Chateau Musee rooftop in Dieppe, France


meh LAZY and damn busy with 4 essays due by monday. so, yay.
anyhoozlebeez, here are some LONG overdue pix. hope you remember the password!

went to Tate Britain for the Whistler/Turner/Monet exhibition and words cannot begin to describe the paintings i saw there. they were SO beautiful. im very disappointed i didnt try to sneak some pictures but since it was the last weekend before closing, it was PACKED to capacity. ah well, some other time...maybe at the louvre when i go to paris.

Stratford-upon-Avon for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Glyndebourne for Mozart's The Magic Flute. It was unbelievable! and we got a backstage tour ;)

Windsor Castle was tastfully decorated with LOTS of gold (hard to believe it was tasteful eh?), and also kinda boring. someone saw the Queen, Charles, Camilla....but I didnt. and we werent allowed in the Royal residences cuz Her Majesty is a bit fussy about visitors :P
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WHOOO!! Dieppe trip was AWESOME and made me realize how sucktastic my French is. I miss pain au chocolats

Westminster Palace - sorry I couldnt get more pics but they prolly woulda chopped off my arm if i had tried (or something similar). The House of Commons/Lords part of it was cool, and nicely air conditioned. Churchill's toe was rubbed to a high shine.
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Portsmouth Dockyard for the "Trafalgar Experience". well, the ship was cool/scary/smelly and had SHORT ceilings (yes i DO realize it was a ship but people musta been VERY short back then) - although Nelson was only 4'11 so there you go.

finally, Stonehenge and Salisbury trip.
was very disappointed that i couldnt actually go touch the rocks at stonehenge, or wont be there for summer solstice

exam time already......................

Photos are up:

days 1 and 2

London

youll need a PASSWORD tho, so email (GMAIL)/msg me and i'll give it to you. im just too lazy to email everyone to let you know what it is. i figure its better for you to come to me :D
ya and password cuz there are weirdos out there that im sure frequents this blog.



ah so updates, since its been a week now, i'll just highlight some of the things that have happened:

The Plane Ride
since im a single (flier, not status :P ), i got shafted for seats and got stuck sitting in the middle aisle, in the middlemost seat. to my left was a fat and disabled man, and to my right was a couple who epitomized the snobby brit image. so yea, no moving for me cuz i couldnt always ask the fat guy to move - cuz he couldnt and cuz the seat in front of him was tilted all the way horizontal - and the couple to my right gave me such a scathing look when i asked them the first time, that i didnt dare upset them again for the remainder of the flight. bastards.
i'd never felt more restless in my life. i couldnt sleep at all for whatever annoying reason, and i couldnt move cuz they wouldnt let me.
i had complained to the flight attendants in the hopes that theyll have a free seat in first class. yea, no such luck and all i got offered was their seat near the aisle. oh well, at least they were superficially nice. and i got drinks.
speaking of food, wow such nice service from British Airways. besides the meals (which we got wine with dinner if we so choose), we got snacks and drinks every 15 min or so. compared to Air Canada, this was awesome! we had our own screens (attached to the headrest of the seat in front of us) and there were about 16 channels of movies/sitcoms/cartoon network ;) so 6 hrs passed by pretty quickly.

Arriving at Heathrow Airport
my goodness it was humid!! i was sweating like never before - mostly cuz i was lugging luggage and had my backpack on which was crammed full of stuff - and was wondering how on earth the men were able to wear three piece suits without dying from heat. since i was on the plane that arrived 2 hrs earlier than the rest of the group, i was stuck waiting for the other flight to come in. luckily i bumped into two of the guys from my floor in first year and we chatted away until we saw the organizers from the castle waving a sign around. we left the airport on the first bus to the castle - it took us 2.5 hrs to get to Herstmonceux Castle. we are literally in the middle of nowhere. well, not quite, we're 1.5 miles away from the nearest town(Herstmonceux), another .5 miles from that point to the bigger town of Halisham and 15 minutes drive away from the town of Eastborne in the other direction.

Herstmonceux Castle
there are many doors and staircases that all eventually lead to the same place. its great! a fantastic place to play hide and seek i say. its a very serene place - to read or to sit and watch nature/tour groups passing by. still havnt found the resident ghost yet, tho the castle people say that theyve never seen anything close to it in all their years of working there. how disappointing.

Classes (yes we have classes)
im taking:
British Studies - what makes the British british?
England since 1851
Elizabethan Shakespeare - studying 5 plays

all classes takes place in the castle with the day going from 830am till 1030pm. i have classes in both of those slots and some in between. no amount of coffee can keep me awake then.
speaking of coffee, its dispensed from coffee/cappucino machines and not in the pots that we're all familiar with. and this isnt just at the castle, its all over england it seems. i havnt been inside a coffee place where it doesnt come from machines - well, except starbucks - and its very odd. mostly cuz it all tastes the same.
meals are taken in the castle dining hall, but residence is about 3 min walk away in Bader Hall. just like a motel/cheap hotel where there are sheets and towels given, but no pillow mints.

oh! and COWS. there are COWS outside my window. well not RIGHT outside my window but closer to a cow than i have ever been in all my life. theyre funny looking and make amusing sounds. i wonder if this isnt the castle's personal slaughtering stash to be used in our meals. mmmmmmmm fresh meat. MOOO!! (will have to organize a cow-tipping party before we leave)
and by the same reasoning, we should also be eating duck and sheep (which we have actually - sheep, not duck)

London
is much more grimy than i thought it would be. i understand that it comes from the fact that its such an old city, but that still doesnt make the black building walls any less surprising. i guess im just used to seeing TO's shiny black buildings where none of the smog seems to stick to it. whereas here, the buildings are/were white and the dirt (smog from cars? factories?) is very noticable.
anyway, ya i love London, black buildings and all :D
all museums and art galleries have free admission which is awestastic!
English people are actually very nice - made very clear when i randomly stopped people to ask for directions.
(oh yea, i was stopping at intervals to ask for directions cuz i got lost from my group, and then lost the one other person i was walking with. so i was wandering around London by myself for much of the 3 hrs of free time we were given. it was wonderful. i love wandering by myself. ive figured that you cover more ground this way since you dont have to keep waiting for people to do their thing. and what is there to be afraid of? i dont understand. its an english speaking country and all major tourist attractions have road signs. )

Prices
absolutely ridiculously expensive! the prices are exactly the same as in canada, but instead of a dollar sign, put a pound sign in front of the numbers. outrageous.

The Globe Theatre
5 pounds to be in the pit and watch the play standing up. it was quite an experience(esp. for my legs!) and i would SO do it again! have you seen Shakespeare in Love? its exactly the same, and more awesome when youre actually standing there taking it all in. the actors were fantastic and i swear the one playing the female parts was more convincing a woman than i ever will be. he's the pretty boy i keep mentioning in my pictures. the pictures are actually quite blurry, but thats cuz they wouldnt keep still long enough for me to snap a photo. booourns.


thats about it for now. sorry it's all so incoherent. i really should have updated on a day-to-day basis instead of all at once now, but, oh well. hope you got a sense of my well being from my looooooooong blog.

next trip(s):
Twelfth Night at Stratford upon Avon
Turner Whistler Monet exhibition at Tate Britain (hopefully. im not actually in that clss)
Windsor Castle

will update in between. enjoy the photos!