Hi everyone,
Big news! I was given a work placement at the Royal National Theatre Archives! I will fill in more information about this later when I find out more. I went there today and figured I'd get my marching orders, but instead I'm going to get a big list of projects and things that I can potentially work on, so I'm pretty excited.
Even better, they're going to give me a stipend for travel and lunch, which is pretty much the fastest way to my heart. The archives are right next to the Imperial War Museum and down the street from a theatre where Patrick Stewart is currently performing! Haha awesome.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Nice weather
Hello! I haven't updated because there hasn't been too much interesting stuff going on yet this week!
The weather has been really nice lately. 50s to 60s and only rain every couple days, haha. This is the first time that London has seemed rainy so far. Hopefully it won't spend all summer raining too!
On Tuesday or Wednesday night, Pep, me and a random friend of ours, Christian, went to a club / bar thing in Soho that had "live classical music." It turned out to be a renaissance chamber group playing a mixture of "duets" (in Renaissance language this means for three people) and bawdy centuries old drinking songs. In terms of their music, I wasn't terribly impressed, but they were fair enough players so it was enjoyable. They taught us all to sing a Henry Purcell drinking song, haha. The pub we were in was dedicated to Oscar Wilde and they had picture frames all over the place surrounding quotations by him. During a break between sets, I went to find the bathroom and squirmed my way out of the crowd. I found a back hallway and walked and walked and found some stairs and went down those and found that there was a whole basement to the club that must have taken up most of the otherwise shared building! There were hallways leading out of that going to more communal areas, more staircases, etc. I found it very interesting that the stage wasn't in the basement, since the upstairs was very tight and narrow, and clearly they weren't using the basement for more than a couple overflow tables and chairs.
We got a bunch of people together one afternoon to play football (soccer) in the backyard. It seems so big when we are having picnics out there, but once we had more than about six people running around we found it to be way too small. My legs are really torn up because there are spiky bushes surrounding two sides of the yard and we frequently had to retrieve the ball from them. A few weeks ago one of the upstairs windows blew open, hit the wall, and shattered all over the backyard grass, so despite trying to pick up as much of it as we could before playing, a couple people ended up with some glass related injuries as well. I guess next time we will just have to walk to a park! I'm glad that my brand new ball didn't get impaled on any glass and ruined!
I went to one of the university pubs after class yesterday with some classmates and learned a bit about the educational system here in the UK. Well, first of all, I still find it odd that the university maintains its own pubs and night clubs above the union, but second of all, I have noticed that many students seem to go to the same place for undergraduate and graduate school. Although this is not entirely uncommon in the US, there seems to be a stigma on staying put too long (an exception being for a Master's and then PhD degree, obviously). When I mentioned this there was some confusion. "But you have already made contacts, found a place to live, and made friends by undergraduate school -- why wouldn't you want to stay for graduate school rather than have to go build a network again?" I was asked. Food for thought.
My computer music professor wants to talk to me about applying for a PhD programme at UCL and although I am not particularly interested in doing a doctorate in the UK (especially in Computer Science, aghhh), I figure it won't hurt to talk to him. From my internet researches, I have come to the conclusion that most PhD programmes in the UK are faculty driven. A department comes up with a certain amount of ideas for research and then advertises them like, "PhD opening for Durham University: Costume Design in Venice in 1700s, 2012 - 2013" and interested students apply. My understanding is that in the US, students find faculty members at universities who share their interests and then work on a slightly related project for their doctorate studies, so this is another way in which the educational systems differ.
I also got some news back about a potential work placement! I might be working at the Royal National Theatre next term! I have emailed the contact back and asked for an interview next week sometime, so hopefully I will know more soon. Although the position is in the archives department (a place where I spent a considerable amount of time as an undergrad working as a scanning monkey and which I hope to avoid as a full-out career, haha), it sounds like there are a lot of opportunities there which don't involve straight-up digitization. I might be involved on an iTunesU project, coordinating collaborative projects between universities, or incorporating technology into stage performances. The iTunes U thing sounds pretty cool to me. I have taken a few courses online through it before and always was pretty impressed. I am excited too because the National Theatre is a really big name over here, and I walk past their facilities not infrequently. They are in the same stack of buildings as the London Phil.
Also, it's official: I will be getting an MSc, and my thesis is going to be on live coding languages and their effects upon performance. If you want some idea of what live coding is, what this cool video! By about three minutes in it gets pretty neat, in my opinion.
Easybus emailed me back and said that they didn't find my purse, so I guess I am out of a wallet now. I've already started replacing some stuff, but I'm sad because my spanish insurance card, old nebraska university student card, and a bunch of random stuff like my gym membership card were in there. I am on the prowl for a replacement London map, but I don't think I'm going to be able to find one as awesome as the map I got when I applied to King's College, alas!
The weather has been really nice lately. 50s to 60s and only rain every couple days, haha. This is the first time that London has seemed rainy so far. Hopefully it won't spend all summer raining too!
On Tuesday or Wednesday night, Pep, me and a random friend of ours, Christian, went to a club / bar thing in Soho that had "live classical music." It turned out to be a renaissance chamber group playing a mixture of "duets" (in Renaissance language this means for three people) and bawdy centuries old drinking songs. In terms of their music, I wasn't terribly impressed, but they were fair enough players so it was enjoyable. They taught us all to sing a Henry Purcell drinking song, haha. The pub we were in was dedicated to Oscar Wilde and they had picture frames all over the place surrounding quotations by him. During a break between sets, I went to find the bathroom and squirmed my way out of the crowd. I found a back hallway and walked and walked and found some stairs and went down those and found that there was a whole basement to the club that must have taken up most of the otherwise shared building! There were hallways leading out of that going to more communal areas, more staircases, etc. I found it very interesting that the stage wasn't in the basement, since the upstairs was very tight and narrow, and clearly they weren't using the basement for more than a couple overflow tables and chairs.
We got a bunch of people together one afternoon to play football (soccer) in the backyard. It seems so big when we are having picnics out there, but once we had more than about six people running around we found it to be way too small. My legs are really torn up because there are spiky bushes surrounding two sides of the yard and we frequently had to retrieve the ball from them. A few weeks ago one of the upstairs windows blew open, hit the wall, and shattered all over the backyard grass, so despite trying to pick up as much of it as we could before playing, a couple people ended up with some glass related injuries as well. I guess next time we will just have to walk to a park! I'm glad that my brand new ball didn't get impaled on any glass and ruined!
I went to one of the university pubs after class yesterday with some classmates and learned a bit about the educational system here in the UK. Well, first of all, I still find it odd that the university maintains its own pubs and night clubs above the union, but second of all, I have noticed that many students seem to go to the same place for undergraduate and graduate school. Although this is not entirely uncommon in the US, there seems to be a stigma on staying put too long (an exception being for a Master's and then PhD degree, obviously). When I mentioned this there was some confusion. "But you have already made contacts, found a place to live, and made friends by undergraduate school -- why wouldn't you want to stay for graduate school rather than have to go build a network again?" I was asked. Food for thought.
My computer music professor wants to talk to me about applying for a PhD programme at UCL and although I am not particularly interested in doing a doctorate in the UK (especially in Computer Science, aghhh), I figure it won't hurt to talk to him. From my internet researches, I have come to the conclusion that most PhD programmes in the UK are faculty driven. A department comes up with a certain amount of ideas for research and then advertises them like, "PhD opening for Durham University: Costume Design in Venice in 1700s, 2012 - 2013" and interested students apply. My understanding is that in the US, students find faculty members at universities who share their interests and then work on a slightly related project for their doctorate studies, so this is another way in which the educational systems differ.
I also got some news back about a potential work placement! I might be working at the Royal National Theatre next term! I have emailed the contact back and asked for an interview next week sometime, so hopefully I will know more soon. Although the position is in the archives department (a place where I spent a considerable amount of time as an undergrad working as a scanning monkey and which I hope to avoid as a full-out career, haha), it sounds like there are a lot of opportunities there which don't involve straight-up digitization. I might be involved on an iTunesU project, coordinating collaborative projects between universities, or incorporating technology into stage performances. The iTunes U thing sounds pretty cool to me. I have taken a few courses online through it before and always was pretty impressed. I am excited too because the National Theatre is a really big name over here, and I walk past their facilities not infrequently. They are in the same stack of buildings as the London Phil.
Also, it's official: I will be getting an MSc, and my thesis is going to be on live coding languages and their effects upon performance. If you want some idea of what live coding is, what this cool video! By about three minutes in it gets pretty neat, in my opinion.
Easybus emailed me back and said that they didn't find my purse, so I guess I am out of a wallet now. I've already started replacing some stuff, but I'm sad because my spanish insurance card, old nebraska university student card, and a bunch of random stuff like my gym membership card were in there. I am on the prowl for a replacement London map, but I don't think I'm going to be able to find one as awesome as the map I got when I applied to King's College, alas!
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Visiting Brad!
Hello!
This reading week went by so quickly! I wish I had another week off. I went to visit Brad for a few days! My flight left Thursday morning at 6:30 am from Stansted, and having learned since last time that I don't enjoy waking up at 3:00 to go to the airport, I decided that instead I would catch a bus there at night and stretch out on some chairs. I picked up an easybus at Baker Street at 11 pm for £2, whoo! There were only a couple other people taking the van, and none of them had big suitcases of any kind so we all fit quite comfortably. The other times I have always taken National Express to the airport and arrived in just over an hour. After an hour had passed, I started getting a panicky feeling that I was on the wrong van. We weren't on main roads anymore, and seemed to be dodging through little tiny villages towards signposts pointing towards "Stratford" and other random towns. I looked at my ticket and in bold at the bottom it said "Ask your driver before boarding to double check your destination. We run many services out of the same stop." Well crap. I had a really bad feeling that I was going to be dumped in a little podunk town somewhere at 1 am on a freezing night and no way back to London or an airport before 6 or 7 am. I was going to miss my flight!
Fortunately, we did eventually get to the airport after about 80 minutes. I bolted out of that van so fast that I think the other passengers thought I was odd. I ran up to the airport and noticed that everything was dark. No lights on in the whole place!
I was worried the doors wouldn't open for me, but whoosh, they slid open as I approached them. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see bodies everywhere, scattered by the sides of walls, grouped around pillars, and slumped over chairs. I made my way towards security to see if I could get into the main terminal, but security was closed. The departures and arrivals board showed that there were no flights until 6:00, so security wasn't opening until 4:00. I searched for some chairs but finally settled for a nice piece of ground by a car rental kiosk. I didn't sleep particularly well. A lot of people were prepared and had brought blankets or were sleeping on their coat bags, but I just had my coat and sweatshirt. The building was not heated very well at night either, so the stone/marble floor was really cold! After what seemed like a long time, security opened up. Nobody else went up to them because people had to get their boarding passes before checking in (but I had printed mine off ahead of time). I made it through security in record time -- they didn't even look at my passport, and then I found the first row of chairs and went to sleep. When I woke up, music was playing, and people were sitting all around me, haha. I wandered over to my plane and got on, and then slept for another hour or so on the way to Spain. When I woke up, the Mediterranean was out the window!
I hadn't realized how stressed out I had been in Germany and the Czech Republic about not being able to read signs, but I got a nice warm feeling when I realized I had no trouble at all figuring out how to get around and buy train tickets from the airport. All of the airport announcements were easily understandable, and even a few conversations that I overheard were pretty clear to me, so I was happy as a clam. I took the underground into Málaga and got my first look at the city!
Lunch was first and foremost on my mind. I nearly broke down and got McDonald's, but I made myself wander around for a while to get my bearings and find a cheap place to eat. Here is the cathedral!
Near the cathedral I found a little café, and knowing how ridiculous it seemed to Spaniards who are used to eating at around 1:30 or 2, I sat down at 11:30 to eat lunch. I was hoping to find my old favorite go-to meal, the bocadillo (sandwich), but the best I could do was a kebab place. Not complaining!
After lunch, I wandered around a bit more but my backpack was really heavy, so I found what looked to be the main plaza and camped out for a few hours reading a book. It was pleasant -- the sun was shining, birds were chirping, and the air was much warmer than in London!
This is the Plaza de la Mérced, where I read for a few hours:
After a while, I got up and tried to track down Brad's piso (apartment flat). I had written down directions for how to reach it from the river bed (I say that because there is no water in it, haha) that runs through the middle of the city, but I was too lazy to walk all the way back there so I tried from the plaza. I did ultimately find it with a bit of zig zagging back and forth, and then I settled on some benches to wait for Brad. Once he got off of work he met me there and gave me a short tour of the city!
This is looking back at Málaga from the pier:
The coastline:
We went to a pizza place for dinner and split a giant ole pizza and wandered around a bit more, but I was realllly tired after my night of very little airport sleep, so we went back to the piso and played some video games on Brad's computer before calling it a night. Brad's roommate was out of town but before she left she said that I could use her bed, so I threw a blanket over it and hunkered down for the night. Their apartment has no central heating, and this became a problem by around 3 or 4 in the morning when I woke up shivering!
The next morning, Brad discovered that a cough he had been fighting for a while had become worse, and I discovered that I had a head cold. No! We decided the best way to combat our illnesses was to eat a typical Spanish breakfast of Churros con Chocolate:
The breakfast of champions, my friends! And something that I miss very much about Spain. I can't figure out how they make chocolate like that. It's so thick and puddinglike, but you can actually drink it....perfect.
The first stop on our tour of Málaga was the Alcazaba -- the old 11th century fortress overlooking the town. At the base of it lies a Roman amphitheater. I captured them both in this photo:
Once we paid our couple euros to get in, they really didn't have anyone to say we couldn't climb on things. We figured there would be signs if they minded, so we scampered about on the ledges and walls:
At some point, we started getting tired of going up steps, but there seemed to be no end in sight! We pushed on, getting higher and higher up...
Momentarily, we were relieved by the sign of an "elevator," but obviously, they were joking.
Looking down at Málaga from the walls. You can see a bull fighting ring among other buildings.
No more stairs, for the moment! When we finished with the Alcazaba, we kept climbing the hill towards the Gibralfaro -- which if I understood the signs correctly was the Phoenician fortress from around 800 ce.
Our legs hurt, but the view was good!
To the castle!
Once we finally got up there, we looked around a cool museum that talked about the Gibralfaro and Alcazaba's roles throughout history. I was interested by the bits about WWI and WWII, actually, because you wouldn't think that thousand year old castles would have a big role, but at least according to that museum it was of strategic value for both sides.
We went up one of the guard posts to have a look around and Brad found his house! Here he is attempting to point it out:
It was cold! A rainstorm had come up that made the ramps and stones slick, so we had a heckuva time getting back down.
Brad is still afraid of heights and doesn't like to climb cool rocks.
We made it back down! At this point, we were really hungry, so we settled on a gyro type stand for lunch. My gosh, it was so good! It was easily the best falafel wrap that I've had in my life, haha. Here is a view of the Alcazaba from the main plaza:
I took a picture of these because I loved the ones growing at Grandma Pat's house, but unfortunately I believe all of the clippings I took have died out, although I kept them going for a few years.
Málaga was the birth place of Picasso, so we spent the afternoon wandering around museums, both free and fairly inexpensive (with a student card, whoo hoo!) looking at random Picasso stuff. We saw the building where he was born and stopped at a café to rest for a while during siesta. I had "hot chocolate," which is pretty much the same thick puddingy stuff that they have for churros, mmmmm. We also went to a museum of Folk Costumbres, which we weren't sure if it was going to end up being about costumes or about customs, but it turned out to be a random collection of wine presses, olive presses, saddles, farrier tools, bread making stuff, etc. The museum was inside an old stable / inn, and it reminded me very strongly of my old house in Toledo:
Earlier, we had decided that we would use a coupon Brad had for a movie theater about twenty minutes from his house. We grabbed dinner (at the same falafel place we'd gone earlier....IT WAS SO GOOD...and cheap, haha) and went to see "The Grey," with Liam Neeson. In Spanish the title was "Infierno Blanco," which can be translated to "White Hell." It was a super intense movie. I recommend it, if you like the feeling of hopeless fear and exhaustion, haha. It also was an entirely uncharacteristic portrayal of wolves and wolf behavior, but whatevs. I was kind of going with a "Ghost in the Darkness" man-eating animal type view and I liked the movie. It was a good pick, too, because it had very little dialogue besides swearing and one liners like, "No, los mataremos" (No, we will kill them). And if there is one thing I can do in Spanish, it's swearing! I made one of the Spaniards in the house blush the other day in a Spanish swear battle. My Toledo host-brothers taught me well. After the movie, we were a bit shaken up by the adrenaline that had gripped us for a few hours, and we went back to the centro to see how the Málaga Carnival was going.
The movie theater was not in the best part of town, you might say, so I went into my London Nighttime Survival Mode and distributed my credit cards and ID on different pockets of my coat, etc so that if something should happen to my purse I would still have most of the stuff that I need (even if just to get back to my house via bus). Once again, my mugging backup plan was completely unnecessary and we made it back to the main part of town in one piece.
We had seen decorations and a lot of people in costumes earlier in the day. We got there just as the parade was ending, which was a bummer, but there were a lot of people singing in the streets, face painting, costumes, instruments, etc.
A group of guys was dressed up like cockroaches singing songs, including one I recognized from the movie Birdcage!
This group was telling fairy tales in song form:
One of the parade floats being put into storage for the night.
We went back to Brad's piso absolutely shattered from the day of stair climbing and museum walking. I don't really even remember going to sleep, but I woke up in the middle of the night really cold again. I woke up in the morning pretty cold too, full of 'bogies' from the head cold, so I took a shower and got all packed. While Brad was occupied elsewhere I took the liberty of getting out my camera. This is the living room of their piso:
This is looking out of the laundry / random stuff room. As you can see, there is no glass, just some rows of bricks, so the apartment is open to the elements, although you can shut a door in the kitchen that blocks this room off. All in all, when you walk into the apartment, there is a kitchen attached to that laundry room thing which is quite narrow. To the other side are Brad's room, his roommate's room, and the landlord's room which is kept locked except when they are staying there also. There is a bathroom and a living room, and that's pretty much it. All of the apartments in the building surround a little courtyard with a few orange trees. I picked an orange and wanted to eat it, but Brad told me that they were gross and would make me sick. I had to wonder if he was right, since there were so many still on the trees all around town. When I scratched the bottom and smelled it I decided that he was probably right. It seemed very acrid or bitter or something to my nose.
We went to the grocery store about ten minutes from his piso to buy picnicking supplies! Originally, when the trip was in its planning stages, we were considering going to Sevilla or Cordoba or another place about three hours away, but that seemed complicated and expensive, so Brad suggested we go to Nerja, a coastal village about 50 minutes away. Our bus tickets were only a couple euros, which was nice. Sack lunch packed, we headed to Nerja. It was a really nice little town with a picturesque beach. It seemed like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be touristy or not -- there were no signs and the beach was difficult to reach, but there were a lot of touristy shops set up along the main few streets near the beach. We walked out onto the "Balcony of Spain" and were treated to a really great view of the Mediterranean.
When we finally found a route down to the beach, we tried out the water but it was a bit too cold. The air temperature was probably only about 55 or 60, but that seemed nice to me! Here's Brad, enjoying his PB&J:
As many beaches seem to be in Spain, this one was a topless beach, whoo.....
Also, while we were eating lunch a couple dogs went nuts! Barking barking barking. We looked to see what had gotten them so upset and we saw a terrified, domestic pig running around near the steep rocks at the back of the beach. Poor guy. The dogs were not being mean, they were just excited and ran back and forth with the pig while their owners tried to call them back. The pig finally found a path up and took to its heels. How interesting!
We spent the afternoon walking around on the beach, and finally begrudging went back up the steep stairs to the cliffs where the town was located. We are really out of shape. The Alcazaba pretty much ruined me and I still felt the burn today when I was going upstairs to my dorm room!
The view we had from a bench where we sat in the Mediterranean sun:
We got back to Málaga at around 5 or so and didn't have a lot else to do before I needed to head to the airport at 8. Brad needed to go grocery shopping for the week, so I went back with him. It turns out that he is starving himself in order to pay for trips to Rome, London, etc. He is living on only about 15 euros a week with a steady diet of lentils and noodles with oil. WTF? I convinced him to buy some chicken, but that was about as far as he would bend on the matter. I guess the good news is that my visit forced him to eat some real food on my behalf, haha. His mom is coming next week to visit him, and she will make sure he eats some meals as well, haha.
We went downtown and saw a bit more of the carnival as it was gearing up for the night. We ducked into a restaurant to grab something to eat and they were kind of scandalized. We would have dressed down the place, had there been any other customers, but since it was only 6:30 obviously nobody else was eating! Who eats dinner before 9 or 10? Sheesh! Poor wait staff. Then we didn't even have the courtesy of ordering our own meals, we ordered one and split it, haha. On the way to the train station, I snapped a few photos of the Alcazaba, Gibralfaro, and the cathedral at night:
And so ends my Málaga adventure! OR DOES IT?
In fact, my adventure extended far into the night. I was sitting next to two curmudgeonly English types that got very excited about my book (James Clavell) and chatted with me for a while about traveling in Europe. I felt like I was in a bad comedy skit though. I think one of them may have been a butler, because he was very droll and always addressed the other, older gentleman as "sir." Their sentences always started with phrases like, "Not to come across as soporific, but..."
I got through customs very quickly and followed the signs for the easybus pickup point. I got there with about ten minutes to spare on my ticket, but the bus never came! I finally checked my ticket more carefully and saw that this particular van went to the north terminal, not the south terminal! Rats! It was after midnight now and all of the other shuttle type services had shut down their kiosks for the night. It looked like I was going to be sleeping in an airport again. On a whim, I went to the north terminal and waited outside in the cold for about twenty minutes while I tried to decide what to do. Finally, another easybus van showed up! Hooray! He let me on with the stipulation that I would have to get back off if too many people showed up, but I ended up being the only one. The van driver was really nice and dropped me off right next to where the night bus runs at night. I could see the bus coming, so I hurriedly thanked him and hopped off. A second later, I realized that I had left my purse on the van, but it was too late and he was already around the corner. Some profanity ensued as I realized that I was stranded in London a couple miles away from my house at 4 am. Thankfully, I then realized that I still had my Oyster card (my London travel card) because I often keep it in my coat pocket rather than my purse for easy access. So I was able to get on the night bus, at least.
Then I realized dourly that my keys were in my purse, so I couldn't get into the house OR my room. More internal profanity until I remembered that I'd been stopped at security and they'd gone through my purse, so I had removed a bunch of stuff and stashed it in random places in my backpack while they were going through item by item. My keys were in my backpack, and so was my camera! Then I remembered that during Nighttime Survival Mode, I had put my ID and credit cards in my pockets! Aw crap, but my passport had been in the purse. After a moment of panic, I realized that in fact I had put that in my backpack while I was waiting to see if a van would come get me! So all I lost was my iPod. NOPE. I'd rolled it up in my headphones and stuffed it into my hoodie pocket. Wow. So the only thing I lost was a superb map of London, my wallet with insurance cards, library cards, etc. Phew! I can't believe my ridiculous luck and odd squirrel-like stashing behavior. At 3:40 I finally made it back to my dorm room and got to sleep!
Thus concludes my epic Spanish adventure! I contacted easybus and I hope to recover my purse, but if not at least I have everything that I still need! Overall, it was a really fun trip!
This reading week went by so quickly! I wish I had another week off. I went to visit Brad for a few days! My flight left Thursday morning at 6:30 am from Stansted, and having learned since last time that I don't enjoy waking up at 3:00 to go to the airport, I decided that instead I would catch a bus there at night and stretch out on some chairs. I picked up an easybus at Baker Street at 11 pm for £2, whoo! There were only a couple other people taking the van, and none of them had big suitcases of any kind so we all fit quite comfortably. The other times I have always taken National Express to the airport and arrived in just over an hour. After an hour had passed, I started getting a panicky feeling that I was on the wrong van. We weren't on main roads anymore, and seemed to be dodging through little tiny villages towards signposts pointing towards "Stratford" and other random towns. I looked at my ticket and in bold at the bottom it said "Ask your driver before boarding to double check your destination. We run many services out of the same stop." Well crap. I had a really bad feeling that I was going to be dumped in a little podunk town somewhere at 1 am on a freezing night and no way back to London or an airport before 6 or 7 am. I was going to miss my flight!
Fortunately, we did eventually get to the airport after about 80 minutes. I bolted out of that van so fast that I think the other passengers thought I was odd. I ran up to the airport and noticed that everything was dark. No lights on in the whole place!
I was worried the doors wouldn't open for me, but whoosh, they slid open as I approached them. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see bodies everywhere, scattered by the sides of walls, grouped around pillars, and slumped over chairs. I made my way towards security to see if I could get into the main terminal, but security was closed. The departures and arrivals board showed that there were no flights until 6:00, so security wasn't opening until 4:00. I searched for some chairs but finally settled for a nice piece of ground by a car rental kiosk. I didn't sleep particularly well. A lot of people were prepared and had brought blankets or were sleeping on their coat bags, but I just had my coat and sweatshirt. The building was not heated very well at night either, so the stone/marble floor was really cold! After what seemed like a long time, security opened up. Nobody else went up to them because people had to get their boarding passes before checking in (but I had printed mine off ahead of time). I made it through security in record time -- they didn't even look at my passport, and then I found the first row of chairs and went to sleep. When I woke up, music was playing, and people were sitting all around me, haha. I wandered over to my plane and got on, and then slept for another hour or so on the way to Spain. When I woke up, the Mediterranean was out the window!
I hadn't realized how stressed out I had been in Germany and the Czech Republic about not being able to read signs, but I got a nice warm feeling when I realized I had no trouble at all figuring out how to get around and buy train tickets from the airport. All of the airport announcements were easily understandable, and even a few conversations that I overheard were pretty clear to me, so I was happy as a clam. I took the underground into Málaga and got my first look at the city!
Lunch was first and foremost on my mind. I nearly broke down and got McDonald's, but I made myself wander around for a while to get my bearings and find a cheap place to eat. Here is the cathedral!
Near the cathedral I found a little café, and knowing how ridiculous it seemed to Spaniards who are used to eating at around 1:30 or 2, I sat down at 11:30 to eat lunch. I was hoping to find my old favorite go-to meal, the bocadillo (sandwich), but the best I could do was a kebab place. Not complaining!
After lunch, I wandered around a bit more but my backpack was really heavy, so I found what looked to be the main plaza and camped out for a few hours reading a book. It was pleasant -- the sun was shining, birds were chirping, and the air was much warmer than in London!
This is the Plaza de la Mérced, where I read for a few hours:
After a while, I got up and tried to track down Brad's piso (apartment flat). I had written down directions for how to reach it from the river bed (I say that because there is no water in it, haha) that runs through the middle of the city, but I was too lazy to walk all the way back there so I tried from the plaza. I did ultimately find it with a bit of zig zagging back and forth, and then I settled on some benches to wait for Brad. Once he got off of work he met me there and gave me a short tour of the city!
This is looking back at Málaga from the pier:
The coastline:
We went to a pizza place for dinner and split a giant ole pizza and wandered around a bit more, but I was realllly tired after my night of very little airport sleep, so we went back to the piso and played some video games on Brad's computer before calling it a night. Brad's roommate was out of town but before she left she said that I could use her bed, so I threw a blanket over it and hunkered down for the night. Their apartment has no central heating, and this became a problem by around 3 or 4 in the morning when I woke up shivering!
The next morning, Brad discovered that a cough he had been fighting for a while had become worse, and I discovered that I had a head cold. No! We decided the best way to combat our illnesses was to eat a typical Spanish breakfast of Churros con Chocolate:
The breakfast of champions, my friends! And something that I miss very much about Spain. I can't figure out how they make chocolate like that. It's so thick and puddinglike, but you can actually drink it....perfect.The first stop on our tour of Málaga was the Alcazaba -- the old 11th century fortress overlooking the town. At the base of it lies a Roman amphitheater. I captured them both in this photo:
Once we paid our couple euros to get in, they really didn't have anyone to say we couldn't climb on things. We figured there would be signs if they minded, so we scampered about on the ledges and walls:
At some point, we started getting tired of going up steps, but there seemed to be no end in sight! We pushed on, getting higher and higher up...
Momentarily, we were relieved by the sign of an "elevator," but obviously, they were joking.
Looking down at Málaga from the walls. You can see a bull fighting ring among other buildings.
No more stairs, for the moment! When we finished with the Alcazaba, we kept climbing the hill towards the Gibralfaro -- which if I understood the signs correctly was the Phoenician fortress from around 800 ce.
Our legs hurt, but the view was good!
To the castle!
Once we finally got up there, we looked around a cool museum that talked about the Gibralfaro and Alcazaba's roles throughout history. I was interested by the bits about WWI and WWII, actually, because you wouldn't think that thousand year old castles would have a big role, but at least according to that museum it was of strategic value for both sides.
We went up one of the guard posts to have a look around and Brad found his house! Here he is attempting to point it out:
It was cold! A rainstorm had come up that made the ramps and stones slick, so we had a heckuva time getting back down.
Brad is still afraid of heights and doesn't like to climb cool rocks.
We made it back down! At this point, we were really hungry, so we settled on a gyro type stand for lunch. My gosh, it was so good! It was easily the best falafel wrap that I've had in my life, haha. Here is a view of the Alcazaba from the main plaza:
I took a picture of these because I loved the ones growing at Grandma Pat's house, but unfortunately I believe all of the clippings I took have died out, although I kept them going for a few years.
Málaga was the birth place of Picasso, so we spent the afternoon wandering around museums, both free and fairly inexpensive (with a student card, whoo hoo!) looking at random Picasso stuff. We saw the building where he was born and stopped at a café to rest for a while during siesta. I had "hot chocolate," which is pretty much the same thick puddingy stuff that they have for churros, mmmmm. We also went to a museum of Folk Costumbres, which we weren't sure if it was going to end up being about costumes or about customs, but it turned out to be a random collection of wine presses, olive presses, saddles, farrier tools, bread making stuff, etc. The museum was inside an old stable / inn, and it reminded me very strongly of my old house in Toledo:
Earlier, we had decided that we would use a coupon Brad had for a movie theater about twenty minutes from his house. We grabbed dinner (at the same falafel place we'd gone earlier....IT WAS SO GOOD...and cheap, haha) and went to see "The Grey," with Liam Neeson. In Spanish the title was "Infierno Blanco," which can be translated to "White Hell." It was a super intense movie. I recommend it, if you like the feeling of hopeless fear and exhaustion, haha. It also was an entirely uncharacteristic portrayal of wolves and wolf behavior, but whatevs. I was kind of going with a "Ghost in the Darkness" man-eating animal type view and I liked the movie. It was a good pick, too, because it had very little dialogue besides swearing and one liners like, "No, los mataremos" (No, we will kill them). And if there is one thing I can do in Spanish, it's swearing! I made one of the Spaniards in the house blush the other day in a Spanish swear battle. My Toledo host-brothers taught me well. After the movie, we were a bit shaken up by the adrenaline that had gripped us for a few hours, and we went back to the centro to see how the Málaga Carnival was going.
The movie theater was not in the best part of town, you might say, so I went into my London Nighttime Survival Mode and distributed my credit cards and ID on different pockets of my coat, etc so that if something should happen to my purse I would still have most of the stuff that I need (even if just to get back to my house via bus). Once again, my mugging backup plan was completely unnecessary and we made it back to the main part of town in one piece.
We had seen decorations and a lot of people in costumes earlier in the day. We got there just as the parade was ending, which was a bummer, but there were a lot of people singing in the streets, face painting, costumes, instruments, etc.
A group of guys was dressed up like cockroaches singing songs, including one I recognized from the movie Birdcage!
This group was telling fairy tales in song form:
One of the parade floats being put into storage for the night.
We went back to Brad's piso absolutely shattered from the day of stair climbing and museum walking. I don't really even remember going to sleep, but I woke up in the middle of the night really cold again. I woke up in the morning pretty cold too, full of 'bogies' from the head cold, so I took a shower and got all packed. While Brad was occupied elsewhere I took the liberty of getting out my camera. This is the living room of their piso:
This is looking out of the laundry / random stuff room. As you can see, there is no glass, just some rows of bricks, so the apartment is open to the elements, although you can shut a door in the kitchen that blocks this room off. All in all, when you walk into the apartment, there is a kitchen attached to that laundry room thing which is quite narrow. To the other side are Brad's room, his roommate's room, and the landlord's room which is kept locked except when they are staying there also. There is a bathroom and a living room, and that's pretty much it. All of the apartments in the building surround a little courtyard with a few orange trees. I picked an orange and wanted to eat it, but Brad told me that they were gross and would make me sick. I had to wonder if he was right, since there were so many still on the trees all around town. When I scratched the bottom and smelled it I decided that he was probably right. It seemed very acrid or bitter or something to my nose.
We went to the grocery store about ten minutes from his piso to buy picnicking supplies! Originally, when the trip was in its planning stages, we were considering going to Sevilla or Cordoba or another place about three hours away, but that seemed complicated and expensive, so Brad suggested we go to Nerja, a coastal village about 50 minutes away. Our bus tickets were only a couple euros, which was nice. Sack lunch packed, we headed to Nerja. It was a really nice little town with a picturesque beach. It seemed like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be touristy or not -- there were no signs and the beach was difficult to reach, but there were a lot of touristy shops set up along the main few streets near the beach. We walked out onto the "Balcony of Spain" and were treated to a really great view of the Mediterranean.
When we finally found a route down to the beach, we tried out the water but it was a bit too cold. The air temperature was probably only about 55 or 60, but that seemed nice to me! Here's Brad, enjoying his PB&J:
As many beaches seem to be in Spain, this one was a topless beach, whoo.....
Also, while we were eating lunch a couple dogs went nuts! Barking barking barking. We looked to see what had gotten them so upset and we saw a terrified, domestic pig running around near the steep rocks at the back of the beach. Poor guy. The dogs were not being mean, they were just excited and ran back and forth with the pig while their owners tried to call them back. The pig finally found a path up and took to its heels. How interesting!
We spent the afternoon walking around on the beach, and finally begrudging went back up the steep stairs to the cliffs where the town was located. We are really out of shape. The Alcazaba pretty much ruined me and I still felt the burn today when I was going upstairs to my dorm room!
The view we had from a bench where we sat in the Mediterranean sun:
We got back to Málaga at around 5 or so and didn't have a lot else to do before I needed to head to the airport at 8. Brad needed to go grocery shopping for the week, so I went back with him. It turns out that he is starving himself in order to pay for trips to Rome, London, etc. He is living on only about 15 euros a week with a steady diet of lentils and noodles with oil. WTF? I convinced him to buy some chicken, but that was about as far as he would bend on the matter. I guess the good news is that my visit forced him to eat some real food on my behalf, haha. His mom is coming next week to visit him, and she will make sure he eats some meals as well, haha.
We went downtown and saw a bit more of the carnival as it was gearing up for the night. We ducked into a restaurant to grab something to eat and they were kind of scandalized. We would have dressed down the place, had there been any other customers, but since it was only 6:30 obviously nobody else was eating! Who eats dinner before 9 or 10? Sheesh! Poor wait staff. Then we didn't even have the courtesy of ordering our own meals, we ordered one and split it, haha. On the way to the train station, I snapped a few photos of the Alcazaba, Gibralfaro, and the cathedral at night:
And so ends my Málaga adventure! OR DOES IT?
In fact, my adventure extended far into the night. I was sitting next to two curmudgeonly English types that got very excited about my book (James Clavell) and chatted with me for a while about traveling in Europe. I felt like I was in a bad comedy skit though. I think one of them may have been a butler, because he was very droll and always addressed the other, older gentleman as "sir." Their sentences always started with phrases like, "Not to come across as soporific, but..."
I got through customs very quickly and followed the signs for the easybus pickup point. I got there with about ten minutes to spare on my ticket, but the bus never came! I finally checked my ticket more carefully and saw that this particular van went to the north terminal, not the south terminal! Rats! It was after midnight now and all of the other shuttle type services had shut down their kiosks for the night. It looked like I was going to be sleeping in an airport again. On a whim, I went to the north terminal and waited outside in the cold for about twenty minutes while I tried to decide what to do. Finally, another easybus van showed up! Hooray! He let me on with the stipulation that I would have to get back off if too many people showed up, but I ended up being the only one. The van driver was really nice and dropped me off right next to where the night bus runs at night. I could see the bus coming, so I hurriedly thanked him and hopped off. A second later, I realized that I had left my purse on the van, but it was too late and he was already around the corner. Some profanity ensued as I realized that I was stranded in London a couple miles away from my house at 4 am. Thankfully, I then realized that I still had my Oyster card (my London travel card) because I often keep it in my coat pocket rather than my purse for easy access. So I was able to get on the night bus, at least.
Then I realized dourly that my keys were in my purse, so I couldn't get into the house OR my room. More internal profanity until I remembered that I'd been stopped at security and they'd gone through my purse, so I had removed a bunch of stuff and stashed it in random places in my backpack while they were going through item by item. My keys were in my backpack, and so was my camera! Then I remembered that during Nighttime Survival Mode, I had put my ID and credit cards in my pockets! Aw crap, but my passport had been in the purse. After a moment of panic, I realized that in fact I had put that in my backpack while I was waiting to see if a van would come get me! So all I lost was my iPod. NOPE. I'd rolled it up in my headphones and stuffed it into my hoodie pocket. Wow. So the only thing I lost was a superb map of London, my wallet with insurance cards, library cards, etc. Phew! I can't believe my ridiculous luck and odd squirrel-like stashing behavior. At 3:40 I finally made it back to my dorm room and got to sleep!
Thus concludes my epic Spanish adventure! I contacted easybus and I hope to recover my purse, but if not at least I have everything that I still need! Overall, it was a really fun trip!
Monday, February 13, 2012
Nearly homeless!
Okay, for those who are interested, here are links to pictures of the stuff that I ate! I asked one of my friends to write down the names so I could look them up, haha.
Dosa - the crepe thing filled with potato goop
Vada - a spicy bread thing that we dipped in different sauces
Lassi - the yogurty drink!
Gobi 65 - the bright orange, fried cauliflower
Now an interesting word about the paan. Turns out that I was spelling it wrong, first of all. Second of all, when I did manage to look it up I was horrified! Paan is a really nasty tobacco, carcinogenic chew that used to be popular in India but apparently is falling out of favor. It has something called areca nut in it that is ridiculously bad for you. Not only does it dye your teeth and mouth red, but it also has really high rates of cancer associated with its use -- even without throwing the tobacco in there! So I was a bit cranky that they had me try to eat that at first, but it turns out that most restaurants (finding the practice of chewing paan distasteful), serve a "virgin" version of it with mint and lime and a few other things all wrapped up in the betel leaf. Phew!!!
We ended up skipping the dubstep club simply because it was far away. We may try again when it is warmer out, because we hear the toilets are amazing. No joke, people on the internet will not stop talking about the "cool" toilets, so we will have to go see what that means, exactly. Hmm! Instead, we walked to Camden and followed our local residence hall stoner to some of his stomping grounds. We wound up at a café / bar / club thing (no entrance fee, therefore my new favorite place) halfway between Camden and Chalk Farm. The smell of weed hung in the air near the entrance, but once we squirmed our way through the crowd big fans were keeping the air fresh so that was nice. The artists performing advertised themselves as a trance-techno-synth group. I liked the music more than I suspected that I would! It was very much like stuff that Jen-Kuang, Kyle, and I used to do at the Zoo Bar or the conferences in Texas and Oklahoma. There was a pre-recorded (I assume) track rolling over the top that the performers were interacting with, banging on drums, using whistles, saw blades, etc, and a woman was either whispering or crooning Sanskrit into a mic with heavy effects, so the whole package came off as very cool. We were probably the youngest people in the place by about twenty years, but we still had a lot of fun. We got to pet a man's rottweiler puppy on the way out too, so that was a clear win. He was standing by the entrance smoking, high as a kite, just holding the dog's leash and smiling wanly. The dog was incredibly excited each time someone opened the door to leave the club and would run up to them wagging its nubbin, so naturally we had to stay and pet it for a good ten minutes. We considered trying to take it back with us to keep it forever -- most likely the guy wouldn't have minded that much! haha.
We have had some excitement here in the ole residence hall for the past couple days. Yesterday, I was washing some dishes when the water stopped working. I filled up a few bottles in my room with what water there was left, texted the vice warden to make sure he knew there was a problem, and then went to the gym. A fire hydrant had exploded across the street and was spraying water everywhere, so that solved the water mystery! I was only at the gym an hour or so, but it was already fixed when I came back. When I walked inside, the floor was squishy with water. Uh oh! The vice warden was running around frantically and wouldn't talk to any of us. It turns out that a guy living on the first floor (that is the second floor to people in the US) had been mystified by the lack of water and had cranked his taps all the way open, then given up and left for the afternoon. Wellll you can see where this story is leading. Sure enough, when the water came back on it overflowed and dominated poor Sanjiv's room just below! He said it started out as a trickle that he put a trash can underneath, but soon it was a waterfall, so he evacuated his electronics and watched from the hall. Even worse, his room is right next to all of the main electrical stuff in the house and the flood trashed some of the systems pretty well. Parts of the house no longer have heat or lighting, haha. But it also knocked out all of the smoke detectors in the house because they are rigged through one main panel! They didn't figure out the smoke detectors were gone until late in the afternoon, so they told us we should leave the house if possible and then made the poor vice warden patrol every twenty minutes through the entire house. All night long! Poor guy!
Since they told us to limit our time in the house, a few of us went to McDonald's, ate ice cream, played card games, and listened to several homeless guys rant about the USSR's role in WWII until we got kicked out at 2 am or something. When we woke up this morning, we were told that we were going to have to find another place to live for the next two days. I called some friends and they said I could stay with them, yay, but not everybody had that option, especially the students from China who have not made a lot of friends outside of the program. So the administrators said whoever couldn't find housing could come sleep on the floor of one of the other residence halls....great. A few people made a pretty big stink about this and demanded hotel rooms, plus compensation for food and inconvenience, and the next thing we knew we were told that we could actually spend the night, they were just going to post several security guards to patrol the building instead! I guess hiring people is cheaper than paying for hotel bills! I was pretty happy because if I was booted for two nights in a row, not only was I going to have to take enough stuff to last me through Saturday, but it meant that I would be sleeping on the floor for three nights + a couch two nights in Spain! That is a lot of uncomfortable sleeping for one week!
In the meantime, because I was planning on spending the night at a friend's house, we had schemed up some movie watching to do and figured we might as well do it anyway! I took a bus out to Finchley Central, a part of town in Zone 4 that I'd not been to previously. I followed her instructions from the station to her house, and was amazed how quickly a busy, fairly typical tube station bustling street faded away to trees! I walked along the side of the road without seeing any buildings for a few minutes, crossed a couple bridges, etc. She had told me that I needed to take a right after a big bridge, and I was getting nervous that I had missed it when suddenly through the rain I saw a gigantic viaduct! Here is some more information about it, it seems quite interesting! She lives in a proper neighborhood in a house, so that was kind of fun to see an English home. On the way back, I decided since it was late I'd rather take the tube and pay for the Zone 4 fare than try to get all the way back to the bus station, and I ended up at Mill Hill East. It was tiny! It was a tiny platform with a "waiting room" and everything -- very old school. It didn't even have ticket barriers! There is only one stop, because a train basically acts as a shuttle between Mill Hill East and Finchley Central, where I had initially arrived. Back in the day, the station was intended to connect the two portions of the northern line, but WWII had disrupted the building plans and after the war it had never been continued. I liked it because it was a quirky, old looking little place.
Tomorrow I'm going to Camden in the morning to work on a group project, and then making fancy cupcakes in the afternoon. Wednesday I'm going to a 3D conference thingy (I have no purpose in going other than to play with new gadgets...admission was free, so why not?), and then Wednesday night I am taking the bus to Stansted around 10 pm! I figured why pay £10 to wake up at 3:00 in order to get to the airport in the wee hours of the morning, when I could pay £2 to head there in the evening and sleep in relative comfort on the floor? haha. If I don't like it then I guess I'll have to default back to the 3 am thing. I wish all the cheap flights weren't the ones that were at balls o'clock, but I suppose that is why they are cheap.
This might be my last update until I get back from Spain on Saturday. I arrive Thursday morning and I have a few hours to entertain myself until Brad gets back from work. I looked at a map, and it would appear that the bus will drop me right next to the beach, so I'm gonna go hang out by the Mediterranean with a book and a bocadillo (sandwich) until the afternoon. Friday I'm dragging Brad to museums to see ancient Phoenician ruins and things, and then on Saturday we're taking a bus to a different beach somewhere! It should be fun!
Now I am getting quite sleepy, so I am afraid I must sign off. Au revoir!
Dosa - the crepe thing filled with potato goop
Vada - a spicy bread thing that we dipped in different sauces
Lassi - the yogurty drink!
Gobi 65 - the bright orange, fried cauliflower
Now an interesting word about the paan. Turns out that I was spelling it wrong, first of all. Second of all, when I did manage to look it up I was horrified! Paan is a really nasty tobacco, carcinogenic chew that used to be popular in India but apparently is falling out of favor. It has something called areca nut in it that is ridiculously bad for you. Not only does it dye your teeth and mouth red, but it also has really high rates of cancer associated with its use -- even without throwing the tobacco in there! So I was a bit cranky that they had me try to eat that at first, but it turns out that most restaurants (finding the practice of chewing paan distasteful), serve a "virgin" version of it with mint and lime and a few other things all wrapped up in the betel leaf. Phew!!!
We ended up skipping the dubstep club simply because it was far away. We may try again when it is warmer out, because we hear the toilets are amazing. No joke, people on the internet will not stop talking about the "cool" toilets, so we will have to go see what that means, exactly. Hmm! Instead, we walked to Camden and followed our local residence hall stoner to some of his stomping grounds. We wound up at a café / bar / club thing (no entrance fee, therefore my new favorite place) halfway between Camden and Chalk Farm. The smell of weed hung in the air near the entrance, but once we squirmed our way through the crowd big fans were keeping the air fresh so that was nice. The artists performing advertised themselves as a trance-techno-synth group. I liked the music more than I suspected that I would! It was very much like stuff that Jen-Kuang, Kyle, and I used to do at the Zoo Bar or the conferences in Texas and Oklahoma. There was a pre-recorded (I assume) track rolling over the top that the performers were interacting with, banging on drums, using whistles, saw blades, etc, and a woman was either whispering or crooning Sanskrit into a mic with heavy effects, so the whole package came off as very cool. We were probably the youngest people in the place by about twenty years, but we still had a lot of fun. We got to pet a man's rottweiler puppy on the way out too, so that was a clear win. He was standing by the entrance smoking, high as a kite, just holding the dog's leash and smiling wanly. The dog was incredibly excited each time someone opened the door to leave the club and would run up to them wagging its nubbin, so naturally we had to stay and pet it for a good ten minutes. We considered trying to take it back with us to keep it forever -- most likely the guy wouldn't have minded that much! haha.
We have had some excitement here in the ole residence hall for the past couple days. Yesterday, I was washing some dishes when the water stopped working. I filled up a few bottles in my room with what water there was left, texted the vice warden to make sure he knew there was a problem, and then went to the gym. A fire hydrant had exploded across the street and was spraying water everywhere, so that solved the water mystery! I was only at the gym an hour or so, but it was already fixed when I came back. When I walked inside, the floor was squishy with water. Uh oh! The vice warden was running around frantically and wouldn't talk to any of us. It turns out that a guy living on the first floor (that is the second floor to people in the US) had been mystified by the lack of water and had cranked his taps all the way open, then given up and left for the afternoon. Wellll you can see where this story is leading. Sure enough, when the water came back on it overflowed and dominated poor Sanjiv's room just below! He said it started out as a trickle that he put a trash can underneath, but soon it was a waterfall, so he evacuated his electronics and watched from the hall. Even worse, his room is right next to all of the main electrical stuff in the house and the flood trashed some of the systems pretty well. Parts of the house no longer have heat or lighting, haha. But it also knocked out all of the smoke detectors in the house because they are rigged through one main panel! They didn't figure out the smoke detectors were gone until late in the afternoon, so they told us we should leave the house if possible and then made the poor vice warden patrol every twenty minutes through the entire house. All night long! Poor guy!
Since they told us to limit our time in the house, a few of us went to McDonald's, ate ice cream, played card games, and listened to several homeless guys rant about the USSR's role in WWII until we got kicked out at 2 am or something. When we woke up this morning, we were told that we were going to have to find another place to live for the next two days. I called some friends and they said I could stay with them, yay, but not everybody had that option, especially the students from China who have not made a lot of friends outside of the program. So the administrators said whoever couldn't find housing could come sleep on the floor of one of the other residence halls....great. A few people made a pretty big stink about this and demanded hotel rooms, plus compensation for food and inconvenience, and the next thing we knew we were told that we could actually spend the night, they were just going to post several security guards to patrol the building instead! I guess hiring people is cheaper than paying for hotel bills! I was pretty happy because if I was booted for two nights in a row, not only was I going to have to take enough stuff to last me through Saturday, but it meant that I would be sleeping on the floor for three nights + a couch two nights in Spain! That is a lot of uncomfortable sleeping for one week!
In the meantime, because I was planning on spending the night at a friend's house, we had schemed up some movie watching to do and figured we might as well do it anyway! I took a bus out to Finchley Central, a part of town in Zone 4 that I'd not been to previously. I followed her instructions from the station to her house, and was amazed how quickly a busy, fairly typical tube station bustling street faded away to trees! I walked along the side of the road without seeing any buildings for a few minutes, crossed a couple bridges, etc. She had told me that I needed to take a right after a big bridge, and I was getting nervous that I had missed it when suddenly through the rain I saw a gigantic viaduct! Here is some more information about it, it seems quite interesting! She lives in a proper neighborhood in a house, so that was kind of fun to see an English home. On the way back, I decided since it was late I'd rather take the tube and pay for the Zone 4 fare than try to get all the way back to the bus station, and I ended up at Mill Hill East. It was tiny! It was a tiny platform with a "waiting room" and everything -- very old school. It didn't even have ticket barriers! There is only one stop, because a train basically acts as a shuttle between Mill Hill East and Finchley Central, where I had initially arrived. Back in the day, the station was intended to connect the two portions of the northern line, but WWII had disrupted the building plans and after the war it had never been continued. I liked it because it was a quirky, old looking little place.
Tomorrow I'm going to Camden in the morning to work on a group project, and then making fancy cupcakes in the afternoon. Wednesday I'm going to a 3D conference thingy (I have no purpose in going other than to play with new gadgets...admission was free, so why not?), and then Wednesday night I am taking the bus to Stansted around 10 pm! I figured why pay £10 to wake up at 3:00 in order to get to the airport in the wee hours of the morning, when I could pay £2 to head there in the evening and sleep in relative comfort on the floor? haha. If I don't like it then I guess I'll have to default back to the 3 am thing. I wish all the cheap flights weren't the ones that were at balls o'clock, but I suppose that is why they are cheap.
This might be my last update until I get back from Spain on Saturday. I arrive Thursday morning and I have a few hours to entertain myself until Brad gets back from work. I looked at a map, and it would appear that the bus will drop me right next to the beach, so I'm gonna go hang out by the Mediterranean with a book and a bocadillo (sandwich) until the afternoon. Friday I'm dragging Brad to museums to see ancient Phoenician ruins and things, and then on Saturday we're taking a bus to a different beach somewhere! It should be fun!
Now I am getting quite sleepy, so I am afraid I must sign off. Au revoir!
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Kicking Reading Week off with a blast
Hello!
Finally, reading week is here! Thursday night I stayed in and worked hard on my synthesizer. It started snowing again so people were very excited, but I was less excited because that meant I had to wake up even earlier to get to my early class! I left two hours before class on Friday (normally I only leave an hour ahead of time), but I actually didn't have any trouble! The Jubilee Line was completely out of it (severe delays, etc) and so was the Metropolitan, so I walked about fifteen minutes to get to the Northern line, expecting that everyone in the world (and farmers' mums) would also be there too, but I was able to smoosh onto the first train and arrived near campus ten minutes later! The below image is a picture of the underground line status when it was snowing so hard last weekend, if you want an idea of the havoc that snow causes with London travel:
This was the view out my window on Friday morning:
Walking past the church on my way to the tube station:
Last night a bunch of us headed to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, as Marin Alsop was conducting Kodàly, Dvoràk, and Chopin! It wassssss awesommmme! I lurve Dvoràk! It was a really fabulous concert. Sanjiv had never seen an orchestra before, so he was really funny. At intermission he had a bunch of questions and comments. "It sounds just like wearing very high fidelity headphones and listening to a lossless format!" He told us. "Which is the instrument that is...how to describe it? It is made of wood and it is tall." "Is the person with the wand, are they, well, what is their job, do musicians actually follow what they are doing?" "Is that an organ?! Oh my gosh, how do they get them to be so big?" "Do people own their own instruments? Or do those belong to the Philharmonic?"
We saw a ton of people that we knew, randomly. It is good to know that so many young folks like us go to classical concerts, haha. We saw a few people from a different residence hall that we occasionally hang out with, and a German Erasmus (exchange program) student as well. Maia saw some folks she used to room with and we added them to our group after the concert. We walked around the Strand a bit looking for a place with food, but a lot of pub kitchens shut down around 10 so we ended up at a fast food place chilling for a few hours.
Today around lunchtime I was putting some pizza leftovers in the oven to heat up when I saw from the window people I knew walking out of the house. I yelled at them for fun and they invited me to go get cheap Indian food. Can't turn that down! So I threw my pizza back in the fridge, grabbed a coat, and went out the door. We ended up in Wembley, which is kind of north-London. It was probably a half hour tube ride to get there. To my eye, it seems like an Indian / Sri Lankan type area with a lot of interesting food stands and things. A stand was selling "Sweet Corn" but with limes, chili pepper, etc, meaning that it was actual esquite, a Mexican dish, so that confused me a bit. Anyway, we found a cheap restaurant specializing in dosas, a kind of crepe-like food. Before the dosas came, I ordered something called a gobi, which I figured would be hotter than heck, but it was actually cauliflower fried in neon-orange stuff that wasn't super spicy or anything. Gross, cauliflower! Sanjiv had me try some of his appetizer too. I should remember the name but I can't at the moment. It was just kind of a light, dumpling type bread that you dipped in different sauces. And then, our dosas came!
Enormous crepes! At the bottom of the photo you can see my bright orange cauliflower, haha.
The proper method of eating a dosa, by the way, is to crumple it up at the edges. It is very crunchy and thing, and on the inside we each had a different potato mash going on. I had one of the very traditional ones with buttery / masala (spice) potatoes, but some people had ordered hot variants and they suffered for their choices, haha. You tried to pick up some of the potato mash with the shell, and then dipped it in any of the four sauces that came with the meal, including a coconut one that I actually liked quite a bit.
Then it was time for round 2! I was already full, but I helped Sanjiv split a giant bread thing that he ordered. When it first came to the table, it was almost as big as a basketball, but it started deflating fast. I liked it a lot!
Lakshmi demonstrating the proper way to eat a dosa:
The insides of a dosa exposed!
After dinner, a few people ordered chai, but I got a yogurt / mango mixture thing. At first it tasted gross to me, like sour cream or something, but then I decided it tasted more like cheesecake and I enjoyed the rest of it, haha.
They also got me to try something called "Pon." I am not entirely sure how to spell it. Apparently, in India you buy it from Pon Shops, which made me laugh. It was a bunch of herbs wrapped up in a leaf, stabbed through with a clove. I figured I would be able to stomach it, but after only about twenty seconds I was fighting off the gag reflex and losing, so I had to spit it out before the worst occurred. The taste and texture was just very unpleasant, but then it left a minty freshness in my mouth which lasted for a long time, so I guess it accomplished its purpose as a kind of after-dinner mint. Here's a photo of the pon experience:
Before you can drink your coffee, you have to make it frothy first! Two of the people at my table were masters of this art, but the third person with coffee made a mess, haha.
We walked down the street to an Indian sweet shop after lunch. I saw these corn looking things right away and decided they must be mine! I passed over the milk based candies and sweet bread items to get a cup of these (the store clerk thought I was weird). They were like chewy rice krispies, but sweetened with syrup or something, I don't really know how to describe them. I would recommend them, haha.
We came back just for a few hours and tonight I am torn between social activities! I found ping pong balls at a store for 50 p, and so I was planning on introducing the UK to beer / cider / liquid pong tonight, but some people are going to a dupstep club, which would be very interesting! Another of my friends (who was randomly at the symphony concert also, haha) is on call at a residence hall and wants people to come play an Israeli / Mennonite card game with her....whatever that means! So I will let you know what I wind up doing tomorrow!
Finally, reading week is here! Thursday night I stayed in and worked hard on my synthesizer. It started snowing again so people were very excited, but I was less excited because that meant I had to wake up even earlier to get to my early class! I left two hours before class on Friday (normally I only leave an hour ahead of time), but I actually didn't have any trouble! The Jubilee Line was completely out of it (severe delays, etc) and so was the Metropolitan, so I walked about fifteen minutes to get to the Northern line, expecting that everyone in the world (and farmers' mums) would also be there too, but I was able to smoosh onto the first train and arrived near campus ten minutes later! The below image is a picture of the underground line status when it was snowing so hard last weekend, if you want an idea of the havoc that snow causes with London travel:
This was the view out my window on Friday morning:
Walking past the church on my way to the tube station:
Last night a bunch of us headed to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, as Marin Alsop was conducting Kodàly, Dvoràk, and Chopin! It wassssss awesommmme! I lurve Dvoràk! It was a really fabulous concert. Sanjiv had never seen an orchestra before, so he was really funny. At intermission he had a bunch of questions and comments. "It sounds just like wearing very high fidelity headphones and listening to a lossless format!" He told us. "Which is the instrument that is...how to describe it? It is made of wood and it is tall." "Is the person with the wand, are they, well, what is their job, do musicians actually follow what they are doing?" "Is that an organ?! Oh my gosh, how do they get them to be so big?" "Do people own their own instruments? Or do those belong to the Philharmonic?"
We saw a ton of people that we knew, randomly. It is good to know that so many young folks like us go to classical concerts, haha. We saw a few people from a different residence hall that we occasionally hang out with, and a German Erasmus (exchange program) student as well. Maia saw some folks she used to room with and we added them to our group after the concert. We walked around the Strand a bit looking for a place with food, but a lot of pub kitchens shut down around 10 so we ended up at a fast food place chilling for a few hours.
Today around lunchtime I was putting some pizza leftovers in the oven to heat up when I saw from the window people I knew walking out of the house. I yelled at them for fun and they invited me to go get cheap Indian food. Can't turn that down! So I threw my pizza back in the fridge, grabbed a coat, and went out the door. We ended up in Wembley, which is kind of north-London. It was probably a half hour tube ride to get there. To my eye, it seems like an Indian / Sri Lankan type area with a lot of interesting food stands and things. A stand was selling "Sweet Corn" but with limes, chili pepper, etc, meaning that it was actual esquite, a Mexican dish, so that confused me a bit. Anyway, we found a cheap restaurant specializing in dosas, a kind of crepe-like food. Before the dosas came, I ordered something called a gobi, which I figured would be hotter than heck, but it was actually cauliflower fried in neon-orange stuff that wasn't super spicy or anything. Gross, cauliflower! Sanjiv had me try some of his appetizer too. I should remember the name but I can't at the moment. It was just kind of a light, dumpling type bread that you dipped in different sauces. And then, our dosas came!
Enormous crepes! At the bottom of the photo you can see my bright orange cauliflower, haha.
The proper method of eating a dosa, by the way, is to crumple it up at the edges. It is very crunchy and thing, and on the inside we each had a different potato mash going on. I had one of the very traditional ones with buttery / masala (spice) potatoes, but some people had ordered hot variants and they suffered for their choices, haha. You tried to pick up some of the potato mash with the shell, and then dipped it in any of the four sauces that came with the meal, including a coconut one that I actually liked quite a bit.Then it was time for round 2! I was already full, but I helped Sanjiv split a giant bread thing that he ordered. When it first came to the table, it was almost as big as a basketball, but it started deflating fast. I liked it a lot!
Lakshmi demonstrating the proper way to eat a dosa:
The insides of a dosa exposed!
After dinner, a few people ordered chai, but I got a yogurt / mango mixture thing. At first it tasted gross to me, like sour cream or something, but then I decided it tasted more like cheesecake and I enjoyed the rest of it, haha.
They also got me to try something called "Pon." I am not entirely sure how to spell it. Apparently, in India you buy it from Pon Shops, which made me laugh. It was a bunch of herbs wrapped up in a leaf, stabbed through with a clove. I figured I would be able to stomach it, but after only about twenty seconds I was fighting off the gag reflex and losing, so I had to spit it out before the worst occurred. The taste and texture was just very unpleasant, but then it left a minty freshness in my mouth which lasted for a long time, so I guess it accomplished its purpose as a kind of after-dinner mint. Here's a photo of the pon experience:
Before you can drink your coffee, you have to make it frothy first! Two of the people at my table were masters of this art, but the third person with coffee made a mess, haha.
We walked down the street to an Indian sweet shop after lunch. I saw these corn looking things right away and decided they must be mine! I passed over the milk based candies and sweet bread items to get a cup of these (the store clerk thought I was weird). They were like chewy rice krispies, but sweetened with syrup or something, I don't really know how to describe them. I would recommend them, haha.
We came back just for a few hours and tonight I am torn between social activities! I found ping pong balls at a store for 50 p, and so I was planning on introducing the UK to beer / cider / liquid pong tonight, but some people are going to a dupstep club, which would be very interesting! Another of my friends (who was randomly at the symphony concert also, haha) is on call at a residence hall and wants people to come play an Israeli / Mennonite card game with her....whatever that means! So I will let you know what I wind up doing tomorrow!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Back to green
Well, the snow was fun while it lasted, but it has mostly melted already and we are back to the daily grind. I had a lot of fun, even though I was poorly equipped for playing in the snow (no gloves)! I taught some friends how to make a snowman (I think only one of them had made one before, let alone seen snow), and I think it ended up pretty good!
This was the view from my window on Sunday.
We threw a lot of snowballs at windows to get people's attention, but then that backfired on me when I finally went inside and some people I had been targeting began retaliating. By poking my head out my window, I was actually able to catch one of their snowballs and return fire, which was pretty cool. Too bad nobody got a picture of my three story warfare!
I went to a digital anthropology lecture last night out of curiousity. It was a presentation by a lady who is currently following around a class of 13 year olds observing their digital activities both in and out of school. I am afraid I learned far less about their digital behaviours and more about the wacked up school system here. The kids are assigned "levels" depending on how well they do. She showed us a picture of their art projects on the wall, and they all had big stamps on the bottom saying "Level 3," "Level 5," etc. The higher the level, the better the achievement, which seemed odd especially on something as subjective as art and expression. "What did you learn today?" she asked one student. "I answered a level 5 question in maths," he responded. Also, they have recording equipment in all of the classrooms and on school computers, and people whose job it is to monitor kids' behaviour and make a rating of it for each day, which the teacher then reads out at the end of school in front of the class. That is way too Orwellian for my liking, but I guess it explains why there is CCTV monitoring systems in place everywhere in London!
I am about to head to the grocery store, because I am pretty much all out of food. I was going to go heat up some oatmeal for dinner last night when I accidentally stumbled across a Chinese New Year party (the 15 day celebration came to an end last night). I helped them cook and tried to contribute a few ingredients, but they were nice enough to basically treat me to a gigantic meal. There were only five of us, but besides a slow cooker sized amount of rice, there was also "Chinese Risotto," a ham/bacon pepper dish, soy-style chicken legs, a hamburger-type dish with peppers, a chicken broccoli dish, chicken soup, and a dessert of peanut buttery dumplings. It was all very good, and now having observed how they cooked it, I think I could replicate it assuming I could find a few ingredients from chinese grocery stores. I think it is very funny when they explain to me why things are healthy. They can be pouring a cup of salt into some broth made with salty bouillon and tell me that "this dish is very healthy, because the soup will restore your age, invigorating!" The girl from Mexico was cooking with them too, and so she made quesadillas which were really good. The Chinese watched her making them over and over, and kept requesting more, because they liked them so much. Mariana is a good sport, but she is very proud of her heritage and it bugs her when Mexican food is compared with Americanized Tex-Mex stuff. She was a tad bit put off when one of the Chinese guys complimented her quesadillas and added, "Oh yes, I love Mexican food, like taco salads and nachos! And, how do you say? Sour cream? On burritos!"
I had a good time helping them make dinner, but at the same time, I feel like I put my life in their hands a little bit. The idea about washing your hands is pretty much non-existent, and knives and cutting boards are treated with little regard as to their previous passengers. "Oh, you chopped the raw chicken on that? Great, I will use it for the broccoli which is not going to be cooked." And a few parts of the meal like the meat had been cooked in the morning and then left out on the counter all day to wait for dinner. I tend to try to avoid eating the foods that I saw were not necessarily, um, safely prepared? But it's rather impossible when the chefs want to make sure that you have tried and liked everything that they made, haha. So far I haven't been sick this year, so maybe I've just been raised in a culture that is hyper-sensitive about proper food preparation, or I've just been dodging bullets. All I know is I am not looking forward to being ill in these bathrooms, because that is a very sad fate indeed!
Here is the recipe for "Chinese Risotto," as my friend was calling it. He said that it could almost be considered fried rice, but once he got here and tried Italian food, he realized that because it is so wet it is more like risotto than it is like anglicized fried rice:
1. Beat 5 - 6 eggs while heating a large pan / wok on high heat with a bit of oil
2. Throw the eggs in and beat them furiously for 30 seconds or so
3. Pour them back into the original bowl
4. Put 5 tomatoes (diced) in the wok and add some sugar, stir for a while, add some cups water
5. Add the eggs back in and mix it all up, still over high heat
6. Remove from heat and add freshly made rice (around 4 or 5 cups worth)
7. Mix, serve
This was the view from my window on Sunday.
We threw a lot of snowballs at windows to get people's attention, but then that backfired on me when I finally went inside and some people I had been targeting began retaliating. By poking my head out my window, I was actually able to catch one of their snowballs and return fire, which was pretty cool. Too bad nobody got a picture of my three story warfare!I went to a digital anthropology lecture last night out of curiousity. It was a presentation by a lady who is currently following around a class of 13 year olds observing their digital activities both in and out of school. I am afraid I learned far less about their digital behaviours and more about the wacked up school system here. The kids are assigned "levels" depending on how well they do. She showed us a picture of their art projects on the wall, and they all had big stamps on the bottom saying "Level 3," "Level 5," etc. The higher the level, the better the achievement, which seemed odd especially on something as subjective as art and expression. "What did you learn today?" she asked one student. "I answered a level 5 question in maths," he responded. Also, they have recording equipment in all of the classrooms and on school computers, and people whose job it is to monitor kids' behaviour and make a rating of it for each day, which the teacher then reads out at the end of school in front of the class. That is way too Orwellian for my liking, but I guess it explains why there is CCTV monitoring systems in place everywhere in London!
I am about to head to the grocery store, because I am pretty much all out of food. I was going to go heat up some oatmeal for dinner last night when I accidentally stumbled across a Chinese New Year party (the 15 day celebration came to an end last night). I helped them cook and tried to contribute a few ingredients, but they were nice enough to basically treat me to a gigantic meal. There were only five of us, but besides a slow cooker sized amount of rice, there was also "Chinese Risotto," a ham/bacon pepper dish, soy-style chicken legs, a hamburger-type dish with peppers, a chicken broccoli dish, chicken soup, and a dessert of peanut buttery dumplings. It was all very good, and now having observed how they cooked it, I think I could replicate it assuming I could find a few ingredients from chinese grocery stores. I think it is very funny when they explain to me why things are healthy. They can be pouring a cup of salt into some broth made with salty bouillon and tell me that "this dish is very healthy, because the soup will restore your age, invigorating!" The girl from Mexico was cooking with them too, and so she made quesadillas which were really good. The Chinese watched her making them over and over, and kept requesting more, because they liked them so much. Mariana is a good sport, but she is very proud of her heritage and it bugs her when Mexican food is compared with Americanized Tex-Mex stuff. She was a tad bit put off when one of the Chinese guys complimented her quesadillas and added, "Oh yes, I love Mexican food, like taco salads and nachos! And, how do you say? Sour cream? On burritos!"
I had a good time helping them make dinner, but at the same time, I feel like I put my life in their hands a little bit. The idea about washing your hands is pretty much non-existent, and knives and cutting boards are treated with little regard as to their previous passengers. "Oh, you chopped the raw chicken on that? Great, I will use it for the broccoli which is not going to be cooked." And a few parts of the meal like the meat had been cooked in the morning and then left out on the counter all day to wait for dinner. I tend to try to avoid eating the foods that I saw were not necessarily, um, safely prepared? But it's rather impossible when the chefs want to make sure that you have tried and liked everything that they made, haha. So far I haven't been sick this year, so maybe I've just been raised in a culture that is hyper-sensitive about proper food preparation, or I've just been dodging bullets. All I know is I am not looking forward to being ill in these bathrooms, because that is a very sad fate indeed!
Here is the recipe for "Chinese Risotto," as my friend was calling it. He said that it could almost be considered fried rice, but once he got here and tried Italian food, he realized that because it is so wet it is more like risotto than it is like anglicized fried rice:
1. Beat 5 - 6 eggs while heating a large pan / wok on high heat with a bit of oil
2. Throw the eggs in and beat them furiously for 30 seconds or so
3. Pour them back into the original bowl
4. Put 5 tomatoes (diced) in the wok and add some sugar, stir for a while, add some cups water
5. Add the eggs back in and mix it all up, still over high heat
6. Remove from heat and add freshly made rice (around 4 or 5 cups worth)
7. Mix, serve
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