The Grand Adventure- Berlin

The train ride from Amsterdam to Berlin was pretty long, about 6 or 7 hours I think. We were on the train basically all day. It wasn't too bad, though, and we were thankful for the rest and caught up on some sleep. We arrived in Berlin in the evening and checked into our hostel, which was outside the city a ways, but in a pretty cute part of town. Our hostel in Amsterdam had been in a really grungy not-pretty part of town. So already things were better.

We didn't have any solid plans for the evening, so we just took a metro into town and looked around for somewhere to eat. We came out of the subway at Potsdamerplatz, and were immediately floored. The architecture there is AMAZING. It's completely modern, cause of course everything was rebuilt after the war. It's towering buildings of glass and pyramids and angles and open space, and come out from under ground at night, it was absolutely beautiful. To steal a picture from the internet, this is exactly what we saw:
Right away we knew it was going to be better than Amsterdam.

We wandered around looking for a place to eat and pounced on the first reasonably-priced place we saw. We didnt realize that it was an American-themed restaurant until we got inside and saw toothpicks with little American flags on them in all of the sandwiches. I think the waiter was a little amused by us, a huge pack of Americans ordering currywurst and bratwurst in a place advertising their hamburgers and milkshakes.

So that was our first night.

We found out that there was a free walking tour of the city put on by New Berlin (a subset of New Europe- they do free tours in several cities across europe, working on a tips-only system). Unfortunately, SOME people in our group have trouble getting up in the morning (it absolutely amazes me that the girls can shower, dress, do their hair, put on makeup, and be down the stairs to breakfast while the boys have barely gotten past picking up a pair of jeans) and we missed the tour. We decided to do some wandering of our own, and made our way to the Reichstag, Berlin's Parliament building. Again, to steal from the internet:


It's a huge beautiful building that was basically rubble during the war- it was the fire started here supposedly by a communist that allowed Hitler to claim absolute power over the country.

We amused ourselves taking silly pictures in front of it and then wandered over to the Brandenburg gate- where we ran into the tour we'd missed! We jumped on board, and it ended up being the best decision ever. The tour guide (Pete O'Keefe- rather Irish) was amazing. You could tell he loved the city and the history of it, and was really enthusiastic telling us stories about everything we saw. I learned so much on that tour, I can't convey the half of it. We saw an amazing Holocaust memorial that was unlike anything I'd seen before, and the site of Hitler's bunker where he killed himself- now an unmarked parking lot. We saw the Berlin Wall and Nazi architecture (the most depressing thing you'll ever see) and Communist propaganda murals and so much more. Every tour we took after that we compared to Pete O'Keefe. :)

The same tour company offered a guided nightly pub crawl and we went on that that evening- that was the other best decision we made. It was such a hassle to get everyone to agree on a place to go at night and an even bigger hassle to get everyone there and happy, that taking the responsibility out of our hands and just following people who knew the city from bar to bar was amazing. It allowed us to actually have fun and stay friends without biting each other's heads off. :) We met some cool Australians and Canadians that night, too.

The second day we all went off and did our own thing. Maggie, Christine, and I decided to take a day trip to Potsdam, a town just outside of Berlin. We didn't make it in time for the free guided tour by New Potsdam, but a paid tour was leaving just as we got there and we jumped on. It ended up being completely worth it. Potsdam is HUGE (or rather, very spread out) and we never would have found all the interesting things on our own. They took us on a tour trolly which had an audio tour in English that told you about what you were passing, and then we stopped at all the big palaces and the tour guide took us around. We saw Cecilianhof, where the Big Three met for the Potsdam Conference (and had our picture taken in the same spot they did!) and Sanssouci Palace, Freidrich The Great's palace from which he introduced the potato to the German people. There were potatoes on his gravestone. :) It was definitely the most beautiful palace we saw:
It wasn't green like this when we saw it, but the yellow was still striking. They love Freidrich the Great in Germany. He's kind of a big deal.

After the tour we did some window-shopping in the town, had dinner, and went back to the Reichstag to climb to the top, which was free, and amazing. I was almost more impressed with the dome than the view, though that was fantastic. They also had an exhibit of the history of the Reichstag building in its various stages, which I was looking at when Dad called me and I got to tell him I was standing on the top of the Reichstag. Definitely one of my favorite buildings in Berlin, partly for the history and partly for the architecture. This is what the dome looks like from the inside:

except we were there at night, which I thought was a good decision. You could see into the Parliament room from the top there too, which was cool.

So, I'm in love with Berlin. :) That's the conclusion of that story! Next stop was Prague, another adventure I'll write about later.

The Grand Adventure- Amsterdam

Hello family and friends! I wish I could have updated more regularly, but I've been staying in hostels for the past 3 weeks and internet access has been sporadic and at times, expensive. Fortunately my current hostel has free internet, and I wanted to start giving an account of my travel experiences. It's absolutely impossible to go over everything that's happened the past three weeks, cause it's been a LOT. But I'll start giving summaries of where I've been.

We caught a cab at 4 in the morning the day we left and were at the airport before dawn. At that point there were only 4 other people with me. Our flight and everything went smoothly and we arrived in Amsterdam when we'd expected- to find it snowing, and hard. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of our visit there. It was bitterly cold and windy, the kind of cold where you don't even want to be outside, let alone outside waiting for public transportation that doesn't come when or where you expect it to, which happened quite a few times. My friend Christine and I spent a frustrating hour one day trying to find the Hop On-Hop Off bus around town. We saw it two or three times, driving away from us (This was after finding out that our transportation pass did not in fact include the river ferries, which was very disappointing). Tourist info told us that apparently it didn't have a set stopping point and we had to wait for it to drive by and flag it down. We tried that, too, for another 15 or 20 minutes and failed. By the time we gave up my hands (in gloves, in pockets) were so cold that they hurt. We ran into a nearby cafe and had pastries and hot drinks, after which Amsterdam was a little redeemed for us. Possibly the worst experience, though, was trying to navigate the night bus system. We ended up on the wrong bus, at the wrong stop, walking back to the hostel in the bitter cold late at night, getting more and more angry at each other (particularly the boy who had led us onto that bus). That was resolved by jumping into a random taxi that drove by, though. I seem to have good luck finding random taxis at the right time. We were so cold when we got back that we turned the hot water on all the way in the shower, crammed into the bathroom, closed the door, and let it fill with steam. It felt wonderful.

So, weather was not a selling point. Possibly the coldest spring break I've ever had....

Not everything was crummy about Amsterdam, though. We did find a couple nice cafes and the canals were gorgeous. It was just that the entire town felt like it had nothing to offer except tourism. Once you get the typical Amsterdam things that everyone comes for out of the way- finding a hash bar, walking down the Red Light District, and making a run through the Sex Museum- there isn't a whole lot else to do except buy wooden shoes, a tulip, and call it a day. So, while we were all glad to finally be out traveling, and the sights were beautiful, we were all happy to leave and vow never to come back after our couple days' visit.

Our next stop, Berlin, was INFINITELY better than Amsterdam and was pretty much amazing in every way. I think it was the universal favorite city for all of us. But I'll write about that later....

Love you all!

Helen

Music and Travel

...are pretty much what have been occupying my mind recently. Not a whole lot exciting has happened since I last posted, I've been working on my last papers (only 4 the entire semester) and hanging out on campus a lot. Here's the big things though:
The last week of February my friend Matt and I went to see Spoon, an American band from Texas that I've been listening to since last spring (but they've been around since I was about 7). Both they and the opening band were quite good live, and the tickets were reasonably cheap. I got to have my first legal beer at a concert! I felt oddly grown up, after years of going to small-venue concerts back home and watching the legals casually sip their beer. Big moment for me.
After the concert, we were approached by a very peppy American girl who'd overheard us talking and recognized our accents as American (not difficult). She introduced herself as Nasi and talked to us for a while. She even invited us to come hang out with her in London if we were ever around. Americans are ridiculously more outgoing than the British. :) We hung around the venue for a while and got our tickets signed by the lead singer, talked to the opening band, and bought their cd (which I've really been enjoying).
Unfortunately, we stayed a little too long and by the time we got to Waterloo we'd JUST missed t the last train back to Egham. After frantically calling our friends who lived in London and wondering when the tube shut down, we ended up on a train to Staines, the next town over from Egham. We got into Staines around 1am. It was rainy, dark, cold, and deserted. Matt wanted to walk back. I was almost ready to comply because the cab company we called to price check said it would take 18 pounds to get us back to campus, until I thought about what I thought Mom and Dad would say if they knew I was stranded in a deserted town in the middle of the night with a *vague* idea of how to get back home. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I imagined them saying was "don't worry about the price and get home safely." Then a cab pulled up near us and I dragged Matt over and made him get in with me. The driver was an incredibly nice Afghani man who took us straight home and charged us I think way less than he should have (10 pounds! So 5 pounds for each of us). Matt later reluctantly agreed that it had been a good idea.
Side note: this was about 4 days after Matt had gone to see a concert with Janine and ended up missing trains/buses and spending the night in Heathrow airport. Lesson learned, keep track of your OWN time when you go see a concert with Matt. :-P
The next exciting music-related thing is that I've been able to MAKE music! My friend Janine has nearly the exact same taste of music as I do, but enough different to expose me to things I wouldn't have listened to otherwise- namely, music/beat poetry hybrids. Janine writes a lot of poetry (very GOOD poetry) and realized quite early on that I love to sing and arrange music in my spare time- then our friend Zoe bought herself a guitar in town and suddenly we formed a band. We've called ourselves the Postcolonials (Zoe's Australian, Janine's Canadian, and I represent the American colonies- together we're all ex-British children). We've even written a song already!! Janine wrote the lyrics, Zoe gave us a few chords, and I composed a melody over it. It's So. Awesome. I've never been part of a group that could just sit together and "jam"- but we've been doing it a lot recently. We have a few more songs in the works now, too. :) And the NEW best thing- Janine and I were talking about how we wish we could add some new instruments (besides the tambourine she bought) when I suddenly remembered that I had a friend in London who was an amazing violinist. The next day I called Alexandra and found out she had miraculously brought her violin to London with her, and the next weekend Alexandra came to visit and had her FIRST EVER improvisation experience! I was so proud of her. She was really self-conscious to come, but I knew she's always wanted to branch away from classical music (much as she loves it) and obviously I knew she was amazing (though she always tells me otherwise) and it ended up being like the best thing for her self-esteem ever, cause Zoe and Janine loved her. So- HOORAY!!
The best thing is that we might actually get to play a gig on campus- there's a bunch of kids on campus who are into acoustic folk/indie music and put on various open mic nights and the like and apparently there's going to be one more in the summer term (May-June) before we leave. There's also talk of an open-air concert being planned on campus.
I can't say enough how much of an amazing experience this is- it's an amazing rush to create music from scratch rather than reproducing what other people have written, and I'm getting better and better at it. I've decided that if I can afford it (which is questionable), I'm going to buy myself an acoustic guitar for my birthday and learn how to play some basic chords so that I can entertain myself and my friends and have real sing-a-longs when I get back to Wellesley. It's the best free therapy ever.
I've got to sign off soon, my neighbor is having a birthday party (the big 2-0) and I need to make an appearance, but I wanted to share with you all my travel plans for the spring break, cause it's really incredible. The cities that are on my itinerary are as follows:
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Berlin, Germany
Prague, Czech Republic
Vienna, Austria
Budapest, Hungary
Munich, Germany
Tallinn, Estonia
Helsinki, Finland
St. Petersburg, Russia
Stockholm, Sweden
Before you have a heart attack Helsinki and St Petersburg are going to be day trips- but everywhere else I'm staying overnight for at least two nights!! I'll be spending the most time in Estonia- I'm staying there a week at the end of my trip. I'm SO excited for Estonia, I've been falling more andmore in love with it, partially because it's so cheap to stay there ($23/night at our hostel for a private 2-person room!) , partially because it's so close to helsinki, st petersburg, and stockholm, and partially because it's a country/city that I knew NOTHING about before I started planning this trip and it's so exciting to be exposed to something completely new.
This that I am looking forward to the most on my trip include:
visiting Beethoven's grave in Vienna
visiting a museum in Vienna that used to be a palace and has a large Klimpt exhibit
visiting a gigantic public park in Munich
visiting the "beer gardens" in Munich
going to the huge national part in Estonia
taking the ferry to Helsinki
staying in a boat hostel in Stockholm
and there's so much more but I haven't read NEARLY enough to know what I'm doing everywhere yet. I bought myself a Europe guidebook today and I'm going to be spending a LOT of time reading that from now until I leave (March 24!!). It's incredibly stressful but SO exciting. I can't believe I'm doing this. I think I might get addicted to travel....
So, all in all, things are going well. :)
Hopefully I'll write again soon,
Helen

PARIS!

Hello all! I'm a bit (hah) delayed in writing about this, but I finally found a bit of time to document my trip to PARIS 2 weeks ago. One of my friends, Maggie, is really good about organizing/planning things, and she worked out a weekend trip to Paris that was relatively inexpensive- so of course a bunch of us decided to tag along. :) There ended up being 8 of us in all. I've never traveled with an independent group that size before, and it was definitely an interesting experience.

We left Friday evening of last week and took an overnight bus that lasted about 7 hours I think. It was the kind of thing you can really only do when you're in you're 20's/in a foreign country, hahah. It wasn't too painful, though, I ended up sleeping the entire way once we actually got into the Chunnel. We were pretty beat when we got there, but Maggie had our itinerary all planned out for the day and we jumped right in- because it was so early and we couldn't get into our hostel, we took the metro to L'Arc de Triomphe and tried to find some breakfast. Depressingly enough the only thing that was open was McDonalds, so my first meal in Paris was an Egg McMuffin. Delish. The morning was gorgeous, though, we got to watch the sun rise over the Arc and take lots of awesome pictures:

After dropping our stuff off at our hostel (the Friends Hostel in Montmartre- the hostel itself was pretty nice considering how inexpensive it was, but the neighborhood was a wee bit sketchy- it was fine, though, because we were always in a group) we went right to Notre Dame. I'd been there before with the family, but I think last time we were there it was under construction- I got to see the full rose window this time. :) It was GORGEOUS both inside and out, as you would expect:





Even cooler was that there was a children's choir rehearsing in the cathedral for a concert that night! We got to sit and listen to them for a while- that was really cool.

We had our first crepes for lunch that day in a really cool cafe- afterwards, we decided we wanted to head over to the Eiffel Tower and opted to walk, even though it was quite a ways, cause it was SO nice out (we had really fantastic weather the entire trip, we never saw a single cloud and it hovered around the low 50s during the daytime). It was such a beautiful walk, we walked along the Seine and kind of weaved our way from one side of the river to the other depending on what looked cool. I took an obscene number of photos on that walk, but it was gorgeous and worth it.

We stopped for pastries on the way, but FINALLY made it to the Eiffel Tower around I think 4 or 5. We were completely exhausted at that point and pretty much just sat around taking pictures and resting, deciding what to do next.

We decided around 6 it was dinner time, and we went to a nearby bakery (sorry, boulangerie) and bought some baguettes, then a supermarket (supermarche) and picked up some cheese, nutella, and wine. Then we brought it all back (via metro) to the Seine, just outside of the Louvre and ate our picnic dinner on the riverbank as the sun was setting. Probably the best dinner idea ever.

Completely exhausted but not ready to give up yet, we trucked it over to the Louvre- Saturdays it's free for "young people"! I was dead tired, but I still managed to enjoy most of the exhibits. I saw all the classic pieces that everyone pretty much has to (Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, Venus de Milo....) but I was kind of disappointed cause the wing with all the impressionist era painting was closed off for some reason. Boo. After the Louvre (it closed at 9) we were pretty much dead. But it was kind of an amazing day. I still can't believe we covered l'Arc de Triomphe and Champs d'Elysees, Notre Dame, walk along the Seine, eclaires, Eiffel Tower, baguette cheese and wine picnic on the Seine, and the Louvre museum all in one day. It just goes to show what you can accomplish if you get up early (in our case... 5 am).

DAY 2!
We tried to get an early start but we were a bit beat. Still, we ended up in the town surrounding Sacre Coeur (just one metro stop from our hostel!) by around 11. Already starving, we looked around for somewhere to eat- this was probably our crabbiest moment of the trip. Everyone was tired, hungry, sick of walking, and tired of keeping up with an entire horde of 8 people- but after we found some relatively inexpensive delicious baguette sandwiches we all felt a lot better. We at our lunch on the steps of the Sacre Coeur- if you haven't seen pictures or been, the view is AMAZING.


We got to see the inside as well, but we couldn't take pictures.

When we'd had our fill of Sacre Coeur we split into two smaller groups. One group went to do some more historic sight seeing- I can't remember what they saw, but it didn't sound like anything earth shattering. I went with the group who decided to wander around the city and do some shopping. Fortunately it was really nice out, cause we didn't really find anything too interesting- we ended up at a huge underground shopping center with people EVERYWHERE and it was really hectic and kind of nerve-wracking. We were pretty happy to get away from there. :-P I did have a pretty awesome experience on the tube getting back, though. It was so crowded we pretty much had to push our way on and ended up bowling over this poor middle-aged guy, who was surprisingly nice about it ("Ce n'est pas grave, ce n'est pas grave!") He started talking to Katie and me- Katie speaks NO french, though, except for one phrase which she was pretty proud of using on him: "Je ne comprends pas le francais!" To which he responded "Pourquoi?" Hahah poor Katie. I came to her rescue and told him that we were Americans- his NEXT question was "Are you for Obama or Hillary?" Somehow I managed to get out (in french!!) that I was for Obama, and that Katie was for Hillary, but that they were both great candidates. Aside from how un-gramatically correct I'm sure my French was, that was one of my prouder moments of the trip.

That night we'd allocated to go out to a "real" dinner- real by our standards is anywhere where you sit down at a table and they serve you food :-P We went to a cute restaurant and had some pretty good food- my friend Chris even ordered escargot (he's a fan, apparently).

We split up again that night, and my group (my roommates and I) wandered around Montmartre for a while- we found a really cute candy stand and my friends stocked up hahah. We ended up in a pub which was okay but they wouldn't let us order pitchers of beer to share and made us order individual glasses, meaning we were charged a couple pounds more- grrr. So if I had to pick a "worst" day in Paris, Saturday would have been it just cause the overall stress level was high and things didn't work out quite the way we'd planned. But for a worst day it was pretty good :)

SUNDAY was awesome.

Most of the group spent Sunday at Versailles, but Janine, Chris and I had all been there before and decided to spend the day exploring parts of Paris that were new to us. We found a really cool market in a guidebook and decided to go check it out. It ended up being really fun- probably most of all for me and Janine, we found some really cute tops for relatively cheap. :) There were lots of other cook knick-knacks to look at, lots of produce. Probably my favorite part though was the street music- I heard some music playing and dragged the other two over to go see it. It was a brass band (+ a drummer) made up of pretty hip-looking young people (guys and girls) and they sounded really good! Probably the cutest part of the trip were the two little girls dancing along to the music:

That was really fun.

After the market Janine decided she wanted to do some exploring on her own, so Chris and I took off together to a church he wanted to see- Eglise de la Madeleine. It was very large, and very beautiful. We didn't really have an agenda after that, and we saw a really big cool-looking building in the distance, so we went and checked that out (didn't really find out what it was) and then... just kind of wandered. We generally aiming to find a. cheap food and b. a free bathroom, both of which were ridiculously hard to come by on a Sunday in the part of town we were in. After wandering around streets and kind of following whatever looked cool, we somehow ended up on the Champs d'Elysees and found lunch for about 4 euros and a free public bathroom and ate lunch on a bench overlooking le Grand Palais. It was pretty ideal. Then it was time to head back to the hostel (we'd agreed to meet people there at 4ish) and we headed in the direction of the Louvre cause we knew where the metro stop there was- but got KIND OF sidetracked by La Place de la Concordes, which was BEAUTIFUL. I don't remember being there before, and I took a ridiculous amount of pictures. Most were either of statues with birds on their heads (which varied in amusement depending on the expression of the statue) and little french kids playing with sailboats in the ponds (which i just thought was adorable). Here's some examples:

No one was at the hostel when we got there, so we took ANOTHER random wandering trip in the neighborhood surrounding our hotel, vaguely looking for a boulangerie. The neighborhood was kind of sketch. We saw a really cute (*sarcasm*) shouting match between a French man and woman and lots of knock-off vendors and weird-looking meat shops. We wandered around for what felt like a really long time, but somehow we found a really cute, inexpensive typical French boulangerie in the middle of all of the ethnic supermarkets. I got a brioche and chris got a baguette and this cool-looking loaf I can't remember the name of. We snacked on bread and took a nap (at least I did) until the rest of the guys got back.

That night we did the Eiffel Tower! I'd been to the second level with the family back in '99, but I'd never been to the top before- it was fantastic. Also freezing cold. But very much worth the 11 euros (the only money I spend on entertainment the entire trip!). One of the more amusing parts of that visit was the hordes of vendors trying to sell us blinking mini-eiffels which they called "bling-bling." To which we responded "pas de bling-bling, s'il vous plait."





I won't go into too much detail about our last night in Paris, other than that it involved a broken wine bottle on the floor of my friends' room and noise complaints/cut off power in my room. Oof. We all went to bed early.

Not much to say about the journey back, except for our adventures with the French customs: Chris (a very slim, shy, accommodating boy who's a really great travel partner just cause he's so chill) had a bit of trouble while the rest of us sat around on the bus and waited for him to get back. He was the last one in line, and when we didn't see him emerge right away, we decided to wait on the bus. We were joking about what could possibly be taking him so long, when we saw him being escorted into a separate building (Katie swears she saw blinds being drawn). This began to worry us a bit, but we weren't actually concerned until a passenger who had just gotten into the bus up front was overheard telling his seat mate that "they still don't know what kind of drugs he has." At this point we were rather concerned.
Poor Chris was detained for what had to be an hour, apparently because the French customs officers thought the container of antibiotics he was carrying were steroids. The scenes that followed, in my head at least, resemble a ridiculous sitcom: (chris speaks hardly any French, and the officers spoke only broken English) "These to make big? Make you big?" *flexing* "WHAT? NO they're antibiotics! For when I'm sick! I take them when... je suis sick!" Apparently they ground up one of the pills on his passport, cracking jokes about American and how strong American passports are. I think my favorite bit is the fact that they searched through ALL of his luggage, and eventually came across his bus reading- "I Am America (And So Can You!)" by Steven Colbert. I'm not sure they got the irony.

And thus ended my epic voyage to France. :) The left-sided traffic was strangely comforting when I got back. Sorry for the excessively long post, but Paris deserved it- shorter, more boring updates will be next I promise!

Ch-ch-ch-changes!

Ready?

...

I CUT MY HAIR OFF!

Alright now that you've hopefully gotten over the shock, here's the story:

A few weeks after getting here, I was visiting my friend Kathleen at her flat in London (Kathleen and I have been friends since high school and she goes to Syracuse University- we just happened to be abroad in the same city the same semester!). I don't remember why we started talking about hair. Maybe Kathleen had been thinking of cutting it off already. In any case, we started talking about hair with a couple of her flatmates and they were all convinced the two of us would look awesome with short hair and Kathleen and I started getting excited and brainstorming different short styles that would look good on us. By the end of the night we'd both decided we were going to get our hair cut off together before we went home, and then before we went home turned into sometime while we were here and then it turned into ASAP and then Kathleen went and got her hair cut the next day. :) I wasn't QUITE that impulsive and I sat around for a week thinking it over and getting more and more excited about it- my hair has been around shoulder length or longer basically since I was 5 and decided I was tired with the bowl-cut Mom had been keeping me in for years and wanted to look more "like a girl." Basically I felt like it was time for a change. Also, long hair is a pain in the arse to take care of, especially when it's think like mine. I was kind of tired of it being everywhere. Also, it just feels easier to do something new and crazy like this in a different country- my friends here have known me for about a month, so they're not attached to my hair and probably won't kill me/freak out if I drastically change my appearance. On the other hand, they've known me long enough to know that this is a big change and comment accordingly which is nice :) There's nothing worse than getting a new haircut and having no one notice :-P

So long story short I went to the same salon Kathleen went to this past Saturday- the "Pop-In" Hair Salon in Kennington and ended up with the same stylist she'd had- a really fun middle-aged mom who was really excited by the prospect of "scalping" someone as she called it. (Sounds a bit violent....) It only cost me about 17 pounds! Afterwards, I went to Kathleen's and we took pictures of our new hair together (which you can see to the right). The other picture is one I took of myself when I was playing around with how to style it. I'm a fan of the messy, tousled look. :)

SO that's the current big news of the week. I'm still having a great time, my friends are fantastic, and my classes are interesting (the papers are somewhat less interesting- I miss being able to elect my own topic, but oh well).
OH and I'm going to Paris on Thursday for 4 days. I keep forgetting about that. Weird.

I'm off to class!

I hope you enjoy the pictures :) I'll probably add more to my Picasa album soon so you can get the full effect.

Contact!

Hello friends and family! Greetings from across the pond.... I decided to start up a blog while I'm here so that you all can actually hear from me, because I know I won't remember to email you all as much as I should. I've never kept a blog before, so we'll see how good I am at updating. I'll try to be good for your sake!
Alright since this is my first entry I figured I'd give an overview of what I've been doing so far since I got here.

Campus/Dorm: I'm at Royal Holloway, which is a part of the University of London but actually lies outside of the city in Egham, Surrey. Surrey is a county (basically equivalent to a state in the US) that lies southwest of the city. It's pretty suburban- the town I live in is small and has a cute little downtown with basic necessity shops and a few odd clothing/shoe stores- and a Subway! (as in the fast food chain, not the underground). Subway was my first meal in Egham. It was cheap, delicious, and felt like home. Although the woman working didn't understand me when I said "tomato." I said it louder and more forcefully while pointing to it and that seemed to work. It wasn't until later that I realized I'd said "to-may-to" when she was expecting to hear "tuh-mah-to." Fortunately, that's about as much of a language barrier as I've experienced. So yeah, Surrey. It's cute, and quiet- on the offchance that any of you have seen The Holiday with Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, and Jack Black (if you haven't, don't, unless you really really like looking at Jude Law, in which case it's worth it), here's a reference point for you. In the movie, Surrey is where Kate Winslet lives in a little cottage and where Cameron Diaz goes on retreat to get away from cities, people in general, and men in particular. So that's Surrey.
My dorm is brand-new (a bit different from my dorm at Wellesley) and pretty un-spectacular except that I have my own bathroom and a double bed! Hooray! I like my room. It's a disaster area at the moment, and I think I have about 3 meals worth of dirty dishes sitting on my desk... which I will take care of shortly, I promise. :)

Food: Thank God I'm feeding myself. I do have the option of eating in the dining halls on campus, but it costs me a bit and the food is really nothing exciting at all. One thing I did not know about the British before I came here was that they put corn in EVERYTHING. My friends and I have found corn in soup, tuna salad, "vegetable pancakes" (which were actually egg rolls), pudding, and most frequently, pizza. I have a flier for a pizza place in my room that features a giant photo of just corn- not corn on the cob, just corn out of the can, sitting there, apparently enticing you to order pizza. It's very bizarre.
Other interesting food experiences I've had have included the greasiest fish and chips I've ever had in my life- my friends and I went into town in search of a late, cheap dinner and ended up and a fish and chips place that was indeed cheap (relatively speaking). We noticed that if you walked next door into the chinese take-out place you found the same people serving you- it was two adjacent restaurants with a single kitchen. We all got our fish and chips (but no tartar sauce or ketchup- you had to pay extra for that) and trekked back to campus cause there weren't any dine-in facilities. When we got back we realized why they'd been put in plastic bags- they'd completely soaked through the two layers of paper they'd been wrapped in. That was rather unappetizing. Our other take-out adventure happened the night before classes started. We ended up ordering pizza, from Domino's (again, the cheapest). There were about 8 or 9 of us and we ordered two large pizzas only to find, half an hour later when they arrived, that "large" here means what "medium to small" means back home. That was a bit unsatisfying.
I have been managing to feed myself well enough now, though. I did manage to find decent peanut butter, and every Tuesday there's a local produce market on campus where you can get fresh fruits and vegetables for decent prices. They're very tasty. Also, my friends and I have been planning collaborative dinners once a week. Last week was our first- we had a pasta party, and everyone brought some ingredient, and we made a ridiculous amount of pasta. It was delicious. This week it's a taco party. I'm quite excited....

Classes: Soooo different from Wellesley. At Wellesley my largest class ever has been 40 students, and that was an intro physics course that's very popular for fulfilling a distribution requirement. Here, all of my classes are held in the same large lecture hall and have about 150-180 students (depending on who actually turns up, of course). It's a completely different format than what I'm used to. Most of them are very interesting, though. There's one professor who's a really sweet somewhat old man but he has the tendency to just talk straight through a class, without directing any comments at the class itself during the entire lecture. Another professor of mine, though, refers to the class constantly and asks for answers, opinions, thoughts, etc. She's by far my favorite- our first day of class she instructed us all to question authority and question what she tells us and watch out for the government cause they only care about mental disorders if they make citizens less productive etc. She also asked if there were any Americans in the class (we reluctantly raised our hands) and pointed out that our president could speak to God, and did the class think that that was a symptom of mental illness? (It was a rhetorical question). Fortunately that's the only awkward America-related moment I've had in any of my classes- some of my friends are in smaller classes and have had weird moments such as being called "hey American guy" by the prof or told that American elementary schools use corporal punishment (by a student) or being confronted (again by a student) about supporting Hillary. Mostly people have been nice, though. Apparently they seem to think our accents are cool, which I did not realize. Anyway. So classes=different but fine.

Social Life: Going well! I have a solid group of friends that I've been hanging out with since the first day or so- we bonded really tightly because of the strange environment, but we've managed to keep up the friendships even after we started taking our different classes and such. All of my friends here are from either the States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, which is a bit odd. I don't really have any British friends yet, which is also odd- but my classes are really too large to meet people, my entire dorm is international students, and I don't have any outside activities other than my part-time job. I really like the friends I have, though. We've gone into London together a few times, and some of us are taking a trip to Paris during our February break. Exciting! I also have a few good friends from home here, too- Alexandra, who I went to high school with and goes to Wellesley with me now, is at UCL in London, and my friend Kathleen who goes to Syracuse University is living near Hyde Park. They're both in incredible locations and I'm really glad I have them to go visit in the city! I've been in the city pretty frequently- the ride by train is about half an hour to an hour (depending on which train you take) and it's only about 7 pounds to get a day pass which you can use for the train, there and return, as well as for any Tube or bus travel you might do while in the city.

Well I have to stop now and do a grocery run before my second class of the day- please feel free to share this with anyone you like if I've missed people! I'll write again soon--

Helen