I'm back!

"Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!....his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes."

--Charles Dickens

So.  Last time I blogged I was abroad.  You may remember back in December I wrote a post briefly explaining that I’d been too busy to blog through most of November?  Despite the fact that it seems like that was maybe two months ago, it turns out it’s been a year.  I’m not sure how that happened either, but I’ve been looking through stuff and I have photographic evidence of every single month between then and now, so yeah, a full year did happen somewhere in there.  But I’m afraid I didn’t get all the way through study abroad or, well, anything here. 

There are a few reasons for this, not all of which I want to discuss, but probably the most relevant is that I simply got overwhelmed.  When you’re living in a foreign country, someplace you’ve been dreaming about most of your life, living with eyes and ears and emotions rather more sensitively tuned than usual, you notice everything and you want to take even the bittiest things down.  And you can’t.  You run out of time, run out of space.  Your hand gets tired of writing.  You begin to feel you’re spending too much time documenting and not enough experiencing.  I got overwhelmed with the snow and the history and the bus rides and the Christmas decorations and the music and the streets and the traveling-traveling-traveling.  I thought constantly in journal form (oh, gosh, my mind churned up so much purple prose while I was on this bus and that train it’s almost embarrassing), but you simply can’t write it all down.  So, the last thing I wrote about was about how the weather was nasty, and before that it was something completely unrelated to anything, and the last time I actually wrote something relevant was in September talking about the British Museum and the British Library.  Well, let me take you on a quick tour of the next twelve months.  You are, of course, welcome to opt out. I’ll go month by month because my goodness do I ever have a lot of pictures and I can simply not manage to cull them down enough to be one photo per month or anything like that.  First up, October/November 2010!

Also, I want to point out here that the new Blogger interface thinks all my contractions are misspelled.  Clearly Blogger has a bad case of NOT SPEAKING CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH.