Nov 2006

This past week was the Bath Mozart Festival. I was glad to be able to celebrate such a big anniversary in some fashion. There was a whole ten days of concerts and a lecture and I'm not talking about some local chorus or something...no, we got world class performers. So I went to two concerts, a violin and piano duet, and then the London Winds last night.

The piano/violin concert was in the Assembly Rooms, where there have been concerts for centuries. If you think Pride and Prejudice, this is where you would have had those Jane Austen-style balls. Very ornate.

The London Winds concert was at Bath Abbey, and I enjoyed it more. It's a beautiful space, and I actually tried to follow along in the program as the pieces progressed from one movement to another (this is allegro...ok this is the minuet...ok this is the largo...etc) so I think I got more out of it as an active listener than I did at the first concert I went to. But even more than that, it was just really relaxing to listen to good music.

Other than that, my weekend consisted of watching the Aristocats and Stepmom, going to the farmer's market, and doing lots of homework. LOTS and lots of homework. But I don't have to complain to you about that, as we all know how that goes sometimes.

I'm sick right now, but I'm still having a good time. i go to oxford tomorrow, and then after that I only have to go one more time. I'm going to be sad when my other classes are done though, because I really enjoy them. It's just that trip to Oxford that gets me down every week.

I forgot that most of you have a lot of this week off for Thanksgiving. Brittany is sitting next to me very anxious about the Bucknell basketball game. I am at least proud of the Seminoles for finally pulling off a win this week.

Go Noles.

Cheers,
Les

I want to go back to Ireland! I had a fantastic three days in Dublin. Flying in, we could see the beautiful coast, but I only spent time in the city. It’s a very compact city, though, nothing like London. From the top of the Guiness Factory (the seventh floor) we had a panoramic view of the city all the way to the mountains that surround it. It’s a beautiful country. I want to go back and spend more time, both in Dublin and other places. I want to go to Connemara and Galway and the spend time in the Aran Islands listening to people speak Gaelic. It’s a really beautiful language, just from the little bit I heard in Dublin. A few people in our group spent our “free day” at Howth, a seaside town not faraway. But there was enough to do in Dublin itself to keep me so busy that I am still tired! We saw an excellent Yeats exhibit at the National Library, and a whole lot of places that had literary significance. It seems that everytime we turned around there was another building or street or statue from a Joyce novel. There are wonderful statues all over Dublin dedicated to the writers- Joyce, Kavanagh, Oscar Wilde, etc. The other thing we did that was relevant to our class material was tour the Kilmanhain Jail. It has a lot of history, but its biggest significance, and what was relevant to our course, was that it was the site where the rebels of the Easter 1916 Uprising were held and executed. I learned a lot in just an hour of touring it. Besides all that, we saw other interesting things, like the National Museum. Not only did they have rooms upon rooms of Bronze Age jewelery and Viking treasures, but they had a whole exhibit on the peat bog bodies. They are bodies that have been preserved in peat bogs and they are both grotesque and fascinating. Speaking of grotesque, I tried my first Guiness on this trip. I couldn’t finish my first pint- I suffered through about half of it and then two other people finished it for me. Everyone was enjoying my experience. But even though I don’t like beer, I still could enjoy the brewery tour, especially the view from the top I just told you about. We took a “literary pub tour” that took us around to four different pubs Saturday night, and the actor and actress leading our tour acted out scenes from famous Irish works. It was really well done. If anyone understands Waiting for Godot, let me know, because that was the second time I’ve seen it AND we read it this week and I still don’t understand what it’s all supposed to mean in the end.
My friends and I spent Sunday afternoon doing a little bit of shopping (something I haven’t done in Paris or London) and walking around Dublin. It was very relaxing to not feel like we were rushing around sightseeing. The people we encountered in the pubs in Dublin were very friendly, and I intend to go back.
But what was the highlight of my trip? Actually, there are two. The first is comical, the other is academically astute.
We saw the spot where Handel’s Messiah was first performed. It’s now a luxury hotel, but there is a nice memorial plaque outside of it. On that street corner in Dublin, one of the ASE staff who accompanied us and our tutor to Dublin started singing the Messiah. Not humming, or even shouting the Hallelujah chorus, but BELTING in his (very good) tenor voice, parts of the Messiah I wouldn’t recognize just having seen it all the way through once. And as he keeps singing, he’s looking around and making hand gestures as though we should all join in. I was sorry that we were so disappointing to him, but who other than Andrew Butterworth (a man of mysterious talents) can just start in the middle of Handel’s Messiah? So finally he stopped and got us all to sing the hallelujah chorus, and we obliged him so we could move on.

And the other highlight was Trinity College, where they have the Book of Kells. I saw pages from the Book of Kells up close, under glass, beautifully illuminated. The exhibit went in depth as to how the book was made, too. The library above it had many other manuscripts from more contemporary times, including the FIRST EVER PRINTED COPY of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Yeah. 1472, or something like that. Not the year he wrote it, of course, but the year it was ever printed rather than copied. Still impressive, I thought.

So that's it. Oh, and maybe I'll look into what kind of graduate programs I could do at Trinity College. But only after I've gone back to Ireland and can base that decision on more than three days.

This weekend was amazing. On Friday, I didn’t even leave my house. I was doing homework for the better part of the day. So, yay that stuff got done, and boo, that I spent one of my last 40 something days in England inside of my house. So Saturday and Sunday well made up for it. On Saturday, Melissa and I set out early, picking up Jess and walking to the farmers’ market. It’s fun to walk around and try samples and buy fresh veggies and such. Then Melissa and I walked around part of Bath, running a couple of errands, and I bought soap that looks and feels like Jell-O. It seems to be a fad here. And I have to admit, it’s pretty awesome. Then when I got home from all of that, Brittany and I went to the gym and really pushed ourselves. And after shower and dinner, we headed up to the university with the rest of the town, to see the fireworks. It was a national holiday weekend here in Bath, so there was a big carnival with rides and games and carnival food and fireworks. It was FREEZING so we left right after the fireworks, but it was a lot of free fun. Then on Sunday, Melissa and I tried a new church (she attends Catholic mass and I go to the Abbey) called the Central Reformed church of Bath. It was really sweet and everyone was very warm and welcoming to us. They have two pastors, a married couple, and they are from the States. The rest of the congregation is over the age of 60. But it was very sweet and I might go back. Then we did homework and I had another power workout and then we went over to Jess’s house and made dinner with her and Abbey. It was a feast! And then we could walk outside of their house and have a perfect view of the fireworks over the recreation center. TWO nights of free fireworks! I think that’s pretty special.
Today is Oxford day. But I figured out that I can take an even later train and still be on time, so that’s what I’m doing. I’m taking a train, and taking the bus to her house directly from the train station and back again. I won’t even feel like I’m really in Oxford.
This weekend coming up is my trip to Dublin with my Irish lit class…three days in Ireland! I can’t wait. Between now and then I have to do a lot of homework, though. I’m very slow at making progress on rewriting my memoir. I don’t want to make a lot of the changes that my prof wants me to make…but I do want to get a good grade! So I’ll be working on that for hours and hours.
Bath is lovely! I hope you are all doing wonderfully. Don’t be out of touch!

I had a meeting today with my "mentor". It seems an unfitting title because this is the first time we've had a mentor meeting, and the program is more than half over. But he asked me about how I'm doing, and more importantly WHAT I'm doing. And then he suggested that I find something else to do.

Apparently, I'm not doing enough. The fact that I'm taking four classes (everyone has four classes here, it's 16 hours credit) and getting along well with the people in my house and making friends with other people on the program and going to and from Oxford for my Spanish tutorial by myself every week and ENJOYING Bath isn't enough...

I wanted to interrupt and tell him that in a normal semester of college, I'm taking 17 hours of class and 10 hours of rehearsal and helping to lead FCA and giving tours of the school for the admissions office.

Can't I enjoy NOT being too busy this semester?

I think so. So I will pretend to take his suggestion of getting more involved, which is what a lot of people were told today apparently, and then throw away the little slip of paper he gave me with a phone number on it.

I am one of three girls helping to organize a shoe box Christmas donation thing through the Abbey, though, and that makes me feel like I am giving back in a tiny way.

I am really bad at keeping a journal. Or maybe this is a sign that I am too busy doing cooler things to keep up with a journal that you all probably stopped checking a month ago.

To try to write down everything about my fall break would be futile, and also take more time than I have now. It was wonderful to see my parents…to show them Bath and my house and the city I live in. We spent two days in London, in a frenzy, and then three days in Paris.

I...adore…Paris.

The Louvre was, of course, incredible. It lived up to all expectations. Mona Lisa is by no means my favorite work in the museum…and we only covered a fraction of the exhibits anyway. But I saw so many things from art history class that came to life before my eyes. Venus de Milo, the coronation of Napoleon, and some of my personal favorites- paintings by Panini.

Notre Dame is beautiful, but smaller than I imagined. It doesn’t compare, in my mind, to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Christopher Wren designed the dome to be like an observatory between Earth and Heaven, and it’s really breathtaking. It’s the largest dome in Europe (I was surprised to learn that, so I might have gotten it wrong…but either way it’s huge). There’s a window in the top of it. St. Paul’s is also more breathtaking than Westminster Abbey, which was too much to take in all at once. So many people are buried there, it’s just too much to see. It doesn’t feel like a church to me, just a graveyard.
But I was very excited to see the tomb of Elizabeth I.

Besides St. Paul’s, I think all my favorite spots were in Paris. Musee d’Orsay has all the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism paintings I could ever dream about…Van Gogh, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet, and lots else. I’ve never enjoyed an art museum that much.

We spent a lot of time at the Eiffel Tower, of course, both during the day and at night. I went up to the very top but I couldn’t see anything because it was foggy. But the view from the second deck was pretty astounding itself.

Versailles was beautiful but repetitive after awhile. We spent about half a day there outside of Paris, but we were still able to see pretty much everything I wanted to see in Paris. As for London, I still want to see Hyde Park (I just rode around the edges of it, but I want to actually be able to see the Peter Pan Statue and the Princess Diana Memorial) and Harrod’s. I’m going back at the end of the month with friends.

And next time I’m there, I’m seeing WICKED! WITH IDINA MENZEL! YESSS!