November's leaf is red and sear."
--Sir Walter Scott
Honestly, I have no idea exactly which pictures go in which month. I mean, I know the order, but I don't have my planning notebook with me here! So, take a conglomerate month this time. And I'm sorry; it's terrifically long and that it's kind of tedious to look at them in such a long, boring line! But...I was abroad. And going a lot of places. And I can't figure out how else to position the pictures on the page because Blogger and I don't always agree about how basic things (or pretty much anything) should work. Although I do have to say the new user interface is nice. Maybe I should give this thing a facelift if I'm planning on dusting it off and using it again?
Not this weekend. But maybe over Thanksgiving.
Anyway, back on topic. Here's up with...oh, gosh, this is early October. The spectacular Alnwick Gardens in Northumberland. The water features and plants and scenery were fantastic. There was even a gated, spooky-looking garden devoted to poisonous plants. But these were my two favorite shots:
Right across the street but amazingly difficult to find considering that it's a MEDIEVAL CASTLE and HUGE is Alnwick Castle. It's privately owned and the family still lives there part of the year (you get to see their TVs and baby pictures and everything in some of the rooms, just like they're regular people, even though they're clearly not because they live in a CASTLE), but the cool thing about this place is that it's Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter movies. Not kidding.
After I visited the castle, I went for a little jaunt in town to see the largest secondhand bookstore in Britain, Barter Books, which I had heard via the Internet was fantastic. And it was. There was a fire. There was tea. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of books. There were words everywhere. The whole bookstore is built inside a renovated, very grand train station, and it keeps a lot of that opulent Victorian flavor without being at all cold--there's even a little train chugging along the tops of the bookshelves, where the quotes are running down in the picture below. I loved Barter Books. It was my favorite stop of the day.
After my stop in Northumberland, I visited Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. I had high hopes for Newcastle, mainly because it's such a lovely name--sounds like a fairytale. The town does not, however, much resemble a fairytale. What it resembles is gray, yucky, modern city with not very much magic in it at all. And I found that, in all my travels, Newcastle had the most smokers, the most disabled people (it seemed like nearly every third person was missing fingers or a leg or something), and the most hopeless-seeming people. The northeast coast of England is really not very nice, you know. It's pretty cold and dismal and gray. However, I did find that when they were not outside being cold and damp and disabled and cigarette-holding, most of the people were perfectly lovely, cheerful and warm, and ever so willing to help or chat. Which I appreciated. Turns out that they keep all the magic in Newcastle inside where it's warm--such as the Children's Literature Museum, which had completely gorgeous exhibits on the artwork of children's book artists and a lovely cafe and an arts-and-crafts area and a dress-up/storytime area and an extremely comprehensive and altogether fascinating exhibit on Puffin Books which pretty much made my life a better place.
Also inside and completely spectacular was the city's ship/sailing museum which is definitely called something more appropriate and grander than that. It was rather empty the day I went, and it was warm inside, and there were films about ships and films about sailors and lots of literature on all of it and, most thrilling of all, models of real ships which sailed out of Newcastle in the past. These ships have been Newcastle's primary business for basically forever, you see. I loved them. The brass gleamed and the threads were taut and the paint was shiny and all the details looked right and it reminded me of home--going to the lifesaving station, and going to the lighthouse, and seeing the ships docked at Norfolk, and hearing about my relatives in the Coast Guard and Navy, and living with the knowledge that my hometown wouldn't be there if people for generations hadn't understood and appreciated boats. I kind of wished my father and grandfather could've been there to see this museum--they would have gotten a kick out of seeing these things.
And at the end of my stay, Newcastle decided to give me a little glimmer of how pretty it might be if the sun ever bothered to come out, or at least how pretty it might've been a few hundred years ago when the sun was out.
I went to see the ruins of Hadrian's wall specifically in honor of my high school Honors World History/AP Government teacher, who had said that I really ought to see it. And honestly, it's not very impressive anymore. But still, the museum was excellent, and it's cool that the stones are even still THERE nearly 2000 years later. I could give you a history lesson about the wall, and part of me wants to just in case you don't already know about it, but that is not the point of this blog entry and you would probably get bored. Suffice it to say that it was a wall built around 100 CE by the Romans for use as a military fortification at the edge of the Roman Empire (read: to keep out those crazy warriors in Northern England/Scotland). It also probably had something to do with deterring cattle thieves, or so Wikipedia tells me. I find this significantly more interesting two semesters later, now that I'm a classical studies minor and have spent entirely too much time studying ancient Rome.
York was my last stop on my early October trip. And I loved York. Really, really loved it. It was charming, it was sunny, it was cute, it was colorful. It had a Beatrix Potter store, for heaven's sake. Just look at this road and tell me it's not adorable and doesn't look just the tiniest bit like a street Belle might walk down in her village in Beauty and the Beast (which, yes, is supposed to be French, but that's not the point).
Went to the National Railway Museum while I was in York (the National Quilt museum, too--but you couldn't take pictures there). It was splendidly Dickensian and had fantastic exhibits and I loved it muchly.
The crowning stop in York, though, was Betty's Tea Room. Betty's is very well known and quite posh...and even though I was there all alone in dirty jeans and a sweatshirt and sneakers, carrying everything I had with me in a backpack, with a bedraggled braid and no makeup on, the waiters treated me as if I were the equal of all the neatly-suited ladies brunching and the wealthy socialites catching up over scones. The lighting was low and there was stained glass and marble everywhere, and every table had a silver tea service and white china, even though it was only around eleven o'clock in the morning. I had a perfectly divine cup of tea and a scone with clotted cream and jam (I do wish they had proper clotted cream in the US. I miss it sometimes, along with Yorkie chocolate bars and the type of chocolate mousse they served in the union shop on campus) and wrote in my journal and wished my mother and grandmother could be with me and closed my eyes and listened to the tinkling music and realized that, really, this pretty much fulfilled a childhood dream completely and perfectly. Oh, but it was thrilling!
This is the window in my dorm room. My festive window thanks to my Mama's care packages :)
I know Brighton is in some of the posts I actually did put up while abroad. But, well, this is a good picture from the time my friend Erin and I went to the famed Brighton Pier. You can just see in the pictures below how the whole waterfront goes for a sort of vintagey-tourism kitschiness.
Erin and me having tea in the next town over, Lewes. Lewes is charming and very historic (yup, there's a castle. They have castles in this country like we have signs that say FAMOUS POLITICIAN SLEPT HERE in our historic houses which barely even register on the historic scale compared to British historic houses. Anyway, our tea was lovely.
Oh, and we went to the farmer's market while we were there and bought produce...
Then tried to make caramel apples. It didn't work, but was fun to try anyway.
Our pumpkin experiments did work, though. They apparently don't sell canned pumpkin in the UK.
Homemade (all the way) pumpkin bars!
One weekend in mid-November, Erin and I up and jaunted off the London for a Saturday. First we stopped in Leicester Square to buy tickets for a show later on.
Then went to the British Museum of Natural History! I had actually been here before with my group in high school, and that was fun, but we spent more time there this time and it really was a blast. Their geologic exhibits are very well-done, and the specimens of, well, everything the museum has are top-notch.
Then we saw our show--Wicked! I'd actually never seen it (though I knew the story), but it was fantastic, and I can't imagine a better place to see it than in a historic theater in London. Staging was amazing.
Ok, this is the point at which I stop saying something about every picture. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Wales around Cardiff!
Wales was really one of my favorite places, and I had a wonderful time there with Erin. However, there is something to be said for meeting up with people you know from home. The picture below has been on this blog before, but it's one of my very favorites--Paris, with wonderful people from Elon. You would not be crazy for not liking this picture, frankly, since two of three people aren't even looking at the camera and the background isn't spectacular, but I like it because it's true to everyone's personalities. Jess is a little away from the rest of the group, soldiering on, but looking happy; Anna's fashionable, cheerful, hamming it up for the camera; Kate's smiling while she explains something, because Kate is always explaining something; and I'm taking the picture. Yes, we had a good time in Paris.
Top of the Eiffel Tower
After our long weekend in Paris, Kate was set to go on a longer trip down to Spain (which ended up horribly, but that's a long story and it's her story to tell, not mine), Anna was going back to her regular classes in Paris, and Jess and I headed back to Sussex via ferry (third picture down) across the English Channel. These next two pictures are of Dieppe, France, which is the place from which we caught the ferry. It was very cold. It was very damp. We ate Indian at a tiny restaurant by the docks and used garbled French to get directions to the ferry. It took forever and we got back late and had to wait in 30-degree weather in light jackets for a late-night train to take us back to campus--and every minute of it was worthwhile and even a bit fun. It's amazing what you are willing to deal with when you are truly determined to get somewhere.
The next several pictures are from Ireland. Erin and I went to Ireland at the end of November, and Christmas decorations were everywhere, with lush, gorgeous displays in the shop windows in Dublin. It was my favorite place of all--I loved everywhere, but in Ireland not only was everything historic and beautiful, but the people were genuinely helpful and friendly, and it just felt good. And, yeah, we saw people shooting up on the trolley thing that takes you around the city and yes, Erin got carsick on the van tour we took of the surrounding countryside, but my overall impression of Ireland is, like my impression of Scotland, one of the highest, highest regard.
This is the tree outside my dorm window. I took a lot of pictures of it simply because it was right there and it did such a very fine job of documenting the seasons. This day I thought it looked particularly nice--no other reason for the photo.
In November several of us went to see Harry Potter 7 Part I, dressed as vaguely Hogswartian characters.
After the movie (which was excellent, as always), we wandered through the streets of Brighton looking at the holiday decorations and contemplating ice cream. I do not remember if the ice cream ended up happening or not. But I know we talked about it.
And, for my last November-related picture (finally), here's a snippet of our American Thanksgiving in England, as prepared by the international students in our little isolated dorm at the top of the hill in Sussex. Some of it was good and some of it was quite awful, but it was nice to celebrate no matter what.
December will be much shorter, and will
have to wait a few days because I have several papers to write over the
weekend. See you next week!
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