commenting should be easier now

So, I've changed the settings so that anyone can comment, before I think I had it set so only google members could? who knows, I'm off to class at the moment but I'll try to put up another entry sometime today about last weekend. Tomorrow morning I'm off to London for the weekend with some other Union girls, and we won't be back til 1am monday morning but I'm sure I'll have a bunch of pictures and stuff to post when I get back! :)

whitby and scarborough

On Thursday the 20th we visited Whitby and Scarborough through a trip planned by the international society. These are towns on the eastern coast of England, about an hour away by bus ride. At Whitby we saw the Whitby Abbey which was just gorgeous, I don’t know how to describe it really besides showing you pictures but it looked out upon this town with many houses with copper colored roofs and it was right on the water and just gorgeous stone architecture. We walked down 199 stairs to get into the actual town of Whitby. I guess children used to use the stairs as a way to learn how to count, how neat  We counted on the way down and there were in fact, 199 stairs. Once we got into the town we looked around at a bunch of little shops. There is a stone, jet (it’s black) that’s famous down there and so there was a lot of black and silver jewelry. I would have bought something since that’s my favorite colors together for jewelry but nothing really struck me. Since we were on the seaside we obviously had to get fish and chips (or fish and French fries, for those Americans out there, haha). We went to a place called Magpie since we’ve made friends with a girl from Scarborough and she recommended that we go there. It was really yummy, fried haddock and front fries, but probably the greasiest food I’ve had in awhile. My stomach wasn’t too happy with me after that meal.
Then, we spent quite a good deal of time trying to find the bench where Bram Stoker wrote Dracula or at least was inspired to write Dracula. We asked about 10 people to try to find it and eventually Maggie (who was the one who really really NEEDED to see this bench) asked a tour-guide who was picking people up for a tour. Rather than shouting he came down from the bus to describe to her where this bench was and how to get there and even took her in the right direction to get there, what a nice man! So after about 45 minutes of searching we finally found this bench, and it was a nice bench thank goodness. But it wasn’t the bench he sat on to write it, they planted the bench there as a sort of…dedication or something, to the fact that the sight from that location was his inspiration for using Whitby as a part of the setting of his novel. One of the professors that I have this term ranted and raved about how we needed to see this bench so I could mention it to him that we did find it! After we found the bench we of course had to take a million pictures on it and of course a re-enactment of someone being bitten by a vampire, how could we resist?
Time to head back to the bus and onto the lovely town of Scarborough. It was about a 30-minute drive there and we had almost an hour to walk around and do our own thing there. It had started to mist a bit by this point so we went into Poundland (much like a Dollarstore, only, everything was a pound rather than a dollar, imagine that). The main reason they brought us into Scarborough was to have “the best ice cream in the north!” so we had to check out that place and man, I’m pretty sure that it was the best soft serve I have ever tasted in my whole life. I got a chocolate and vanilla twist on a chocolate covered cone and it just tasted heavenly. We went into a few more shops and then it was time to head back to the university. All in all, a great day trip. Since it takes so much effort to load pictures onto this blog I’ll just put a selection of them on here and I’ll set up another account with webshots or something so that people can view all of my pictures since there will definitely be quite a few.

General school

School has been pretty good so far, we do not have internet connection in our rooms, so we have to go to the library to get online which has been a bit of a shock to me, I'm kind of addicted to the internet. But I'm starting to get used to not having it all the time, maybe I'll get my essays done faster without IMing people all the time hmm. Also there isn't a bookstore here where they have all the books you need you have to go to outside bookstores to find your books, also a difference from home. The people here are a lot nicer than in the US they don't get angry if you bump into them or mess something up or whatever, they just are all so calm and collected. Also, the people dress so nicely I feel a bit out of place with that. Girls don't leave the house without drying their hair and doing their makeup and they think it's appalling that we'd leave the house in sweatpants or a sweatshirt or with wet hair. I guess they're in for a rude awakening from the americans haha. The place I'm living is cute, I have my own room which has a sink (kind of weird, but convenient so no one watches while you brush your teeth or wash your face!) They provided the international students with a duvet, a pillow, and a bottom sheet and a pot, a pan, a plate, a mug, a bowl, a knife/fork/spoon which I thought was extremeley generous of them. My housemates are all british and this is their first year at the university so they are 2 years younger than me. There are 3 girls and 2 boys - me, Josie, Jenny, Liam and Will. They're all very nice and we've been getting along well. We are all a bit messy so the kitchen never really gets fully cleaned a lot of the time but it's alright. There's one toliet in one room and then the shower is in it's own room too so thats nice, you can see go to the toliet when someone is showering. I've been having to make all of my own food and go to the grocery store to do food shopping and all that which has been different too, I'm used to the dining hall at union with all the fully prepared food. I'll probably end up losing a bit of weight if I keep eating like I am now...not very much because it's a hassle to make food. The place I'm living is about 10-15 minutes away from the main campus so I can't just roll out of bed and go to class haha, oh well. Another fun fact about people from England - they like to drink, a lot! The people here go out every single night to the pubs and drink a ton, I'm not sure how their bank accounts can handle it because mine sure cannot. Hopefully they find other activities to do because I'd rather have some movie nights or game nights. Maybe I just haven't found the right people yet. Oh! and you know how in the US we say "how are you?" as a general greeting? well here they say "are you alright?" which at first was kind of weird becayse I kept thinking oh maybe I don't seem like I'm okay man do I really look that bad?" haha. But figured that out eventually. Wells thats all I have to say really about a general school entry. I'll have more details some other time when I have more time like about classes and the people and different things I've been doing throughout york. And throughout this entry are pictures of my room at school and also of the taco dinner the boys prepared for us the other night (which was really yummy!) The last entry just had pictures of manchester :)

Well, I made it to England. It was quite the adventure getting here though. The flight took less time than we expected and luckily our flight was one of the first in that day so we only had to wait in line for an hour to get into the country; the poor people behind us probably had a few hours of standing around before they were admitted. After that it was a chore dragging hundreds of pounds of luggage to the train station and then onto the tram - I actually fell throwing my 50 pounds suitcase onto the tram car and still have a bruise...ouch! Our sheet said the hotel was a short walk from the tram station we ended up at so, we decided to walk. what a dumb idea! it took about 30 minutes to drag all of our luggage there and we were so sweaty by the time we arrvived, i think the girls at the reception desk had a good laugh at us. and then once we got there we couldn't even check in for an hour but they nicely held our luggage for us and we walked around town trying to find something to eat since we had had two meals of airplane food which wasn't terrible but not quite satisfying either. we had these great sandwiches, chicken with stuffing and the bread was amazing (maybe an exaggeration considering how hungry we were.) so then we got back to the hotel and dragged our stuff up to our room. which looked pretty cute! the view outside the window was also very nice :) (check out the nice pictures! haha)

So, then we showered and I made the mistake of laying on my bed and really wanted to go to sleep but we were determined to stay awake at least until it was dark outside. Walking around Eccles was nice, we got some tea/coffee and wandered about the area going into little shops and such, getting lost but not really, we eventually found a restaurant, the hope something, and I had a steak and ale pie and it was absolutely delicious. on the way back to our room we stopped at a wine store and bought a bottle and were thoroughly dissappointed when they didn't ask for our IDs. After getting back to our room we had some of the wine, ate some peanut M&Ms and fell asleep even though it was only 7:30 and wasn't even dark yet.
After about 13 hours of amazing sleep we got up and took the tram into the main part of manchester and explored around there for awhile. It was neat! We had some delicious sandwiches for our brunch I guess you'd call it, and checked out the Manchester art gallery which was free and really neat to walk around, they had some pottery there and I enjoyed looking at that. One of the pieces was this gigantic pineapple all made out of clay so I bought a postcard of that since I found it really interesting. We also checked out the Manchester public library since we thought they might have internet access and they gave us a guest pass for 20 minutes of computer use so that was great, got to send some e-mails to people so they would know I was alive and doing well.
We checked out the malls around there and just walked around for a long period of time and by dinnertime the place was getting pretty dark and it didn't seem like the best of areas so we decided to get out of there and get back to Eccles (a suberb of Manchester). On the tram back there were some very obnoxious teenagers, and they got off the tram at our stop but maggie and I were so relieved that they were gone that we kind of forgot to get off and had to get off at the next stop and get onto another tram to get taken back to Eccles. How stupid of us haha. Then we decided we might as well check out the pub scene in Eccles - why not, right? It was kind of an awkward scene if you ask me. The first one we went into was clearly a gay bar, we stuck out...a lot. The next place wasn't so great either, the last one was having a birthday party for some girls and we're not even sure if we were allowed in but we went anyways, whoops! This old man, probably about 70+ decided to befriend us, he had two watches on and told us he "had a lot of time on his hands" oh boy. We finished our drinks fast there and headed out back to the hotel...where there was a wedding party going on! So we went to the bar at the hotel and watched football (soccer) with the people who work at the hotel, what fun. Next morning we checked out and made our way over to the Manchester train station where we took a train to York to come to school!