. Reykjavik was peripherally included. I gave my chicken dinner to a hungry Spain-bound boy a few seats down from me. How do I always miss the vegetarian memo? You have to book it in advance. I slept a lot on the flight, which is unusual for me, but I was up all the previous night (why, WHY do you do these silly things? I don’t know. It never feels good. It’s like these roasted mushrooms they have at this 24-hour grocery store in New Haven, and all of spring 2007 I’d be up late writing papers and go, hm, those mushrooms look so good, and I’d load up on them, and then I’d roll around on the floor feeling like I’d been kicked by a horse, and then the next night I’d go back and go, those mushrooms look so good, another $8 worth, please.) so it wasn’t hard. We landed a little earlier than expected, around 6:30. We followed a lot of signs to customs and baggage claim. Customs was a long sweaty line if you weren’t a British national, so I guess there’s some nice travel symmetry there. There’s some sort of fast-lane iris-scanning thing you can sign up for, which sounds appealing, though the idea of them having your iris on record is unnerving. Needless to say, they don’t have mine (yet) so I had to head for the All Other Countries line. The All Other Countries sign subtitle: This includes U.S. citizens. Love it. And I am not going to pretend I didn’t need it to say that, because much as it hurts my soul to admit this, I totally saw “All Other Countries” and thought, does this mean U.S. citizens too?

The customs man actually spent a long time looking at my papers – I’ve heard from other people that theirs weren’t scrutinized at all. He read the letter we were issued and then asked me if there was any “placement” involved in my studies, which I guess meant would I be working, and I said no, just a lecture course, and then he said, Well, it doesn’t say that here. So I awkwardly ducked down in front of the counter and pulled some more random papers out – course descriptions and things – and he stamped my passport and let me through, and then on the other side I squatted on the grungy floor and stuffed all of it back into my luggage, how’s that for symmetrical?

Here comes the part I’m proudest of, so beware. You may think this is unimpressive. If so, don’t tell me, because it makes me really happy. Transportation from Heathrow to the dorm was, of course, foremost in my mind the entire trip, as it turned out the two other students I thought would be on my flight weren’t. So, first things first, I went anxiously to the baggage claim (it’s called the “baggage reclaim” here, actually, whatevs) – I say anxiously because earlier one of the program coordinators had sent us an email talking about how recent changes at Heathrow have led to loss of luggage – and located the proper conveyor for my flight (airports make me feel so competent, I’ve said it before) and immediately my bag came rolling out. So I shouldered it with much grunting and wrinkling of clothes and went trudging out past the lines of people waiting with signs, and suppressed the urge to pretend to be one of the passengers they were looking for. I’d seen a lot of advertisements in the airport for shuttles to Paddington Station (“Smart Londoners use HeathrowConnect”, said the ads, and I believed them) so I bought a ticket from a nice woman (6 pounds 90 pence, which is better, shall we say, than 65 pounds for a taxi) and took a nice train from the nondescript outskirts into the city of London. Paddington, when I got there and hauled my stuff off, was huge, high-ceilinged and airy, and actually wide-open – there was a truck driving into the main lobby when I arrived. I considered a taxi from there but decided, no. The adventure starts now. Buses are cheaper, cheaper even than the Tube, and apparently a great way to see the city. Seeing the city is first on my goal list this time around (given my buckle-down study existence in Beijing last year), so I lugged everything over to a map of the routes and pulled out the map they’d given us of the dorm neighborhood and figured out I wanted the 205 bus, and then I tottered out of the station, bought a 2 pound ticket at the stop, and didn’t have to wait very long before it came careening up.

I noticed that one of the passengers, an English guy, asked the driver
to let him know when we got to a certain street, and since the stops weren’t marked too clearly with names, I decided to ask the driver to announce my stop too. Maybe this made me look kind of like a dork since I was getting off at an official stop that was probably obvious to everyone else, but hey, I got there, so whatever. At Euston Station, the bus stop that appeared on the map to be closest to my destination, I took a little while to orient the map properly, but I’ve oriented maps with only mountains to go by so it wasn’t as difficult as it could have been, and I eventually lurched my way down Euston Street to Judd Street, where I passed the first major landmark that told me I was on track – the British Library! So close to us! And huge. And then I figured out the smaller streets – I was almost there and kind of wandering and this nice English guy called, “Excuse me, are you lost?” in his nice English accent, so I told him the name of the street I was looking for and he pointed it out to me, straight ahead. And okay, I kind of knew where it was anyway but I thought it was sweet. So far the people have been extremely friendly. I got into the dorm at around 9:30 A.M. and technically we weren’t supposed to be allowed into our rooms until 12 noon but the man at the desk let me in, which was a major relief as I was pretty exhausted. I put everything down, I called my parents thinking it was like 6 in America when it was actually more like 4 (sorry, Mom), and then I went to sleep. I intended it to be a 2-hour nap, something like that. And then I woke up at 8 P.M. Whoops. Anyway, a little disoriented but still riding the high of having got myself to the dorm alone, on public transportation, for about 9 pounds (VERY, VERY impressive, you may congratulate me through the Comments section or in person, greeting cards preferred), I went out to get the lay of the land*. I found a supermarket where I got apples. Apples, and access thereto, are important to me, as those who know me will attest. And then I walked about some more and stood awkwardly in front of restaurants trying to decide whether or not to go in – it felt weird to go alone. But then – THEN! – I realized that this neighborhood is full of other amazing dining options. Including lots of Chinese and Indian restaurants that offer, as the British call it, “take-away”. So I got me some garlic vegetables and I was very happy. I did Chinese for dinner again tonight from another place (I think tomorrow our group is going to get together and go out) and it was really good. Reminds me of China, actually.

I’m struck by what a diverse city London seems to be. I mean, obviously you can’t tell by looking where everyone’s from, but there seem to be a lot of people from the Middle East, and from the Far East as well, and I’ve heard all kinds of European languages spoken today. I woke up fairly late this morning and went for my inaugural run, employing my usual foreign-city navigational technique of only turning left for the first forty minutes, thus having only to remember to turn right during the second forty minutes on the way back. My father pointed out that, if I were to keep turning in only one direction, I would eventually end up going in a square, and while I have no concrete explanation for why this doesn’t happen to me, I can say that it doesn’t. It was a beautiful day and I even found some hills to run up. I also avoided getting hit by cars, because some municipal official wisely decided to paint each crosswalk with a bold LOOK LEFT or LOOK RIGHT, a practice which perhaps cheats natural selection (and this is a country with Charles Darwin on their ten-pound note, have I said that? how cool? we could never do that here.) but for which I am nonetheless grateful as the proper direction to look in is never the one in which I naturally look.

Also had this conversation today, while walking along sidewalk.

Sketchy English Guy in Car Stopped at Light: Excuse me, how old are you?

Me: (after momentarily forgetting – nineteen? Twenty?) I’m twenty-one.

SEGICSAL: (to friends) See, that makes it all right.

And then they kept going. I think I just got semi-hit on. To be honest, felt kind of like a compliment. We take what we can get.

Anyway, we’re now preparing for our first day, which is tomorrow at 10 A.M. I walked over to Bedford Square today to make sure I knew how to get to the Paul Mellon Center so I think I’ll be okay. Okay if I can finish Pride and Prejudice. I will admit that I am liking it better. The confessional scene with Darcy at Hunsford is nice. Okay? My heart is not made of ice. And Elizabeth’s relationship with her father seems interesting and unusual. And now I have to go finish it. I will post photographs soon. More to follow.

*I just reread that sentence and I’ve been using that expression for ages and for the first time ever, in rereading, it suddenly sounded weird and vaguely suggestive to me. I went out to explore. Period.

Yes, that’s what I’ve been up to. Also looking at maps. The lucky thing is that two other Yale-in-London kids are going to be on my flight, so hopefully we can figure out the directions and share transportation costs. Such costs are, it appears, bound to be high regardless – sixty-five pounds (that’s to say, a hundred and thirty dollars) for a taxi directly from Heathrow to the lodgings. Needless to say, I won’t be doing that – apparently there’re some busing options, and also a train to Paddington Station (Paddington! Like the bear!), from which one can take a less expensive taxi to our destination. I’m hoping to conserve money as much as possible – well, I always hope for that, but I’m focusing HARD on it right now – so I can take advantage of these great trips that a student organization – to which YiL belongs – offers. There are surprisingly low-priced trips to Wales (a three-night stay that includes horseback riding and hiking), Cornwall, Canterbury, and Rochester. I’m also mulling – it’s all up in the air, of course – staying after the program is over and exploring the Scottish highlands. There are all kinds of fairly reasonable and aesthetically decent youth hostels. So many things to do!

We were talking about this, my family and I, the other night, and I mentioned that I’d read, on the YiL website, that England is the size of the state of Wyoming. This struck me as pretty large. This conversation followed:

ME: Apparently it’s the size of Wyoming.

DAD: Is that including Scotland?

ME: Um, I think so. So it’s Britain that’s the size of Wyoming, I guess, not England. The UK.

MOM: That seems way too big. Maybe they mean it’s the size of Wyoming including Ireland.

ME: No, I don’t think they would include Ireland.

MOM: Why not?

DAD: Well, it’s a different island. It’s also a different country.

ME: Unless by “size of Wyoming” they mean “size of Wyoming including Nevada”.

Anyway, good times. My mom, without whom I probably would not be able to get to the supermarket let alone across the Atlantic Ocean, is shouldering a lot of the stress of this takeoff. She is also synthesizing some of her own. Earlier today she told me that maybe I shouldn’t drink the water over there. I said I thought it would be okay. She said to ask. I said I didn’t want to insult anybody. She said that the problem is I might not be used to The Microbes. I capitalize this because the way she said it, it just sounded capitalized. My mom stresses a lot about invisible dangerous things. Ticks, pathogens, UV rays. (After the holiday party at our local library, to my brother and me: “Wash your hands, guys. Because, you know, The Germs.”) All of them worth worrying about, certainly. But I survived two months in China doing just about everything wrong in terms of microbe avoidance: I ate tons of fresh fruit, I didn’t wash it. I ate raw bean sprouts and mushrooms. Constitution like iron. Never sick once. I maintain that what really makes people sick is the meat, and they blame it on the produce because they want an excuse not to eat vegetables.

Anyway, as we close in on the hour of adieus, I’m racing to finish the required reading. About a third of the way through Pride and Prejudice. I spent much of my young life avoiding Austen, against the advice of all the people who gushed about her and insisted that I would love her work. I read my first Austen book, Sense and Sensibility, in a great course on eighteenth-century literature (S&S was published in 1801 but they grandfather it in. The long eighteenth century, you know.) And I sailed through it, I was totally taken by surprise, it was great. Maybe part of that was the result of first having to struggle through Robinson Crusoe for the second time in as many years and then moving on to Richardson’s sometimes compelling but often sanctimonious and histrionic mess (about 20% of my margin notes read simply, Shut up, Pamela.) But anyway, I liked it. Apparently some critics regard Sense and Sensibility as one of Austen’s lesser works, and I know everyone loves Pride and Prejudice (by everyone I mean the Jane Austen Girls, as I used to think of them); on my edition protagonist Elizabeth Bennett is described as “the most beloved heroine in English literature”. But frankly – smite me, Regency gods – I don’t see it. It’s entertaining enough, but it’s going more slowly than its alliterative sibling did for me, and so far I think Sense‘s Elinor Dashwood is far superior as a heroine to Elizabeth. Elinor almost functions as a proxy for Austen herself (or Austen’s narrative voice) at some points – same great dry, sarcastic sense of humor. As my English professor contended, she is essentially removed from the “courtship plot” when putative fiance Edward appears to have lost interest in her, so she can stand outside it and evaluate. Even before her seeming rejection, she provides wonderful counterpoint to her sister Marianne’s flights of sentimentality. So far, as far as I can see, Pride and Prejudice (I keep typing Pridge and Pridejudice and I think I like that better, that’s what I’m calling it in my head from now on.) doesn’t have that. No, we’ve got Elizabeth going gooey like this:

My dear, dear aunt, [she rapturously cried] what delight, what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains? Oh, what hours of transport we shall spend!

Marianne Dashwood, in her worst excesses, never prattled like this. So as to where I stand on Pridge: I’m whatev-ish.

And it’s 3:16 A.M. I hope that was entertaining. I have fewer guidelines with this blog because I’m not writing it for anyone in particular like I was with the last one, which was a required journal. So, readers – all right, to modify that realistically – So, Mom and Dad, tell me if you have preferences. Will you be bored if I spend more posts rambling about literature? Do you want diary entries? Personal reflection? Classic Livejournal whining about how the drama teacher picks favorites? I’ll stick to England itself more if that’s what’s interesting. I subtitled this blog with an achingly clever pun and I’m going to do it justice*. I’ll write whatever. Can also spew everything that’s in my head at a given moment. It’s like a party in here. Plus a secret society – that’s what I told myself this spring after none of them tapped me. Screw them, I have a secret society in my head. Lots of advantages. I’m never left out. And also I can definitely have my own Independence Day fete, regardless of program schedule. Like J.C. Penney. It’s all inside.

Anyway, wooooooo! England! I hope we fly over Reykjavik. That’s my favorite city that I’ve never been to.

*After writing this it occurred to me that I don’t think the little blog format I picked displays my blog’s subtitle, and I can’t leave you in the dark on such a charming linguistic turn; it’s “Stories from the Anglofiles”. Precious, right? Personally I don’t actually identify as an Anglophile. It sounds scary, and like an accusation. Anglophile! I’m a Hibernophile, that sounds like something nice, muscular but also furry.

So anyway, I’ll be keeping a log of the time I spend in London this summer.  I did this last summer in China.  (You can find that at http://nell-beijingsummer.blogspot.com/ if you’re interested.  Keep in mind that I was venting.  In a country with very little ventilation.)  I’m looking forward to doing it again.  I like to think that my being on a trip takes some of the self-indulgence out of it.  And I’m excited about doing it here.  When I was blogging at Blogspot, no Mr. Blogspot came over and left a comment on my first post.  This is so friendly.  Plus it makes it appear that I have friends.

I leave on Friday; at this time two days from now I will probably be somewhere over Ireland.  I’m excited.  I’m taking American Airlines.  I wonder if they’ll do the safety announcements twice over like they did when I went to France.  Fasten your seatbelts, chappies.

By the way, the name of the blog comes from an email one of the Yale-in-London program coordinators sent us detailing the schedule for the term.  I just think it’s really funny.  Not a holiday.  Noted.