Ah, updates

Once again, rather late.  I took a two-day trip to Edinburgh (20th-22nd) which was loads of fun.  First up was Edinburgh Castle, which was old and cool.  It sort of dominates the view of Edinburgh (as it probably should) and you get a view of the whole city from it.  Here's my favorite shot from the Castle (actually, the outside of it), with a fountain on the grounds outside of it, at the bottom of the hill:

And then we walked around the Royal Mile for a bit, then located Elephant House, which is where JK Rowling wrote the first bits of Harry Potter, which is super cool.  I think, though, enough people have been like "let's go visit where Harry Potter was written" that the cafe realized it and made it kind of touristy (or, the cafe "sold out" if you prefer that set of vocabulary).  Afterwards, a humorous bit regarding wigs occurred, which is observable via Facebook.

The first night we took a haunted ghost tour of Edinburgh's vaults.  The thing is with the vaults, they're built inside one of Edinburgh's bridges (I believe it's the south bridge?), and without ventilation, lighting, and, you know, basic living conditions, it was a pretty terrible place to be.  With regards to the tour and the guide itself, it was pretty impressive with the way everything built up to near the end, with stories accompanying each vault that, along with most people being particularly suggestible in the vaults due to the conditions, amplified the fear bits in people.  It climaxed with a story in a particular room where 96 women and children were killed by their husbands because of the great fire in Edinburgh which cooked the vault's inhabitants (and thus the husbands essentially mercy-killed their families).  Apparently (I did not actually see the perpetrator) then around this point, an extra tour guide jumped out into the entrance and scared the whole group.  Funnily enough, and maybe as a result from not actually seeing what was going on, I only jumped a bit was only really rattled because everyone else freaked out.  The tour itself took the stories and made them "ghost"-y to scare people, but I would hazard to guess that most of the stories were true, which is kind of scary, when you think about it.

The second day involved a trip to St. Andrew's, famous for it's Old Course and the Chariots of Fire scene where they run on the beach.  There's also a very run-down cathedral there, but all in all St. Andrew's is a very small town/city and so it didn't take a long time.

And then we went back to Edinburgh and took a night bus back, which was pretty terrible, to be honest.  Not a lot of room, plus a bumpy bus makes for not happy sleepers and people.

Otherwise, there really hasn't been a lot going on (especially since Italy did in fact fall apart, as evidenced by the Edinburgh trip), but now that third term starts today, I need to get cranking and start studying for two finals and write another paper.  Here is how it works out:

ECON3019 exam (2010.05.11) - 100% of my grade
ECON3019 exam (2010.05.17) - 100% of my grade
HIST2312B paper (2010.05.17) - 60% of my grade

So as it turns out, this sucks because my grades hinge entirely on one test for two of the classes, and one paper can swing my grade from really good to really bad (and vice versa, hopefully)...though given my first paper (which I collect back today) and its quality (probably not very good, the more I think about it), any effort on the second paper will be more of a "bad to good" scenario than the other way around.  Or so I hope.

But yeah, three weeks and two days until I return!  It's weird to think about that.  No matter how much it sucks to be not around all my friends back home, I've established a nice friend network here and London has become rather bearable despite all its quirks...and I'll actually miss it when I get back, which part of me never really expected given how hard it was to adjust to here and everything (and part of me never expected to fully adjust).  I'll be back soon (and it'll be great to be back, trust me).

-e.

NP: Wilco - A.M.

An old standby of mine.  Some tracks are kinda weird, but it's Wilco and I love it all the same.

An open letter to Iceland

Dear Iceland,

I send great vibes your way due to the recent volcanic activity in your country.  However, I do not appreciate it endangering my trip to Italy which (in)conveniently starts tomorrow.

Best wishes,
-e.

A long while's update!

So it appears that I last updated two weeks ago.

The first of the two was quite boring.  Just stayed around London and hung out and got everything for the trip ready.

The trip itself:
-36 hours in Geneva
-6 days in France

Geneva is actually a very boring city.  It's likely because I was there on Easter weekend and so no one was around, but it seems more or less that Geneva lived up to its nickname: "City of Joylessness."  Must be the residue of the Calvinism that held there for a long time.  Even, say, the trees were always trimmed to look depressing:

And outside of a clock whose face was constructed of flowers, and the all-famous Lake Geneva and the fountain there, there really isn't a whole lot to the city...it was rather empty and slightly glum.  So 36 hours was actually quite enough to get a good feel of Geneva.  So it was time to leave for Paris!

Of course, I did go to France already.  But the return trip allowed me to see some extra things.  For one, I was able to just enjoy Paris for Paris rather than going into "take a picture of this so I can remember it" mode, which is never the right way to enjoy a city (but sadly I fall into that mode rather often).  Revisiting the Louvre allowed me to catch more that I didn't see the first time, but the key find this time around was a trip to Monet's house and garden.  He had both a typical French, walled-in garden and then a more spacious Japanese garden.  They were both stunning in beauty.  Here's one favorite photo from that:

It's from the Japanese garden, and I have always liked those "bleeding heart" flowers.  I remember my old piano teacher used to have them growing in front of her house.  Here's the other that I particularly like:

Th

This one was from the walled-in garden.  I had to actually lay down on the ground to get this shot, but it was worth looking especially goofy lying on the ground to take this photo (I mean, imagine seeing someone just randomly lying on the ground at a very touristy location) because I'm really a big fan of this photo.  It might actually be my favorite from Paris.

Our tour guide for the Monet thing was pretty awesome because we also got to go through the countryside and see rural France.  It's really lovely (and seems like a lot of rich folk move out there for retirement or the like), and we got to stand on what once was a key hill that separates the valley of the Seine and the western Normandy areas.  A rather breathtaking view:

Some other Parisian notes:
1. I enjoyed the buskers a whole bunch this time around.  Random tuba players, accordion players, jazz combos, and all.
2. The Metro is fine and all, but not when the part that goes overground is right outside the hotel room.  Yikes.
3. Boxed wine is a worthy adversary.  Next time, I will eat dinner before meeting you again.  I will win.
4. Parisians aren't the most friendly, but I found them on the whole slightly more friendly than Londoners.
5. While it's bearable to deal with the language barrier in France, as many of the French at least know some English, it's still a pain.  It does, however, yield its moments, as when asking the hotel receptionist a question, his response was "I do not...understand.  My English is...dead."

For the next couple of days, I'll be around.  And then Friday, I leave for Italy!  Part of me is really excited, but part of me knows my time in Europe is beginning to wind down (5.5 weeks from today, I will be coming home!) and I do miss Ohio dearly.

Cheers,
-e.

NP: Brian Eno - Another Green World

This album didn't click with me until recently, and so now I've been exploring Eno and ambient music in general, at least.