Back "Home"

Thank you to all who've been reading this blog while I was away, it's been really fun to read your comments! I hope you all continue to read it even though I'm officially back home in the States. For some reason or other I was locked out of my blog for about a month while I was abroad so I need to do some catch up reports in the next few weeks. Here's a trailer of what's to come: France and the gorgeous palace of Versailles, Ireland and Belfast home stays, and random things that I think about. Possibly even some more travel writing like I did for Lindisfarne! I will also be adding pictures to my previous couple blogs due to poor internet connections when I posted them last. So, thanks again for reading and hope to see your comments in the future!

Second Time in London

Just a small note to those who read this blog: I come home in less than a week! Sad day, I’ll miss England L. About a month ago our second professor Mark Bruce and his wife, Julianne and daughter Rhiannon came over. Our first professor Dan Ritchie and his wife Judie left us before I left for Italy and returned to the States a week later. The transition between teaching styles and pace of the trip changed a lot when Mark came over. Not in a bad way, just different. Mark’s style of teaching is much more laid back than Ritchie’s so it took a few days to get used to the more frequent and more discussion-based classes. And since Mark and Julianne’s daughter Rhiannon, who is five years old, is along with us for this later part of England Term it took a couple days to get used to having a lil’ kid with us-though she is always a pleasure.

After coming back from free travel (at 2 am on the very, very last day possible) we all assembled again in London at the Celtic Hotel, our favorite “home base”. We were there for a week having class and recovering from our ten days of living completely on our own. We may or may not have done a little shopping too…

We went to the British Library to see a performance of the first third of Beowulf done by this guy who sat up on a stage with coloured backlights and a harp of sorts. He sang slash spoke the poem and played little interludes or background music along with the text. It was a really neat experience but I think I might have gotten more out it if I had read the poem previous to the trip or in high school or something. …Or if it hadn’t been performed at night in a dark, warm room with light harp-like melodies being played, if you catch my drift. The library itself is very larger and has a ton of reference materials for use. The majority of us however, went to the gift shop to look for literary souvenirs.

The next place we stayed was a retreat center in Turnbridge Wells called Salamon’s. It is a center that belongs to a Christian university somewhere in England. The main building was amazing, all stone and old looking, though it probably was not older than perhaps a hundred years-if that. There were separate dorm-like rooms a few hundred feet from the main building and huge gardens slash back yard. There was a good few acres stretching out behind the mansion style house. The yard sloped down the further away from the house it lay creating a step-like look in the grass. Off to the side of the yard was a forested area. We used this treed area for our ropes course.

One of our two main activities at this location was an intense ropes course. If you don’t know what that is, it is a team building workshop involving heights, ropes, harnesses, and screaming encouragingly by the people you’re with. There were these two guys who led the activity. We divided up into two groups and grabbed white, hard helmets and an awkwardly fitting harness and chose our starting activity. My group started with an activity that involved climbing a very high wooden pole and standing on a little platform like circus animals, then leaning backwards…with two other people up there with you at the same time. I would say that it was between 25 and 30 feet in the air but I’m a bad estimator. We all had our harnesses on and were attached to a line to hold us up while we were climbing up the pole. Others down on the ground attended to the slack of the rope and kept it taut and secure. I made it up to the top with one other person. But when we clasped hands to lean back we were unbalanced weight-wise so after a few seconds we fell off and swung in the air for a bit before making a graceful, fairy-like landing.

Our next activity was to climb up an even higher pole and free jump at a trapeze, hopefully making it. This one was harder for me and I lost energy at the top and couldn’t make it. I wasn’t really scared, I just didn’t have any strength left, which I was sad about ‘cause I really wanted to make the jump.

Our next big activity at Salamon’s was Halloween! Which, I will be posting a separate blog for because it was so awesome.