Dublin to Derry

I went with my Modern Irish Literature class on a week-long trip to Ireland, which is a pretty fantastic deal I would say. We took RyanAir, and although reviews online mention instances where the airline employees, halfway through conversation, feigned not knowing English when faced with difficult problems, our flight was uneventful (although there was pretty loud techno music playing for a lot of it).

We started in Dublin. We went on a lot of tours, of the sites of the Easter 1916 rising (including the post office, HQ of the republicans and still a fully functioning post office today), of Kilmainham Gaol (which conveniently housed like every single Irish republican from the 19th to the early 20th century), of Glasnevin Cemetery (where our tour guide pointed out that you can write that you're an in the IRA or any other illegal organization when you're dead as they can't arrest you then). We also saw a fantastic exhibition on WB Yeats (which noted that Yeats had a vasectomy late in life so that he could experience a 'second puberty'), the James Joyce Martello tower (the site of the first chapter of Ulysses, complete with old Irish swimmers bathing in the freezing, turbulent waters of Dublin bay, and the Book of Kells (one of the most famous and beautiful illuminated bibles, full of gorgeous Celtic designs and definite influences from the East, the Middle East, Germany, etc). We also went on a musical pub crawl which involved a lot of Guinness (it's better in Dublin) and very talented Irish folk musicians who explained their craft and then performed a lot of traditional songs.

After a few days in Dublin, we headed to Derry, or Londonderry. The name depends on where you are and who you're talking to; in the Republic of Ireland, it's Derry, but in the North it's Londonderry due to the fact that London sent over its guilds centuries ago to set up shop there, and the name people use depends on whether they're republicans or unionists (consequently, the 'London' is crossed out on a lot of the signs in the North). Derry was home to a lot of the bloodiest fighting during the Troubles of the past forty years, including both the Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday (in which the British military killed thirteen civil rights protesters), and the city's past is commemorated in a lot of giant murals throughout. It's quite safe now (although the Catholic and Protestant populations are becoming more and more stratified), and the people are unbelievably warm and welcoming. Also the city itself is really cool, with the only complete city wall in Britain never to be breached, and probably some of the steepest commercial streets I have ever seen.

Derry's location also set us up to do numerous trips to the countryside. On the way from Dublin we stopped at Newgrange, a prehistoric tomb that's older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids. We also went to Grianan of Aileach, an Iron Age fort in Donegal, and from there Malin Head, northernmost point of Donegal and Ireland, at the same latitude as about halfway up Newfoundland. Malin Head, which we arrived at right as the sun began to set, featured the most riveting, majestic scenery I have ever seen, with giant cliffs overlooking the sea and enormous multicolor waves and basically the sort of landscape that makes you feel like this guy. After all this we returned home to London.

It's crazy that this semester is nearly over. Two more weeks of classes, and then I go to Budapest for a week, and then I go back to America. In a lot of ways it will be nice, but in a lot of ways I am totally unprepared.

Italia (Venezia + Bologna + Firenze + Ravenna)

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Oh lordy it's been weeks. I've been so busy that it's been difficult to find times to update. But here's something.

Maddie and I went to Italy for break. We planned to do Venice with Maddie's mom and then Bologna but ended up doing Venice and Bologna and Florence and Ravenna, and all in all it was thrilling. I can't hope to recount everything we did, but Venice was a truly tangibly magical place, one that shines through the enormous crowds of slow moving tourists because at the bottom of it all is the fact that we were in a city with canals for streets, and consequently a city without cars or significant pollution or anything else you would expect in any other city in the world. What's more is that Venice is incredibly silent—living in London means I don't think I've heard silence in months, but in Venice it's commonplace.

I'm sure this has all been said before re Venice, but it's something to come to those sorts of realizations yourself. There's something about the city that can't be captured in any amount of words, and that's what makes it magical. And obviously the Doge's Palace and San Marco are some of the most striking (and ludicrously ornate) buildings I've seen, and the Ghetto is fascinating, especially since Jews weren't permitted to work as architects so the interiors of the synagogues look like weird hybrids between baroque churches and synagogues. Oh, and despite the next stop being the one known for its food, I had some incredible dishes in Venice; notably, fried zucchini flowers filled with ricotta and spaghetti cooked in cuttlefish ink (and thus pitch black).

I should mention also that there's this problem in Venice called acqua alta, where the water rises to the point where it floods Piazza San Marco and sometimes the basilica itself.

We went to Bologna next, which was a totally different experience. Bologna is still pretty medieval in appearance (if not function), and there are still majestic loggias flanking every street that radiates out from the central Piazza San Maggiore. The piazza itself featured one of the biggest basilicas in Europe, the production of which the Vatican tried actively to halt as it rivaled the size of St. Peter's in Rome (consequently the facade is only half-completed). We went at a slower pace than we did in Venice, and consequently didn't see as much, although we did see an old operating room with Renaissance-style anatomical figures (think David but with only muscle, no skin) in one of the older parts of the university (the oldest university in Europe, by the way).

The best part about Bologna was the food, though. On via Broccaindosso we found a place where you ring a doorbell, and if there's room inside, they let you into a place where you can simply say 'antipasti' and they put you through a gauntlet of fifteen different kinds of antipasti, from bruschetta to sausages to polenta (also big pieces of mortadella, the precursor to baloney). If that weren't enough, they do the same with desserts, urging you to try all the different mousses and cream puffs and everything else (my favorite being just a giant tub of mascarpone). On another night we went to a gelateria called Sorbeteria Castiglione where we had between the two of us some transcendent chocolate, pistachio, and hazelnut gelato, plus weirder varieties like fig and ricotta.

We realized a night into our stay in Bologna that we were very close to both Ravenna and Florence, and ended up taking day trips to each. Florence is not the sort of city that can be seen in a day, but we tried and saw the Duomo, the Baptistry, Santa Croce, and the Uffizi. The views from the basilica's belltower were stunning, and the entire city is just bursting with culture and history in the most overwhelming way (seeing both Michelangelo's and Galileo's tombs in the same church is pretty astounding), but the city itself didn't lend itself to walking around in the way that Venice or Bologna did, it seemed. I'm still unsure why.

Ravenna was awesome throughout. The onetime capital of the Roman Empire, we saw a lot of early Christian churches which reminded me in a big way of the churches I saw in Tbilisi last year, but the perfectly preserved mosaics inside—particularly in the basilicas of San Vitale and Sant' Apollonaire in Classe and in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia—totally blew me away. We also saw Dante's tomb and an Italian taxi driver yelled at me in incomprehensible Italian over the phone.

We returned to London the day after Ravenna, and I've been busy since. Next Wednesday I go to Ireland with my Irish literature class, and I'm very excited. And then the program's nearly over. It's amazing how quickly time passes sometimes.

Midsems (aka finals)

Unfortunately I have no pictures, and this is the last week of the first phase of the semester so it's rather busy, but here are some fun things recently:
1. The bloodiest play I have ever seen, a production of the Jacobean revenge tragedy The White Devil at the Chocolate Factory.
2. Black swans in St. James's Park. Also this video of a pelican eating a pigeon in St. James's Park.
3. Attending the 7 a.m. grand opening of a new Sainsbury in which I got both the first Mars Bar and the first baked good.
4. Night openings at the Tate.

More things as I think of them.

Caerdydd and Elsewhere

Last weekend Alissa and I went to Cardiff, the capital of Wales. We spent two days and a night there, and while it would've been nice to see the Welsh countryside, the capital was pretty cool too.

We first went to Cardiff Castle, which started off with a preposterous video and an audio tour (highlight of the tour: the castle's onetime gardener's name, which was Lancelot Capability Brown), and which seemed like a pretty lame time until we took the guided tour through the 19th century buildings. Designed by crazed architect William Burges, one room was simultaneously a tribute to Chaucer (with a statue of him over the fireplace and stained glass windows illustrating the Canterbury Tales), all the birds of Britain (painted on the walls), and famous women who killed themselves for love (woodcarvings everywhere). The library featured woodcarvings of monkeys ripping apart books on the walls to illustrate why the owner of the castle didn't agree with the theory of evolution (also one of the monkeys had the face of Charles Darwin, so there's that).

So basically I love William Burges. I looked for houses designed by him in London, but the only one I could find is currently owned by Jimmy Page and isn't open to the public. For shame.

We went to Cardiff Bay afterwards and ambled about until it got too cold to amble. Cardiff Bay seems to be an extremely new development, and all of the buildings look about as fabulously 21st century as any building I've seen. Cardiff is apparently trying to become a tourist destination (more for Britons than for international travelers, judging from the emphasis on entertainment centers and theater and other non-historical things that international, or at least American, tourists aren't too interested in), and this new development is pretty indicative of that.

We eventually wound up at this club called Oceana which seemed more like five regular-sized clubs in one; there was a separate "Reykjavik Ice Club" with loud trance music and a "French Boudoir" with tons of velvet and something that was supposed to be in Tahiti and other things like that. Everyone had the same haircut and we watched people sort of jerk around on the dance floor for a while and then everything dissolved into a giant conga line. It was all pretty strange. But fun!

The next day we went to St. Fagans, which is something like a Welsh colonial Williamsburg (and pretty much the exact same thing as something I visited two summers ago in Tbilisi) with historical cottages from different regions of Wales and a castle and gardens in the middle. I got a lot of pictures that look like they're in the Welsh countryside but are actually just well-designed green areas that are 15 minutes from central, industrialized Cardiff (see above picture).

We also ate a lot of Welsh food (a lot of which is similar to English food except with more lamb), drank a lot of Welsh beer (Brains (!!!), which is quite good), and tried to find in the Welsh National Gallery what was, according to our hostel host, 'the biggest collection of Impressionist art outside of Paris' to no avail. Then we went home.

This week has been a lot more quiet. I saw Albus Dumbledore in a pretty turgid play early in the week and went to the Tate Britain, which is one of the better art galleries I've seen here. This weekend two Grinnellians who are studying in Madrid are visiting, and today we're going to the Borough Market with them. This is the first weekend in weeks where I've been in London for the whole time, and as fun as traveling all the time is, it's about time for some (relative) relaxation.

The first phase of my program is nearly over, which is scary to think about. I'll be in Italy soon!

The Theatre

These past few days have been the most theatrical yet. On Thursday I went with my flatmates to Shunt, a club that's built into the cavernous tunnels surrounding London Bridge tube station. It was exactly the sort of thing that I would enjoy; the entire place was Soviet-themed, and there were people running around finding clues and announcing them into telephones scattered around the room and weird dance music and some guy in tights and a fanny pack. I'll be back at some point, although hopefully with some idea of what was going on.

Then we went traveling! First we went to Warwick Castle, built by William the Conquerer but currently under the ownership of Madame Tussaud's wax museum. You could tell. My favorite part was when we went to go see a trebuchet launching where the 'trebuchet master' described it as a 'giant, monstrous seesaw' and emphasized repeatedly for a good twenty minutes the amount of toil and danger that trebuchet engineers had to face every day! There were also a lot of really, really lame wax people. Beautiful views though.

We went from Warwick to Stratford, which at first glance is a lot like Disneyland for a certain subset of people, namely the subset that's obsessed with Shakespeare. Basically I loved it. I had some incredible Thai food in a reasonably-priced while 2 Michelin starred restaurant, and then saw a production of Hamlet featuring David Tennant, Patrick Stewart and this guy from Star Wars that was probably the best theatrical production I have ever seen. Pretty perfect. The next day we saw a much more terrible production of the Merchant of Venice which basically amounted to a recital of the script without any meaningful interpretation. And then we went home!

It's worth noting that the entire town of Stratford is completely rife with Shakespeare references, with a bunch of rentable boats with female character names (Juliet, Viola, Beatrice), restaurants called Iago, Othello, Cordelia, an As You Like It Café, et cetera. Oh, and the gem of a toy store in the picture above.

Yesterday we saw a contemporary production of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author that was probably the most clever play I've ever seen. I'm not sure if I liked it, but I did like that it starred Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars (sci fi seems to be the second theme of the week) and referenced Hamlet quite a bit, at one point specifically referring to the production I had seen two days previously. I can't even begin to describe what the performance was about, but there was one scene in which the writers of the play explained the whole story to a producer and then were horribly murdered by one of the characters. The whole thing sort of reminded me of a much more self-referential At Swim-Two-Birds.

It's cold and rainy out today. I should probably start getting used to that.

Ahh!

Oh lordy, I have been bad at updating this blog. Two weekends ago we went to Oxford, and last week we went to Bruges and Ghent to eat a lot of waffles (which are truly divine creations) and frites and chocolate and see the Ghent Altarpiece and some really funny paintings by Memling (and a Bosch!). Belgium was a really great change from London, and Bruges was probably one of the most serene, fairylandish towns I've been to (Ghent seems more like people could actually live there). We did nearly go to a bar called Retsin's Lucifernum, but given the name and the location on a sketchy (or sketchy for Bruges, which is Not Sketchy) street, we got scared and got beers elsewhere. Next time!

My flickr page is probably a better indication of what I've been doing than this is for these two trips, alas.

Tomorrow we go to Stratford for quite a lot of Shakespeare. What else! Today I bought a coffee mug for my favorite Underground line. The whole set is pretty cool, although the Hammersmith & City line mug probably looks like something of a dirty joke to the uninformed.

It's somehow already phase one midterms week here. I'm not sure where the time went.

Catching Up

The fact that I'm studying abroad is maybe catching up to me, and I've been really busy. But here are some of the cool things I've done recently:

1. A country walk near Silchester. I saw the remains of a Roman amphitheater of the city of Calleva, miles of Roman walls, and a 12th century church whose back wall was a bit of one of these Roman walls. The town we began in, Mortimer, had streets with names like "The Street" and "The Avenue," and the weather was pretty wacky and we basically had to wade through some giant pits of mud. This was all a really welcome change from bustling London.

2. The Hunterian Museum, the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, which was probably one of the strangest and coolest museums I'll see while I'm here. Essentially a display of hundreds of preserved of preserved, uh, things in formaldehyde, I got to see (among other things) an armadillo fetus, Winston Churchill's dentures, syphilitic penises, a giant collection of nipples, and pretty much every other weird thing you could imagine. The staff was sort of surprised that we were there and kept whispering to each other, "They're just a group of friends!" as if the normal visitors are actually interested in studying animal fetuses and weird skeletons.

3. This amazing farmers market in Marylebone, right near my flat! I talked with the jolliest man about yogurt and then bought some.

4. A blues bar, Ain't Nothin' But the Blues which is located in a room that's smaller than my bedroom here. Lots of fun, good music (the lead singer kept twitching in a sort of British rocking out way), and once again, just the tiniest place. There was a woman with a tiny hat there as well.

Autumn's a coming. It's fast becoming coat weather. I'm terribly excited.

Tomorrow we're going as a class to the Tower of London, and the next day a bunch of fun friends are headed to Oxford. The future holds Bruges, Stratford, and maybe Cardiff.

Oh, and here's a picture of the Hunterian Museum, which might give you an idea of how bizarrely this place was set up. Cases and cases of preserved things!

Food, Greenwich, Beckett

I've done a lot since I last updated. Last Friday we went to Westminster Abbey on Friday and while we were in the Poets' Corner (Samuel Johnson! Lord Tennyson!) the choir started rehearsing and it was pretty epic. The next day we went to Greenwich and revisited a lot of the places I first visited when I was thirteen, as well as the house of Queen Anne of Denmark which had a gorgeous spiral staircase. Then on Monday we went to see a bunch of Samuel Beckett shorts at the Young Vic, some of which were absolutely amazing. And then yesterday Maddie and I went to the Courtauld Gallery, which has my favorite Manet and so much else good in it.

But this post is going to be about food. Some basic points on British eating followed by an adventure:

1. Tikka. I read a few months ago about how the UK Foreign Minister proclaimed that Chicken Tikka Masala is Britain's national dish, but lordy, it's everywhere. Yesterday I saw a bagel with tikka flavoring, and the day before I saw tikka flavored potato chips, and every day I go to Tesco I see tikka sandwiches. I've yet to try any of these.

2. British chocolate. It's better, and that seems to be as empirical a fact as there is. Some of the varieties are just more well constructed (the Mars Bar is a perfect candy bar, no contest), but some of the British candy bars are better than their American counterparts solely due to the quality of the chocolate (British confectionary manufacturers don't have to worry so much about their candy melting since it's colder and smaller here, so they use fewer stabilizers and other candy tainters). Thus, Kit Kats taste fabulous here even if their American cousins taste like chalk. There's a NYT article from last year which explains the issue quite well.

3. Feathery eggs. Regular food items (even the cheap stuff) seem more natural here. Our eggs are sometimes entirely covered in feathers (this is frightening) and our bread molds much, much faster than I'm used to (this is frustrating). It's just a shame that quality produce is so expensive and hard to come by, although I suppose if we started eating more of peas and carrots we'd be all set. Note of interest: the idea of a veggie pasty/wrap/etc. here is much more carrot-and-pea-oriented than I'm used to or care to be used to.

4. St. John Bread and Wine. The big culinary fun was today, when Maddie and I went to St. John Bread and Wine in Spitalfields, a spinoff of St. John, which I guess is ranked in Restaurant Magazine as the sixteenth best restaurant in the world or something, as well as one of the bricklayers of the current ongoing British culinary renaissance. In addition to having just really good bread and wine (wowowowowow), St. John Bread and Wine is a British restaurant in the most traditional sense, so that not only are the items on the menu contingent on what's growing in Britain, but the meat served is the sort of meat that Britons have been eating for centuries, even if it seems sort of repellent now. So Maddie and I had deviled rabbit kidneys along with a whole artichoke, local green beans, corn on the cob, and two delicious desserts that each somehow had currants in them (and the bread, oh the bread). It was all really wonderful, and rabbit kidneys have the consistency of sausage and are actually really flavorful. Pictures later, hopefully.

The pound is falling! The pound is falling! 1.785! 1.785!

Classes, Carnival

Yesterday was the last day of the Notting Hill Carnival. We got there pretty early before the crazy began" but we did manage to catch some really great parades. There was a procession of skeleton knights and a pirate ship and a giant plant woman and a Beijing Olympics caravan. There was also a lot of Jamaican and other Caribbean food, and I had curried goat (great) and drank out of a coconut that I watched a guy whack open with a machete (awful pretty much). By the time we left crowds were streaming in from miles away. I guess what impressed me the most about Carnival was how it made London seem to be a city with a really active, contemporary culture that's perfectly able to incorporate and celebrate outside influences (in this case Caribbean, but also South Asian, African, etc. etc. etc.) while simultaneously retaining such an innately British heritage. I'm not sure if every European city can do that so successfully (Paris, for example? Or so I've heard), and I'm not even sure if London can, but at the moment that's what it seems like.

We managed to do the most un-Carnival thing possible at night, which was to go to a BBC Prom concert here featuring Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony and selections from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. This was the only free concert that Grinnell-in-London provides, but considering music is cheaper than going out to eat or pretty much everything else, I'd like to see much more.

Thomas and I went to the British Museum today and saw a wonderful exhibit on American prints, with a lot of Pollock and Hopper and some prints by a guy named Martin Lewis who used the coolest lighting effects I've ever seen in printmaking.

Classes also started today. My Shakespeare class is going to see A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe tomorrow. My Renaissance Art professor has the most over-the-top accent I have heard yet. But we're going to Bruges and Ghent!

Orientation, Produce, etc.

Well let's see. Two days ago I went to the Tate Modern (we were going to see the Klimt exhibit but oh wait, that's in the Tate Liverpool) after walking a long way along the Thames and ordering a £4 smoothie for lunch (not worth it). What's nice about the Tate and all the other free museums in Britain is that they're used for so much more than just the galleries; tons of people were just hanging out and eating lunch in the absolutely massive entrance hall (the building used to be a power station and is featured in both Children of Men and on a Pink Floyd album cover). I hope that I can somehow utilize this space when the homework starts getting piled on.

The next day we had our big lengthy orientation meeting, in which a few people talked to us with absolutely incomprehensible accents and our program director explained, among other things, the program's field trips. We're going to Bruges and Dublin, but perhaps just as cool is the trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see a production of Hamlet featuring Patrick Stewart and Doctor Who. This is pretty much the coolest thing.

Today we went to Camden, which is filled with open-air markets and food stalls and a surprisingly huge variety of things. I found some t-shirts that had little transparent compartments on front that had Star Wars Lego figures inside. I'd imagine it'd be painful to be punched in the chest if there were a tiny plastic figurine lodged inside your shirt. There were also a lot of punks walking around, but a lot of them seemed to be employed by leather stores and the Doc Martens shop in order to hold signs advertising their stores. There was also a guy who described himself as the most pierced man alive, which I guess becomes more of a profession than an aesthetic choice after a certain point.

The best parts of Camden were food-related though. For one, I'm really excited that this city is as obsessed with international cuisines as I am, and the stalls and stalls of ethnic food in the market just made me all the more excited. I got an empanada for £1 at an Argentine stall. We also found a bunch of produce stands which had cilantro and limes and a lot of other really cheap pretty good produce that's a lot cheaper than it would be in a grocer. Upon returning home I made turmeric potatoes and really garlicky dal and both turned out fantastic.

Given the price of food here, it's a shame that I spend so much time thinking about it. But I do pretty much spend most of my time here thinking about food.

Speaking of which, tomorrow begins the Notting Hill Carnival, the biggest carnival outside the Caribbean. There is going to be so much good food (and music and costumes and everything else) and I'm tremendously excited.

Alissa is cutting Thomas's hair, despite absolutely no haircutting ability. I just googled 'man bangs' and got mostly porn.

Day Two

There's something wrong with my bed frame such that it always makes me feel like I'm going to roll off to the left and off my bed. It's really disorienting.

Yesterday we went to Regent's Park, which is right down the street from our flat. Then Maddie and I went to Wembley Stadium to watch the England v. Czech Republic friendly (2-2, with a really dumb sort-of-goal by England during the time added on). It was pouring on the field and nobody was too impressed by England's performance, which I guess are two pretty essential parts of being an English football fan. The stadium is gorgeous, although transportation to and from is a chore considering just how many English people use the tube. But mounted police officers were able to break the tens of thousands of people-sized mass into more manageable groups, and the ride back to downtown London wasn't packed at all.

Oh, and I think that the tendency to walk and use public transportation in London makes it a prime place for zombie movies at a level that only malls (and maybe New York) can really achieve in the states. That giant Wembley mass certainly made me think so at least.

We befriended an Oberlin student! His name is Madhav and he's from Delhi.

Also, I'm going to put my photos online here. Most I'll probably post on this blog but there might be some extras.

Day One

A lot of my first day in London involved me standing behind groups of people (in the airport, the underground, etc. etc. etc.) thinking that they were forming a line, only to later realize that they weren't so much a line as a family or tour group or something similar.

Our flat works! It's beautiful! Our toilet only sort of works. But there are high ceilings and what seems like a distinct possibility for haunting.

Oh, and the name of this blog is the title of a song by Lord Kitchener, one of the most famous Trinidadian calypsonians. It's a great song and one that's been stuck in my head since a few days ago at least.