Recap: Wednesday-Friday

Wednesday:

• Class. Which was good--I took lots of notes. It's a particular joy of mine whenever I get three pages or more of notes, because I have small handwriting and it looks particularly neat and academic when amassed all over several pages like that. But that's just because I'm weird, maybe.
• Back at the dorm, mixed the leftover noodles from the previous night with cheese and heated it up. It was delicious. Because I did this, I can claim brilliance for the rest of my life.
• Okay, maybe not my whole life. But for the rest of the week, anyway.
• Realized that my welcome packet was MIA. Panicked.
• Mentally retraced my steps and realized I must have left it on the counter at Bramber the day before.
• Went to Bramber, explained, and was told to come back in half an hour when the person at the counter had time to talk to the person who'd been there yesterday.
• Went on to Friston to collect my Sussex student ID card, which I had had an email about the previous evening.
• Went back to the dorm for like ten minutes, which is a bit of a trek up a bit of a hill that makes your legs burn, but it's less awkward to go back than to stand around having nothing to do.
• Said a prayer.
• Went back to Bramber. They found the envelope! God likes me after all!
• Back to the dorm, then back out again with one of the Elon girls to the Student Union store, where we discovered they were having a terrific sweatshirt sale. And then discovered the reason for the sale was that every last one of the sweatshirts was an XXL. Aw, heck. We passed the library and stopped at a little cafe on the way back to make up for the fruitless trip--I got a small latte and the girl put it in one of the regular-sized cups, but I'm not complaining. Is that dishonest of me? Either way, it was good and I enjoyed it. The cafe is cute...and I'm enamored of the cup my drink was in. The whole cup is made of diagonal lines of corrugated cardboard, so it doesn't burn your hand and you don't need a coffee collar.
• PS--Every time I think "coffee collar" I think of Patrick Dempsey's character, Tom, inMade of Honor. Raise your hand if you like that movie. Ok, me too.
• Hung out at the dorm for an hour or so before 7:00 rolled around and half the dorm spilled down the hill to the York parking lot. We were scheduled for a Brighton Food Tour, you see, and none of us wanted to miss it.
• Listen to the two SIS guides, Malcolm and Kai, try to one-up each other's restaurant choices for the night. Each of them is taking a group of us to three restaurants, and they are both trying to advertise. It's quite funny, really. They sound like commercials.
• Catch the bus into town. Kai's group leaves before Malcolm's group; I'm in Malcolm's group, so I get to stay and chat with people on the bus.
• Drove the bus driver crazy with our loud American accents.
• Enjoyed the way these buses really do careen about--those steep, steep stairs to the top floor are like an obstacle course once the bus starts moving, and I think it's a good deal of fun.
• Went first to a Korean barbeque, which was nearly empty but for ourselves. People in these parts seem to eat early and then go to the pubs for the rest of the night. Four other girls and I (we had the end of the long table) spent about half an hour examining the menu and eventually deciding upon a bowl of kimchi (correct spelling unknown), which is spiced/pickledy radishes, cucumbers, and cabbage in a red sauce and which I did not particularly care for, a plate of delicious chicken nugget-like things, and then a bowl of rice with some spicy type of sauced pork to put overtop. It surprised me by all (minus kimchi) being good! It took us another quarter of an hour to figure out how to pay (tip? no tip? tax? splitting? gah) but we did it and ended up paying somewhere around three pounds apiece.

Our side of the table at the Korean Barbeque.

The one in the red shirt is our guide, Malcolm.

Ok, here are the chicken nugget things. They were sooo hot, but very tasty.

This is what the next girls down the table got to share. It's onions and fish. Yech.

Kimchi. Also yech.

Here's the pork stuff we put on rice, though, and that was very good.

Aren't these chopsticks pretty? I thought they looked very nice and were very substantial compared to any I've seen in the past...I still can't use them, though.

• Walked just down the street to a Lebanese restaurant with a polished, semi-vaulted wooden ceiling and a lot of lamps, all mismatched but all glass and iron and quite lovely, hanging from it. There were prints of Turkey on the walls, and oriental rugs, and in general it was very Mediterranean and atmospheric. Three other girls and I shared a big wooden platter with two creamy spreads of hummus with pools of olive oil glistening on top. There were vegetables piled up in the center and stuffed grape leaves on the side, and also pita stuffed with a type of cheese I'd never tasted and pita stuffed with meat, and these little things that looked like nuts but really contained ground lamb's meat. I'd never had Lebanese before and it was wonderful. I felt as though we should've been sitting on rich-looking cushions upon a floor somewhere.

Here's the street both of the first restaurants were on.

The Lebanese restaurant was really nice.

Here's a better picture of the ceiling I was trying to describe.

Food!

And lastly, a picture of the shop from the front.

• Having managed to pay there (less than three pounds), we trekked about a million miles through the city's restaurants and shops and teensy alleyways and wide sidewalks, more than once wondering if Malcolm was lost, before we finally got to Donatello's and were led through the sparkling white ground floor into the well-lit, white-tableclothed lower level. They put two round tables together with two small square ones in between, which seemed a most illogical formation, but hey, this is Britain, and they can do what they want. Almost all of us ordered something called a Coppa Olivia (except for the Danish girl, who said she was way too full already, ordered a lemon sorbet, and gave half of it to Malcolm--we told her she really ought to come to America sometime and see true hearty eating). I was a little concerned about it, since it was four pounds twenty-five pence (about $6.60), which is kind of high for a dessert especially considering that neither of my supper portions were that much, but it. was. amazing. Picture this here for a moment: white tablecloth, crystal water goblets, a pitcher of water with ice clinking at the side (oh, ice, how I miss you), and a glass dish with a wavy rim carrying a thick slice of tiramisu, three scoops of creamy vanilla ice cream, real whipped cream atop that, and then hot chocolate sauce drizzled over the whole fabulous concoction. It was a lot to eat, and every single one of us who ordered it ate every single bite.

This building has nothing to do with anything; it was just really fancy and all lit up with purple, so I took a picture. I still think it's cool.

The Donatello's door.

...and the menu.

Coppa Olivia!

This is a bad picture and my eye is wonky, so ignore that, please. Look at the mound of tiramisu and ice cream instead. Ok? Ok.

Like I said, it was good.

This is how we left the table, haha.

• Back to the bus with much chatter and cheer, especially when the bus stopped and picked up Kai's group (funny coincidence, seeing as how the buses run every five minutes and we hadn't been sticking to the time suggested--it was nearly midnight) and then met and chatted with an Irishman one of the boys was bothering up at the front of the bus. We actually nearly made him miss his stop, we chattered so at him. But really, could we possibly have passed up an Irish accent?? The answer is no.
• Back to campus, back to the dorm, back to the laptop.

Thursday:

• 9:00am: Fire alarm sounds for our portion of hall. It sounds very much like a duck, and pauses for a few seconds between quacks, so that you get your hopes up it's ending and you can crawl back under the covers. Except in reality you have to find shoes and go downstairs and hop from foot to foot outside the building, because it's cold and the five of us who were on the hall at the time are all in our pajamas. Unlike in America, where the slightest hint of fire alarm on campus sends out a wave of firetrucks and police personnel and every student in the building is evacuated and made to stand a certain distance from the building (I know Elon's fire policies very well, due to a certain uber-sensitive alarm in my freshman-year dorm which repeatedly went off with the very bittiest bit of provocation), they let us stand right outside the double doors, and only two officers came. I think somebody came upstairs to check it out, but the officers merely stood in front of the control panel in the front room and tried to figure out how to turn the alarm off. Turns out that this also is a very sensitive alarm, and one of the chemicals the cleaning crew used that morning was very strong and very close to it, and it reacted in a negative fashion. We went back to bed, resenting the cleaning crew for their chemicals even more than we resent their vacuuming at 7:00am.
• Slept very late; fixed PB&J for lunch. I have a story about this for my next post.
• Read The Secret Garden. Pretty much all day. Did not leave the dorm.
• Fixed supper--two pieces of whole wheat bread, with ham atop both slices and cheddar cheese atop that, microwaved for two minutes. Also, carrots. You may not know it, but this was a very good meal.
• Journaled, wrote more of this post. Talked to my mother. The usual, you know.

Friday:

• And this brings us up to today, doesn't it? Hooray! This is an excruciatingly long post. I'm sorry. Anyway, I woke up this morning, got dressed, went to class, came back from class and had cereal and a nectarine for lunch, and then went back to the classroom again because we watched The Railway Children, based on the book by E. Nesbit. Despite the fact that this is one of those instances where something is very well-known in Britain and hardly known at all in America (children's lit is my thing, and although there are many things I know and love by E. Nesbit, I had never heard of this book or the movie, and nor had anyone else in the class), it was quite a lovely little movie. It's set around the turn of the century (the last one, not the 1999-2000 one, of course) and was produced in the 1970s. Apparently it's sort of like The Wizard of Oz or It's a Wonderful Life or something like that is in America in that it plays a lot on TV around holidays, and every family has a copy. What?! How did I not know about this? It was darling, anyway.
• And now I'm finishing this up, and thinking about going for a little walk around campus and then to get a coke from the York store and read The Railway Children, for which I have to do a presentation on Monday. I also need to get some money out of the ATM and make sure I'm all ready for our trip to Stonehenge and Bath tomorrow!