Day 90: The highlight of that day was attending the game between the Queen's Park Rangers (hereafter referred to as QPR) and Cardiff City, playing for admission into the Premier League. For those unfamiliar with the massively complex system of football leagues in Britain, there are a bunch of leagues on different levels, and the Premier League is the top-level league, where teams like Chelsea and Manchester United play. At the end of every season, the two best teams from the second-to-Premier League play for the chance to get into the Premier League and the two worst teams in the Premier League play for the chance to stay. And now I've typed the word 'league' so many times that it doesn't even look like a word anymore.
Anyway, we took the Central Line all the way out to White City and got off into a milling crowd, many already drunk, the sky above already darkening fast. Police stood everywhere you turned; policemen on foot with riot helmets on, mounted riot cops with megaphones, policemen with bomb-sniffing dogs and canine units. Dr. King had explained that this level of security was totally normal for a game as important as this one, but I still felt like a citizen of some horrible post-apocalyptic dystopia like 'Children of Men'. At random intervals, someone in the huge crowds would scream "Rs!" and receive a shout of "Come on, you Rs!" in return, accompanied by booing from the Cardiff City fans in the crowds. It was freezing, drizzling, and the area around Loftus Field was composed of run-down council housing, so the mass amounts of chavs I saw screaming profanity at each other wasn't surprising.
Anyway, we finally shoved our way into the stadium, found seats, and the game began. Our group had the questionable luck of being seated adjacent to the Cardiff City fans (who had come all the way from Wales for the game, so we knew they were devoted), who didn't shut up once for the entire two hours of the match. Except for when they lost.
BURN.
QPR, dressed in magnificent blue and white, managed to win 2-1 despite their goalie being kneed in the gonads twice and both teams playing insanely dirty. The mood in the stands was like static electricity, zipping from one person to the other and exploding in invective-laced screams in the direction of the Cardiff stands, flipping the double-fingered salute, and singing, "You're not singing, you're not singing, you're not singing anymore!" I participated enthusiastically in all of these events, particularly the flipping of double-fingered salutes. The invective was taken care of by the man two seats down from me, who screamed every profanity known to man, and a few I think he made up on the spot, to express his deep emotions. By the end, I was shivering in my seat and sleet was beginning to fall, but it was still an absolutely awesome event, and one I'll always remember.
The trek back to the Tube station was also quite memorable, if for much less fun reasons. At the exits to the field, the police separated the Cardiff and QPR fans into two separate lines and herded us away so as to prevent riots, although that didn't stop profanity from being hurled at both sides. As we passed by a council house, someone started setting off fireworks, so a policeman unfurled his nightstick and started off, only to be confronted by a chav, earring, track suit, and all, who screamed at him and called him words I shall not reprint here, for this is a family blo-
Sorry, even I couldn't say that with a straight face.
Day 91: I finished the last of my preparation for the exams that day, which on one hand was awesome, because yay, free time, and on the other hand was bad, because while I had free time, everybody else was working and therefore couldn't go do anything. So I went to the local tea shop and got tea and scones on take-away, which is tremendously amazing and something I will miss terribly. The rest of the day consisted of moping about due to the terrible cold outside and attempting not to crawl straight into bed and enter a hibernation mode I would not emerge from until temperatures ascend above the freezing mark.
Day 92: We had our Politics and Literature final in the morning, where we wrote on Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Not much of any importance happened that day beyond starting to contemplate the upcoming terror of packing and doing laundry, which ended up being a horrible decision, as we are using a new detergent that I am apparently allergic to and has left me scratching my back and legs like some deranged chimpanzee. Fun.
Also, I am sick of this royal wedding business and am starting to be glad that I'm leaving, if only to get away from all the newspapers crowing how Kate Middleton is 'just like us.'
No, she's bloody well not! Her parents are multi-millionaires, she was educated at a prestigious fee-paying school (or private, to the Americans), she attended an ancient and renowned college, she has a job (which is something most graduates can't claim) and a flat in central London (which most Britons dream about but will never achieve). So they can stop telling us that she's just like us, because she's not, and I hope that most people are smart enough to see beyond this treacle spoonfed to us by the monarchy in the hope of seeming relevant and relatable instead of a decrepit institution peopled by dysfunctional spoiled brats.
Day 93: SNOW. We (and I'm starting to realize that I sound like some sort of horrible monarch with this royal 'we' business) woke to big fluffy flakes shooting straight out of the sky and splattering into the ground, but unfortunately not sticking due to the ambient temperatures in the middle of cities being higher than the countryside. Shivering and sticking my hands in my armpits, I trudged to the last day of British Life and Culture, where there were more presentations which were quite interesting: sex and politics in James Bond, brewing beer, pub culture, the history of the red telephone box, Jack the Ripper and his relationship to Victorian social mores, and the difference in gun control between the US and UK. The rest of the day was quite boring, as I wanted to attend the Winter Wonderland festival in Hyde Park but was stymied by the rest of the group having homework and finding it too cold to go, and I wasn't willing to leave the warmth of the flat without having somebody to go with. Miffed, I slogged to the nearest used bookshop to sell all of my books from the semester, for which I received the princely sum of five pounds. Go go used book market.
Day 94: Today there was no more snow, but ice stuck to some parts of the ground. I turned in my final paper for Shakespeare and took the final for British Art and Architecture, and considering I wrote down everything Barnaby ever said and have grown quite proficient at regurgitating information when required to do so, I'm not terribly worried about the exam. After the exam, I went back to the flat, packed, had some oatmeal, had a nap, and got up to go to the Winter Wonderland with Claire.
We rode a rollercoaster (I cursed the entire time), went through an awesomely cheesy haunted house (that made me laugh hysterically and Claire hide her eyes), and I had hot apple cider with cinnamon and a cheese and bacon pie that was amazing. After two hours wandering in the cold, gazing at the rides and merchants, we returned to the flat, and since then I've been in hibernation mode trying to warm up. Tomorrow morning, I leave Hendrix-in-London, which is crazy and not a little unsettling; I'm already halfway through my junior year in college, and yet it still feels like I've only just begun.
Tomorrow morning I leave the flat and Hendrix-in-London for good, so this will be my last entry. I hope you've enjoyed reading my sarcasm-laden thoughts, and if there's any photography you liked, I'm glad you did! Thank you for putting up with all my rants, too.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
Days 84-89
Day 84: I spent time in the Senate House Library, laboring over my presentation for British Life and Culture. Called “The Great War and the Crisis of Masculinity,” I analyzed how the entrenched gender roles of Edwardian England, coupled with the forced passivity of soldiers on the battlefield, led to psychological trauma or shell-shock. Tremendously exciting, I know. And just as a forewarning, this week wasn’t very exciting, as exams are coming up next week and sucking up all of my time like some collapsing star.
Day 85: We had British Life and Culture today, where half of the class gave their final presentations, ranging from why museums forming connections with their local constituencies are important to the history of the London Underground. All were entertaining; even the London Underground one, which I have to admit didn’t sound that interesting at first. I gave mine as well, and got a good reception. I think Susie enjoyed it, and I know she liked the first draft of my paper, so I’ll probably do well in that class, since the presentation and paper were my final exam. That night we all had our final dinner at a Greek restaurant, where I devoured hummus, pita, and domous like it was my last day on Earth. It was a lovely dinner, and we found out that all of our professors like us quite a bit and think we’re one of the best groups to come from Hendrix in a while, which is awesome.
Day 86: That day dawned sunny and bitterly cold, befitting the Arctic weather warning the National Weather Service had delivered. We met Barnaby in the far north of London in a district called Shoreditch, which is beside Whitechapel. Since Shoreditch’s creation as a borough, it’s been known as a place of prostitution and crime, which is a reputation that’s stuck with it from the 1600s until the 1990s, when artists, looking for cheap real estate, moved in to the repurposed industrial space in the district. Now it’s starting to become gentrified, and all the artists have had to move out because of the rising property costs.
Shivering in the cold, we all trooped after Barnaby like a horde of sulky ducklings until we fetched up on the steps of the White Cube gallery, which is neither white nor a cube. The exhibition of art within was called ‘Lamentations’ and involved what looked like Christmas wreaths made up of porcelain phalluses. Not something I’d hang on my door. Then we went to another gallery, which had a display of photographs by a man named Mick Rock, who’s photographed lots of rock stars and celebrities and was David Bowie’s personal photographer for a while. Bowie hasn’t aged a day since the 70s, which is kind of creepy and impressive, and I think that scientists should apply themselves to the problem of Bowie’s seeming immortality. Barnaby then led us through the empty back streets of Shoreditch, past walls covered with graffiti and small, random shops carrying bespoke clothing, to two more galleries, one of which housed the photographs of a girl named Francesca Woodman, who killed herself at 22 by jumping off her studio balcony. After viewing her photography, I can say that I’m not surprised by her end.
We then went back to the flat, ate a hurried lunch, and went to Shakespeare. Also I got an A on my paper for Shakespeare, so yay. As we had covered everything for the semester, we ended class early, and Jean came with us to a nearby pub where we watched the students protesting in Whitehall and discussed accents. Jean also shared the stories of the two movies she’s played zombies in. All in all, an exciting time; I’m going to miss Jean.
Day 88: In Politics and British Literature, we finished discussing A Man for All Seasons and Dr. King handed out the sheets with the final exam questions. But class wasn’t terribly important on that day; what was important was making food, and lots of it. I spent the afternoon engaged in cooking the butteriest dressing the world has ever seen, and by four I was done. Slowly, the rest of the Hendrix group trickled in, bearing food: a giant turkey, vegan gravy and dumplings, carrots, biscuits, potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, green beans, vegetable quiche, salad with pears and feta cheese, chess pie, pumpkin pie, and apple pie. For two hours, we devoured food and talked, before most of the group left to go to the pub at six, when it was already pitch-black outside. I, already in the thrall of a food coma, elected to go to bed and vegetate watching documentaries before falling asleep at eleven. A thoroughly satisfactory day.
Day 89: I slumbered until noon, when I got up, had eggs and toast for breakfast, and engaged in washing some of the copious dishes from Thanksgiving for a while, before retiring back to bed and laboring over my preparatory notes for Dr. King’s exam on Monday. There was no reason but my own laziness that this process took four hours, but as it’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’ve done well in all my classes so far, I’m not worried. Dinner was left-over dressing, apple pie, and Yorkshire pudding. After dinner, I had the urge to bake, and so made chocolate-chip cookies which were shared out among the flat, and now I sit in bed typing this up. Tomorrow we’re all going to a football/soccer game between the Queen’s Park Rangers and Cardiff City, where they play for the opportunity to get into the Premier League. It’s supposed to be bitterly cold, and so I’m going to wear as many sweaters and jackets as I can, but I’m still excited. I’ll have to buy batteries for my camera, though, since I’m out, which is why all the pictures in this post have been pilfered from Facebook.
Making the aforementioned butteriest dressing in the world.
In the wonderful depths of a food coma.
Day 85: We had British Life and Culture today, where half of the class gave their final presentations, ranging from why museums forming connections with their local constituencies are important to the history of the London Underground. All were entertaining; even the London Underground one, which I have to admit didn’t sound that interesting at first. I gave mine as well, and got a good reception. I think Susie enjoyed it, and I know she liked the first draft of my paper, so I’ll probably do well in that class, since the presentation and paper were my final exam. That night we all had our final dinner at a Greek restaurant, where I devoured hummus, pita, and domous like it was my last day on Earth. It was a lovely dinner, and we found out that all of our professors like us quite a bit and think we’re one of the best groups to come from Hendrix in a while, which is awesome.
Day 86: That day dawned sunny and bitterly cold, befitting the Arctic weather warning the National Weather Service had delivered. We met Barnaby in the far north of London in a district called Shoreditch, which is beside Whitechapel. Since Shoreditch’s creation as a borough, it’s been known as a place of prostitution and crime, which is a reputation that’s stuck with it from the 1600s until the 1990s, when artists, looking for cheap real estate, moved in to the repurposed industrial space in the district. Now it’s starting to become gentrified, and all the artists have had to move out because of the rising property costs.
Shivering in the cold, we all trooped after Barnaby like a horde of sulky ducklings until we fetched up on the steps of the White Cube gallery, which is neither white nor a cube. The exhibition of art within was called ‘Lamentations’ and involved what looked like Christmas wreaths made up of porcelain phalluses. Not something I’d hang on my door. Then we went to another gallery, which had a display of photographs by a man named Mick Rock, who’s photographed lots of rock stars and celebrities and was David Bowie’s personal photographer for a while. Bowie hasn’t aged a day since the 70s, which is kind of creepy and impressive, and I think that scientists should apply themselves to the problem of Bowie’s seeming immortality. Barnaby then led us through the empty back streets of Shoreditch, past walls covered with graffiti and small, random shops carrying bespoke clothing, to two more galleries, one of which housed the photographs of a girl named Francesca Woodman, who killed herself at 22 by jumping off her studio balcony. After viewing her photography, I can say that I’m not surprised by her end.
We then went back to the flat, ate a hurried lunch, and went to Shakespeare. Also I got an A on my paper for Shakespeare, so yay. As we had covered everything for the semester, we ended class early, and Jean came with us to a nearby pub where we watched the students protesting in Whitehall and discussed accents. Jean also shared the stories of the two movies she’s played zombies in. All in all, an exciting time; I’m going to miss Jean.
Day 88: In Politics and British Literature, we finished discussing A Man for All Seasons and Dr. King handed out the sheets with the final exam questions. But class wasn’t terribly important on that day; what was important was making food, and lots of it. I spent the afternoon engaged in cooking the butteriest dressing the world has ever seen, and by four I was done. Slowly, the rest of the Hendrix group trickled in, bearing food: a giant turkey, vegan gravy and dumplings, carrots, biscuits, potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, green beans, vegetable quiche, salad with pears and feta cheese, chess pie, pumpkin pie, and apple pie. For two hours, we devoured food and talked, before most of the group left to go to the pub at six, when it was already pitch-black outside. I, already in the thrall of a food coma, elected to go to bed and vegetate watching documentaries before falling asleep at eleven. A thoroughly satisfactory day.
Day 89: I slumbered until noon, when I got up, had eggs and toast for breakfast, and engaged in washing some of the copious dishes from Thanksgiving for a while, before retiring back to bed and laboring over my preparatory notes for Dr. King’s exam on Monday. There was no reason but my own laziness that this process took four hours, but as it’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’ve done well in all my classes so far, I’m not worried. Dinner was left-over dressing, apple pie, and Yorkshire pudding. After dinner, I had the urge to bake, and so made chocolate-chip cookies which were shared out among the flat, and now I sit in bed typing this up. Tomorrow we’re all going to a football/soccer game between the Queen’s Park Rangers and Cardiff City, where they play for the opportunity to get into the Premier League. It’s supposed to be bitterly cold, and so I’m going to wear as many sweaters and jackets as I can, but I’m still excited. I’ll have to buy batteries for my camera, though, since I’m out, which is why all the pictures in this post have been pilfered from Facebook.
Making the aforementioned butteriest dressing in the world.
In the wonderful depths of a food coma.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Days 79-83
Day 79: Normal Art History and Shakespeare day today. After class, I had dinner, then hopped on the Tube to Westminster Cathedral, where I'd bought a ticket to hear the War Requiem. The War Requiem, for those unfamiliar, was composed by Benjamin Britten, and consists of the Latin Requiem Mass being sung by a chorus, a boy's choir, and a soprano soloist, interspersed with a baritone and a tenor singing some of Wilfred Owen's poetry. The groups all sing separately until the last movement, the Libera Me, where all come together in a crescendo of sound.
I was the youngest person in the audience; everyone surrounding me was elderly and I got some strange looks. But then I've realized that people seem to find me strange for doing things on my own; wherever I go and buy a ticket for something or present a ticket to get in, they always ask "Just you?" with a peculiar expression, as though I'll slap my head and go "Oh, damn, I forgot my husband at home."
Anyway, the War Requiem was heartbreakingly beautiful (here's a link to the text, if you're interested: War Requiem Text). The tenor wasn't Peter Pears, but he was more than good enough. The Libera Me is the last movement, and for my money the most effective. The chorus comes in, begging God to liberate them on the judgment day, the drums rumbling in the background and growing louder and louder, the overall effect like that of thousands of men crowded in a trench, their hearts hammering, their voices muffled by the earth. The pleading reaches a crescendo, the noise such that it's almost unbearable, before cutting out entirely as a whistle blows, like an officer sending regiments over the top.
Then, to the quiet, doleful sounds of the chamber orchestra, the tenor comes in, singing the first half of Owen's Strange Meeting, a poem about the inevitability of war, and the commonality between all men that is lost by those wars. The baritone sings the last half, before the two combine as one to sing, "Let us sleep now," over and over, while the boy's choir comes in, followed by the soprano, than the full chorus, the funeral mass overlapping with the soloist's pleas for rest, the noise getting louder and louder and louder, before a bell rings out and echoes in the sudden silence.
Once. Twice. Three times. And all goes still. I'd never heard an audience reduced to complete silence for a solid minute and a half before, and I'm not sure I ever will again. I got up after the applause and left the Cathedral. Outside it was pitch-black and so cold my breath fogged, and fighting back tears I walked to the station in the rain.
Day 80: We had our normal British Politics and Literature class today, where we've moved on from Riddley Walker to the play A Man for All Seasons, about Thomas More's fall from grace and execution during the reign of Henry VIII. For the person asking about the final opinion on Riddley Walker: a lot of the class disliked it immensely, but I feel like that was more a product of how we were analyzing it than any fault of the book itself. The class consisted of us sitting there listening to Dr. King lecture, and for most of us, learning through pure lecturing isn't that stimulating. I really liked the book, though, and not just because I love post-apocalyptic settings in general; the regressed English was unique and interesting to puzzle through, and Hoban stuffed incredible layers of meaning into the book. Everything can be analyzed six different ways, innocuous things end up having great meaning when looked at the right way, and the characters are interesting. About the only complaint I have is that the ending is weak, but that's a common issue with the book, according to Dr. King.
Day 81: I got up late and spent the afternoon bumming around the Natural History Museum. Unfortunately I entered near the Geology section, which meant I had to learn all about plate tectonics and how rocks are made before I got to my area of interest, which is biology. But on the bright side they had a very extensive exhibit of precious stones I got to check out, some of which are very rare, such as alexandrite, a mineral that changes between red and green depending on the quality of the light hitting it. I also unfortunately got stuck in between two school groups, which is always tremendously exciting. There was one exhibit about the span of history on Earth that was quite interesting. If you put your arms out to either side and look at that length as representing the history of Earth, life on this planet has existed for no more than your fingernail. A few swipes with a nail file will obliterate all of human history.
The biology section was a bit disappointing, mostly because it consists of lots of taxidermied animals. There are some interesting specimens, though, such as a Tasmanian Tiger, and a Passenger Pigeon. But all of my disappointment was obliterated when I emerged into the main hall and saw the Museum's pride and joy: a cast of a complete skeleton of Diplodocus, a massive dinosaur fifty feet from head to tail. The dinosaur section more than made up for whatever problems I had: Brontosaurus loomed by the main entrance, Deinosuchus (or 'terrible claw') hung over the catwalk, and a cluster of Iguanodon skeletons gazed blindly in all directions, 65 million years old and miraculously intact.
Then I started hearing children screaming in horror. The reason for this phenomenon was the animatronic T. Rex they had at, which roars convincingly and responds to the flash of cameras by swinging around to glare and roar. I found it absolutely amazing, but the children around me looked like they were about to keel over in terror. One day they'll grow up and realize how amazing dinosaurs are, even if the animatronic ones are terrifying.
Day 82: I finished my analysis of a five-page section of Riddley Walker today, which took far more time than it sounds like it would, Russell Hoban being fond of cramming as many multi-layered puns into every paragraph as is humanly possible. All in all, a terribly boring and productive day.
Day 83: Today I got up at 10:30, ate breakfast, got dressed, and took the Tube out to the O2 Arena where an exhibition of artifacts from the sunken RMS Titanic was being shown. I hadn't realized that the O2 was more like a mall than just an arena; there's food shops all the way around it, a movie theater, and people with little kiosks selling cheap kitsch like 3D portraits of yourself in Lucite and so on and so forth. Luckily one of the O2 security guards was able to direct me towards the exhibition.
Be forewarned: there's no pictures, because it cost fifteen pounds to get in and I didn't fancy being thrown out for photography. When you enter the exhibit, they give you a fake boarding pass for the Titanic with the name of a passenger on board, so that when you reach the memorial wall at the end you can check to see if your passenger survived. I got a ticket for a woman traveling in First Class (a one-way crossing in First Class cost the equivalent of $64,000 dollars today), and was a bit disappointed, since her gender and class made her survival a foregone conclusion. The only First Class woman I know of that died was Ida Strauss, wife of the man who owned Macy's, who refused to abandon him on the ship and so died beside her husband.
They did have some interesting artifacts: a pair of pince nez spectacles, several bottles of perfumer's samples that still smelled strongly, incredible amounts of china, a boot, the ship's bell. The design of the exhibit was awful, though; they played this tinny music over the loudspeakers through the entire thing, and it is my firm belief that whoever made that decision should be shot. I was also unlucky enough to be in a group with a lot of young children, who either got bored and cried through the entire thing or ran around like ninnies. I suppose that's the price one pays for going on a Sunday afternoon.
They did have mock-ups of the bedrooms on board, from a First Class stateroom to a Third Class room housing four people in bunk beds (it looked like a hostel). The First Class one wasn't that opulent to modern eyes, looking like any decent hotel room in today's world, certainly not worth paying 64 grand for. The strangest bit of the exhibit was how quickly they passed over the sinking; that section consisted of one room with a few screens playing a CGI render of the Titanic sinking. They did have one very cool thing in that room: a giant freshwater iceberg. The Atlantic is saltwater (duh) and thus has a lower freezing point than freshwater, so the liquid water that the survivors landed in was colder than that iceberg. Most of the people on Titanic that escaped the Third Class sections but still died didn't drown, but died of hypothermia.
There weren't many personal accounts of survivors, which disappointed me. A few stories were quite poignant: the five people in charge of the mail (the RMS in RMS Titanic designated it a Royal Mail Service ship) dragging bags of mail out of cargo and dying at their posts; the captain, Edward Smith, crying "Be British, boys!" as the bridge flooded; the last sighting of the designer of the ship, who had only boarded because the person who was supposed to be there dropped out, being him standing alone in the First Class Smoking Room, staring at a painting of Plymouth Harbor, his life belt not even on.
And then you exit into a gift shop, full of tatty little knick-knacks like a reproduction Third Class bunk blanket, or a bit of coal from the Titanic's steam room, or your picture in front of an imitation Grand Staircase. I didn't buy anything, being starving, and went and broke my embargo on British beef by having a burger. It would probably have been a middling burger were I in the U.S., but I had been so long without one that it tasted like Kobe beef. Yum. Then I took the Tube back to the flat, where I've been ever since, working on my final paper for Shakespeare. Tomorrow I will go and coop myself up in Senate House Library again, and I'm sure my excitement is just palpable.
I was the youngest person in the audience; everyone surrounding me was elderly and I got some strange looks. But then I've realized that people seem to find me strange for doing things on my own; wherever I go and buy a ticket for something or present a ticket to get in, they always ask "Just you?" with a peculiar expression, as though I'll slap my head and go "Oh, damn, I forgot my husband at home."
Anyway, the War Requiem was heartbreakingly beautiful (here's a link to the text, if you're interested: War Requiem Text). The tenor wasn't Peter Pears, but he was more than good enough. The Libera Me is the last movement, and for my money the most effective. The chorus comes in, begging God to liberate them on the judgment day, the drums rumbling in the background and growing louder and louder, the overall effect like that of thousands of men crowded in a trench, their hearts hammering, their voices muffled by the earth. The pleading reaches a crescendo, the noise such that it's almost unbearable, before cutting out entirely as a whistle blows, like an officer sending regiments over the top.
Then, to the quiet, doleful sounds of the chamber orchestra, the tenor comes in, singing the first half of Owen's Strange Meeting, a poem about the inevitability of war, and the commonality between all men that is lost by those wars. The baritone sings the last half, before the two combine as one to sing, "Let us sleep now," over and over, while the boy's choir comes in, followed by the soprano, than the full chorus, the funeral mass overlapping with the soloist's pleas for rest, the noise getting louder and louder and louder, before a bell rings out and echoes in the sudden silence.
Once. Twice. Three times. And all goes still. I'd never heard an audience reduced to complete silence for a solid minute and a half before, and I'm not sure I ever will again. I got up after the applause and left the Cathedral. Outside it was pitch-black and so cold my breath fogged, and fighting back tears I walked to the station in the rain.
Day 80: We had our normal British Politics and Literature class today, where we've moved on from Riddley Walker to the play A Man for All Seasons, about Thomas More's fall from grace and execution during the reign of Henry VIII. For the person asking about the final opinion on Riddley Walker: a lot of the class disliked it immensely, but I feel like that was more a product of how we were analyzing it than any fault of the book itself. The class consisted of us sitting there listening to Dr. King lecture, and for most of us, learning through pure lecturing isn't that stimulating. I really liked the book, though, and not just because I love post-apocalyptic settings in general; the regressed English was unique and interesting to puzzle through, and Hoban stuffed incredible layers of meaning into the book. Everything can be analyzed six different ways, innocuous things end up having great meaning when looked at the right way, and the characters are interesting. About the only complaint I have is that the ending is weak, but that's a common issue with the book, according to Dr. King.
Day 81: I got up late and spent the afternoon bumming around the Natural History Museum. Unfortunately I entered near the Geology section, which meant I had to learn all about plate tectonics and how rocks are made before I got to my area of interest, which is biology. But on the bright side they had a very extensive exhibit of precious stones I got to check out, some of which are very rare, such as alexandrite, a mineral that changes between red and green depending on the quality of the light hitting it. I also unfortunately got stuck in between two school groups, which is always tremendously exciting. There was one exhibit about the span of history on Earth that was quite interesting. If you put your arms out to either side and look at that length as representing the history of Earth, life on this planet has existed for no more than your fingernail. A few swipes with a nail file will obliterate all of human history.
The biology section was a bit disappointing, mostly because it consists of lots of taxidermied animals. There are some interesting specimens, though, such as a Tasmanian Tiger, and a Passenger Pigeon. But all of my disappointment was obliterated when I emerged into the main hall and saw the Museum's pride and joy: a cast of a complete skeleton of Diplodocus, a massive dinosaur fifty feet from head to tail. The dinosaur section more than made up for whatever problems I had: Brontosaurus loomed by the main entrance, Deinosuchus (or 'terrible claw') hung over the catwalk, and a cluster of Iguanodon skeletons gazed blindly in all directions, 65 million years old and miraculously intact.
Then I started hearing children screaming in horror. The reason for this phenomenon was the animatronic T. Rex they had at, which roars convincingly and responds to the flash of cameras by swinging around to glare and roar. I found it absolutely amazing, but the children around me looked like they were about to keel over in terror. One day they'll grow up and realize how amazing dinosaurs are, even if the animatronic ones are terrifying.
Day 82: I finished my analysis of a five-page section of Riddley Walker today, which took far more time than it sounds like it would, Russell Hoban being fond of cramming as many multi-layered puns into every paragraph as is humanly possible. All in all, a terribly boring and productive day.
Day 83: Today I got up at 10:30, ate breakfast, got dressed, and took the Tube out to the O2 Arena where an exhibition of artifacts from the sunken RMS Titanic was being shown. I hadn't realized that the O2 was more like a mall than just an arena; there's food shops all the way around it, a movie theater, and people with little kiosks selling cheap kitsch like 3D portraits of yourself in Lucite and so on and so forth. Luckily one of the O2 security guards was able to direct me towards the exhibition.
Be forewarned: there's no pictures, because it cost fifteen pounds to get in and I didn't fancy being thrown out for photography. When you enter the exhibit, they give you a fake boarding pass for the Titanic with the name of a passenger on board, so that when you reach the memorial wall at the end you can check to see if your passenger survived. I got a ticket for a woman traveling in First Class (a one-way crossing in First Class cost the equivalent of $64,000 dollars today), and was a bit disappointed, since her gender and class made her survival a foregone conclusion. The only First Class woman I know of that died was Ida Strauss, wife of the man who owned Macy's, who refused to abandon him on the ship and so died beside her husband.
They did have some interesting artifacts: a pair of pince nez spectacles, several bottles of perfumer's samples that still smelled strongly, incredible amounts of china, a boot, the ship's bell. The design of the exhibit was awful, though; they played this tinny music over the loudspeakers through the entire thing, and it is my firm belief that whoever made that decision should be shot. I was also unlucky enough to be in a group with a lot of young children, who either got bored and cried through the entire thing or ran around like ninnies. I suppose that's the price one pays for going on a Sunday afternoon.
They did have mock-ups of the bedrooms on board, from a First Class stateroom to a Third Class room housing four people in bunk beds (it looked like a hostel). The First Class one wasn't that opulent to modern eyes, looking like any decent hotel room in today's world, certainly not worth paying 64 grand for. The strangest bit of the exhibit was how quickly they passed over the sinking; that section consisted of one room with a few screens playing a CGI render of the Titanic sinking. They did have one very cool thing in that room: a giant freshwater iceberg. The Atlantic is saltwater (duh) and thus has a lower freezing point than freshwater, so the liquid water that the survivors landed in was colder than that iceberg. Most of the people on Titanic that escaped the Third Class sections but still died didn't drown, but died of hypothermia.
There weren't many personal accounts of survivors, which disappointed me. A few stories were quite poignant: the five people in charge of the mail (the RMS in RMS Titanic designated it a Royal Mail Service ship) dragging bags of mail out of cargo and dying at their posts; the captain, Edward Smith, crying "Be British, boys!" as the bridge flooded; the last sighting of the designer of the ship, who had only boarded because the person who was supposed to be there dropped out, being him standing alone in the First Class Smoking Room, staring at a painting of Plymouth Harbor, his life belt not even on.
And then you exit into a gift shop, full of tatty little knick-knacks like a reproduction Third Class bunk blanket, or a bit of coal from the Titanic's steam room, or your picture in front of an imitation Grand Staircase. I didn't buy anything, being starving, and went and broke my embargo on British beef by having a burger. It would probably have been a middling burger were I in the U.S., but I had been so long without one that it tasted like Kobe beef. Yum. Then I took the Tube back to the flat, where I've been ever since, working on my final paper for Shakespeare. Tomorrow I will go and coop myself up in Senate House Library again, and I'm sure my excitement is just palpable.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Days 73-78
Day 73: Not much of interest happened that day. We had British Politics and Literature with Dr. King in the morning and finally finished discussing Riddley Walker. I spent the afternoon and evening lazing around and working on the massive amounts of homework I had.
Day 74: I spent that day cooped up in the Senate House Library searching through the stacks for war poetry anthologies and journal articles to use in my final paper for Susie. After finishing my first draft of the paper in a process that took most of the day, I returned to the flat, had dinner, and didn't do much for the rest of the day.
Day 75: I spent that day cooped up in the flat, which made for a nice change of pace, working on my paper on Leontes' aside in The Winter's Tale for Jean's Shakespeare class.
Day 76: I got up early, pinned my poppy on my lapel, and walked down to Westminster. It was cold and misty, the city silent in the morning, the streets empty of everything but even emptier buses. As I turned onto Whitehall, I joined the throngs of people surrounding the Cenotaph, the bleak white edifice watched over by a single Coldstream guard pacing to and fro, saluting it as he passed. There were still two hours to go until eleven, when the city would fall silent for two minutes to commemorate the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the guns fell silent on the Western Front.
For the next two hours, regiment after regiment, dressed in formal uniforms, formed up around the empty Cenotaph: the Horse Guards with their tasseled helmets, military cadets in their greens, marines switching their guns from hand to hand in robotic motions. The people around me talked, laughed, and pointed at uniforms they found particularly amusing, as if we were at a party, or something, anything other than a moment for us all to stand and thank the deceased for their sacrifices, even though mere thanks can never repay them. This was especially poignant due to my position: I stood beside veterans of the current Mid-East conflicts, boys my own age missing both legs, half their face, or blind.
Down the street, Big Ben began to toll the eleven o' clock, and as if on cue, it began to rain. The doors to the Foreign Office opened; the Coldstream Guard in charge of the production shouted "Attention!"; and down the steps, surrounded by others, came a little old lady all in black, the Queen. I watched her, thinking about what a strange life she must lead, but I didn't feel anything more for her than a vague dissatisfaction at her status, at the fact that she lives in unimaginable luxury while the poor of England struggle to find jobs.
The silence ended, and in the rain we prayed and sang a hymn. But then the service part ended, and the parades began, the mood in the crowd doing a complete one-eighty from solemn remembrance and thanks to patriotic jingoism as 4,500 veterans marched past the Cenotaph, laying wreaths of poppies at its feet as if the dead give a shilling for poppies. It was different from the U.S. in that they at least spent fifty percent of the time in remembrance and fifty percent being jingoistic, compared to the U.S. where it's a hundred percent jingoism all the time.
The entire thing just reminded me of the History Boys, where they discuss how the best way to forget something is to remember it: to build monuments and hold ceremonies and give speeches so that all the lost sons congeal together into that formless mass of the Glorious Dead, to be honored forever for their formless sacrifices, and the real sacrifices- of fathers and sons and brothers, limbs and eyes and sanity- go unmarked.
It kept raining and the veterans kept marching: Bedford Boys taken from the mines to fight in World War Two, veterans of Burma who sweated and crawled through marshes, kids blinded and maimed by IEDs. And they'll never stop marching; there'll never be enough time without war so that war, and veterans of war, become a thing of the past, so that Remembrance Day can be just that- a day of remembrance- untainted by jingoism for the current conflict. The wars will keep going, and the veterans will keep marching, and the Cenotaph will remain wreathed in poppies, the Glorious Dead's wish to end war unfulfilled.
Day 77: Again, not much happened that day. I finished putting the final touches on my presentation for Barnaby's class.
Day 78: In British Life and Culture, Susie brought a sports journalist in to teach us about British sports. We asked about cricket, and an hour and a half of words later, I still understood nothing about cricket except for the fact that they have the best position names ever, such as 'silly wicket'. They don't have shortstops, they have silly wickets. We also found out that the longest cricket match in history went on for two weeks. On the whole, I'm quite glad cricket was never imported to the U.S.
Day 74: I spent that day cooped up in the Senate House Library searching through the stacks for war poetry anthologies and journal articles to use in my final paper for Susie. After finishing my first draft of the paper in a process that took most of the day, I returned to the flat, had dinner, and didn't do much for the rest of the day.
Day 75: I spent that day cooped up in the flat, which made for a nice change of pace, working on my paper on Leontes' aside in The Winter's Tale for Jean's Shakespeare class.
Day 76: I got up early, pinned my poppy on my lapel, and walked down to Westminster. It was cold and misty, the city silent in the morning, the streets empty of everything but even emptier buses. As I turned onto Whitehall, I joined the throngs of people surrounding the Cenotaph, the bleak white edifice watched over by a single Coldstream guard pacing to and fro, saluting it as he passed. There were still two hours to go until eleven, when the city would fall silent for two minutes to commemorate the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the guns fell silent on the Western Front.
For the next two hours, regiment after regiment, dressed in formal uniforms, formed up around the empty Cenotaph: the Horse Guards with their tasseled helmets, military cadets in their greens, marines switching their guns from hand to hand in robotic motions. The people around me talked, laughed, and pointed at uniforms they found particularly amusing, as if we were at a party, or something, anything other than a moment for us all to stand and thank the deceased for their sacrifices, even though mere thanks can never repay them. This was especially poignant due to my position: I stood beside veterans of the current Mid-East conflicts, boys my own age missing both legs, half their face, or blind.
Down the street, Big Ben began to toll the eleven o' clock, and as if on cue, it began to rain. The doors to the Foreign Office opened; the Coldstream Guard in charge of the production shouted "Attention!"; and down the steps, surrounded by others, came a little old lady all in black, the Queen. I watched her, thinking about what a strange life she must lead, but I didn't feel anything more for her than a vague dissatisfaction at her status, at the fact that she lives in unimaginable luxury while the poor of England struggle to find jobs.
The silence ended, and in the rain we prayed and sang a hymn. But then the service part ended, and the parades began, the mood in the crowd doing a complete one-eighty from solemn remembrance and thanks to patriotic jingoism as 4,500 veterans marched past the Cenotaph, laying wreaths of poppies at its feet as if the dead give a shilling for poppies. It was different from the U.S. in that they at least spent fifty percent of the time in remembrance and fifty percent being jingoistic, compared to the U.S. where it's a hundred percent jingoism all the time.
The entire thing just reminded me of the History Boys, where they discuss how the best way to forget something is to remember it: to build monuments and hold ceremonies and give speeches so that all the lost sons congeal together into that formless mass of the Glorious Dead, to be honored forever for their formless sacrifices, and the real sacrifices- of fathers and sons and brothers, limbs and eyes and sanity- go unmarked.
It kept raining and the veterans kept marching: Bedford Boys taken from the mines to fight in World War Two, veterans of Burma who sweated and crawled through marshes, kids blinded and maimed by IEDs. And they'll never stop marching; there'll never be enough time without war so that war, and veterans of war, become a thing of the past, so that Remembrance Day can be just that- a day of remembrance- untainted by jingoism for the current conflict. The wars will keep going, and the veterans will keep marching, and the Cenotaph will remain wreathed in poppies, the Glorious Dead's wish to end war unfulfilled.
Day 77: Again, not much happened that day. I finished putting the final touches on my presentation for Barnaby's class.
Day 78: In British Life and Culture, Susie brought a sports journalist in to teach us about British sports. We asked about cricket, and an hour and a half of words later, I still understood nothing about cricket except for the fact that they have the best position names ever, such as 'silly wicket'. They don't have shortstops, they have silly wickets. We also found out that the longest cricket match in history went on for two weeks. On the whole, I'm quite glad cricket was never imported to the U.S.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Days 65 - 72
Day 65: After class, I went to King's Cross station to board the train for the four-and-a-half-hour ride to Edinburgh. I only brought one book with me for both the ride there and back, as I thought I would nap to fill up some of the time.
This plan was foiled by me sitting next to the Angriest Typist in the World, a Professor of Art History from University of Michigan Ann Arbor. This man did not type; he attacked the keyboard with such ferocity that I could hear him even with my hearing aids out and my iPod earbuds in. Even with industrial music blaring as loud as I could stand it without killing what little auditory cells I have remaining. This man treated his keyboard like it had personally insulted him for the entirety of the ride, leaving me to eat my meal and fail to concentrate on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.
Anyway, I finally arrived at Edinburgh Waverly Station and hired a taxi to take me to Castle Rock Hostel. I recommend Castle Rock, as it's located across the street from Edinburgh Castle and a three-minute walk from Edinburgh's High Street, on which you can buy all the kilts and wool scarfs you want. After checking in, I had an evening to fill, and so joined up with an Edinburgh ghost tour. We walked around the old parts of Edinburgh and into 'closes', which are very narrow alleyways connecting street to street, the remnants of medieval Edinburgh's streets. Medieval Edinburgh, by the way, was not a nice place to live; on either side of closes, thirteen- and fourteen-story tenements stood, many of them leaning towards each other until the roofs touched and sealing the close below in darkness. The city had no sewers, and at ten every night every window in the tenements would fly open and the inhabitants would dump the day's human waste out onto the streets below. This is how Edinburgh got its nickname: Auld Reekie, or Old Stinky.
There were a few creepy stories, courtesy of the guide, but nothing so incredibly terrifying that it's worth typing out. I was also disappointed by the fact that the company threw in a cheap jump scare at the end, which I feel invalidates all the stories you've been told before. After the tour ended, I returned to Castle Rock, as I had to get up in the morning to board the Haggis Adventures Tour Bus.
Day 66: After getting up and having a quick breakfast, I tromped down High Street to Haggis Adventures to check in and board the yellow bus with 'Wild & Sexy' emblazoned in large letters across the side. This was due to Haggis Adventures' motto being 'Wild. Sexy. Legendary.' which is on all their merchandise, including the shirts that our guide, Tony, wore for all three days. Tony, by the way, was all of those things, having a Glaswegian accent and resembling a cross between Daniel Craig and Simon Pegg. He leaped onto the bus, delivered his safety soliloquy and noted helpfully that if we were to drive into the lochs, the skylight could be an escape hatch, then sat down and drove us out of Edinburgh.
Our first stop was the William Wallace Monument above the town of Stirling, where Wallace (the guy from Braveheart, although that movie has very little to do with William Wallace and a lot to do with Robert the Bruce) had his greatest success at defeating the English, who were attempting to annex Scotland (which, by the way, was a sovereign nation and had been for millennia). Wallace succeeded because he had one very potent weapon on his side: highlanders. Highlanders are a strange people, totally different from lowland Scottish, and this held true even in the eleventh century. The highlanders at Stirling were also berserkers, and so would pump themselves up for battle by imbibing copious amounts of strong Scottish whisky and eating psychedelic mushrooms, so that they were frothing at the mouth when the time came. There are records of them being kept on leashes before the battle. Anyway, when Wallace gave the order, thousands of insane highland berserkers came charging down the hillside, waving shields, halberds, claymores, longswords, and dirks, into the flank of the English army, routing them horribly. The English, realizing that not much could stand up against several thousand high highlanders, turned around and fled. Unfortunately, they'd neglected to account for this possibility, and so thousands of English had to try and fit across a very narrow bridge, which then collapsed underneath them, and most of the English drowned or were slain.
Unfortunately, Wallace was not to enjoy this success for long. He was betrayed by John Menteith (there's a lake called Menteith in Scotland, and all true Scots are required to spit in it and spit every time they say Menteith's name), handed over to the English, and tried for treason in Westminster Hall, in the current Houses of Parliament. Wallace had a perfectly reasonable defense; as he was not a citizen of England, Edward I was not his king. Every time the English tried to get him to admit to wrongdoing, or indeed to say anything, Wallace responded, "He is not my king." However, Edward didn't much care for Scotland's sovereignty, and so had Wallace declared guilty, stripped naked, and hauled out of the hall to Smithfield, which at the time was a place where animals were slaughtered. Wallace, to the English, was no more a man than a cow could claim to be. At Smithfield, he was hung by the neck (thus crushing his trachea and ensuring no Gibson-esque screams of 'freedom!'), cut down while still alive, his stomach cut open and his entrails pulled out and burned before him, and then when he finally expired, he was cut into four pieces which were sent to different parts of the realm. His head, on the other hand, was tarred and placed on a pike on London Bridge.
After Stirling, we drove up over Rannoch Moor into the highlands, passing by Killin, the Falls of Dochart, and Loch Tay on the way, before finally stopping for a bit at Glencoe, or the Glen of the Weeping. Without going into too much detail, at the time of the massacre at Glencoe, England was ruled by Protestant William of Orange, a foreign king, while many Scottish highlanders remained loyal to the Scottish Catholic Stuarts, ancestral kings of Scotland who had been invited to rule England who had been ousted from the English throne and replaced with Protestants. When William took the throne, he insisted that all of the highlanders sign an oath of allegiance to him, and demanded that they do so before a certain deadline. The highland chieftains asked the exiled Stuart king for permission to sign, but by the time they received it, time was running out. Alistair Mclain, chieftain of the Mclains, raced to sign the oath before the deadline. Unfortunately, he was a few days late, due to having first gone to the wrong place and then being delayed, as well as the terrible winter weather.
Having signed the oath, he returned home, satisfied that he had done his duty. England, however, saw his lateness as an insult, and so sent Robert Campbell, another Scot, and his men to Glencoe, where the Mclains lived. Campbell's men played on the highland custom of hospitality, which states that if someone turns up at your door asking for hospitality, you are honor-bound to supply food and shelter. So the soldiers asked for hospitality of the Mclains, were taken in by the highlanders, and stayed for the night in the clan's homes. However, in the early morning hours, Campbell's men rose and methodically slaughtered their hosts. Some of the Mclains managed to escape out into the snow, but froze to death in their attempts to escape, while some English soldiers managed to warn their hosts and refused to take part in what they knew to be a heinous crime, but the vast majority of Clan Mclain was wiped out, giving rise to Glencoe's status as the Glen of the Weeping.
Another story of English-Scottish dislike that Tony told us was of a highland chief who was captured by Oliver Cromwell's men in one of England's many attempts to exterminate highland culture. The chief was being executed, and so was already tied to the post while the firing squad readied themselves. A soldier asked him if he had any last words, to which the chief responded in Gaelic (Scottish Gaelic, by the way, is pronounced Gallic, and has been separate from Irish Gaelic for 1700 years; however, the two dialects are still mutually intelligible). The soldier slapped him across the face and commanded him to speak English, at which point the chieftain asked him to come closer, then lunged and tore his throat out with his teeth, taking one of Cromwell's soldiers down with him. All in all, a pretty hardcore story.
But then highlanders were generally hardcore, as we learned at the highland clan show that night, where a man who's devoted himself to studying the lost clan cultures showed us how they lived. Girls as young as 12 or 13 would go into battle alongside their fathers and brothers, fighting at the edge of the skirmish; highlanders' kilts were rubbed with mutton fat and never washed, as the highlanders never washed but for weddings, and then only their hands and face; in battle, they didn't carry only a longsword, but also a sharp spike at the center of their shields and a dirk in their shield hand for stabbing behind them. Also, in winter, the highlanders would dip their kilts in freezing cold water and then roll up in them before lying down to sleep. The mutton fat would keep the water out of the cloth, but the water would help to form a seal between the kilt and the skin, trapping heat. As far as hardcore cultures go, highlanders were up there with Spartans.
As far as people, I met Glen, a Canadian and the only foreigner I've ever met who thinks that U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan is awesome; Jeremy, a very well-dressed and very cool Kiwi Canadian; and a South African woman who, hearing that I used London public transport, immediately announced that she refused to use South African public transport as it was "full of blacks" (her words, not mine). I'm fairly sure she could feel me radiating incredible disapproval, though, as she shut up after saying that and didn't talk to me the rest of our time there. We arrived at our hostel on the banks of Loch Ness, had dinner, and went to bed, ready for another day of stories in the morning.
Day 67: We got up earlier than usual that day, as we had to drive all the way from Loch Ness up to the Isle of Skye off the north coast of Scotland. Skye is known as the Winged Isle, or the Isle of Mists, and is supposedly the place where the Fair Folk, or fairies, live. Interesting Scotland fact: Scotland is twenty percent of the UK's landmass, but contains seventy percent of its coastline.
On the way up to Skye, we stopped at the grave of Robert MacKenzie, another highlander killed by British. However, he's buried without a head, and there's quite a story behind that. The main Jacobite rebellion was in 1745, led by a man known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, the last exiled Stuart to attempt reclamation of the throne of Scotland. After the incredible Jacobite defeat at Culloden Moor, Bonnie Prince Charlie was forced to flee. An incredible price was put on his head by the English, and soldiers scoured Scotland looking for him. Prince Charlie was long gone to Skye at this point, but that didn't stop the English taking pot shots at any highlander they saw, one of whom was the hapless Robert MacKenzie. However, upon being shot, MacKenzie rasped to the soldiers, "How dare you shoot your king?" before expiring. The soldiers, pleased at having killed the supposed usurper, chopped off his head and stuck it in a brine barrel before sending it down to London for identification. The news came back that it wasn't Prince Charlie, but how one can identify a rotting pickled head as being someone or not someone with that much certainty I don't know. Anyway, Prince Charlie escaped, and MacKenzie is hailed as a hero for throwing off the pursuit.
We also stopped at Eilean Donagh Castle, just before Skye, but unfortunately the castle was closed for the winter. However, we encountered the owner of the castle, Lady MacRae herself, who was a very kind person and let us into the courtyard for a quick peek, which was very nice of her. After the castle, we drove over the bridge and hit Skye. Tony then told us the story of the Battle of the One-Eyed Woman.
There were two young people who belonged to feuding clans: Maggie and Duncan. They had to get married to stop all the fighting, which they both agreed to, having already fallen in love. So on the nuptial day, Duncan stood at the altar in the church, waiting for his bride, who had to ride a white horse across Skye to prove her adulthood on her way to the wedding. However, as they crossed a river, her horse slipped, throwing Maggie onto some rocks and knocking her eye out. This would be a tragedy on any day, but on your wedding day when you're supposed to unite the clans: unthinkable! But Maggie, being a brave lass and believing that Duncan would love her for her mind, got right back on her horse and raced to the church, where her father took one look at her and decided to hide the damage by covering her face with a veil. All the feuding clan members were in the church, sobbing into handkerchiefs and apologizing for past stabbings and cattle-raids, when Duncan was told that he could kiss his bride. He lifted the veil, prepared to stare upon her radiant face-
And found her not so radiant. In fact, a bit pale from blood loss. Anyway, he turned around and was sick, as this wasn't what he signed up for, the clans devolved into fighting again, the church burned down, and Maggie went racing back to the river weeping. However, Oberon, king of the fairies, appeared and offered to make her five times more beautiful if she stuck her face in a freezing river for five seconds. So she did, and became beautiful, and then when Duncan came back sniveling for forgiveness, she rejected him. Go Maggie. And then I suppose she ran off somewhere and started some sort of Amazonian commune. I don't know, Tony didn't tell us what happened after that. So we all stuck our faces in the freezing water of the stream for five seconds, then got up and went to Portree for lunch.
After lunch, we passed by a rock known as the Old Man of Storr (if you look at him, you see the despairing face of an old man transfigured by Oberon into a rock). Tony then showed us some dinosaur footprints, Kilt Rock and the waterfall, and then we returned back to the hostel to sleep.
Day 68: We got up and drove by Loch Ness (I didn't see a monster, but I got to pick the nose of the stuffed version), and on to Culloden Moor.
Culloden is where the last Jacobite uprising was put down in 1745. It is also the only battle that British regiments are not allowed to claim honors for. This is for the simple reason that Culloden wasn't a battle: it was a massacre, and led to the complete extermination of highland culture.
Prince Charlie decided to fight on flat, marshy ground, ill-suited for his highland supporters' charge tactics, and that was his undoing. When the highlanders charged, they were cut down by artillery and bayonet. The English lost less than a hundred men; the Jacobites, over a thousand. However, even that wasn't enough of an insult; the English commander, the Duke of Cumberland, ordered his men to torch the field hospitals of the highlanders, slaughter the wounded and kill the women and children camp followers. Then he refused to allow the dead highlanders to be buried for six weeks, before dumping them into unmarked mass graves. After the victory at Culloden, the English embarked on what can only be termed genocide: an attempt at the complete extermination of a cultural and linguistic minority. Speaking Gaelic and wearing the kilt were banned; vast numbers of highlanders were transported to Australia and other colonies; the cattle and other animals of highlanders were taken; highlanders were kicked off their ancestral lands, the land taken by English landlords. Culloden is the deathbed of highland culture.
After Culloden, Tony took us to the Clava Cairns, which are Bronze Age tombs built by the aboriginal peoples of Scotland, the ancestors of the Picts. Then he took us up Cairngorm Mountain, where snow was already heaped high on the peak; with wind chill, the temperature was well below zero. By the way, the mountains of Scotland are so dangerous that more people die every year on Scottish mountains than Scottish roads.
And now, a story that illustrates why Scottish people are mad and why I love them so. After the Scottish king and national hero Robert the Bruce, who secured Scottish independence for a while from England, died, his heart was removed from his body. This was in accordance with his wishes, as he wanted his heart to be carried into battle against God's foes by his best friend, Sir James Douglas. Douglas obeyed, wearing his king's heart around his neck as he went to Grenada to fight the Muslim Moors of Spain. Upon arriving at the battle, he found a group of Christian soldiers surrounded and fighting for their lives. Rising in his saddle, he took Robert's heart from around his neck and flung it towards the enemy, screaming, "Lead on, my brave heart!" (See, told you Braveheart was about Robert the Bruce.)
The heart didn't do any leading, as Douglas and the heart were captured shortly thereafter. However, the Moors, much impressed by the sight of a maniac charging their lines and chucking a human heart at them in the belief that this would do something, let both Douglas and the heart return to Scotland.
We returned to Edinburgh around 5, and I bid a sad goodbye to Tony and my tour mates.
Day 69: Tired from traveling, I vegetated and did nothing of interest.
Day 70: In British Life and Culture, we watched a movie called My Son the Fanatic about the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in second-generation Muslim immigrants. Unfortunately it was on VHS, so I can't tell you much of what actually happened, but oh well.
Day 71 (also my birfday): In the morning Barnaby took us to a display of outdoor art in Hyde Park. There were several very large and very persistent swans near several of the pieces, which I wasn't happy with, as swans are beastly creatures who will attack at a moment's notice. After fleeing the swans, we went to a display of cameraless photography at the Victoria and Albert, which was quite cool. In Shakespeare, we got to act out the Mousetrap from Hamlet, which was very fun, and only made me miss acting even more. I wasn't very good at it, but I enjoyed it, which was what mattered. The evening was wonderful; Jack came up from Oxford to help me celebrate my birthday, and we feasted on sushi and giant chocolate cupcake, courtesy of my wonderful parents. Also I've gotten more Facebook messages wishing me happy birthday than ever before, which is a reason for glee. It's just a shame that I'm turning 21 in A) a country where the drinking age is 16, and when B) I don't drink, which makes the whole thing doubly redundant. Still, it was wonderful.
Day 72) Not much of interest happened today, although I have got huge amounts of homework this weekend. Still, I'm going to escape on Sunday to see the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph.
This plan was foiled by me sitting next to the Angriest Typist in the World, a Professor of Art History from University of Michigan Ann Arbor. This man did not type; he attacked the keyboard with such ferocity that I could hear him even with my hearing aids out and my iPod earbuds in. Even with industrial music blaring as loud as I could stand it without killing what little auditory cells I have remaining. This man treated his keyboard like it had personally insulted him for the entirety of the ride, leaving me to eat my meal and fail to concentrate on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.
Anyway, I finally arrived at Edinburgh Waverly Station and hired a taxi to take me to Castle Rock Hostel. I recommend Castle Rock, as it's located across the street from Edinburgh Castle and a three-minute walk from Edinburgh's High Street, on which you can buy all the kilts and wool scarfs you want. After checking in, I had an evening to fill, and so joined up with an Edinburgh ghost tour. We walked around the old parts of Edinburgh and into 'closes', which are very narrow alleyways connecting street to street, the remnants of medieval Edinburgh's streets. Medieval Edinburgh, by the way, was not a nice place to live; on either side of closes, thirteen- and fourteen-story tenements stood, many of them leaning towards each other until the roofs touched and sealing the close below in darkness. The city had no sewers, and at ten every night every window in the tenements would fly open and the inhabitants would dump the day's human waste out onto the streets below. This is how Edinburgh got its nickname: Auld Reekie, or Old Stinky.
There were a few creepy stories, courtesy of the guide, but nothing so incredibly terrifying that it's worth typing out. I was also disappointed by the fact that the company threw in a cheap jump scare at the end, which I feel invalidates all the stories you've been told before. After the tour ended, I returned to Castle Rock, as I had to get up in the morning to board the Haggis Adventures Tour Bus.
Day 66: After getting up and having a quick breakfast, I tromped down High Street to Haggis Adventures to check in and board the yellow bus with 'Wild & Sexy' emblazoned in large letters across the side. This was due to Haggis Adventures' motto being 'Wild. Sexy. Legendary.' which is on all their merchandise, including the shirts that our guide, Tony, wore for all three days. Tony, by the way, was all of those things, having a Glaswegian accent and resembling a cross between Daniel Craig and Simon Pegg. He leaped onto the bus, delivered his safety soliloquy and noted helpfully that if we were to drive into the lochs, the skylight could be an escape hatch, then sat down and drove us out of Edinburgh.
Our first stop was the William Wallace Monument above the town of Stirling, where Wallace (the guy from Braveheart, although that movie has very little to do with William Wallace and a lot to do with Robert the Bruce) had his greatest success at defeating the English, who were attempting to annex Scotland (which, by the way, was a sovereign nation and had been for millennia). Wallace succeeded because he had one very potent weapon on his side: highlanders. Highlanders are a strange people, totally different from lowland Scottish, and this held true even in the eleventh century. The highlanders at Stirling were also berserkers, and so would pump themselves up for battle by imbibing copious amounts of strong Scottish whisky and eating psychedelic mushrooms, so that they were frothing at the mouth when the time came. There are records of them being kept on leashes before the battle. Anyway, when Wallace gave the order, thousands of insane highland berserkers came charging down the hillside, waving shields, halberds, claymores, longswords, and dirks, into the flank of the English army, routing them horribly. The English, realizing that not much could stand up against several thousand high highlanders, turned around and fled. Unfortunately, they'd neglected to account for this possibility, and so thousands of English had to try and fit across a very narrow bridge, which then collapsed underneath them, and most of the English drowned or were slain.
Unfortunately, Wallace was not to enjoy this success for long. He was betrayed by John Menteith (there's a lake called Menteith in Scotland, and all true Scots are required to spit in it and spit every time they say Menteith's name), handed over to the English, and tried for treason in Westminster Hall, in the current Houses of Parliament. Wallace had a perfectly reasonable defense; as he was not a citizen of England, Edward I was not his king. Every time the English tried to get him to admit to wrongdoing, or indeed to say anything, Wallace responded, "He is not my king." However, Edward didn't much care for Scotland's sovereignty, and so had Wallace declared guilty, stripped naked, and hauled out of the hall to Smithfield, which at the time was a place where animals were slaughtered. Wallace, to the English, was no more a man than a cow could claim to be. At Smithfield, he was hung by the neck (thus crushing his trachea and ensuring no Gibson-esque screams of 'freedom!'), cut down while still alive, his stomach cut open and his entrails pulled out and burned before him, and then when he finally expired, he was cut into four pieces which were sent to different parts of the realm. His head, on the other hand, was tarred and placed on a pike on London Bridge.
After Stirling, we drove up over Rannoch Moor into the highlands, passing by Killin, the Falls of Dochart, and Loch Tay on the way, before finally stopping for a bit at Glencoe, or the Glen of the Weeping. Without going into too much detail, at the time of the massacre at Glencoe, England was ruled by Protestant William of Orange, a foreign king, while many Scottish highlanders remained loyal to the Scottish Catholic Stuarts, ancestral kings of Scotland who had been invited to rule England who had been ousted from the English throne and replaced with Protestants. When William took the throne, he insisted that all of the highlanders sign an oath of allegiance to him, and demanded that they do so before a certain deadline. The highland chieftains asked the exiled Stuart king for permission to sign, but by the time they received it, time was running out. Alistair Mclain, chieftain of the Mclains, raced to sign the oath before the deadline. Unfortunately, he was a few days late, due to having first gone to the wrong place and then being delayed, as well as the terrible winter weather.
Having signed the oath, he returned home, satisfied that he had done his duty. England, however, saw his lateness as an insult, and so sent Robert Campbell, another Scot, and his men to Glencoe, where the Mclains lived. Campbell's men played on the highland custom of hospitality, which states that if someone turns up at your door asking for hospitality, you are honor-bound to supply food and shelter. So the soldiers asked for hospitality of the Mclains, were taken in by the highlanders, and stayed for the night in the clan's homes. However, in the early morning hours, Campbell's men rose and methodically slaughtered their hosts. Some of the Mclains managed to escape out into the snow, but froze to death in their attempts to escape, while some English soldiers managed to warn their hosts and refused to take part in what they knew to be a heinous crime, but the vast majority of Clan Mclain was wiped out, giving rise to Glencoe's status as the Glen of the Weeping.
Another story of English-Scottish dislike that Tony told us was of a highland chief who was captured by Oliver Cromwell's men in one of England's many attempts to exterminate highland culture. The chief was being executed, and so was already tied to the post while the firing squad readied themselves. A soldier asked him if he had any last words, to which the chief responded in Gaelic (Scottish Gaelic, by the way, is pronounced Gallic, and has been separate from Irish Gaelic for 1700 years; however, the two dialects are still mutually intelligible). The soldier slapped him across the face and commanded him to speak English, at which point the chieftain asked him to come closer, then lunged and tore his throat out with his teeth, taking one of Cromwell's soldiers down with him. All in all, a pretty hardcore story.
But then highlanders were generally hardcore, as we learned at the highland clan show that night, where a man who's devoted himself to studying the lost clan cultures showed us how they lived. Girls as young as 12 or 13 would go into battle alongside their fathers and brothers, fighting at the edge of the skirmish; highlanders' kilts were rubbed with mutton fat and never washed, as the highlanders never washed but for weddings, and then only their hands and face; in battle, they didn't carry only a longsword, but also a sharp spike at the center of their shields and a dirk in their shield hand for stabbing behind them. Also, in winter, the highlanders would dip their kilts in freezing cold water and then roll up in them before lying down to sleep. The mutton fat would keep the water out of the cloth, but the water would help to form a seal between the kilt and the skin, trapping heat. As far as hardcore cultures go, highlanders were up there with Spartans.
As far as people, I met Glen, a Canadian and the only foreigner I've ever met who thinks that U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan is awesome; Jeremy, a very well-dressed and very cool Kiwi Canadian; and a South African woman who, hearing that I used London public transport, immediately announced that she refused to use South African public transport as it was "full of blacks" (her words, not mine). I'm fairly sure she could feel me radiating incredible disapproval, though, as she shut up after saying that and didn't talk to me the rest of our time there. We arrived at our hostel on the banks of Loch Ness, had dinner, and went to bed, ready for another day of stories in the morning.
Day 67: We got up earlier than usual that day, as we had to drive all the way from Loch Ness up to the Isle of Skye off the north coast of Scotland. Skye is known as the Winged Isle, or the Isle of Mists, and is supposedly the place where the Fair Folk, or fairies, live. Interesting Scotland fact: Scotland is twenty percent of the UK's landmass, but contains seventy percent of its coastline.
On the way up to Skye, we stopped at the grave of Robert MacKenzie, another highlander killed by British. However, he's buried without a head, and there's quite a story behind that. The main Jacobite rebellion was in 1745, led by a man known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, the last exiled Stuart to attempt reclamation of the throne of Scotland. After the incredible Jacobite defeat at Culloden Moor, Bonnie Prince Charlie was forced to flee. An incredible price was put on his head by the English, and soldiers scoured Scotland looking for him. Prince Charlie was long gone to Skye at this point, but that didn't stop the English taking pot shots at any highlander they saw, one of whom was the hapless Robert MacKenzie. However, upon being shot, MacKenzie rasped to the soldiers, "How dare you shoot your king?" before expiring. The soldiers, pleased at having killed the supposed usurper, chopped off his head and stuck it in a brine barrel before sending it down to London for identification. The news came back that it wasn't Prince Charlie, but how one can identify a rotting pickled head as being someone or not someone with that much certainty I don't know. Anyway, Prince Charlie escaped, and MacKenzie is hailed as a hero for throwing off the pursuit.
We also stopped at Eilean Donagh Castle, just before Skye, but unfortunately the castle was closed for the winter. However, we encountered the owner of the castle, Lady MacRae herself, who was a very kind person and let us into the courtyard for a quick peek, which was very nice of her. After the castle, we drove over the bridge and hit Skye. Tony then told us the story of the Battle of the One-Eyed Woman.
There were two young people who belonged to feuding clans: Maggie and Duncan. They had to get married to stop all the fighting, which they both agreed to, having already fallen in love. So on the nuptial day, Duncan stood at the altar in the church, waiting for his bride, who had to ride a white horse across Skye to prove her adulthood on her way to the wedding. However, as they crossed a river, her horse slipped, throwing Maggie onto some rocks and knocking her eye out. This would be a tragedy on any day, but on your wedding day when you're supposed to unite the clans: unthinkable! But Maggie, being a brave lass and believing that Duncan would love her for her mind, got right back on her horse and raced to the church, where her father took one look at her and decided to hide the damage by covering her face with a veil. All the feuding clan members were in the church, sobbing into handkerchiefs and apologizing for past stabbings and cattle-raids, when Duncan was told that he could kiss his bride. He lifted the veil, prepared to stare upon her radiant face-
And found her not so radiant. In fact, a bit pale from blood loss. Anyway, he turned around and was sick, as this wasn't what he signed up for, the clans devolved into fighting again, the church burned down, and Maggie went racing back to the river weeping. However, Oberon, king of the fairies, appeared and offered to make her five times more beautiful if she stuck her face in a freezing river for five seconds. So she did, and became beautiful, and then when Duncan came back sniveling for forgiveness, she rejected him. Go Maggie. And then I suppose she ran off somewhere and started some sort of Amazonian commune. I don't know, Tony didn't tell us what happened after that. So we all stuck our faces in the freezing water of the stream for five seconds, then got up and went to Portree for lunch.
After lunch, we passed by a rock known as the Old Man of Storr (if you look at him, you see the despairing face of an old man transfigured by Oberon into a rock). Tony then showed us some dinosaur footprints, Kilt Rock and the waterfall, and then we returned back to the hostel to sleep.
Day 68: We got up and drove by Loch Ness (I didn't see a monster, but I got to pick the nose of the stuffed version), and on to Culloden Moor.
Culloden is where the last Jacobite uprising was put down in 1745. It is also the only battle that British regiments are not allowed to claim honors for. This is for the simple reason that Culloden wasn't a battle: it was a massacre, and led to the complete extermination of highland culture.
Prince Charlie decided to fight on flat, marshy ground, ill-suited for his highland supporters' charge tactics, and that was his undoing. When the highlanders charged, they were cut down by artillery and bayonet. The English lost less than a hundred men; the Jacobites, over a thousand. However, even that wasn't enough of an insult; the English commander, the Duke of Cumberland, ordered his men to torch the field hospitals of the highlanders, slaughter the wounded and kill the women and children camp followers. Then he refused to allow the dead highlanders to be buried for six weeks, before dumping them into unmarked mass graves. After the victory at Culloden, the English embarked on what can only be termed genocide: an attempt at the complete extermination of a cultural and linguistic minority. Speaking Gaelic and wearing the kilt were banned; vast numbers of highlanders were transported to Australia and other colonies; the cattle and other animals of highlanders were taken; highlanders were kicked off their ancestral lands, the land taken by English landlords. Culloden is the deathbed of highland culture.
After Culloden, Tony took us to the Clava Cairns, which are Bronze Age tombs built by the aboriginal peoples of Scotland, the ancestors of the Picts. Then he took us up Cairngorm Mountain, where snow was already heaped high on the peak; with wind chill, the temperature was well below zero. By the way, the mountains of Scotland are so dangerous that more people die every year on Scottish mountains than Scottish roads.
And now, a story that illustrates why Scottish people are mad and why I love them so. After the Scottish king and national hero Robert the Bruce, who secured Scottish independence for a while from England, died, his heart was removed from his body. This was in accordance with his wishes, as he wanted his heart to be carried into battle against God's foes by his best friend, Sir James Douglas. Douglas obeyed, wearing his king's heart around his neck as he went to Grenada to fight the Muslim Moors of Spain. Upon arriving at the battle, he found a group of Christian soldiers surrounded and fighting for their lives. Rising in his saddle, he took Robert's heart from around his neck and flung it towards the enemy, screaming, "Lead on, my brave heart!" (See, told you Braveheart was about Robert the Bruce.)
The heart didn't do any leading, as Douglas and the heart were captured shortly thereafter. However, the Moors, much impressed by the sight of a maniac charging their lines and chucking a human heart at them in the belief that this would do something, let both Douglas and the heart return to Scotland.
We returned to Edinburgh around 5, and I bid a sad goodbye to Tony and my tour mates.
Day 69: Tired from traveling, I vegetated and did nothing of interest.
Day 70: In British Life and Culture, we watched a movie called My Son the Fanatic about the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in second-generation Muslim immigrants. Unfortunately it was on VHS, so I can't tell you much of what actually happened, but oh well.
Day 71 (also my birfday): In the morning Barnaby took us to a display of outdoor art in Hyde Park. There were several very large and very persistent swans near several of the pieces, which I wasn't happy with, as swans are beastly creatures who will attack at a moment's notice. After fleeing the swans, we went to a display of cameraless photography at the Victoria and Albert, which was quite cool. In Shakespeare, we got to act out the Mousetrap from Hamlet, which was very fun, and only made me miss acting even more. I wasn't very good at it, but I enjoyed it, which was what mattered. The evening was wonderful; Jack came up from Oxford to help me celebrate my birthday, and we feasted on sushi and giant chocolate cupcake, courtesy of my wonderful parents. Also I've gotten more Facebook messages wishing me happy birthday than ever before, which is a reason for glee. It's just a shame that I'm turning 21 in A) a country where the drinking age is 16, and when B) I don't drink, which makes the whole thing doubly redundant. Still, it was wonderful.
Day 72) Not much of interest happened today, although I have got huge amounts of homework this weekend. Still, I'm going to escape on Sunday to see the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Picture Dump!
A medieval lute inside the British Museum. You have to look at it in close-up, though; the details on the tiny figures making up the sides are incredible.
A Celtic metal ewer.
A Celtic cloak made out of a paper-thin sheet of gold. It could only be worn by a child or a small woman due to its size.
An angel from Bath.
The Royal Crescent in Bath, some of the city's most valued real estate.
The head of the cult statue of Athena at the Roman baths in Bath.
The millennia of mineral buildup have left the stones orange. Also you can see just how hot the water is from all the steam.
The edge of Dartmoor.
Some of the semi-feral Dartmoor ponies.
Another shot of the moor.
A wall from Tintagel Castle.
The wild Cornish coastline.
The apothecary's shop at the Old Operating Theatre.
A window display of old medicine jars from the Old Operating Theatre.
An amputation kit. You can probably figure out which tools are for what purposes.
The operating table, where people were held down and operated on, with most dying.
Somebody put a lot of time into these pumpkins at the street market.
Fish at the market, caught that day.
The view from the side of Buckingham Palace into Green Park.
The seal of the United Kingdom on the gates of the Palace. The lion is England, the unicorn Scotland, and the harp in the seal represents Northern Ireland.
An angel atop the Victoria Monument.
A glimpse of the Scottish landscape.
William Wallace's statue at the Wallace Memorial, high above the town of Stirling.
A shot of Rannoch Moor, where we drove through on our way up into the Highlands.
The Falls of Dochart.
Another shot of the Falls.
This area is called Glencoe, or the Glen of the Weeping. Explanations will be in the forthcoming post.
The mountains surrounding Glencoe.
Crazy Scottish autumn foliage.
Some bridges spanning a river we saw on the way to the Isle of Skye.
Tony, our guide, telling us about Robert MacKenzie and the Jacobite Rebellion.
The grave of MacKenzie, where he lies without a head. Again, explanations forthcoming.
A loch, with the mountains called the Five Sisters in the background.
Eilean Donagh Castle, which was blown up in the Jacobite Rebellion and rebuilt in the 19th century.
Tony showing us Scottish jujitsu on the Isle of Skye, beside the river where the Battle of the One-Eyed Woman was fought.
The pinnacle up there is called the Old Man of Storr on Skye, and it (like everything in Scotland) has a story.
The falls beside Kilt Rock, which is visible in the background. It's the same type of geological formations as the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.
A view from Skye.
Loch Ness in the early morning.
A small brook running into Loch Ness behind the trees.
Tony insisted upon taking a picture of me picking Nessie's nose.
The memorial to the Jacobite highlanders who fell on Culloden Moor. Culloden has an incredibly sad story, to be covered, like all the other stories, in the next post.
The rocks have the clan names of the highlanders who fell at Culloden on them. The humps in the earth behind the stones are the mass graves the highlanders were dumped into by the British.
A stone erected by Neolithic people at the Clava Cairns, burial sites just outside of Culloden.
The entrance into one of two passage graves at the Clava Cairns.
The outside of the passage grave.
The snow on Cairngorm Mountain. Tony estimated that, with the wind chill, we were standing in temperatures several degrees below zero. Quite fun.
The landscape of Scotland from Cairngorm's summit.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)