Two days in Dover

Guess what? We're on break at last! Our paper was due Tuesday, and break started whenever we finished. I got mine done by 4, and then I went to meet Mom and Joe. It was great to see them again. On Wednesday we went to the Dickens House Museum, the Soane Museum, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub, and Baker Street. Then on Thursday morning we left for Dover with Adam. After a longish train ride (on which I slept and wrote postcards), we arrived and found our guest house. Then we went out to the beach. It was so beautiful. Seeing the blue-green waves on the pebbled shore made me so happy.

We walked up and along the magnificent white cliffs, with the sea below the whole time. It was incredibly windy, and mostly cloudy, so it was pretty cold, but it didn't matter. It was wonderful just being there, surrounded by beauty, away from the city.

We were so high up. Mom got nervous and Adam freaked out when Joe or I went too close to the edge (Joe was more dangerous than I was). There were wild ponies grazing. We walked a long way, just wandering along. Finally we turned back, left the cliffs behind, and went back to the guest house.

After hanging out there, resting, for a while, we headed out to find somewhere to eat supper. Eventually we decided on a pub. The food was delicious. Midway through the meal we noticed some random superheroes--Spiderman, Ironman, Batman, and Superman. They weren't even together. It was weird.

The next day we went to Dover Castle. It was high up on a hill; the path up was really steep. We went on a tour of the wartime tunnels and then explored on our own. There were all sorts of random ruin-like towers and little tunnels. We couldn't go in the castle keep because it was closed, which was a little disappointing. But it was fun just walking around. We could see all of Dover.

It was especially cold and windy up there, so we stopped in a restaurant and got tea and hot chocolate. The latter had whipped cream and marshmallows. Mmmm. We also got two slices of cake (chocolate and lemon) and shared them.

After a while we went back down the hill and returned to the beach one more time. Adam read aloud the poem "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/doverbeach.html), which we'd just had to read for the program. On the way back Mom and Joe got off the train at Canterbury, and I continued back to London with Adam, needing a day of rest, which I certainly got--I slept for 10 hours last night!

Photos again

Yet another London Facebook album: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2017319&id=1449219994&l=bb2eb82291 -- including the green hair photos!
Our excursion to Canterbury: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2017244&id=1449219994&l=2078c06ef3
And our second day there: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2017310&id=1449219994&l=eb28c2f9ae
Also, our second day in Bath: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2017061&id=1449219994&l=6b06e50b29
London album 3 has new photos too (http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2014735&id=1449219994&l=a2c4a888dc).
And Cambridge and Hampton Court Palace are coming soon!

Much better

Already this week has been so much better than last week (and the week before). Easier reading, shorter MAGG, and beautiful weather. On Monday we got ice cream from an ice cream truck (my first ice cream in London!) and read under a tree in the park.

Yesterday four of us dyed our hair green for St. Patrick's Day. It was spray-on, wash-out dye we got at a store called Preposterous Presents. We used a washcloth to protect our faces and took turns spraying each other and combing the dye into our hair. It smelled really strongly, and Eri and Steve started feeling funny. My comb turned green. Instead of doing his hair, Dan did his beard. It looked so funny. Steve had most of his hair done, and Eri and I did streaks. It turned out pretty well on all of us. (See pictures on Dan's blog, and on my Facebook eventually.)

Our friends' reactions were great, ranging from shock to amusement. Some people loved it, some seemed horrified, and it took some a while to even notice. The best part was going out to the Tate Britain and getting weird looks from strangers. Some smiled; some just stared. A schoolgirl said scornfully to Steve, "Oh my god, you have grass in your hair!" It was great.

That evening we watched the Fox and the Hound, since we hadn't done our weekly Disney movie last Sunday. And today Eri and I are done with MAGing for the week, and I've finished my reading. So I'm free! We might play tennis later; it's another lovely day. Life is fun again. :)

P. S.

So that post I just wrote was really random, but I thought you would all like to get at least a small idea of how my life in London is going. :) And you probably don't know who the people I mentioned are, except if you've seen photos of them on Facebook. Anyway. I miss you all!

Funday

Ahhh, Sunday feels so good after a crazy week of work. This was the biggest MAGG (Museum and Gallery Guide) we've had (according to the professors), so it took a long time and wasn't the most fun. But the John Soane House was really cool--he was an architect and his house was like a maze, and each room was unique and filled with random stuff from his collections. So that was cool. The reading this week wasn't too bad--two of the major ones were fiction, Candide and part IV of Gulliver's Travels--but one day we had this long philosophical thing, which was actually interesting but really long, and it drove me crazy. Dan drew a comic on it for me, though, and Eri wrote encouraging notes. So that made it not as bad.

Also this week Adam, Dan, Mary Beth and I finally booked our flights to Ireland and Scotland, where we're traveling together after the program. That's definitely something to look forward to. Let's see . . . I played tennis for the first time ever on Thursday, before we got the paper topic. Steve is good, but Dan, Eri and I are not--none of us three have played much before. But it was fun and silly, a good thing to do before the stress of the paper began. The topic was ridiculous; no one could really figure it out. So we were all miserable together for three days, especially on Saturday. We called the blue lounge "the room of despair", Adam repeatedly asked me to kill him, and other people were talking about suicidal urges as well. I turned in my paper right at midnight, and I know it wasn't good. But we all made it through, and now it's Sunday!

I slept till noon, went grocery shopping (it was a beautiful day), then we got a pizza for 5 pounds and watched The Prestige, a ridiculously amazing movie full of crazy mess-with-your-mind unexpectedness. It was good. So although it was another stressful week, now it's over, and this new week has started well. And next week is break, which we definitely all need. And Mom and Joe are coming to visit! So I just have to make it through one more week, one more paper, and then I'll be able to completely relax and have fun. :)

Stress!!!!!!!!!!!

That is what my life has been for the past week: utter busyness and pain. Okay, that might be exaggerating a little, but we had so many museum assignments and long, hard readings, and I got a B-/C+ on my last paper, which discouraged me. So it wasn't such a great week. And then I got a last start on that week's paper because I was out all day Thursday finishing up the MAG and seeing an opera (Dr. Atomic, about the atomic bomb--very weird), and on Friday I was so tired that I napped for most of the afternoon. And on Saturday I didn't have any ideas, so by the time I actually started writing it was 5pm. But the reason I could finally start writing was because I finally had something to write about, so after that it went well; I got it finished just in time, and I feel pretty good about it.

So today is Sunday, and I'm supposed to be able to relax and have fun. But it hasn't turned out that way (although we did watch Disney's Beauty and the Beast, which was great--we watch a Disney movie every week). And this week is going to be busy too, maybe even busier, so if you could all pray for me about being able to get everything done and not getting stressed, that would be wonderful. :)