Thanksgiving & Host

Happy last day of November!!

While you at home were all enjoying your breaks off from school and work, gathering with family for a large feast, us here in London had a little Thanksgiving celebration of our own. After Contemporary Britain class, we gathered in a festively decorated Vandon House kitchen for a meal that was prepared by us students. The menu was that of the traditional Thanksgiving meal we all know and love: turkey, 3 kinds of potatoes, green bean casserole, cream corn, salads, and of course, pumpkin pie and other lovely desserts. There was quite a lot of food, and like at home, there were leftovers for the next day. After stuffing ourselves with food and wine, most of us collapsed into slumber, but some stayed around and played card games. While it looked much like Thanksgiving would at home, it still wasn't the same. I became a bit homesick this weekend in light of the holiday. But, there are only 2 weeks left now, and still much to soak up in London!

On Friday morning, I was up with the sun and left on a 4 and a half hour bus ride up north to Leeds for my Host UK weekend stay. I was greeted with rain and Eric and Marie (pronounced Mary) Songhurst, a retired couple living in Leeds, the third largest city in the UK. I was joined for the weekend by another American student who was studying in Leeds. I knew from the drive from the bus stop to their house that it would be a long weekend. The other student was extremely quiet; I was talkative and outgoing compared to Christina. But our amount of talking did not make any difference as Eric talked nonstop the entire weekend. He would go on and on telling stories with little point or interest from me. So, I was stuck nodding and "mmhmm"-ing all weekend, pretending to listen. I realize how bitter this sounds, but it's the truth. I was really hoping for a really cool experience staying with a British family for a weekend but was quite disappointed, as a few others in our program have also been. Some students have had awesome Host stays while others have been similar to mine.

Anyway, Friday afternoon we went to a place called Tropical World were we walked around an indoor rain-forest essentially. It was kinda cool, took some pictures of animals you would see in a zoo. That night we had a casserole with fish and mince pies for dessert (not my favorite), and then they showed us pictures of their son's wedding. They also told us about all the previous students they have had stay with them over the years and how they have kept in contact with most of them and even visited some of them in their many travels to the States. Eric talked about how he didn't realize how big of an affect they had on the students they had stay for a weekend over holidays. During this entire time, I kept wondering, well then this couple must be pretty great to have students invite them to come stay at their homes years later. I thought then that my weekend had to get better. But it never really did.

Saturday, we began a car ride out to the countryside, but I ended up feeling sick halfway there, and we had to go back to their house so I could rest. It was quite miserable (I won't go into details here). I took a nap and was feeling better by dinner time that night. Eric and Marie were making a Thanksgiving meal for us, their son and daughter-in-law, and two other older couples that were also friends of the family. The visitors were all quite chatty, but mostly talked to each other about things going on in their lives, and little to me or Christina, something Eric actually later mentioned might have been a mistake (they usually just invite their son and daughter-in-law). The meal was fairly similar to what we have for Thanksgiving, but with a British flavor; about a third of the dishes were more common to Britain, like gooey parsnip and Christmas pudding.

Sunday morning, Eric took Christina and I to York for a 2 hour walking tour. It was quite windy out which made it quite cold at first. We walked at a brisk pace, stopping to hear Eric talk about a building or street or something he did as a teenager. We did see some cool churches, even the one Guy Fawkes was baptized in. It was a charming town, kind of like Pella is, only bigger. There was a lot of places for shopping around and I had wished we could have spent some time exploring the shops on the streets we breezed through. Oh well. Afterwards we drove back to Leeds, had lunch, and I packed up to head back to London. The bus ride took an extra hour or so due to an accident, so I was quite hungry and restless by the time I finally arrived to Victoria station later that evening.

Don't worry, I am better now that I am back in London! I am happy to be staying in the city for the remainder of my time, and have lots planned! This Friday, our program will be going on a day trip to Canterbury and Leeds Castle (not in Leeds). Then for the rest of the weekend I plan on going to some museums and other parts of the city I haven't yet ventured to. I will have to do a bit of homework though as well, since we have a load of assignments due on Monday. In other news, I have submitted my first application to graduate school today to a PhD program at the University of Minnesota in Educational Psychology! Quite exciting! I will be busy working on more when I get home for break.

16 days!!

And Germany!

Hello, hello!

So, my travels this weekend were to Germany! I went to stay with a friend, Anna, who was a foreign exchange student when I was in high school. She lives with her parents in a small town called Gladbeck, a 2 hour train ride from Cologne. I flew early on Friday morning, landing around 9:30am. Anna was to meet me and we were to take the one-hour train ride to Gladbeck, however, there was a little mix-up. She had told me to fly to Dusseldorf, so I booked a RyanAir flight there but found out when I arrived that it really wasn't Dusseldorf. It was Dusseldorf, but in parenthesis on my ticket it says Weeze, which is a small airport about a 2 hour train ride from Dusseldorf. Anna had gone to the main airport in Dusseldorf, and so after she realized where I really was and hopped on the train, it was about 2 and a half hours after I had landed that we were finally reunited. I almost did not recognize her as her hair had been dyed bleach blonde and was much thinner than I remembered. We then rode 3 hours on the train to her hometown. It was a pretty town with streets lined with trees all orange and yellow in the late fall afternoon.

That night we met up with her boyfriend Ahmed and went to the Christmas market in Dusseldorf. We took her car which suddenly made me feel back at home, riding in the front seat of a car (even on the right side!) on highways through fields to get there; it has been constant public transportation in London! She had the radio on which was playing popular American songs, and we discussed how it was interesting how popular America music and movies are everywhere; what is so great about American music and movies that they are so globalized and not those of other countries?? Anyway, we went to the market which was a pretty cool experience. There were Christmas lights and music all around, and there was plenty of food and people. We just walked up and down the stalls of various crafts and Christmas decorations.

On Saturday we left for Cologne where we explored the Cologne Cathedral and the many shops. Anna and Ahmed had me try the typical German street sandwich (actually Turkish), döner, which was a large sandwich of beef strips with veggies and a special sauce on bread. I quite enjoyed it! We headed back late afternoon and then met up with Anna's friend Ramona to go to a Latin American cocktail bar to have some drinks. Sunday we slept in and just hung out, taking a short walk through Gladbeck's downtown area, which was dead since it was Sunday and nothing was open. That night we went to another Christmas market in Oberhausen, which was even bigger and more crowded than the one in Dusseldorf. My favorite part of these markets was finding Pofferjes stands!! Early Monday morning (as in 3am), Anna drove me to the airport (the correct one this time!) and I flew back to London. It was a foggy morning and my bus from Stansted airport to Vandon house took an extra hour and I missed my yoga class. Oh well, I simply went back to bed!

I have gained a new job at my internship, something I wish I would have started earlier: helping teach the English as a second language class on Tuesday mornings. It has been a very good experience; you forget how difficult English is to learn until you have to try and explain why you put "an" instead of "a" in front of a vowel! The students are at the moment all women; most speak Arabic as their first language, one speaks Turkish, one Italian, one French. I have also continued helping with the family learning course on Wednesday afternoons which is also a lot of working on speaking and writing English.

This week is Thanksgiving, and we are having a family meal on Thursday afternoon, and then I will head to Leeds on Friday morning to stay with my Host UK family. I was to go with Rachel, another girl in our program, but she had to leave London last week due to a family emergency. So, I will be going alone, but there apparently is a new American student from another UK university who will be there with me. This will be the last of my travels, and I will only have 2 more weekends left after this one! So much left to do and see!

Amongst all of this, I have assignments and graduate school application deadlines creeping up on me....eek!

Paris!

Hello there! So, as you probably gathered from the title of this post, I went to Paris this past weekend.

Shannon, Jacque and I left on Eurostar at 8pm Thursday evening and arrived in Paris 2 hours later. After about 45 minutes of attempting to navigate the confusing streets of an unfamiliar European city, we finally made it to our hotel and crashed. Friday morning, we made our way to Notre Dame Cathedral. We toured inside the beautiful church then got in line to climb the 387 steps to the top of the tower where we could get a panoramic view of the city and say hello to those famous gargoyles. :)

It was a cold, foggy day so photos were not the most beautiful; only the bottom third of the Eiffel Tower could be seen from the top of the cathedral towers! After lunch, we did some souvenir shopping and walked to tour another big and gorgeous church. Next on the agenda was the famous Louvre museum. We had been told by other students in our programme that the Louvre would be free after 6pm on Friday nights if you were under 26 years old, so we headed that way around 5pm, but discovered that it was a bank holiday and so the museum would be closing at 6. No free tour for us! :( Instead, we got some delicious coffee and went back to our hotel to re-plan.

The three of us decided to get up early Saturday morning to go back to the Louvre and explore the galleries even though we had to pay the 10 Euro charge. It was still very much worth it--I mean, it is the Louvre! We spent about an hour or so looking around the Ancient Egyptian gallery, which was my favourite. We of course saw the Mona Lisa, and many other paintings and sculptures, then saw how Napoleon's apartments looked--not to shabby! We finished about 3 hours later so that we could head to the Catacombs, which required standing in line for 2 hours before we could make our way down deep into the earth, below the metro trains, and walk through the tunnels of old stone mines where the remains of about 6 million people have been buried. The bones of all these people have been stacked and arranged into walls in a sort of decorative way. It was interesting to see, but still creepy. After this tour, plus a stop for some Nutella crepes, we went over to the Eiffel Tower and took all our wonderful touristy photos like the one I have added to this post. We had dinner nearby so that when we finished, it was dark and the tower was lit up all beautifully. Before heading back to our hotel on our final night in Paris, we stopped at the Arc de Triomphe which was also all lit up and magical.

Paris was much more beautiful on a nice day like Saturday, but I still can't believe how dirty other European cities seem compared to London. There is so much more trash and the metro stations reek of urine!! It made me happy that I chose London to be the city to stay for three and half months! Three and a half months which are coming to an end quite quickly! Only 4 and a half weeks left! I have made a short list of all the things I need to see and do in London before I leave, and I will be gone the next two weekends with more travelling (Germany and my Host UK stay) so hopefully I can accomplish it all with the time I have left. Today, I went to yoga and then explored Covent Garden a bit in all its Christmas splendor. I also walked through Green Park this afternoon which is no longer very green. :) The ground is blanketed with leaves which I thoroughly enjoyed walking through. Back to my internship tomorrow which will hopefully go better this week; last week I was told by one of the social workers there that I need to talk more because it makes her think I don't like it there. She is one of those people who has a loud and shrill voice, so it is usually hard to determine whether she is angry or if it is just how she always talks. I tried not to let the comment get to me, as I do enjoy it there for the most part, when they give me decent work to do, and I do talk more when I am one-on-one with people, I am just a quiet person otherwise. Anyways, it just made me think about how I behave there and how I come across to other people I work with.

But anyway, I hope all is well back in the States. I will be back before we all know it! Then I will need to do more thinking about where to go after graduation! I just wish it was more clear what I wanted to do. But that is a discussion for another time...

Quiet week

Hello! So break has been over for a week, and I have done absolutely nothing! Okay, that is not true, but compared to my day-packed adventures of break, it sure feels like it.

Monday, I slept in and went to yoga class, which was especially relaxing and I came back to Vandon quite refreshed. The rest of the day I spent retrieving photos from Margaret from our times in Italy so I could post them for ya'll to see. I also tried to write a paper for Contemporary Britain but was not doing so well (it did not get written until the night before, of course!).

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at my internship, which is undergoing a lot of transition. We have about 4 new people coming in to work, so there is a lot of moving stuff around. Within the slight increase of chaos, I was able to get a little more work to do. Two of the new employees have definitely pulled me into helping them with their projects. One organizes a mentoring program for youth and is having me research for programs and activities for the mentors to do with the kids. I will also probably be able to go with her to some meetings with the high school mentors. Another is trying to start some Arabic language courses for local businesses, residents, and community practitioners. We offer English as a second language classes at the centre for the many non-English speaking families that we serve, but he wants to flip it around to help those of foreign tongues share their language and culture in the community. I think it is a great idea, and am helping him find and recruit Arabic teachers for the course. On Wednesday afternoons, I am also observing an adult education course we are offering for parents in the area. It's meant to help parents learn how to help their children in school, helping them to improve their communication skills. It was kind of fun; we made toys out of ordinary objects and kind of talked about our backgrounds. It was pretty cool to watch the mothers as they had started the class very shy and uncomfortable and after 2 hours leave smiling and having a good time, confident in themselves. I am looking forward to going again this Wednesday.

Both Tuesday and Wednesday night I spent trying to work on that paper, a review of a topic in British media...not too exciting. I ended up staying up late on Wednesday night to finish it before class on Thursday, but I was actually fairly awake in class. The topics last week and the next 2 weeks are interesting, dealing with British identity and multiculturalism.

So besides all this, my week has been pretty boring. I've had a very relaxing and kind of lazy weekend. Yesterday was Guy Fawkes day, which is celebrated by fireworks all over London. I did not get to see any however, as it was too cloudy/hazy and did not venture out to wherever they were being shot off at. I did a lot of sleeping this weekend, which while I feel like I should be doing something outside of Vandon as my time here in London is starting to dwindle, I still felt like it was needed, especially after break. Next weekend though, I will be in Paris!!! Then Germany the weekend after that! Then soon enough, I will be back in the States with you all again.

Cheers!