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Although this blog is not a book, I still have the restless need to give it an "ending."  Yesterday I finally came home after 3 months of traveling between cities, states, and countries.  A really good old friend stopped by for a little while to catch up last night.  He's been reading my blog off and on throughout this whole thing and said I was lucky to have such a nice keepsake from my travels.  While this was nice of him to say, the better my study abroad experience got, the harder it got for me to write about it.  So much so that I was completely unable to write about the last week when I traveled from Edinburgh, Scotland to Dublin, Ireland and then Cork, Cobh, and Galway (also in Ireland).  That week was in a word, beautiful.  I could tell some stories here, but then this blog really would be a book.

The best experiences are the ones that are hardest to describe.  And I'll admit, if I struggle to blab about something, that's pretty telling.  All I can say is that I'm incredibly grateful for this life-changing experience.  I'm especially grateful for the friends I made along the way.  My main objective now, is to apply everything that I learned while away, and not leave it out of reach.  It's great to run off and have crazy adventures and grow from them, but if you leave it far away then what's the point?  I've made that mistake before.  

So here I am, in my childhood bedroom, trying to write about stuff way too big for this room.  So that's the next step.  Getting out of this room.  Finding a job, and a place of my own.  

But I'll work on that more tomorrow- because today is the 4th of July, it's almost 100 degrees outside, and I have a pool party to go to!  

Edinburgh, Scotland:

       (The Elephant Cafe, where J.K. Rawling wrote Harry Potter)

       (The Whiskey Distillery, where we did some scotch tasting)

      
      (Edinburgh castle)

      

   

Dublin, Ireland:

Cork, Ireland:

       Kissing the Blarney Stone  (for good luck and eloquence-)

Thanks to my family and friends who have been checking up on this till the end.  

Happy Father's Day!!!

I know a lot of daughters day this, but I really have the best Dad a girl ever had.  Today is his favorite day of the year, and it sucks not being able to be home for it.  We've always had a lot of little traditions, Dad and I.  One of them is going golfing on Father's Day  (usually the one time I golf a year...)  which we'll have to postpone until I get back in the States in July.  =(

So here's my lame transatlantic attempt at Father's Day.  See you soon Dad!  You're the best and I love you!!!

I Got Stoned Today...

Things have been so crazy lately.  Everyone's trying to do everything the last week here.  It's been nonstop amazing times.  I'm so sleep deprived, but I don't care.  I need to pack everything I own, do all my readings, and write an essay tomorrow, but I don't care.  This has been one wild ride and I am so incredibly grateful that I've gotten to experience all of this with so many wonderful people.

Highlights of this past week:

Thursday was the "end of term" boat party.  It rained like mad, but we all had a ball anyway.  (Ruined my hair!!)  So much fun.

Yesterday was Ethan's 21st, so we all went to a "bop" at Christ Church.  Which is basically the English way of saying "Lets put a little stage on one end of the JCR, and a little bar on the other end, and play some funky tunes."  The theme was things that used to be cool.  So we all had to raid our carefully planned limited clothing for stuff we actually didn't like.  A little challenging.  Anyway, it was fun.  I ended up bartending for part of it.  Dropped a 2 liter of pop and sprayed the crowd when I opened it.  They loved it.

Then today I went to Stonehenge and Bath.  Oh the puns we came up with when we realized we drove an hour to look at a bunch of rocks from 30 feet away.  Ridiculous and amazing at the same time.  I guess you could say we "became one" with the stones.
 

Bath is the most beautiful city I've ever seen.  The country literally pays its residents to keep up the housing.  It's considered a national treasure-  like, the ENTIRE city.  Of course, it's most famous for it's ancient Roman baths.  And no, you're not allowed to touch the water.  And yes, I did anyway.

There's an abbey right next to the baths, and it had the most incredible stained glass windows I've ever seen.  They were HUGE!

More pictures to come, but I don't have time to post more than this for now.  I'm sorry if I have been ignoring anybody's e'mails, things have just been so insane.  Once things slow down (in a week or two...)  I promise I'll make it up to you!

Christ Church

I have just enough time for a quick update:

One of the things I've desperately wanted to do while I'm here is have dinner at Christ Church.  Of all the colleges in Oxford, Christ Church is the most prestigious.  It is also where many scenes from Harry Potter were filmed, namely, the Great Hall.  

Now, this is debatable, a lot of people say that Christ Church's dining hall was only the inspiration for the great hall, and that it was not actually filmed there.  This is usually backed by the fact that there are only 3 long tables in the dining hall, not 4 as in Harry Potter.  But I was in there today and there is room for 4!  Not to mention the staircases and corridors surrounding the Great Hall are 100% in the movie  (pictured below!)

Anyway, my friends Jessica and James both go there and they took a bunch of us for formal dinner tonight.  I say formal because at Oxford there are two types of dinners you can go to:  formal and informal.  

Informal is as normal as Oxford gets, but formal requires that you wear robes.  Yep, traditional, strange-looking robes.  I got my pair today.  I know I will never have an excuse to wear them again, but it's one of those "part of the Oxford experience" things.  Kind of like getting an ugly as hell college scarf.  

And when they say formal, they mean formal.  The dinner consists of a few courses, which are brought to you by dining hall staff.  Plus, they pray in latin beforehand.  Because it's Oxford.

Tonight they served spring rolls, dinner rolls, baby corn and pea pods, rice, and some sort of chinese pork vegetable thing.  All very good.  I can't believe this is normal for some people here.  

Wales Trip!

So after a short day trip to Wales, I've concluded that it's awesome.  For a country smaller than most American states, it has a definite culture of its own.  At times it seems more Swedish than English, which is strange.  The people there are incredibly friendly.  Stuff is a lot cheaper there than in England, which was refreshing.  

Anyway, so the trip began with a visit to an outdoor Welsh museum.  Below is a group photo of most of the Oxford program students that went.  (Note that they're under a thatched roof!)

Of course there was a castle at the museum.  Here is the front entrance.  GORGEOUS!  It looked like Mr. Darcy's place in Pride and Prejudice.

Soooo pretty!

Then we went to Cardiff, the capitol of Wales.  It's about a 2 hour drive from Oxford.  And of course, what's the first thing we saw in Cardiff?  Cardiff Castle!  Because that's what you do when visiting the UK, visit castles. But first, the stocks.

So Cardiff castle, in addition to it's touristy stocks, is built like a fortress, and has large walls and a few castles surrounding it for protection.  This is one of the more ornate of the castles.  The inside was incredible!

The ceiling of one of the rooms of the castle.

This castle was in the other castle, and surrounded by a moat!  Exactly what you'd imagine when thinking about a castle.  We got to climb up to the top, it was intense.

For those of you who don't know, people in Wales speak Welsh and English.  And Welsh is insane.  It's a language of consonants.  Usually when you see a foreign language, you can at least try to pronounce the words, but not Welsh, forget it.  And the whole city of Cardiff has signs written in both English and Welsh.  It's pretty cool.

Brains is a popular type of beer in Wales.  I tried the Brains SA, and it was actually pretty good!  Better than most English beers I've tried.  

We went to a pub called "The Goat Major" to try some authentic Welsh cuisine, and turns out in terms of food they exclusively sold meat pies.  With "chips" of course!  So that's what I had (popular in England too, so nothing too new)  but so good!

Old meets New.  Castle on one side of the street, city on the other.  No big deal.

So yeah, that's Wales.  Kinda goofy, definitely quaint.  A fun day.

CAMERA!

It won't stop raining.  It just won't.

But I don't care, know why?  

MY CAMERA CAME TODAY!!!!

HOORAY!!!!!!!!!!

Just in time for the Wales trip tomorrow  =)

Till then, I ended up taking weird and random pictures around the house today.  Like the Stonehenge replica James fashioned out of Jenga blocks.

This camera delivery has been a ridiculous ordeal.  It took a month to get here.  I was starting to give up hope.  The flatmates were convinced that I had gotten ripped off.  So we celebrated with a photoshoot after watching Star Wars Episode 4  (Kate hadn't seen it, CRAZY!)

Yep, these are the best pictures we got.  I didn't say it was a glamorous photo shoot.  We followed up Star Wars with a Louis C.K. HBO special.  AWESOME!  We've sort of gotten over the guilt of "I'm overseas, I need to be sight-seeing constantly".  It was rainy and we each just finished 1 or 2 tutorials.  A lazy day was totally called for.

My flatmates are pretty awesome.  I love being here, although I'm starting to get sort of "Englished" out.  The food is horrible, the weather is worse, and English guys are definitely not my type.  I'm excited for Wales tomorrow, and even more excited to visit Scotland and Ireland though.  It's time to see what else the UK has to offer.