Hey everyone (and by everyone, I mean my single subscriber at this point),
First of all, I want to assure everyONE that I don't want this blog to just degenerate into a litmus test for my mood swings. I have a journal for that sort of writing, and that carries the dual benefits that nobody will try to pry into my personal life, and neither will they feel as though I'm trying to ram those selfsame thoughts down their throat(s).
That being said, I will use this blog as an outlet for meditations that I think merit release. I will try to record these in a fair and rational manner, though.
So here's a little introspection: anyone who knows me will say that I'm not really a competitive guy. For the most part; at times I show a competitive streak, but only infrequently. I'm trying to think where that facet of my personality comes from--competition wasn't really emphasized in my household when I was growing up. No allegiances to sports teams were espoused. My brother and I played pretty calmly; he would always beat me in board games and the like, and since I didn't like losing, I just gradually learned to stop challenging him. Most of our play was collaborative or independent rather than competitive, and even in the midst of competition, I remember him as a very impassive opponent, and as a young kid, frequently I didn't realize how badly I was being beaten or just kind of emulated his passivity in victory with a similar passivity in defeat. We just read books more than anything else, where your only opponent is yourself...but then, how much of a rise do you really get from completing a book? Not exactly invigorating.
Growing up in a household where sports were virtually absent, I'm still pretty clueless about most sports. I can remember attempts by my parents to teach Andrew and I to throw a football or the proper way to catch, but neither of us were interested, so there was no point for my parents--neither of whom are sports enthusiasts themselves--to persist in this way. I played soccer at the YMCA for a couple years, but the coaches had this brilliant strategy of neglecting to explain the game to the stupid six-year-olds and instead just turning us loose to roam the field. I remember receiving the ball during one such game and literally stopping in my tracks: this had never happened before, and I was completely at a loss. No worries, though; the coach's daughter managed to put the ball in the goal, which was ample cause for obligatory celebration.
The "Don't Ask, Don't Teach" policy was in full swing throughout all my years of elementary school--bear in mind that if you're a youngster at a Christian school in the midwest, it was assumed that you know how to play sports, because there's no pastime in which the Good Lord takes more unadulterated delight than seeing the sheep of His flock putting the ball through the hoop. Then by middle school, if you don't know how to play these games, you're just a lost cause; the question of learning, much less being taught, is stupid.
This wasn't entirely the case. I started playing on the school soccer teams in fifth grade, and after a year, I finally began to get a grasp on the game. Of course, this didn't happen until the coach gave me some pointers, just the most elementary principles of the game, that enabled me to at least act like I knew what I was doing. (Funny thing is, these tips only took a couple minutes to explain; I suppose all my coaches and physical education teachers in previous years just didn't have those few minutes to spare to help the kid who obviously didn't know what he was doing...but then again, they are busy, important people, aren't they?) Middle school soccer was a fun experience--lots of my friends were on the team as well, and even though I wasn't very good, I still managed to enjoy playing, and as a defensive player I even blocked a couple of shots throughout the season.
Soccer stopped after middle school, though; during our practices, I could see the ordeal that was varsity soccer practice, and I had no difficulty deciding that the returns I would receive weren't worth the blood, sweat, and tears I would have to invest in order to join that proud fraternity.
I should clarify that I don't intend to blame negligent instructors for my ineptitude at sports. I mean, as an American male child, teenager, and now young man, I'm definitely the oddball for still being ignorant of the technical rules of the major sports. If I had been like most other young boys, I would have learned these almost as a part of growing up, and that would have been a good foundation for more competence. But, for whatever reason, I didn't, and I was never interested enough in them to learn independently.
In high school, I dabbled in the fine arts and literature. I played trumpet in the school concert band from 5th grade through my senior year (like in soccer, I was never outstanding, but I did alright); I got good parts in the school plays for five years and performed occasional skits as a part of the school drama club; I read extensively, and took an interest in writing. During my freshman year, a keen interest in film sprung up in me, and that combined with my lifelong reading habit to form a general love of stories and a curiosity into the different ways to effectively tell a story. I suppose I viewed myself as something of a nonconformist, and perhaps I was, but not in an overtly intentional way. I mean, let's face it--high school is a weird time of life.
During this time, I gradually came to really regret that fact that I didn't really know aything about sports. This can leave you isolated in a lot of ways in current American culture, obviously; I couldn't contribute to digressions on the annual NCAA tournament or even just step in to join an improptu game of basketball in the gymnasium. This is something that I'm still really self-conscious about, and even though it's probably too late to substantially change things, I want to at least learn the rules and conventions of different sports--undertaking at age 19 what most boys learn by age 7--and try to get more active and try some different sports. I'm late, but hopefully not too late.
Now, to rope this all back in: I'm not competitive (a fact that I'm attributing to both nature and nurture after everything I just typed). I'm okay with that. I feel that I'm a pretty pleasant guy to be around. Of course lots of other people are really competitive--heck, my girlfriend is one such person--and I'm cool with that too, I really am.
Maybe it's just that I don't see winning as most interesting part of playing a game. To me, the most interesting thing about a basketball game or billiards or whatever is the way that the players willingly submit to arbitrary rules for the duration of the game and watching what results. It's like a science experiment, and the players are the variable values. I think it would be interesting to try out different variables just to see how the games ended up...but of course, the most common variables are those used just to obtain different permutations of victory.
Nobody likes losing a game, and I admit that I still get upset about losing at games sometimes. But most of the time I don't mind losing a game until I feel as if my opponent is just drawing attention to their victory. Then I get indignant--of everything that the game entails, it seems like a pretty dull thing to focus on when all's said and done. I prefer to enjoy the process of playing the game. Admittedly, sometimes I take action that may slow my chances of victory, but isn't the actual game more fun than the outcome? Half the time when I play Settlers of Catan, I don't worry much about winning, but instead just set other goals for myself, like just trying to get the longest road or arrange my settlements in a certain pattern. I feel like if I played with victory as my sole objective, the game gets a lot more repetitive the more I play it. Granted every game is intrinsically different, but still, I like more originality. I like to challenge myself more than my fellow players, and sometimes that means adding my own personal arbitrary rules, such as completely avoiding tiles that yield grain or maybe placing the robber on my own territory every chance I get. If I alter the equation of the game, what's the result? I like to play just for the sake of playing.
If I complained about my losses after these strategies, then I would just be a moron. But I honestly don't think I do complain about my losses. A fellow player may think the way I play the game is stupid; I may think the way he plays the game is terribly dull. So what? Perhaps winning is the objective of the game; well, even if it is, if I defy that objective, the only person I hurt is myself (unless it's a team game, obviously).
I could say more about this, but this has grown to a monstrous post already, and I'm losing focus.
The Bottom Line: I'm not competitive. I don't see anything so wrong with that. I try not to dislike people who are more competitive than I, and I feel like I can make that work most of the time. However, if they want to criticize my philosophy, what's to stop me from turning right around and criticizing theirs? Let me be myself, and enjoy being who I am; I'm only too eager to return the favor.
Thursday, 25 March 2010
Ancient History (March 24, 2010)
Hello all,
You're in luck--this week wasn't nearly as interesting or eventful as its predecessor--cross your fingers and hope that I manage to keep it concise.
First of all, for those of you with Facebook profiles, I feel like I should apologize for not keeping remotely current on uploading photographs to my profile. I've always had problems with the photo-uploading utility when I access my profile using Internet Explorer, and it just so happens that Internet Explorer is the browser of choice for York St. John. Thus I'm restricted to uploading a mere five photos at a time, on a good day, and my "good days" have been few and far between. Suffice to say that this makes the readings I've done about the Luddites' demonstrations during the industrial revolution all the more potent.
Monday slipped by in a flurry of trying to bring my thoughts to bear on an essay I was assigned to write for my history class on Empires--an objective no less concise and no less daunting than: "What was the secret of the Roman Empire"? Admittedly I had been putting the assignment off for a while; I had taken the initiative to get a couple of books from the library beforehand, but with such a broad topic, it was daunting to know where to begin. However, I did have some idea where to begin, having studied the Romans relatively recently in my Calvin history and art history classes. With the imagery of the ruins of Pompeii in mind, as well as anecdotes we had covered in class, I hit upon pragmatism, self-preservation, and dynamic leadership as three crucial elements of Roman conquest...just a drop of water in the ocean, I know, but for the purposes of the assignment, I figured these three would do.
Tuesday morning brought British Culture class, as usual. For the first half, the class divided into groups and each person displayed their "commonplace books"--a kind of mandatory scrapbook assignment we have, which is intended to emulate journals which were in vogue in Europe starting in the 1600s--to the rest of their group members. My commonplace book is comprised of printouts of these weekly emails, augmented with papers and brochures, all compiled in plastic display sheets in a ring binder. We've been exchanging anecdotes from our commonplace books in weeks past, which is really neat, because that way the little tidbits that individuals discover in their encounters with the culture are diffused throughout the whole group. During the second half of class, the different focus groups gave their presentations for the tapestry, describing the class systems in place during the Edwardian Era, the suffrage movement for women at the time, and turbulence surrounding Welsh and Irish affairs at the time. Part of one demonstration had a student submitting Prof. Ward to a "How Snobbish Are You?" test online--I think we were all relieved when the test results were tabulated and we found that, although Prof. Ward exhibited the pernicious vestiges of snobbery, he was not beyond reclamation. Doubtless I have now aroused an eagerness on your part to evaluate your own snob index--here's the link for the quiz: http://www.pbs.org/manorhouse/quiz/game.html
I spent Tuesday evening spinning a web of words about the Roman empire...not too exciting.
In the Wednesday morning Empires class, we turned our backs on Rome and began talking about the British empire. This class kind of brought to a variety of thoughts and realizations that I had been mulling over to a head. All my reading of literature and education of history had formed in my mind this image of the British empire as something grand, impregnable, and reproach--certainly with anomalies at certain times and places, but no major ones. As we began to look at roots of the British empire, my views started to aquire a different shade. First of all, my notions of British impregnability have been shaken by learning just how precarious British history has been, from the invasion by the Romans to attacks by Vikings and the Norman Conquest. The notion of the invincible British Empire was formed relatively late in English history, and in many ways was a response to England's history of subjugation to other powers; as such, it has been widely propogated in the Western hemisphere, where England has traditionally exerted such strong cultural influence. And even at the height of the British empire, the British homeland was still beset by all manner of domestic problems, and the image of the empire was soiled by defeats and humanitarian abuses that were largely suppressed. I look forward to the rest of the class for the semester.
Thursday and Friday passed pretty uneventfully. I turned in my essay and took it easy for most of those two days, hanging out in my room, watching a movie or two online, and dinking around with my ukulele (I can now stumble my way through a rough phrase of "Wipeout'). Also, a prolonged game of Battleship that had been raging back and forth online between one of my readers and me came to a denouement--I regret to report a defeat on my part, but in negotiations with my opponent, it seems that another battle is brewing, so I have a chance to redeem myself. On Friday evening, I joined the rest of the Calvin students for another social evening at our professor's house, enjoying a birthday cake prepared in observation of three birthdays of our groupmembers occuring within the span of a week or so. It was rainy that evening, and once back to my flat, I streamed a jazz radio station on my laptop, brewed some tea, and savored the gloom as best I could.
On Saturday we boarded a bus once more to visit some sites in Yorkshire not far from the town. Our first destination was the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. Rievaulx Abbey was founded in 1132 by twelve Cistercian monks, and as the first Cistercian abbey in the north of England, it served as a base for missions in the north and up into Scotland. The monks raised sheep and sold the wool, and also mined ore nearby to generate their livelihood; and Rievaulx Abbey became not only one of the best-known abbeys in the north, but also one of the wealthiest abbeys in England. Eventually it was destroyed during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries.
Set in the countryside against a hilly backdrop of bare trees, the abbey ruins were impressive. It was an overcast morning, and a light misting rain made the setting all the more placid. I wandered around some of the foundations of the buildings associated with the abbey, all that is left of them, and admired the extant structure of the abbey itself, which was much better preserved than the Whitby Abbey.
After about an hour at Rievaulx, we took the brief ride to the nearby town of Helmsley to view the ruins of a castle that had stood there at one time. Construction on Helmsley Castle began in 1120 by a local nobleman and continued for the next 200 years or so. It changed hands several times throughout the next 400 years and was besieged during the English Civil War, after which Parliament ordered that it be partially destroyed. All that remains of the castle today is one side of a tower, the foundations of the walls, a couple of the front battlements, and one extant hall; these remains are now managed by English Heritage, a department of the British government tasked with historical preservation. Although there wasn't much left of the castle itself, the moat was well preserved, and approaching the castle I got a real feel for just how defensible a position a castle could be. It was neat to poke around, but by that time, my shoes were soaked through, and the chill and damp were starting to get to me. After thoroughly checking the place out, I joined six other students and we walked into Helmsley, where we got some food; then three of us stepped into a secondhand book store, where we amused ourselves by reading the inscriptions in several old books that had been given to previous owners as Sunday school rewards and the like. After whiling away some time in another shop or two, we boarded the bus and returned to York. Back in my flat, I busied myself with folding laundry, taking care of small chores, and Skyping with Karin.
I slept in a bit on Sunday morning before going into town somewhat early for breakfast and some errands. The breakfast was successful, as I grabbed a fruit pasty from a bakery for the third day in a row, but it hadn't occurred to me that no shops would be open at that time on a Sunday morning. So I wandered around a bit, pausing on the old walls to admire the sunny morning until an elderly gentleman walking along the wall advised me that I would get a better view from atop the central tower of York Minster. I agree with him, and then headed that way for Sung Eucharist. En route, I was stopped by a large grizzled man who was shuffling laboriously down the street, hunched over his walker. He asked me where I was from, and while he cited something vague about having worked building oil pipelines in Texas, mysterious reference to Vancouver, and some connection to J.P. Morgan, in an accent so thick it could barely be understood, his unkempt appearance and shabby clothes didn't corroborate his story at all. He insisted that he was a representative of some charitable relief organization (producing a crumpled postcard of said organization as a sort of validation), and offered me some of his "artwork" in return for a donation. The artwork in question was a crumpled pile of what appeared to be finger paintings perched atop his walker, and while I knew at the time that I was undoubtedly subsidizing nothing more than an evening pint for that gentleman, I gave him a donation and collected a piece of artwork, just for the novelty of the experience. Looking back, I feel silly for indulging in this novelty, and I'm not going to reveal what I gave this gentleman for his scrap of paper; suffice to say it will look lovely displayed in my commonplace book. He then asked me where I was having lunch, but I simply told him I didn't know, perceiving that he wished to prolong this relationship in which he only stood to gain.
I arrived at the Minster right as the service was starting and found a seat near the back next to my friend Sam. The service was beautiful, as usual, although the very beginning and end were interrupted by a couple of noisy toddlers who got a kick out of beating their plastic ponies on the seats of the wooden chairs. After the service Sam and I spent an hour or so at a nearby Starbucks, where he gave me advice on what to see in London next week. At one point he whipped out a pen and drew a personalized map of central London for me, noting the relative positions of all the must-see destinations. He was also gracious enough to offer me free lodging in Cambridge, which is where he hails from.
After coffee with Sam, I returned to my flat and spent the next three or four hours in a frenzy of booking hostels for my Easter break. I had hoped to travel on the continent throughout break, but having failed to plan sufficiently in advance or coordinate plans with anyone, I didn't feel ready to travel solo in Europe. Instead, I'll be visiting a handful of cities in the southeast of England, not too far from London. It should be fun, and I'm looking forward to it. Sunday evening ended pleasantly with conversations with my parents and Karin.
I had intended to send out this email at that time, but time had kind of escaped me for the past couple days.
I hope this message finds all of you well! I ask for your prayers as I set out on my Easter Break for the next couple weeks, and I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on all my comings and goings throughout that time.
I miss you all, and think of you frequently.
Sincerely,
John Morton
You're in luck--this week wasn't nearly as interesting or eventful as its predecessor--cross your fingers and hope that I manage to keep it concise.
First of all, for those of you with Facebook profiles, I feel like I should apologize for not keeping remotely current on uploading photographs to my profile. I've always had problems with the photo-uploading utility when I access my profile using Internet Explorer, and it just so happens that Internet Explorer is the browser of choice for York St. John. Thus I'm restricted to uploading a mere five photos at a time, on a good day, and my "good days" have been few and far between. Suffice to say that this makes the readings I've done about the Luddites' demonstrations during the industrial revolution all the more potent.
Monday slipped by in a flurry of trying to bring my thoughts to bear on an essay I was assigned to write for my history class on Empires--an objective no less concise and no less daunting than: "What was the secret of the Roman Empire"? Admittedly I had been putting the assignment off for a while; I had taken the initiative to get a couple of books from the library beforehand, but with such a broad topic, it was daunting to know where to begin. However, I did have some idea where to begin, having studied the Romans relatively recently in my Calvin history and art history classes. With the imagery of the ruins of Pompeii in mind, as well as anecdotes we had covered in class, I hit upon pragmatism, self-preservation, and dynamic leadership as three crucial elements of Roman conquest...just a drop of water in the ocean, I know, but for the purposes of the assignment, I figured these three would do.
Tuesday morning brought British Culture class, as usual. For the first half, the class divided into groups and each person displayed their "commonplace books"--a kind of mandatory scrapbook assignment we have, which is intended to emulate journals which were in vogue in Europe starting in the 1600s--to the rest of their group members. My commonplace book is comprised of printouts of these weekly emails, augmented with papers and brochures, all compiled in plastic display sheets in a ring binder. We've been exchanging anecdotes from our commonplace books in weeks past, which is really neat, because that way the little tidbits that individuals discover in their encounters with the culture are diffused throughout the whole group. During the second half of class, the different focus groups gave their presentations for the tapestry, describing the class systems in place during the Edwardian Era, the suffrage movement for women at the time, and turbulence surrounding Welsh and Irish affairs at the time. Part of one demonstration had a student submitting Prof. Ward to a "How Snobbish Are You?" test online--I think we were all relieved when the test results were tabulated and we found that, although Prof. Ward exhibited the pernicious vestiges of snobbery, he was not beyond reclamation. Doubtless I have now aroused an eagerness on your part to evaluate your own snob index--here's the link for the quiz: http://www.pbs.org/manorhouse/quiz/game.html
I spent Tuesday evening spinning a web of words about the Roman empire...not too exciting.
In the Wednesday morning Empires class, we turned our backs on Rome and began talking about the British empire. This class kind of brought to a variety of thoughts and realizations that I had been mulling over to a head. All my reading of literature and education of history had formed in my mind this image of the British empire as something grand, impregnable, and reproach--certainly with anomalies at certain times and places, but no major ones. As we began to look at roots of the British empire, my views started to aquire a different shade. First of all, my notions of British impregnability have been shaken by learning just how precarious British history has been, from the invasion by the Romans to attacks by Vikings and the Norman Conquest. The notion of the invincible British Empire was formed relatively late in English history, and in many ways was a response to England's history of subjugation to other powers; as such, it has been widely propogated in the Western hemisphere, where England has traditionally exerted such strong cultural influence. And even at the height of the British empire, the British homeland was still beset by all manner of domestic problems, and the image of the empire was soiled by defeats and humanitarian abuses that were largely suppressed. I look forward to the rest of the class for the semester.
Thursday and Friday passed pretty uneventfully. I turned in my essay and took it easy for most of those two days, hanging out in my room, watching a movie or two online, and dinking around with my ukulele (I can now stumble my way through a rough phrase of "Wipeout'). Also, a prolonged game of Battleship that had been raging back and forth online between one of my readers and me came to a denouement--I regret to report a defeat on my part, but in negotiations with my opponent, it seems that another battle is brewing, so I have a chance to redeem myself. On Friday evening, I joined the rest of the Calvin students for another social evening at our professor's house, enjoying a birthday cake prepared in observation of three birthdays of our groupmembers occuring within the span of a week or so. It was rainy that evening, and once back to my flat, I streamed a jazz radio station on my laptop, brewed some tea, and savored the gloom as best I could.
On Saturday we boarded a bus once more to visit some sites in Yorkshire not far from the town. Our first destination was the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. Rievaulx Abbey was founded in 1132 by twelve Cistercian monks, and as the first Cistercian abbey in the north of England, it served as a base for missions in the north and up into Scotland. The monks raised sheep and sold the wool, and also mined ore nearby to generate their livelihood; and Rievaulx Abbey became not only one of the best-known abbeys in the north, but also one of the wealthiest abbeys in England. Eventually it was destroyed during Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries.
Set in the countryside against a hilly backdrop of bare trees, the abbey ruins were impressive. It was an overcast morning, and a light misting rain made the setting all the more placid. I wandered around some of the foundations of the buildings associated with the abbey, all that is left of them, and admired the extant structure of the abbey itself, which was much better preserved than the Whitby Abbey.
After about an hour at Rievaulx, we took the brief ride to the nearby town of Helmsley to view the ruins of a castle that had stood there at one time. Construction on Helmsley Castle began in 1120 by a local nobleman and continued for the next 200 years or so. It changed hands several times throughout the next 400 years and was besieged during the English Civil War, after which Parliament ordered that it be partially destroyed. All that remains of the castle today is one side of a tower, the foundations of the walls, a couple of the front battlements, and one extant hall; these remains are now managed by English Heritage, a department of the British government tasked with historical preservation. Although there wasn't much left of the castle itself, the moat was well preserved, and approaching the castle I got a real feel for just how defensible a position a castle could be. It was neat to poke around, but by that time, my shoes were soaked through, and the chill and damp were starting to get to me. After thoroughly checking the place out, I joined six other students and we walked into Helmsley, where we got some food; then three of us stepped into a secondhand book store, where we amused ourselves by reading the inscriptions in several old books that had been given to previous owners as Sunday school rewards and the like. After whiling away some time in another shop or two, we boarded the bus and returned to York. Back in my flat, I busied myself with folding laundry, taking care of small chores, and Skyping with Karin.
I slept in a bit on Sunday morning before going into town somewhat early for breakfast and some errands. The breakfast was successful, as I grabbed a fruit pasty from a bakery for the third day in a row, but it hadn't occurred to me that no shops would be open at that time on a Sunday morning. So I wandered around a bit, pausing on the old walls to admire the sunny morning until an elderly gentleman walking along the wall advised me that I would get a better view from atop the central tower of York Minster. I agree with him, and then headed that way for Sung Eucharist. En route, I was stopped by a large grizzled man who was shuffling laboriously down the street, hunched over his walker. He asked me where I was from, and while he cited something vague about having worked building oil pipelines in Texas, mysterious reference to Vancouver, and some connection to J.P. Morgan, in an accent so thick it could barely be understood, his unkempt appearance and shabby clothes didn't corroborate his story at all. He insisted that he was a representative of some charitable relief organization (producing a crumpled postcard of said organization as a sort of validation), and offered me some of his "artwork" in return for a donation. The artwork in question was a crumpled pile of what appeared to be finger paintings perched atop his walker, and while I knew at the time that I was undoubtedly subsidizing nothing more than an evening pint for that gentleman, I gave him a donation and collected a piece of artwork, just for the novelty of the experience. Looking back, I feel silly for indulging in this novelty, and I'm not going to reveal what I gave this gentleman for his scrap of paper; suffice to say it will look lovely displayed in my commonplace book. He then asked me where I was having lunch, but I simply told him I didn't know, perceiving that he wished to prolong this relationship in which he only stood to gain.
I arrived at the Minster right as the service was starting and found a seat near the back next to my friend Sam. The service was beautiful, as usual, although the very beginning and end were interrupted by a couple of noisy toddlers who got a kick out of beating their plastic ponies on the seats of the wooden chairs. After the service Sam and I spent an hour or so at a nearby Starbucks, where he gave me advice on what to see in London next week. At one point he whipped out a pen and drew a personalized map of central London for me, noting the relative positions of all the must-see destinations. He was also gracious enough to offer me free lodging in Cambridge, which is where he hails from.
After coffee with Sam, I returned to my flat and spent the next three or four hours in a frenzy of booking hostels for my Easter break. I had hoped to travel on the continent throughout break, but having failed to plan sufficiently in advance or coordinate plans with anyone, I didn't feel ready to travel solo in Europe. Instead, I'll be visiting a handful of cities in the southeast of England, not too far from London. It should be fun, and I'm looking forward to it. Sunday evening ended pleasantly with conversations with my parents and Karin.
I had intended to send out this email at that time, but time had kind of escaped me for the past couple days.
I hope this message finds all of you well! I ask for your prayers as I set out on my Easter Break for the next couple weeks, and I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on all my comings and goings throughout that time.
I miss you all, and think of you frequently.
Sincerely,
John Morton
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
Rocks On Top Of Other Rocks (March 14, 2010)
Hello All,
The spring weather has not abated, and while a history paper keeps me in close proximity to my laptop at the moment, once class obligations abate somewhat, I hope to enjoy the weather to the fullest.
I left off on Monday morning.
On Monday night, I joined one of my British pals (or "mates") for his birthday dinner. After class, I met him near campus and walked to a house that he shares with six or seven other students. It was kind of a large, rambling terraced building that probably served as apartments in the past, cluttered with clothing, food containers, empty bottles, and the other paraphernalia that piles up in college housing. We played videogames for maybe half an hour before three of us walked to the restaurant: The Lettuce and Slug, which I understand is a chain across England. All food is half off on Monday nights, and evidently the occupants of this house dine there nearly every Monday. This led us to eye the menu all the more greedily as more guests trickled in, some of whom I recognized from Christian Union meetings--there ended up being about twenty in our party. Before the food arrived, we were bantering back and forth, debating whether England or the United States is superior--at one point, one of my arguments was met by the retort: "Pardon me? I can't hear you over our free healthcare!" Following a massive dish of appetizers that I split with two other guys, my main course--a chili burger--arrived, and needless to say, I was stuffed. After the meal, the rest of the guests were going to a bar and then to a club, but I had homework to take care of, so I walked back to my flat and busied myself with that for the rest of the night.
On Tuesday morning, we proofread assignments that we had prepared for class. Mine was on the attraction that draws people to history. After some more spit and polish, perhaps I'll send it out as a separate email. Then the weekly tapestry presentations commenced. Since this time period covered the mid-Victorian era, there was a substantial presentation on Charles Darwin and On the Origin of the Species, and with Darwin occupying such an established niche in modern culture, it was intriguing to try to imagine the impact of his work at the time of initial publication. There was also a presentation about the ordeals of Victorian dress. Another girl presented on the macabre practice at the time of posing the deceased for keepsake photographs, and I said a few words about the Crystal Palace. In the evening, I attended Small Group; I was the only one there apart from the group leader, so we discussed the commandment not to murder between ourselves before another guy showed up near the end. Then I returned to my flat and started reading George Eliot's Middlemarch.
My single Wednesday class was cancelled to allow the students time to work on their essays, so I spent Wednesday morning taking care of things around the flat and running an errand or two. In the evening, I met the same kid whose birthday I attended, Jared, for some soccer ("football" to the British, of course). We walked with a couple other guys from the house to the outdoor soccer "pitch" (field) where about twenty other players were assembled as well. Initially I had thought that this was a league of players that all attended the same church, but it may have actually been intramurals for the university. We played on astroturf under floodlights, since dusk was rapidly giving way to night. There were two half-field matches going on, with teams of about six players each. I had warned my comrades that I hadn't played soccer since middle school, and not only had I been mediocre at that time, but I had been mediocre by American standards. They reassured me that people came with a range of different skill levels. Stick to what you know, was their advice.
Needless to say, I was out of my league. I admit that I'm rusty on the rules and conventions of soccer, but it seemed like nobody was playing a set position and people ranged all over the pitch. The game seemed much more dynamic than my memories of its American counterpart. I played defense most of the time, with little distinction, although I managed to work in a couple of stabs throughout the course of the game. All the players rotated through the goal throughout the game, and at least I didn't get scored on during my short time as keeper--probably because the benefit of replacing me with a more competent player on the field gave my team an added edge. Most of the players were student age, but there were two or three adults, who seemed to be university faculty. As we played, a crowd of youngsters and a couple of teenagers gathered outside the pitch fence, waiting to use the field once our game was concluded. After about an hour of play, we were done; I think my team lost.
As I approached my apartment complex in the dark, I looked off to my right to see that the entire time I had been playing, I had only been about a hundred yards from the gate. I had seen that athletic pitch before, coming and going from my flat, but it was funny to think that I had to make a twenty-minute walk to get around the river that separated the pitch from the road. I finished up Wednesday by doing homework and talking to Karin via Skype.
Nothing much happened on Thursday morning; I slept in and puttered around my room. I went to class at 12:30 where we started our discussion of Middlemarch. George Eliot is our professor's favorite author, and he warned us beforehand that any dissatisfaction with the novel should be hidden from him. The picture he presented to us of George Eliot intrigued me--I knew nothing about her beforehand, so it was all new information to me. Evidently Eliot possessed a very sharp mind, and she managed to accomplish a monumental amount of work as the assistant editor of The Westminster Review, a publication that served 1850s England much it the same way as The New Yorker or Harper's in contemporary America. She published a prolific number of articles, covering a comprehensive array of contemporary thought and trends. On top of all of this, she took up fiction "on the side" at the recommendation of a friend; her books were well-received, but she only published eight novels over the course of twenty years, essentially the opposite of writers like Dickens or Trollope. In the intervals between novels, she would research her material exhaustively, traveling to her settings to take accurate notes and even learning Hebrew in order to better construct a Jewish character. Immediately I made the comparison to Stanley Kubrick and the obsessive quantity of research he would do in preparation for his films. There's something that attracts me to such singular and meticulous inquiry, although it also does seem simultaneously overwhelming and impersonal.
After class, I had just enough time to pack a bag, grab some food, and have a quick word with Karin before meeting two other students for a weekend excursion. We walked to the railway station in York and boarded a train outbound to Bath. I discovered that I had forgotten to bring my youth discount card, but as there was no time to return to my flat to get it, I figured I would just go with the flow and see what happened.
I spent much of the four-hour ride reading Middlemarch and observing some of our fellow travelers. I was most interested by a young man who sat across from me for an hour or so; as soon as the train departed, he hunched over a notebook and began feverishly copying notes of some sort from a webpage he had accessed on my cell phone. This student had an intense, even timid expression on his face; he was silent the entire time, and when he finally finished his writing, he promptly shut the notebook, put away his phone, and collapsed back in his seat, arms crossed, almost as if the completion of his task had stricken him with profound melancholy.
Thankfully none of the rail staff asked to see my youth pass for the entire transit, and we arrived in Bath with no difficulty at about 8:00. We checked into a hostel, which was associated with a pub and was located in the second and third floors of the building. We declined an invitation to join in celebrating one of the bartenders' birthday, and instead struck out to see Bath by night. It didn't take us long to figure out that Bath is a pretty small place, and pretty much everything worth seeing is concentrated in a relatively small area. We saw the complex of buildings built around the mineral springs that feed the eponymous mineral bath, as well as the elegant structure of the Bath Abbey. A couple of block over, we saw the Circus and the Royal Crescent, two stately Georgian apartment complexes built to host the rich who would travel to indulge in the mineral waters. As the names suggest, the Circus is a circular arrangement, and the Royal Crescent forms a half-ellipsoid atop a hill, overlooking much of the rest of Bath. Standing by the Crescent at night with lights dotting the horizon was a gorgeous sight, and it made me lament the fact that my girlfriend was 4,000 miles away. Back at the hostel, we sat up and talked for a while before calling it a day sometime after 11:00.
Friday dawned overcast and chilly; I awoke to the percussive sounds of the window washers' implements agains the bunk room windows. After a shower and some breakfast, I sent off a couple of letters, then the three of us checked out the Bath Abbey. It was a gorgeous structure, like most abbeys are. At 10:30, we joined a free walking tour of the city, who showed us around, explaining Bath's history from its foundation by the Romans and conquest by different factions (both foreign and domestic) to its more recent history as a resort town, with all the accompanying social machinations. From the sound of it, most of Bath's patrons were the idle rich, who would visit the bath daily to converse, gossip, and flirt, before returning to their lodgings, dressing in their finest costumes, and venturing back out to promenade around the city for the sole purpose of attracting attention and keeping up appearances. However, there was also some medical practice in Bath for those suffering rheumatic afflictions, and stories of the common people as well. Our tour guide was entartaining and very knowledgable, and despite chilly winds and intermittent rainfall, it was two hours very well spent.
After the tour, I grabbed some lunch and wandered into an indoor flea market, where I got a cheap secondhand copy of T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The three of us then headed to the Roman Bath museum for the afternoon.
I'll attempt to give the history of Bath in a nutshell. Rainwater falls on the Mendip Hills to the north of bath and percolates through the limestone in the region to a depth of 9000 feet, where it absorbs geothermal energy and finds its way back up through the rock to gush through a fault line in Somerset at the rate of a quarter million gallons per day, at a temperature of 109 degrees Fahrenheit. According to scientists, this whole process takes about 10,000 years. Prior to Roman presence in Britian, the site of the mineral springs was nothing more than a steamy marsh, venerated by the indigenous people for whatever mysterious force caused hot water to issue from the ground. With the Romans happened upon the mineral springs in the 1st Century AD, they ascribed a supernatural significance to the site as well, but also saw a chance to build a little piece of home in the cold, soggy wilderness that Britian must have seemed to one accustomed to life in Italy. (The Romans valued cleanliness, and public baths were a staple throughout the empire.) Thus the Romans built a complex on the site of the mineral spring, including not only a temple to Minerva--the Latin equivalent of the Greek goddess Athena, who shared similarities with the local god Sulis--but also a reservoir to collect the mineral water and a large enclosed bath house. An entire settlement developed around the hot spring complex, known as Aquae Sulis. This settlement existed in a couple different permutations until the Romans withdrew from Britain, when it fell into ruin. Like most old British cites, Aquae Sulis endured the cycle of Saxon, Norman, and local rule, with new structures and streets built on top of older ruins through each phase of development. Bath enjoyed a revival as a spa during the Elizabethan Period; new bathing facilities were constructed and the city enjoyed a rise in popularity that peaked in the late 1700s with patronage by the Royal Family. Since that time, the mineral springs are no longer used by patrons, but Bath remains a popular destination. Excavations and preservation efforts in the 1980s unearthed the remains of the last Roman bathing facility, twenty feet below the current street level, and these remains are now on display to the public.
The Bath Museum was outstanding. It led through what remains of the foundations of the temple area, all laid out in an engaging way, with screens situated at different points depicting what space would have looked like during Roman occupation. Artifacts uncovered at the site were displayed and accompanied by filmed demonstrations of the people and events that took place at the site. In contrast to the corny and unimpressive video segments one sees at many museums, the production values on these segments were top quality, with the actors frequently speaking in Latin. The whole exprience was tied together with a portable audio tour device, which visitors could use to listen to commentaries that corresponded to different parts of the museum. Not only were these devices availaible in a variety of languages, but they enabled visitors to pick and choose their topics of interest and replay them at will. The information about the site was thorough, covering the particulars of worship at the temple of Aquae Sulis, profiles of the various people who would have visited the baths. My favorite artfacts on display were small scraps of pewter on which the ancient Romans inscribed curses and threw into the bubbling reservoir. These curses solicited harsh punishments--bloody death, blindness, and skin disease--for seemingly petty transgressions, such as the theft of clothing.
It's hard to describe the site of the bath itself. Basically it was a large, elaborate in-ground pool, fed from the mineral spring by original Roman lead pipes. The arched roof that would have housed the structure 1700 years ago is long gone, but portions of it were on display in the museum. As I said, all the original drainage and plumbing installed by the Romans still exists and allows the bath to funcion just as it did in Roman times, although the bathwater has turned green from algae and obviously no one uses them anymore. Arranged around the main bath were a series of smaller rooms that housed other pools, sweat rooms, and furnaces, all contributing to an experience much like a modern Turkish bath.
The final thing I did in the museum was swill a glass of the mineral water, which anyone could obtain for 50 pence but comes free with museum admission. The water is sterilized and clear but comes out of a fountain still warm. The verdict: not bad. No different from some of the more robust drinking fountains I've used over the years.
After the museum, I spent about half an hour in a free art gallery in town, then walked over to a house that allegedly was inhabited by Jane Austen during one of many trips she made to Bath with her rheumatic brother. After puttering around town for a little bit, we got some takeout fare for dinner and settled down in a pub by the hostel do get some reading done. I ordered a pint of Bulmer's pear cider--my first alcohol over here, excluding wine for eucharist--to sip as I read Middlemarch, and managed to get a lot read despite the loud music and enthusiastic karaoke performances by other patrons. Shortly before 10:00, I returned to the pub beneath the hostel to join one of the other Calvin students who had left earlier to check out a live band that was performing that evening. Had I known before that it was a Blues Brothers tribute band (only appropriate, as the name of the pub was "Belushi's") I would have been there for the outset, but I remained for the last 45 min. or so, bobbing my head to such songs as "Mustang Sally", "Build Me Up Buttercup", and "Jailhouse Rock". It was more or less the perfect way to end the day.
After a quick shower and breakfast on Saturday, the three of us caught at train from Bath to Salisbury, then proceeded by bus to Amesbury. From Amesbury, a two-and-a-half mile walk along green pastures and sunlit roads brought us to the imposing site of Stonehenge. The Stonehenge site is much less built up than Bath, but it was still impressive. After passing through a reception area, one walks beneath the highway and takes a circular path along the Bronze Age monument. You can't get any closer to the monument than about probably 100 yards, but it remains impressive nevertheless.
Unlike Bath, Stonehenge predates the Roman occupation by nearly 3,000 years. The first monument erected on the site was a circular formation of upright timbers surrounded by a low trench, and over the next 1,000 years, large stones were brought to the site and arranged in a series of about seven different configurations, all roughly circular, with some stones simply standing like upright monoliths while others support horizontal lintels. Two types of stone were used to construct the monument; one type, called bluestone, was transported all the way Wales--this stone is unique in that it always feels warmer to the touch than other stone, which perhaps explains its usage in the monument. The largest stone at Stonehenge weighs in at seven tons; the stones stand erect with one-third of their total length buried underground, and the best theories that experts have on the construction of the monument boil down to simple machinery and a lot of brute strength. The builders of the monument, as well as its intended purpose, remain shrouded in mystery, although different theories abound--some of the more extreme theories credit construction of the monument to Merlin, the devil, and extraterrestrials.
After spending a good hour and a half at Stonehenge, we made our way back to Salisbury, where I checked out the local cathedral. At this point, a realization that had slowly been dawning upon me for the last month suddenly sprang into crystal clear focus: the exploration of history is largely a matter of looking at different arrangements of rocks piled on top of other rocks--cathedrals, walls, abbeys, castles, ancient ruins. I don't mean to imply that this makes historical research more enriching, but perhaps lends the whole affair an air of regal simplicity.
To resume, the Salisbury cathedral was imposing, with a central spire--the tallest church spire in England--jutting high into the sky. One side of the cathedral was obscured by scaffolding, part of a restoration effort begun in the 1980s and scheduled to continue until 2015. With admission at the rate of a discretionary donation, I paid one pound to enter the cathedral and gawk. An added bonus that I didn't find out about until I arrived at the cathedral was one of four original copies of the Magna Carta on display in the Chapter House, an octagonal building adjoining the nave of the cathedral. The Magna Carta was a very plain document to behold---small, neat lines of Latin script covering a sheet of parchment smaller than the front page of a newspaper. I was more impressed by the architecture of the chapter house, and was particularly drawn to small sculptures running along the walls depicting Old Testament stories, from the Creation to Joseph's reunion with Jacob in Egypt.
We made it back to Bath with no problem, stepping on the train at the last minute. On this trip I was reprimanded by one of the rail staff for not having my youth pass. Back in Bath, we recovered our luggage from the hostel and sat in a coffee shop for an hour before boarding our first train back to York at 7:00. At this point my luck ran out, and being unable to produce my railcard, I had to purchase an alternative fare back to York, via three or four different connections. The employee who did this transaction for me emphasized that he was giving me the best possible deal, because the employees on the later trains were less understanding than he. Another employee who was standing nearby--apparently just to watch--chimed in that the other staff were "Hitlers" compared to them, a point which he was quick to reiterate twice or thrice during the transaction. Thus I bade farewell to my two companions at a smaller station where I waited half on hour for a connecting train. There I came face-to-face with one such "Hitler"--in this case, a grey-haired, soft spoken Indian man.
This train left me in Birmingham, where I was supposed to catch a connection to Sheffield. I frantically searched for the appropriate train on the timetables in the station, and after fifteen minutes, I learned at an information desk that the next connection to Sheffield wouldn't depart until 8:37 the next morning. The next hour I spent wandering around the heart of Birmingham, searching in vain for the bus station before resigning myself to buying another train fare, and then looking for lodging for the night. Thankfully one hotel provided me with a contact list for several other hotels in the area, and I was able to book a room without much trouble. As I recounted my situation to my cab driver on my way to the hotel, we both conceded that the best course of action was to handle things philosophically (although in cab driver lingo).
I got six hours of sleep in a double-bed at the hotel, caught a taxi back to the train station, and spent most of the ride to York reading Middlemarch. Needless to say, I was greatly relieved to be back "home" shortly past noon today.
Whew! Another long email. Thanks everyone to all your patience in bearing with me through these messages--perhaps this coming week will be less eventful, and ergo easier to type out. I hope all of you are well!
I miss you all and think of you frequently. Take care!
-John Morton
The spring weather has not abated, and while a history paper keeps me in close proximity to my laptop at the moment, once class obligations abate somewhat, I hope to enjoy the weather to the fullest.
I left off on Monday morning.
On Monday night, I joined one of my British pals (or "mates") for his birthday dinner. After class, I met him near campus and walked to a house that he shares with six or seven other students. It was kind of a large, rambling terraced building that probably served as apartments in the past, cluttered with clothing, food containers, empty bottles, and the other paraphernalia that piles up in college housing. We played videogames for maybe half an hour before three of us walked to the restaurant: The Lettuce and Slug, which I understand is a chain across England. All food is half off on Monday nights, and evidently the occupants of this house dine there nearly every Monday. This led us to eye the menu all the more greedily as more guests trickled in, some of whom I recognized from Christian Union meetings--there ended up being about twenty in our party. Before the food arrived, we were bantering back and forth, debating whether England or the United States is superior--at one point, one of my arguments was met by the retort: "Pardon me? I can't hear you over our free healthcare!" Following a massive dish of appetizers that I split with two other guys, my main course--a chili burger--arrived, and needless to say, I was stuffed. After the meal, the rest of the guests were going to a bar and then to a club, but I had homework to take care of, so I walked back to my flat and busied myself with that for the rest of the night.
On Tuesday morning, we proofread assignments that we had prepared for class. Mine was on the attraction that draws people to history. After some more spit and polish, perhaps I'll send it out as a separate email. Then the weekly tapestry presentations commenced. Since this time period covered the mid-Victorian era, there was a substantial presentation on Charles Darwin and On the Origin of the Species, and with Darwin occupying such an established niche in modern culture, it was intriguing to try to imagine the impact of his work at the time of initial publication. There was also a presentation about the ordeals of Victorian dress. Another girl presented on the macabre practice at the time of posing the deceased for keepsake photographs, and I said a few words about the Crystal Palace. In the evening, I attended Small Group; I was the only one there apart from the group leader, so we discussed the commandment not to murder between ourselves before another guy showed up near the end. Then I returned to my flat and started reading George Eliot's Middlemarch.
My single Wednesday class was cancelled to allow the students time to work on their essays, so I spent Wednesday morning taking care of things around the flat and running an errand or two. In the evening, I met the same kid whose birthday I attended, Jared, for some soccer ("football" to the British, of course). We walked with a couple other guys from the house to the outdoor soccer "pitch" (field) where about twenty other players were assembled as well. Initially I had thought that this was a league of players that all attended the same church, but it may have actually been intramurals for the university. We played on astroturf under floodlights, since dusk was rapidly giving way to night. There were two half-field matches going on, with teams of about six players each. I had warned my comrades that I hadn't played soccer since middle school, and not only had I been mediocre at that time, but I had been mediocre by American standards. They reassured me that people came with a range of different skill levels. Stick to what you know, was their advice.
Needless to say, I was out of my league. I admit that I'm rusty on the rules and conventions of soccer, but it seemed like nobody was playing a set position and people ranged all over the pitch. The game seemed much more dynamic than my memories of its American counterpart. I played defense most of the time, with little distinction, although I managed to work in a couple of stabs throughout the course of the game. All the players rotated through the goal throughout the game, and at least I didn't get scored on during my short time as keeper--probably because the benefit of replacing me with a more competent player on the field gave my team an added edge. Most of the players were student age, but there were two or three adults, who seemed to be university faculty. As we played, a crowd of youngsters and a couple of teenagers gathered outside the pitch fence, waiting to use the field once our game was concluded. After about an hour of play, we were done; I think my team lost.
As I approached my apartment complex in the dark, I looked off to my right to see that the entire time I had been playing, I had only been about a hundred yards from the gate. I had seen that athletic pitch before, coming and going from my flat, but it was funny to think that I had to make a twenty-minute walk to get around the river that separated the pitch from the road. I finished up Wednesday by doing homework and talking to Karin via Skype.
Nothing much happened on Thursday morning; I slept in and puttered around my room. I went to class at 12:30 where we started our discussion of Middlemarch. George Eliot is our professor's favorite author, and he warned us beforehand that any dissatisfaction with the novel should be hidden from him. The picture he presented to us of George Eliot intrigued me--I knew nothing about her beforehand, so it was all new information to me. Evidently Eliot possessed a very sharp mind, and she managed to accomplish a monumental amount of work as the assistant editor of The Westminster Review, a publication that served 1850s England much it the same way as The New Yorker or Harper's in contemporary America. She published a prolific number of articles, covering a comprehensive array of contemporary thought and trends. On top of all of this, she took up fiction "on the side" at the recommendation of a friend; her books were well-received, but she only published eight novels over the course of twenty years, essentially the opposite of writers like Dickens or Trollope. In the intervals between novels, she would research her material exhaustively, traveling to her settings to take accurate notes and even learning Hebrew in order to better construct a Jewish character. Immediately I made the comparison to Stanley Kubrick and the obsessive quantity of research he would do in preparation for his films. There's something that attracts me to such singular and meticulous inquiry, although it also does seem simultaneously overwhelming and impersonal.
After class, I had just enough time to pack a bag, grab some food, and have a quick word with Karin before meeting two other students for a weekend excursion. We walked to the railway station in York and boarded a train outbound to Bath. I discovered that I had forgotten to bring my youth discount card, but as there was no time to return to my flat to get it, I figured I would just go with the flow and see what happened.
I spent much of the four-hour ride reading Middlemarch and observing some of our fellow travelers. I was most interested by a young man who sat across from me for an hour or so; as soon as the train departed, he hunched over a notebook and began feverishly copying notes of some sort from a webpage he had accessed on my cell phone. This student had an intense, even timid expression on his face; he was silent the entire time, and when he finally finished his writing, he promptly shut the notebook, put away his phone, and collapsed back in his seat, arms crossed, almost as if the completion of his task had stricken him with profound melancholy.
Thankfully none of the rail staff asked to see my youth pass for the entire transit, and we arrived in Bath with no difficulty at about 8:00. We checked into a hostel, which was associated with a pub and was located in the second and third floors of the building. We declined an invitation to join in celebrating one of the bartenders' birthday, and instead struck out to see Bath by night. It didn't take us long to figure out that Bath is a pretty small place, and pretty much everything worth seeing is concentrated in a relatively small area. We saw the complex of buildings built around the mineral springs that feed the eponymous mineral bath, as well as the elegant structure of the Bath Abbey. A couple of block over, we saw the Circus and the Royal Crescent, two stately Georgian apartment complexes built to host the rich who would travel to indulge in the mineral waters. As the names suggest, the Circus is a circular arrangement, and the Royal Crescent forms a half-ellipsoid atop a hill, overlooking much of the rest of Bath. Standing by the Crescent at night with lights dotting the horizon was a gorgeous sight, and it made me lament the fact that my girlfriend was 4,000 miles away. Back at the hostel, we sat up and talked for a while before calling it a day sometime after 11:00.
Friday dawned overcast and chilly; I awoke to the percussive sounds of the window washers' implements agains the bunk room windows. After a shower and some breakfast, I sent off a couple of letters, then the three of us checked out the Bath Abbey. It was a gorgeous structure, like most abbeys are. At 10:30, we joined a free walking tour of the city, who showed us around, explaining Bath's history from its foundation by the Romans and conquest by different factions (both foreign and domestic) to its more recent history as a resort town, with all the accompanying social machinations. From the sound of it, most of Bath's patrons were the idle rich, who would visit the bath daily to converse, gossip, and flirt, before returning to their lodgings, dressing in their finest costumes, and venturing back out to promenade around the city for the sole purpose of attracting attention and keeping up appearances. However, there was also some medical practice in Bath for those suffering rheumatic afflictions, and stories of the common people as well. Our tour guide was entartaining and very knowledgable, and despite chilly winds and intermittent rainfall, it was two hours very well spent.
After the tour, I grabbed some lunch and wandered into an indoor flea market, where I got a cheap secondhand copy of T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The three of us then headed to the Roman Bath museum for the afternoon.
I'll attempt to give the history of Bath in a nutshell. Rainwater falls on the Mendip Hills to the north of bath and percolates through the limestone in the region to a depth of 9000 feet, where it absorbs geothermal energy and finds its way back up through the rock to gush through a fault line in Somerset at the rate of a quarter million gallons per day, at a temperature of 109 degrees Fahrenheit. According to scientists, this whole process takes about 10,000 years. Prior to Roman presence in Britian, the site of the mineral springs was nothing more than a steamy marsh, venerated by the indigenous people for whatever mysterious force caused hot water to issue from the ground. With the Romans happened upon the mineral springs in the 1st Century AD, they ascribed a supernatural significance to the site as well, but also saw a chance to build a little piece of home in the cold, soggy wilderness that Britian must have seemed to one accustomed to life in Italy. (The Romans valued cleanliness, and public baths were a staple throughout the empire.) Thus the Romans built a complex on the site of the mineral spring, including not only a temple to Minerva--the Latin equivalent of the Greek goddess Athena, who shared similarities with the local god Sulis--but also a reservoir to collect the mineral water and a large enclosed bath house. An entire settlement developed around the hot spring complex, known as Aquae Sulis. This settlement existed in a couple different permutations until the Romans withdrew from Britain, when it fell into ruin. Like most old British cites, Aquae Sulis endured the cycle of Saxon, Norman, and local rule, with new structures and streets built on top of older ruins through each phase of development. Bath enjoyed a revival as a spa during the Elizabethan Period; new bathing facilities were constructed and the city enjoyed a rise in popularity that peaked in the late 1700s with patronage by the Royal Family. Since that time, the mineral springs are no longer used by patrons, but Bath remains a popular destination. Excavations and preservation efforts in the 1980s unearthed the remains of the last Roman bathing facility, twenty feet below the current street level, and these remains are now on display to the public.
The Bath Museum was outstanding. It led through what remains of the foundations of the temple area, all laid out in an engaging way, with screens situated at different points depicting what space would have looked like during Roman occupation. Artifacts uncovered at the site were displayed and accompanied by filmed demonstrations of the people and events that took place at the site. In contrast to the corny and unimpressive video segments one sees at many museums, the production values on these segments were top quality, with the actors frequently speaking in Latin. The whole exprience was tied together with a portable audio tour device, which visitors could use to listen to commentaries that corresponded to different parts of the museum. Not only were these devices availaible in a variety of languages, but they enabled visitors to pick and choose their topics of interest and replay them at will. The information about the site was thorough, covering the particulars of worship at the temple of Aquae Sulis, profiles of the various people who would have visited the baths. My favorite artfacts on display were small scraps of pewter on which the ancient Romans inscribed curses and threw into the bubbling reservoir. These curses solicited harsh punishments--bloody death, blindness, and skin disease--for seemingly petty transgressions, such as the theft of clothing.
It's hard to describe the site of the bath itself. Basically it was a large, elaborate in-ground pool, fed from the mineral spring by original Roman lead pipes. The arched roof that would have housed the structure 1700 years ago is long gone, but portions of it were on display in the museum. As I said, all the original drainage and plumbing installed by the Romans still exists and allows the bath to funcion just as it did in Roman times, although the bathwater has turned green from algae and obviously no one uses them anymore. Arranged around the main bath were a series of smaller rooms that housed other pools, sweat rooms, and furnaces, all contributing to an experience much like a modern Turkish bath.
The final thing I did in the museum was swill a glass of the mineral water, which anyone could obtain for 50 pence but comes free with museum admission. The water is sterilized and clear but comes out of a fountain still warm. The verdict: not bad. No different from some of the more robust drinking fountains I've used over the years.
After the museum, I spent about half an hour in a free art gallery in town, then walked over to a house that allegedly was inhabited by Jane Austen during one of many trips she made to Bath with her rheumatic brother. After puttering around town for a little bit, we got some takeout fare for dinner and settled down in a pub by the hostel do get some reading done. I ordered a pint of Bulmer's pear cider--my first alcohol over here, excluding wine for eucharist--to sip as I read Middlemarch, and managed to get a lot read despite the loud music and enthusiastic karaoke performances by other patrons. Shortly before 10:00, I returned to the pub beneath the hostel to join one of the other Calvin students who had left earlier to check out a live band that was performing that evening. Had I known before that it was a Blues Brothers tribute band (only appropriate, as the name of the pub was "Belushi's") I would have been there for the outset, but I remained for the last 45 min. or so, bobbing my head to such songs as "Mustang Sally", "Build Me Up Buttercup", and "Jailhouse Rock". It was more or less the perfect way to end the day.
After a quick shower and breakfast on Saturday, the three of us caught at train from Bath to Salisbury, then proceeded by bus to Amesbury. From Amesbury, a two-and-a-half mile walk along green pastures and sunlit roads brought us to the imposing site of Stonehenge. The Stonehenge site is much less built up than Bath, but it was still impressive. After passing through a reception area, one walks beneath the highway and takes a circular path along the Bronze Age monument. You can't get any closer to the monument than about probably 100 yards, but it remains impressive nevertheless.
Unlike Bath, Stonehenge predates the Roman occupation by nearly 3,000 years. The first monument erected on the site was a circular formation of upright timbers surrounded by a low trench, and over the next 1,000 years, large stones were brought to the site and arranged in a series of about seven different configurations, all roughly circular, with some stones simply standing like upright monoliths while others support horizontal lintels. Two types of stone were used to construct the monument; one type, called bluestone, was transported all the way Wales--this stone is unique in that it always feels warmer to the touch than other stone, which perhaps explains its usage in the monument. The largest stone at Stonehenge weighs in at seven tons; the stones stand erect with one-third of their total length buried underground, and the best theories that experts have on the construction of the monument boil down to simple machinery and a lot of brute strength. The builders of the monument, as well as its intended purpose, remain shrouded in mystery, although different theories abound--some of the more extreme theories credit construction of the monument to Merlin, the devil, and extraterrestrials.
After spending a good hour and a half at Stonehenge, we made our way back to Salisbury, where I checked out the local cathedral. At this point, a realization that had slowly been dawning upon me for the last month suddenly sprang into crystal clear focus: the exploration of history is largely a matter of looking at different arrangements of rocks piled on top of other rocks--cathedrals, walls, abbeys, castles, ancient ruins. I don't mean to imply that this makes historical research more enriching, but perhaps lends the whole affair an air of regal simplicity.
To resume, the Salisbury cathedral was imposing, with a central spire--the tallest church spire in England--jutting high into the sky. One side of the cathedral was obscured by scaffolding, part of a restoration effort begun in the 1980s and scheduled to continue until 2015. With admission at the rate of a discretionary donation, I paid one pound to enter the cathedral and gawk. An added bonus that I didn't find out about until I arrived at the cathedral was one of four original copies of the Magna Carta on display in the Chapter House, an octagonal building adjoining the nave of the cathedral. The Magna Carta was a very plain document to behold---small, neat lines of Latin script covering a sheet of parchment smaller than the front page of a newspaper. I was more impressed by the architecture of the chapter house, and was particularly drawn to small sculptures running along the walls depicting Old Testament stories, from the Creation to Joseph's reunion with Jacob in Egypt.
We made it back to Bath with no problem, stepping on the train at the last minute. On this trip I was reprimanded by one of the rail staff for not having my youth pass. Back in Bath, we recovered our luggage from the hostel and sat in a coffee shop for an hour before boarding our first train back to York at 7:00. At this point my luck ran out, and being unable to produce my railcard, I had to purchase an alternative fare back to York, via three or four different connections. The employee who did this transaction for me emphasized that he was giving me the best possible deal, because the employees on the later trains were less understanding than he. Another employee who was standing nearby--apparently just to watch--chimed in that the other staff were "Hitlers" compared to them, a point which he was quick to reiterate twice or thrice during the transaction. Thus I bade farewell to my two companions at a smaller station where I waited half on hour for a connecting train. There I came face-to-face with one such "Hitler"--in this case, a grey-haired, soft spoken Indian man.
This train left me in Birmingham, where I was supposed to catch a connection to Sheffield. I frantically searched for the appropriate train on the timetables in the station, and after fifteen minutes, I learned at an information desk that the next connection to Sheffield wouldn't depart until 8:37 the next morning. The next hour I spent wandering around the heart of Birmingham, searching in vain for the bus station before resigning myself to buying another train fare, and then looking for lodging for the night. Thankfully one hotel provided me with a contact list for several other hotels in the area, and I was able to book a room without much trouble. As I recounted my situation to my cab driver on my way to the hotel, we both conceded that the best course of action was to handle things philosophically (although in cab driver lingo).
I got six hours of sleep in a double-bed at the hotel, caught a taxi back to the train station, and spent most of the ride to York reading Middlemarch. Needless to say, I was greatly relieved to be back "home" shortly past noon today.
Whew! Another long email. Thanks everyone to all your patience in bearing with me through these messages--perhaps this coming week will be less eventful, and ergo easier to type out. I hope all of you are well!
I miss you all and think of you frequently. Take care!
-John Morton
Sunshine! (March 8, 2010)
Hello all,
As the title of this epistle may suggest, spring has sprung upon jolly old England during the past week. This has led to my discovery that the window in my room does, indeed, face east, meaning that I get a full barrage of of sunshine in the mornings...at times I almost get too warm. Certainly didn't expect that when I was contemplating this trip, but hey, far be it from me to complain.
I last left off following a day excursion to Haworth. While Skyping with my girlfriend later that evening, she complained of headaches, nausea, and other aches over her body. These symptoms had matured into an unpleasant case of mono by the time we spoke the next day.
My single Monday class was more lively than usual--not because Great Expectations took on some new excitement, but rather because I chose to sit by the window. At one point I heard what sounded like shouting from outside, and looked down upon the street running alongside the academic building and witnessed the final blows of a fight occuring in the street. A man who appeared to be the proprietor of the small take-out place near campus drove his fist into another man's collarbone, while three other bystanders tried to separate the two. The fight broke off, with the man who had been struck shouting some parting remarks at the take-out proprietor before making his way down the street. Within ten minutes, a pair of police officers had appeared on the scene, and I saw them questioning the proprietor, who then took them outside and re-enacted, with one of the bystanders, how the fight had taken place. This questioning continued for perhaps half an hour, throughout which I couldn't help but peek out the window every minute or so. I kind of wish I had witnessed the whole thing, terrible though it sounds.
Tuesday brought my British History/Culture class, as usual. I should explain how this class works: throughout the semester, the class is collaboratively working on creating a "tapestry", as a sort of imitation of the Bayeux Tapestry (although hopefully less biased than it's predecessor). The class has been divided into five groups dedicated to politics, religion, society, science, and art (I am a member of the art group), and each group makes a weekly collaborative presentation on the advances of their topic of interest during the time period we study for that week, with some sort of tangible component to affix to the large sheets of paper that comprise our "tapestry". Our class period on Tuesday was spent reviewing the progress we had made thus far on the tapestry and trying to discern patterns, trends, and other relationships throughout 1700 years of British history we've covered so far.
On Tuesday night I attended small group as usual; the "lads" and I discussed the implications of preserving the purity of the body as God's temple in correlation with the Lord's admonition not to commit adultery.
Wednesday's class on Empires was enjoyable, as the professor just showed a video thab basically gave a synopsis of the big events in Roman history. Wednesday afternoon passed pleasantly as the preceding days had--reading back and forth between Great Expectations (for class) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for pleasure), fooling around on the ukelele, contemplating my spring break itinerary, and keeping Karin company as she rested up. On Wednesday evening, I took a bus to the University of York campus (not to be confused with York St. Johns, the university where I'm studying--it's my understanding that YSJ is the party school, and that learning occurs at the University of York) for a performance of some cantatas by Bach. The concert was preceded by a lecture by the Chamber Orchestra conductor; to all appearances, I was the only one in attendance at this lecture under the age of thirty, and I got a good view not only of the lecture, but several balding British heads in the rows ahead of me. The lecture was interesting, although much of it went over my head (which, thankfully, is balding at a much slower rate than those of the other attendees at the lecture)--the conductor expounded on the multiple layers of meaning that Bach wrote into his "Magnificat", managing to communicate different things to listeners with different levels of music education all in the midst of the same piece. He explained how certain sequences or patterns of notes were commonly understood to communicate a specific idea at the time, how Bach either used or contradicted these conventions to draw attention to specific parts of the piece, and even commented that the number of measures or notes in certains segments of the "Magnificat" conveyed a numerological significance. What impressed me the most was his remarks about symbology--if one were to visualize the notation of what he were hearing at a certain point in the piece, the configuration of the notes on the page formed a representation of a crucifix.
The concert itself was pretty good; my only complaint was stomach pains of some sort throughout the first half of the concert (probably due to having eaten my dinner too quickly). During the first half, the orchestra and choir performed Cantatas 110 and 191, and the "Magnificat" (BWV 243) comprised the second half. All three pieces were written for Christmas evensong services throughout Bach's tenure as Director of Music for the churches of Leipzig. The lecturer had also explained that the resources available to Bach in Leipzig allowed him to explore new forms of music he had been studying in recent years and mount his pieces for larger, more capable ensembles. Needless to say, the performance was magnificent.
Our Thursday afternoon literature class had us divided into groups, preparing pitches for certain scenes of Great Expectations as if we were to film the novel. My Grammar and Text class passed by slowly but surely, reprising knowledge that wasn't really new to me, but I feel I will benefit from the review. I attended the Christian Union worship service in the evening--a local youth pastor gave a message, which I don't quite remember. Throughout the service someone was distributing Scandinavian gummy candies the likes of which I had never seen before--they were formed in the shape of basic female figures, just curvaceous enough to elicit a double-take and a subsequent chuckle. I hung around to chat with people and accompanied some of them to hang out in the Student Union for a little bit following the service. Upon my return to my flat, I was thrilled to receive word that my RA application had been approved by Calvin Residence Life, so I am now looking forward to acting as an RA in Schultze-Eldersveld next year.
Friday morning was spent running a couple errands in the city center before returning to the flat, sneaking a nap, and striking out of the final leg of Great Expectations. In the evening, I heated up some frozen vegetables and brought them as my humble contribution to a potluck for all the Calvin students living in my apartment complex. The food was good, since we're lucky enough to boast a couple of competent cooks amongst our ranks. Afterwards, back to the flat for the night.
On Saturday, I boarded a charter bus at 8:30, read a chapter or two of Dickens, napped for about an hour and a half, and found myself in the town of Lincoln, next to a pub with probably the best sign I've ever seen and with the spires of a cathedral towering nearby All the Calvin group then walked to the public library in Lincoln where we viewed a gallery dedicated to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. We enjoyed a private lecture by one of the custodians who gave us a detailed description of the gallery and its significance. Tennyson was quite famous by the time he was appointed poet laureate in 1850, and as a result he was in correspondence with many prominent figures of 19th-century England. After his death, his wife and son painstakingly catalogued and preserved as many of his possessions as they could...that is, as many of his possessions that cast him in a good light; letters that revealed details about his epilepsy and other embarrassing details were collected and destroyed, and Mrs. Tennyson carefully bowdlerized her jounals of any references that could be misinterpreted to be unsavory in any way. As a result of this very self-conscious preservation of initiative, many of Tennyson's personal effects, such as his numerous pipes and a couple articles of clothing, a large body of his correspondence, items associated with his terminal illness and death, and nearly all of his personal library are preserved in good condition. Following the lecture, we were permitted to peruse his library of over 4,000 well-preserved volumes and examine some of his personal documents. I held in my hands an autographed first edition of Through the Looking-Glass, given as a gift from Lewis Carroll to Tennyson, a first edition of On the Origin of the Species, hand-written notes from Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, and early drafts of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (the latter documents were sheathed in plastic, but nevertheless!). Words can't describe the thrill this gave me.
After the gallery, we were released to wander Lincoln on our own. Inevitably I was drawn to Lincoln cathedral. Earlier we had been told that we would not be permitted to enter the cathedral at all, because none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury was visiting for some special occasion and only ticket holders would be admitted to the cathedral. I wandered around the exterior of the structure, snapping pictures of the architecture (my favorite feature was a carving of the damned writhing in infernal agony and casting desperate glances at a corresponding panel of saints enjoying the empyrean) and listening longingly to the sounds of the choir emanating from within. I made my way to one of the entrances set into the transept, and while loitering there, taking pictures, I struck up a conversation with the man ushering at the entrance. Upon discovering that I was a student studying abroad, he nonchalantly asked me if I wanted to attend the service. My heart leapt; I said I didn't have time to sit through the whole service before I had to rendezvous with the rest of my group, but asked if I could just step inside and get a look at the place. He obliged me, with the condition that I didn't wander into the service--"...otherwise, I'll get in trouble!"--and discreetly let me in the side door. Needless to say, the interior of the cathedral was stunning--the sun was illuminating the stained glass, and the organ echoed through the structure, playing an arrangement that I recognized as the "Gravement" from Bach's "Fantasia in G Major". I took numerous pictures, including one of the Lincoln Imp, a carved figure of a demon that serves as de facto mascot for the town of Lincoln. I thanked my benefactor profusely, and walked around the rest of the cathedral, pausing to allow right-of-way to a procession of white-robed clergy preparing for the ceremony. On the far side of the cathedral I encountered a large bronze statue of Tennyson, morosely contemplating a flower, with a dog waiting faithfully at his side.
I repeated the reading and napping procedure for the return ride to York and spent the rest of the evening finishing up Great Expectations. I began the next day, Sunday, by attending Communion at York Minster (the second separate cathedral I'd entered in as many days, I reflected gleefully); rather than taking place in the choir like the previous two services I had attended at the Minster, this service occurred in the towering nave, or central section, of the cathedral, which I had previously only glimpsed. Like the Lincoln Cathedral, the Minster was illuminated by the sun streaming through the stained glass, and the gorgeous setting, combined with the gorgeous music of the choir, made for a very moving service. Following the service, I got some lunch in town and returned to my flat for an afternoon of reading up on the Roman empire and proofreading a document for my girlfriend. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call from my parents, whose long search for a workable international calling option finally paid off. As soon as I woke up this morning, I received even more warm tidings from back home in the form of a brief video greeting from the guys on my floor at my Calvin dormitory.
That's all for this time. Once again, I hope everything is going well for all you who are reading this. With spring just beginning to reveal herself, I wish the best experience of sunny afternoons, returning flowers, and fun-filled Spring Break adventures to you all. Take care!
Sincerely,
John Morton
As the title of this epistle may suggest, spring has sprung upon jolly old England during the past week. This has led to my discovery that the window in my room does, indeed, face east, meaning that I get a full barrage of of sunshine in the mornings...at times I almost get too warm. Certainly didn't expect that when I was contemplating this trip, but hey, far be it from me to complain.
I last left off following a day excursion to Haworth. While Skyping with my girlfriend later that evening, she complained of headaches, nausea, and other aches over her body. These symptoms had matured into an unpleasant case of mono by the time we spoke the next day.
My single Monday class was more lively than usual--not because Great Expectations took on some new excitement, but rather because I chose to sit by the window. At one point I heard what sounded like shouting from outside, and looked down upon the street running alongside the academic building and witnessed the final blows of a fight occuring in the street. A man who appeared to be the proprietor of the small take-out place near campus drove his fist into another man's collarbone, while three other bystanders tried to separate the two. The fight broke off, with the man who had been struck shouting some parting remarks at the take-out proprietor before making his way down the street. Within ten minutes, a pair of police officers had appeared on the scene, and I saw them questioning the proprietor, who then took them outside and re-enacted, with one of the bystanders, how the fight had taken place. This questioning continued for perhaps half an hour, throughout which I couldn't help but peek out the window every minute or so. I kind of wish I had witnessed the whole thing, terrible though it sounds.
Tuesday brought my British History/Culture class, as usual. I should explain how this class works: throughout the semester, the class is collaboratively working on creating a "tapestry", as a sort of imitation of the Bayeux Tapestry (although hopefully less biased than it's predecessor). The class has been divided into five groups dedicated to politics, religion, society, science, and art (I am a member of the art group), and each group makes a weekly collaborative presentation on the advances of their topic of interest during the time period we study for that week, with some sort of tangible component to affix to the large sheets of paper that comprise our "tapestry". Our class period on Tuesday was spent reviewing the progress we had made thus far on the tapestry and trying to discern patterns, trends, and other relationships throughout 1700 years of British history we've covered so far.
On Tuesday night I attended small group as usual; the "lads" and I discussed the implications of preserving the purity of the body as God's temple in correlation with the Lord's admonition not to commit adultery.
Wednesday's class on Empires was enjoyable, as the professor just showed a video thab basically gave a synopsis of the big events in Roman history. Wednesday afternoon passed pleasantly as the preceding days had--reading back and forth between Great Expectations (for class) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for pleasure), fooling around on the ukelele, contemplating my spring break itinerary, and keeping Karin company as she rested up. On Wednesday evening, I took a bus to the University of York campus (not to be confused with York St. Johns, the university where I'm studying--it's my understanding that YSJ is the party school, and that learning occurs at the University of York) for a performance of some cantatas by Bach. The concert was preceded by a lecture by the Chamber Orchestra conductor; to all appearances, I was the only one in attendance at this lecture under the age of thirty, and I got a good view not only of the lecture, but several balding British heads in the rows ahead of me. The lecture was interesting, although much of it went over my head (which, thankfully, is balding at a much slower rate than those of the other attendees at the lecture)--the conductor expounded on the multiple layers of meaning that Bach wrote into his "Magnificat", managing to communicate different things to listeners with different levels of music education all in the midst of the same piece. He explained how certain sequences or patterns of notes were commonly understood to communicate a specific idea at the time, how Bach either used or contradicted these conventions to draw attention to specific parts of the piece, and even commented that the number of measures or notes in certains segments of the "Magnificat" conveyed a numerological significance. What impressed me the most was his remarks about symbology--if one were to visualize the notation of what he were hearing at a certain point in the piece, the configuration of the notes on the page formed a representation of a crucifix.
The concert itself was pretty good; my only complaint was stomach pains of some sort throughout the first half of the concert (probably due to having eaten my dinner too quickly). During the first half, the orchestra and choir performed Cantatas 110 and 191, and the "Magnificat" (BWV 243) comprised the second half. All three pieces were written for Christmas evensong services throughout Bach's tenure as Director of Music for the churches of Leipzig. The lecturer had also explained that the resources available to Bach in Leipzig allowed him to explore new forms of music he had been studying in recent years and mount his pieces for larger, more capable ensembles. Needless to say, the performance was magnificent.
Our Thursday afternoon literature class had us divided into groups, preparing pitches for certain scenes of Great Expectations as if we were to film the novel. My Grammar and Text class passed by slowly but surely, reprising knowledge that wasn't really new to me, but I feel I will benefit from the review. I attended the Christian Union worship service in the evening--a local youth pastor gave a message, which I don't quite remember. Throughout the service someone was distributing Scandinavian gummy candies the likes of which I had never seen before--they were formed in the shape of basic female figures, just curvaceous enough to elicit a double-take and a subsequent chuckle. I hung around to chat with people and accompanied some of them to hang out in the Student Union for a little bit following the service. Upon my return to my flat, I was thrilled to receive word that my RA application had been approved by Calvin Residence Life, so I am now looking forward to acting as an RA in Schultze-Eldersveld next year.
Friday morning was spent running a couple errands in the city center before returning to the flat, sneaking a nap, and striking out of the final leg of Great Expectations. In the evening, I heated up some frozen vegetables and brought them as my humble contribution to a potluck for all the Calvin students living in my apartment complex. The food was good, since we're lucky enough to boast a couple of competent cooks amongst our ranks. Afterwards, back to the flat for the night.
On Saturday, I boarded a charter bus at 8:30, read a chapter or two of Dickens, napped for about an hour and a half, and found myself in the town of Lincoln, next to a pub with probably the best sign I've ever seen and with the spires of a cathedral towering nearby All the Calvin group then walked to the public library in Lincoln where we viewed a gallery dedicated to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. We enjoyed a private lecture by one of the custodians who gave us a detailed description of the gallery and its significance. Tennyson was quite famous by the time he was appointed poet laureate in 1850, and as a result he was in correspondence with many prominent figures of 19th-century England. After his death, his wife and son painstakingly catalogued and preserved as many of his possessions as they could...that is, as many of his possessions that cast him in a good light; letters that revealed details about his epilepsy and other embarrassing details were collected and destroyed, and Mrs. Tennyson carefully bowdlerized her jounals of any references that could be misinterpreted to be unsavory in any way. As a result of this very self-conscious preservation of initiative, many of Tennyson's personal effects, such as his numerous pipes and a couple articles of clothing, a large body of his correspondence, items associated with his terminal illness and death, and nearly all of his personal library are preserved in good condition. Following the lecture, we were permitted to peruse his library of over 4,000 well-preserved volumes and examine some of his personal documents. I held in my hands an autographed first edition of Through the Looking-Glass, given as a gift from Lewis Carroll to Tennyson, a first edition of On the Origin of the Species, hand-written notes from Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, and early drafts of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (the latter documents were sheathed in plastic, but nevertheless!). Words can't describe the thrill this gave me.
After the gallery, we were released to wander Lincoln on our own. Inevitably I was drawn to Lincoln cathedral. Earlier we had been told that we would not be permitted to enter the cathedral at all, because none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury was visiting for some special occasion and only ticket holders would be admitted to the cathedral. I wandered around the exterior of the structure, snapping pictures of the architecture (my favorite feature was a carving of the damned writhing in infernal agony and casting desperate glances at a corresponding panel of saints enjoying the empyrean) and listening longingly to the sounds of the choir emanating from within. I made my way to one of the entrances set into the transept, and while loitering there, taking pictures, I struck up a conversation with the man ushering at the entrance. Upon discovering that I was a student studying abroad, he nonchalantly asked me if I wanted to attend the service. My heart leapt; I said I didn't have time to sit through the whole service before I had to rendezvous with the rest of my group, but asked if I could just step inside and get a look at the place. He obliged me, with the condition that I didn't wander into the service--"...otherwise, I'll get in trouble!"--and discreetly let me in the side door. Needless to say, the interior of the cathedral was stunning--the sun was illuminating the stained glass, and the organ echoed through the structure, playing an arrangement that I recognized as the "Gravement" from Bach's "Fantasia in G Major". I took numerous pictures, including one of the Lincoln Imp, a carved figure of a demon that serves as de facto mascot for the town of Lincoln. I thanked my benefactor profusely, and walked around the rest of the cathedral, pausing to allow right-of-way to a procession of white-robed clergy preparing for the ceremony. On the far side of the cathedral I encountered a large bronze statue of Tennyson, morosely contemplating a flower, with a dog waiting faithfully at his side.
I repeated the reading and napping procedure for the return ride to York and spent the rest of the evening finishing up Great Expectations. I began the next day, Sunday, by attending Communion at York Minster (the second separate cathedral I'd entered in as many days, I reflected gleefully); rather than taking place in the choir like the previous two services I had attended at the Minster, this service occurred in the towering nave, or central section, of the cathedral, which I had previously only glimpsed. Like the Lincoln Cathedral, the Minster was illuminated by the sun streaming through the stained glass, and the gorgeous setting, combined with the gorgeous music of the choir, made for a very moving service. Following the service, I got some lunch in town and returned to my flat for an afternoon of reading up on the Roman empire and proofreading a document for my girlfriend. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call from my parents, whose long search for a workable international calling option finally paid off. As soon as I woke up this morning, I received even more warm tidings from back home in the form of a brief video greeting from the guys on my floor at my Calvin dormitory.
That's all for this time. Once again, I hope everything is going well for all you who are reading this. With spring just beginning to reveal herself, I wish the best experience of sunny afternoons, returning flowers, and fun-filled Spring Break adventures to you all. Take care!
Sincerely,
John Morton
Tennyson and Desperate Housewives (February 28, 2010)
Hello all,
This week, I really mean it when I say that I'll try to keep the email short. You all can take comfort in the fact that justice is served in that I am currently reading Great Expectations for my literature class--Dickens was according to the number of words he wrote, and I imagine that my emails must resemble his prose at points.
I started the week on a somewhat despondent note, discussing the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson in literature class. As our professor explained, the bleak, doubtful mood that underlies Tennyson's poetry exemplifies the demarcation between the more euphoric meditations of the Romantic poets we had previously read and the prevailing attitudes of the Victorian Age, an age in which industrial advancement, political reform, and scientific discoveries effectively turned things on their head. Much of Tennyson't best poetry was written in response to the death of a schoolmate who was Tennyson's closest friend. I typically read poetry with varying degrees of enjoyment, and although the prose was thick at times, there was something both exhausting yet cathartic about certain of Tennyson's poems. I would recommend "Ulysses", "Break, Break, Break", and, of course, "The Charge of the Light Brigade".
The readings for my British culture class continued outlining the pantheon of English kings from the Tudors through the Stuarts, bringing us up to George III for the focus of our Tuesday class period. Although I can keep a handful of the English kings distinct in my mind, most of them run together in a swirl of war, intrigue, and manipulation. I know that history is, to an extent, inherently an account of chaos and turmoil--let's face it, peaceful, normal days aren't really newsworthy--but I found myself aghast at points at the sheer relentless drive of different factions for political influence. Nobody ever seemed to take a break, exploiting the slightest chink or loophole they possibly could to advance their own causes. Perhaps the most staggering facet of all this conflict is the inextricably tangled relationship that existed between politics and religion at that time--a constant back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism depending on who was on the throne at the time, what other countries were up to, what the relationship with the Vatican was like, how the population was treated at the time, and countless other things. One student in class was insightful enough to point out that perhaps this is one reason that Christianity is such a minor presence in England today--in America, religion is largely an exercise in freedom, but England has a heritage of religion serving as an instrument of suppression, with often fatal consequences for those unwilling to submit to the official policy at the time.
Luckily I had no cause to worry about religious manipulation when I met with my small group once more on Tuesday evening, discussing the eighth commandment--Thou Shalt Not Steal.
I have consistently enjoyed my Wednesday morning class, which is focusing on the Roman Empire for the first half of the semester. The topic of the lecture last week was the legacy the Romans left on the ancient world. I find the study of the Roman Empire fascinating, largely because one can examine the many similarities between Roman culture and modern society, simultaneously consider the critical differences, and try to observe correlations and disparities between the two. I am consistently impressed with the society the Romans built--certainly they were bloodthirsy, brutal, and despotic at turns, but I would be hard-pressed to name any single great society that didn't stoop to similar behavior at least intermittently. And if one examines the triumphs and accomplishments of Roman society, they discover a race that was refreshingly broad-minded, pragmatic, methodical, and dignified. Certainly it's a good thing that some of their practices have been abandoned over the years, but I also think it's a great shame that more powers and influential leaders don't look to them for an example.
That afternoon, in a fit of boredom, I purchased a cheap ukelele. Don't be deceived by the callouses forming on my fingers: I am not that cool, and I don't know what I'm doing.
On Thursday morning I was pleasantly surprised to receive a care package from my girlfriend. I had my final classes of the week, finishing up on Tennyson and limping through a 3-hour grammar lecture. In the evening I went to the weekly meeting of the YSJ Christian Union; this week the leaders had set up several stations around the meeting room for all attendees to go and reflect on different things. It was a pleasant experience. I helped them pack things up afterward and accompanied several of the members to the Student Union afterward, where I chatted with two students who had spent last semester studying in the United States at Michigan State University. They spoke of America in glowing terms.
Friday morning was spent sleeping, grocery shopping, and walking through downpour. In the afternoon I walked through more downpour to meet a British friend and the Hope College exchange student at a Starbucks in the city center. When I joined them, Sam (my British aquaintance) was taking farcical stock of Meaghan's (the exchange student) true American qualities by submitting her to a series of questions. Such things as drinking coffee, shopping at Hollister, and aquaintance with someone who drives a SUV qualified as "American points"; conversely, dislike of McDonald's and admitting the merits of any country other than the United States counted as "American losses"--by the final reckoning of these and similar inquiries, neither Meaghan nor I were truly patriotic. Then my fellow (if dubiously so) American and I were highly entertained by Sam's declaration that the seminal representation of American suburban life was to be found depicted on ABC's "Desperate Housewives". Then I went with Sam to a nearby McDonald's, which Meaghan had asserted was superior to its American counterpart, and we discussed cosmetic differences and underlying similarities between British and American politics. (I should add that both the Starbucks and McDonalds were the most elaborate manifestations of those establishments I have ever been in. Contrary to Meaghan's insistence, British McDonald's tasted just the same as American McDonald's.)
I concluded Friday night with a friendly gathering at Prof. Ward's house and by watching Martin Scorcese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" with one of my fellow Calvin students.
Saturday was a pretty lazy day. I spent the morning sleeping and and making pancakes from a mix I had purcased at the store. The end result, fried with oil in a frying pan rather than cooked on the griddle, was more like a crepe than the pancakes I was raised on. The rest of the day slipped lazily by in a cycle of Dickens, Facebook, Skype, coaxing amateurish noises from the ukelele, and napping.
This morning I hopped on a bus at 8:30 and rode with my fellow Calvin students to the town of Haworth, homeplace of the Brontë sisters. We attended a service at St. Michael and All Angels Anglican church, which stands on the site of the previous church over which Patrick Brontë presided as minister. His two enthusiastic present-day successors led us through what was possibly the most invigorating church service I've ever attended (and yes, I make that remark about a service in the Anglican church). Despite the fact that the heating system in the church had broken down that morning, the two boisterous ministers (the phrase that kept flitting through my mind throughout the service was "holy mischief-makers") kept things cheerful, upbeat, and even humorous. Following the service, we looked around the gorgeous building and took a peek at a memorial chapel that stands over a crypt housing the remains of most of the Brontë family.
We then walked to the parsonage where Patrick Brontë raised his gifted daughters. The parsonage stands just behind the church itself, and its front door overlooks the cramped ranks of headstones that stick up from the churchyard. This is a testimony to Haworth's bleak past as a squalid industrial town with a high mortality rate. Conditions were squalid, and evidently groundwater seeping through that very cemetary was just one of the many factors that contributed to the unhealthy living conditions. Growing up in a setting like that, it's no wonder that the Brontës wrote such bleak, dark, and unorthodox works. First we enjoyed a lecture by one of the musuem staff, which confirmed the fact that most great writers were formed by personal experiences that were at least slightly hellish. Then we toured the house itself, which was furnished largely with original furniture and actual possessions of the Brontës. Perhaps the most macabre item on display was a bonnet which was intended for Charlotte Brontë's unborn child, who accompanied her pregnant mother to her death. Also on display were several artworks by the Brontës' good-for-nothing older brother and some of their earliest writings--fantasy epics composed on folios only slightly larger than matchbooks, adorned with Lilliputian handwriting.
From the parsonage museum, we set out on a muddy hike across the moors that inspired much of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Although it was overcast and somewhat chilly, the scenery was starkly gorgeous, reminiscent in some ways of the Lake District, which we visited last weekend. After nearly two hours, we reached the secluded site of a ruined house, which is thought to have inspired the setting of Wuthering Heights. We stopped to take a group picture and hang out with some sheep that were seemed indifferent to our presence, then headed out to return to the bus. Our group got spread out and separated on this return hike, but this allowed me some nice conversation and reflection of the experience of traveling abroad with one of my friends in the group. We finally made it back to the bus, where I napped much of the way back to York.
I thank all of you once again who are interested enough in me and my travels to read all these dispatches. I miss you all and think about you frequently.
God bless!
-John Morton
This week, I really mean it when I say that I'll try to keep the email short. You all can take comfort in the fact that justice is served in that I am currently reading Great Expectations for my literature class--Dickens was according to the number of words he wrote, and I imagine that my emails must resemble his prose at points.
I started the week on a somewhat despondent note, discussing the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson in literature class. As our professor explained, the bleak, doubtful mood that underlies Tennyson's poetry exemplifies the demarcation between the more euphoric meditations of the Romantic poets we had previously read and the prevailing attitudes of the Victorian Age, an age in which industrial advancement, political reform, and scientific discoveries effectively turned things on their head. Much of Tennyson't best poetry was written in response to the death of a schoolmate who was Tennyson's closest friend. I typically read poetry with varying degrees of enjoyment, and although the prose was thick at times, there was something both exhausting yet cathartic about certain of Tennyson's poems. I would recommend "Ulysses", "Break, Break, Break", and, of course, "The Charge of the Light Brigade".
The readings for my British culture class continued outlining the pantheon of English kings from the Tudors through the Stuarts, bringing us up to George III for the focus of our Tuesday class period. Although I can keep a handful of the English kings distinct in my mind, most of them run together in a swirl of war, intrigue, and manipulation. I know that history is, to an extent, inherently an account of chaos and turmoil--let's face it, peaceful, normal days aren't really newsworthy--but I found myself aghast at points at the sheer relentless drive of different factions for political influence. Nobody ever seemed to take a break, exploiting the slightest chink or loophole they possibly could to advance their own causes. Perhaps the most staggering facet of all this conflict is the inextricably tangled relationship that existed between politics and religion at that time--a constant back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism depending on who was on the throne at the time, what other countries were up to, what the relationship with the Vatican was like, how the population was treated at the time, and countless other things. One student in class was insightful enough to point out that perhaps this is one reason that Christianity is such a minor presence in England today--in America, religion is largely an exercise in freedom, but England has a heritage of religion serving as an instrument of suppression, with often fatal consequences for those unwilling to submit to the official policy at the time.
Luckily I had no cause to worry about religious manipulation when I met with my small group once more on Tuesday evening, discussing the eighth commandment--Thou Shalt Not Steal.
I have consistently enjoyed my Wednesday morning class, which is focusing on the Roman Empire for the first half of the semester. The topic of the lecture last week was the legacy the Romans left on the ancient world. I find the study of the Roman Empire fascinating, largely because one can examine the many similarities between Roman culture and modern society, simultaneously consider the critical differences, and try to observe correlations and disparities between the two. I am consistently impressed with the society the Romans built--certainly they were bloodthirsy, brutal, and despotic at turns, but I would be hard-pressed to name any single great society that didn't stoop to similar behavior at least intermittently. And if one examines the triumphs and accomplishments of Roman society, they discover a race that was refreshingly broad-minded, pragmatic, methodical, and dignified. Certainly it's a good thing that some of their practices have been abandoned over the years, but I also think it's a great shame that more powers and influential leaders don't look to them for an example.
That afternoon, in a fit of boredom, I purchased a cheap ukelele. Don't be deceived by the callouses forming on my fingers: I am not that cool, and I don't know what I'm doing.
On Thursday morning I was pleasantly surprised to receive a care package from my girlfriend. I had my final classes of the week, finishing up on Tennyson and limping through a 3-hour grammar lecture. In the evening I went to the weekly meeting of the YSJ Christian Union; this week the leaders had set up several stations around the meeting room for all attendees to go and reflect on different things. It was a pleasant experience. I helped them pack things up afterward and accompanied several of the members to the Student Union afterward, where I chatted with two students who had spent last semester studying in the United States at Michigan State University. They spoke of America in glowing terms.
Friday morning was spent sleeping, grocery shopping, and walking through downpour. In the afternoon I walked through more downpour to meet a British friend and the Hope College exchange student at a Starbucks in the city center. When I joined them, Sam (my British aquaintance) was taking farcical stock of Meaghan's (the exchange student) true American qualities by submitting her to a series of questions. Such things as drinking coffee, shopping at Hollister, and aquaintance with someone who drives a SUV qualified as "American points"; conversely, dislike of McDonald's and admitting the merits of any country other than the United States counted as "American losses"--by the final reckoning of these and similar inquiries, neither Meaghan nor I were truly patriotic. Then my fellow (if dubiously so) American and I were highly entertained by Sam's declaration that the seminal representation of American suburban life was to be found depicted on ABC's "Desperate Housewives". Then I went with Sam to a nearby McDonald's, which Meaghan had asserted was superior to its American counterpart, and we discussed cosmetic differences and underlying similarities between British and American politics. (I should add that both the Starbucks and McDonalds were the most elaborate manifestations of those establishments I have ever been in. Contrary to Meaghan's insistence, British McDonald's tasted just the same as American McDonald's.)
I concluded Friday night with a friendly gathering at Prof. Ward's house and by watching Martin Scorcese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" with one of my fellow Calvin students.
Saturday was a pretty lazy day. I spent the morning sleeping and and making pancakes from a mix I had purcased at the store. The end result, fried with oil in a frying pan rather than cooked on the griddle, was more like a crepe than the pancakes I was raised on. The rest of the day slipped lazily by in a cycle of Dickens, Facebook, Skype, coaxing amateurish noises from the ukelele, and napping.
This morning I hopped on a bus at 8:30 and rode with my fellow Calvin students to the town of Haworth, homeplace of the Brontë sisters. We attended a service at St. Michael and All Angels Anglican church, which stands on the site of the previous church over which Patrick Brontë presided as minister. His two enthusiastic present-day successors led us through what was possibly the most invigorating church service I've ever attended (and yes, I make that remark about a service in the Anglican church). Despite the fact that the heating system in the church had broken down that morning, the two boisterous ministers (the phrase that kept flitting through my mind throughout the service was "holy mischief-makers") kept things cheerful, upbeat, and even humorous. Following the service, we looked around the gorgeous building and took a peek at a memorial chapel that stands over a crypt housing the remains of most of the Brontë family.
We then walked to the parsonage where Patrick Brontë raised his gifted daughters. The parsonage stands just behind the church itself, and its front door overlooks the cramped ranks of headstones that stick up from the churchyard. This is a testimony to Haworth's bleak past as a squalid industrial town with a high mortality rate. Conditions were squalid, and evidently groundwater seeping through that very cemetary was just one of the many factors that contributed to the unhealthy living conditions. Growing up in a setting like that, it's no wonder that the Brontës wrote such bleak, dark, and unorthodox works. First we enjoyed a lecture by one of the musuem staff, which confirmed the fact that most great writers were formed by personal experiences that were at least slightly hellish. Then we toured the house itself, which was furnished largely with original furniture and actual possessions of the Brontës. Perhaps the most macabre item on display was a bonnet which was intended for Charlotte Brontë's unborn child, who accompanied her pregnant mother to her death. Also on display were several artworks by the Brontës' good-for-nothing older brother and some of their earliest writings--fantasy epics composed on folios only slightly larger than matchbooks, adorned with Lilliputian handwriting.
From the parsonage museum, we set out on a muddy hike across the moors that inspired much of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Although it was overcast and somewhat chilly, the scenery was starkly gorgeous, reminiscent in some ways of the Lake District, which we visited last weekend. After nearly two hours, we reached the secluded site of a ruined house, which is thought to have inspired the setting of Wuthering Heights. We stopped to take a group picture and hang out with some sheep that were seemed indifferent to our presence, then headed out to return to the bus. Our group got spread out and separated on this return hike, but this allowed me some nice conversation and reflection of the experience of traveling abroad with one of my friends in the group. We finally made it back to the bus, where I napped much of the way back to York.
I thank all of you once again who are interested enough in me and my travels to read all these dispatches. I miss you all and think about you frequently.
God bless!
-John Morton
Two Birds with One Stone (February 21, 2010)
Hello all,
First of all, sorry for the delay in getting this message out; this last week was busier than I anticipated. So I'll catch up on two weeks in one email; ergo, this one's going to be long. My apologies I'm starting to feel more at home here. It's still a new experience to figure out the logistics of a pretty independent lifestyle, but I'm figuring new things out all the time.
So here's what I've been up to in the last weeks:
On Sunday the 7th, I accompanied seven or eight fellow Calvin students to a morning service at York Minster Cathedral. York Minster is an active church, offering four services daily, as well as hosting different special events throughout the month. While there is a fee to enter the Minster for sightseeing purposes, religious services are free, so they're an economical way to take a quick glimpse and also hear a really beautiful service. I can't really give a detailed description of the Minster yet, but for the service we entered the cavernous east "choir" of the cathedral (I'm consulting a quick guide to Gothic architectural terms, so bear with me) that branches off of the equally cavernous transept, opposite the nave, or "front" of the Minster. The interior of the elongated choir is furnished with tiers of wooden pews; the ranks of organ pipes are housed in a large, elegantly carved wooden fixture mounted over the arched entrance to the choir. The seats for the choir members divide the choir in two, with twin raised pulpits immediately nearby, on either side of the space. More pews stand beyond the pulpits, leading up to the altar in the front, where an illustrated tarp stands in for the massive stained glass windows that adorn the east side, which is currently undergoing restoration. The service was Solemn Eucharist, which followed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and consisted of liturgical readings, canticles by the choir, selections from scripture, and culminated in the eucharist. All of us Calvin students chose to receive eucharist, and accordingly we proceeded to the altar when prompted by an usher, knelt at the rail, and received the host and a sip of wine from the priest (being unfamilar with Anglicanism, I can only guess at the titles of the clergy). The service concluded exactly the way it started, with a procession of clergy and choir.
Later that afternoon, the entire Calvin group showed up for "Tea and Toast", two hours of Sunday afternoon fellowship at a church not far from my apartment complex. In addition to the Calvin students, there were merely six regular congregation members in attendance, so I felt somewhat awkward, fearful that we had overwhelmed them. However, there was an abundance of bread and crumpets (which, contrary to what I had imagined, are like fine, porous English muffins) for toasting, an abundance of jams and spreads to accompany them, and an abundance of tea and hot chocolate for sipping. After some friendly fellowship, the supervisors of the meeting showed one of Rob Bell's "Nooma" videos, which may seem more novel in York than they do to a group of students from Grand Rapids, where Bell's church is located, which was followed by discussion of the video.
I ventured out to the supermarket to buy groceries on Monday, which will probably become a weekly habit. In my British literature class we wrapped up our discussions on the bucolic poetry of William Wordsworth and switched to the more fantastic visions of his opium-crazed peer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I find Coleridge's poetry more gripping than Wordworth's and quite enjoyed "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", although some archaic language and flowery phrases made it diffiult every now and then (I suppose that's what it must be like to read these emails of mine, although I balk at comparing myself too explicitly to Coleridge).
On Tuesday night I joined the first meeting of a "Lad's Small Group", coordinated through the York St. John's Christian Union. The focus of the meetings this semester is the Ten Commandments, only in reverse order to make things more exciting. Thus I discussed the ramifications of the Tenth Commandment (Thou shalt not covet) with five other "lads" attending the university. Despite some noise from a "football" game televised in the Student Union, we had a pretty good discussion, and afterward they were willing to entertain some of my questions about life in England.
On Wednesday afternoon, I joined the entire Calvin group for an excursion to the National Rail Museum, which is situated within a fifteen minute walk from the York St. John campus. There was a variety of locomotives and cars exemplifying the evolution of trains from their early days through the present. The trains were all in pretty good shape (thanks to extensive restoration in some cases), and there were a handful that had their cabs exposed for visitors to see the workings that regulated the engines. One engine had been cut away so that the inner mechanisms could be seen, which was quite interesting; an another one was situated above a trench in the floor, allowing one to walk beneath it and see its underside. Among the specialty displays in the museum were several of the royal coaches, including those used to transport Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth, as well as a Japanese Bullet train. But probably the exhibit that intrigued me most was a display on the restoration of the Flying Scotsman. A balcony overlooked a large machine shop where the famous locomotive was disassembled down to its chassis, with all its components spread around the shop at different stations. I was somewhat disappointed not to see her in one piece, but it was a sight to see nevertheless.
On Thursday evening, I went to one of the Christian Union meetings, which was just an informal praise service. One member led some songs on the acoustic guitar, and a local youth minister delivered a message about communication with God. Small prayer groups and more songs concluded the service, which was overall very similar to a dorm worship meeting in the Calvin dormitory, only longer. Afterward, I met a couple other members of the Christian union, including a fellow expatriate English major from Hope College. Our meeting was friendly and not marred by any rivalry whatsoever.
I stayed up late on Thursday night, catching only an hour and a half of sleep before rousing from bed and walking to the train station for 3:00 train for the first leg of a weeekend trip to Wales. My half of the group thought had gotten tickets for an earlier train than the rest, but not so early as we initially thought; only after we were aboard did we discover that we had misread the itinerary and boarded a train an hour too early. Thus we were compelled to spend an hour layover in the city of Leeds, midway between York and Manchester. I passed that hour catching some patchy sleep stretched between two metal chairs on the platform. After another half hour of layover following our arrival in Manchester, I was able to snatch a solid two hours of slumber during the trip from Manchester to the Welsh town of Llandudno (a name whose true pronunciation I won't even attempt to convey via email). We waited in a smoky, greasy cafe for an hour for the second half of our group to arrive before dropping our stuff off at at the local hostel, getting some quick lunch, and catching a bus for the nearby town of Conwy.
Most of our time in Conwy was spent checking out the well-preserved remains of a castle built there, just one of several castles constructed as a part of Edward I's campaigns agains Welsh uprisings in the 13th century. Branching out from the main structure of the Castle is a stone wall that still practically encircles Conwy, which rests on the shores of a lake. We walked along the wall as far as the outer keep, entering the castle through a "back door" of sorts. Once inside, we were free to roam virtually anywhere in the structure. All of the eight towers were accessible by means of surviving spiral stone steps, and the view of the surrounding countryside was stunning. The wooden-framed structures within the walls were long gone, obviously, but the cellars and some structural walls were all accessible. Overall, it ranks as one of the single coolest things I've seen so far in the course of this trip. After an hour or two at the castle, we explored the rest of Conwy: more winding streets, a starkly beautiful lakeshore path, and the smallest house in the British Isles(little more than a lean-to with a door, window, and chimney). We rode the bus back to Llandudno shorty before dusk.
Back in town, we got dinner at a local pub, whose barkeeper ridiculed the frugal Americans for ordering water instead of more stimulating (and expensive) beverages. Then it was back to the hostel for the rest of the evening. Being unable to catch any coverage of the Olympics on television, we instead contented ourselves with snacks and games (we were the only ones in the hostel, which allowed us to be as loud as we wanted). Everyone was agreeable to an early bedtime after a long day.
After waking and having breakfast at the hostel, our group split into two; I accompanied the larger of the two groups, and we hiked up the Great Orme, a "prominent limestone headland" that juts into the Irish Sea from the coastline of Llandudno. As we climbed higher and higher, the view grew more and more glorious--mountains were visible behind us, and wind turbines and oil rigs dotted the horizon in front of us. Midway up the grassy, rocky climb, we stopped at a small church and meditated on the lonely, windswept graveyard. The final leg of the climb to the very summit of the Orme sloped up at a severe angle, and everyone was eager to catch his breath and pose for a photograph by a small pylon that stoon on the summit. From there, I split off on my own, because I wanted to check out the site of a Bronze Age copper mine nearby on the Orme; I was dismayed to discover that it was closed for the season, which I really should have anticipated. I contented myself to take a route back down the orme that strayed through a couple streets, meandered along a rock face, and brought me close to some nonplussed sheep (sheep droppings were ubiquitous on the Orme). After some lunch, I spent the afternoon wandering by myself, checking out some shops in Llandudno, ambling to the end of a long boardwalk that jutted into the sea, clambering around on the seashore, and walking the seaside promonade at sunset, with resort hotels on my right and the water on my left. After dinner, we caught an 8:00 train, where efforts to read "Wuthering Heights" were frustrated by the fact that we were caught between a group of noisy drunkards and some teenage girls who played music the entire time. Things were more peaceful after the connection at Manchester, and I was able to lavish all of my attention on the story of Heathcliff and Catherine and how they made life miserable for themselves and everyone around them. We arrived back in York shortly after midnight, and I flopped into bed around 2:00.
I slept in on Sunday morning, compensating for my slothfulness by attending Evensong at York Minster on Sunday afternoon. Once again, the service was lovely and I was chilled. Evensong concluded with a nice setting of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G (BWV 541) that swelled magnificently in the air, as if the organ were a living, breathing thing...forgive me, I always think of organ music that way. Returning from that, I had the treat of speaking to my parents and younger sister via Skype (thanks Karin!). I spent much of Monday wrapping up "Wuthering Heights" and neglecting to write emails to sypmathetic and patient people who are interested in my time spent abroad. Since it's difficult for me to find means to stay caught up on weekly episodes of NBC's "The Office" over here, I decided instead to watch episodes of it's British predecessor on YouTube, which are pretty entertaining despite being hard to understand at some points.
Tuesday evening brought another meeting of the Lad's Small Group; I discussed the implications of the Lord's admonition not to bear false witness (white lies and Santa Claus featured tangentially in this discourse). There were some new faces at this meeting, including a wheelchair-bound student named Ben, who had a penchant for devil's advocacy; after I casually mentioned that I hadn't yet exploited my new priviliege of legal alcohol consumption because I had no idea what to drink, he promised to act as my helmsman to help me navigate the virtual ocean of alcoholic offerings in the city of York.
Wednesday night was something of an adventure. I purchased a ticket for an orchestra concert at the University of York (a different school than York St. John's) and took the bus to the campus at the alloted time. Following two modernist, selections, a collection of lieder by Wagner, and the intermission, the orchestra performed a stirring rendition of Beethoven's 7th Sympony--well worth the £3 student ticket. I missed the bus to return to the city center after the concert, however, and ended up walking the empty streets of York for an hour to return to my flat. It was peaceful and moderately comfortable, so it wasn't that bad.
Not much happened on Thursday; Friday evening was marked by a social gathering at Prof. Ward's house. Another girl and I inadvertently arrived early, so we sat and talked with the professor and his wife for half an hour before others arrived. Inevitably, I ended up discussing bad genre fiction stereotypes with some of the fellow English majors in the group until about 10:00 before returning to my flat and hastily packing for our expedition to the Lake District. Yesterday morning we boarded a charter bus at 8:00 in the morning as drove for three hours to the village of Grasmere, stopping midway at the small town of Settle where I got some phenomenal fresh tea cakes at a bakery called "Ye Olde Naked Man Cafe"...I can only assert that the truth is stranger than fiction. The landscape was rolling and starkly beautiful, and almost everyone remarked how similar it seemed to the landscape seen in Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings".
Grasmere is the town where William Wordsworth spent his most artistically productive years. We toured that housed some of his manuscripts, the journals kept by his sister Doroth, and manuscripts by a couple other Romantic authors, such as Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott. After the gallery we toured Dove Cottage, where Wordworth resided with his family and whichever of the friends he constantly entertained was with them at the time, such as Coleridge, Scott, and Thomas de Quincey. After stopping briefly in the village proper, we struck out on a hike up the slopes of a mountain behind dove cottage. Again we were struck by the rugged beauty, and it was evident how Wordsworth found limitless inspiration hiking over those hills. Myelf and three other students lagged behind the bulk of the Calvin group, pausing frequently to take photographs of the breathtaking scenery: clouds hung over mountains in the distance, only intermittently allowing some bold rays of sunlight to pierce through and bathe the scenery below in patches of golden light. The way up the mountain wandered over short grassy turf and metal gates admitted us through the stone fences that ran all over the slopes of the hills.
Following the hike and the 20 minute drive to the town of Keswick, we checked into our hostel. With an hour or two until supper, I explored a bit of the town, following a pathway along a river to a private garden I probably had no business to be in and then walking down a couple streets to a town square. The hot dinner that the hostel was a godsend, and I spent the rest of the evening filling out postcards and reading, first Tennyson, then Alistair Maclean, before calling it a day at 10:30. After a hot shower and breakfast this morning, two other students and I took advantage of a couple hours of free time to check out the James Bond Museum in Keswick (neglecting Sunday church to worship at the altar of Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Pierce Brosnan). The museum wasn't too extensive, but I took several prohibited photographs of the actual vehicles used in many of the films. After that I wandered through town for a bit, discovering that a local theater was screening Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" right at the time we were scheduled to leave town. I was able to moderate my disappointment at this cruel twist of fate and met the rest of the group to go take a look at the house inhabited by Coleridge after he followed his idol Wordsworth to the Lake District. The house is privately owned, so all we could do was take photographs from a distance; the massive housecat that ambled out down the drive attracted more admiration that the large white house itself.
We had intended to take another, more prolonged hike through more hilly terrain around a nearby lake, but reports of snow in York persuaded our bus driver to depart ahead of schedule...a mere three inches of snow. Small potatoes to those of us accustomed to weather in the Midwest, but snowfall is a much more confounding phenomenon to the English. We still hiked for an hour or so, and again I was one of the students who fell behind for the sake of taking phtographs. At one point we stepped into a theater to avail ourselves of the restrooms, and it seems that the theater is managed in some capacity by Dame Judi Dench, which I found somewhat interesting. We boarded the bus again at about 2:30 and headed back to York; I napped for some of the trip and finished reading The Guns of Navarone for the duration.
Upon returning to my flat, I spent half an hour trying fruitlessly to secure some clothesline and adhesive hooks to my walls; washing machines and driers entail exhorbitant fees, and doing laundry in my washstand is becoming an increasingly attractive option.
Whew! Sorry this message is so long. I really will try to stay more current in my dispatches so as to avoid too many messages of this length in the future. I hope everyone who is reading this is having finding success and satisfaction as he or she attends to whatever it is they do. For my part, I do miss life in the United States quite a bit; England is fantastic, but it isn't home. I intend to enjoy every minute I'm here, and also to relish being back home at the end of four months.
I miss you all and think of you often!
-John Morton
First of all, sorry for the delay in getting this message out; this last week was busier than I anticipated. So I'll catch up on two weeks in one email; ergo, this one's going to be long. My apologies I'm starting to feel more at home here. It's still a new experience to figure out the logistics of a pretty independent lifestyle, but I'm figuring new things out all the time.
So here's what I've been up to in the last weeks:
On Sunday the 7th, I accompanied seven or eight fellow Calvin students to a morning service at York Minster Cathedral. York Minster is an active church, offering four services daily, as well as hosting different special events throughout the month. While there is a fee to enter the Minster for sightseeing purposes, religious services are free, so they're an economical way to take a quick glimpse and also hear a really beautiful service. I can't really give a detailed description of the Minster yet, but for the service we entered the cavernous east "choir" of the cathedral (I'm consulting a quick guide to Gothic architectural terms, so bear with me) that branches off of the equally cavernous transept, opposite the nave, or "front" of the Minster. The interior of the elongated choir is furnished with tiers of wooden pews; the ranks of organ pipes are housed in a large, elegantly carved wooden fixture mounted over the arched entrance to the choir. The seats for the choir members divide the choir in two, with twin raised pulpits immediately nearby, on either side of the space. More pews stand beyond the pulpits, leading up to the altar in the front, where an illustrated tarp stands in for the massive stained glass windows that adorn the east side, which is currently undergoing restoration. The service was Solemn Eucharist, which followed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and consisted of liturgical readings, canticles by the choir, selections from scripture, and culminated in the eucharist. All of us Calvin students chose to receive eucharist, and accordingly we proceeded to the altar when prompted by an usher, knelt at the rail, and received the host and a sip of wine from the priest (being unfamilar with Anglicanism, I can only guess at the titles of the clergy). The service concluded exactly the way it started, with a procession of clergy and choir.
Later that afternoon, the entire Calvin group showed up for "Tea and Toast", two hours of Sunday afternoon fellowship at a church not far from my apartment complex. In addition to the Calvin students, there were merely six regular congregation members in attendance, so I felt somewhat awkward, fearful that we had overwhelmed them. However, there was an abundance of bread and crumpets (which, contrary to what I had imagined, are like fine, porous English muffins) for toasting, an abundance of jams and spreads to accompany them, and an abundance of tea and hot chocolate for sipping. After some friendly fellowship, the supervisors of the meeting showed one of Rob Bell's "Nooma" videos, which may seem more novel in York than they do to a group of students from Grand Rapids, where Bell's church is located, which was followed by discussion of the video.
I ventured out to the supermarket to buy groceries on Monday, which will probably become a weekly habit. In my British literature class we wrapped up our discussions on the bucolic poetry of William Wordsworth and switched to the more fantastic visions of his opium-crazed peer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I find Coleridge's poetry more gripping than Wordworth's and quite enjoyed "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", although some archaic language and flowery phrases made it diffiult every now and then (I suppose that's what it must be like to read these emails of mine, although I balk at comparing myself too explicitly to Coleridge).
On Tuesday night I joined the first meeting of a "Lad's Small Group", coordinated through the York St. John's Christian Union. The focus of the meetings this semester is the Ten Commandments, only in reverse order to make things more exciting. Thus I discussed the ramifications of the Tenth Commandment (Thou shalt not covet) with five other "lads" attending the university. Despite some noise from a "football" game televised in the Student Union, we had a pretty good discussion, and afterward they were willing to entertain some of my questions about life in England.
On Wednesday afternoon, I joined the entire Calvin group for an excursion to the National Rail Museum, which is situated within a fifteen minute walk from the York St. John campus. There was a variety of locomotives and cars exemplifying the evolution of trains from their early days through the present. The trains were all in pretty good shape (thanks to extensive restoration in some cases), and there were a handful that had their cabs exposed for visitors to see the workings that regulated the engines. One engine had been cut away so that the inner mechanisms could be seen, which was quite interesting; an another one was situated above a trench in the floor, allowing one to walk beneath it and see its underside. Among the specialty displays in the museum were several of the royal coaches, including those used to transport Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth, as well as a Japanese Bullet train. But probably the exhibit that intrigued me most was a display on the restoration of the Flying Scotsman. A balcony overlooked a large machine shop where the famous locomotive was disassembled down to its chassis, with all its components spread around the shop at different stations. I was somewhat disappointed not to see her in one piece, but it was a sight to see nevertheless.
On Thursday evening, I went to one of the Christian Union meetings, which was just an informal praise service. One member led some songs on the acoustic guitar, and a local youth minister delivered a message about communication with God. Small prayer groups and more songs concluded the service, which was overall very similar to a dorm worship meeting in the Calvin dormitory, only longer. Afterward, I met a couple other members of the Christian union, including a fellow expatriate English major from Hope College. Our meeting was friendly and not marred by any rivalry whatsoever.
I stayed up late on Thursday night, catching only an hour and a half of sleep before rousing from bed and walking to the train station for 3:00 train for the first leg of a weeekend trip to Wales. My half of the group thought had gotten tickets for an earlier train than the rest, but not so early as we initially thought; only after we were aboard did we discover that we had misread the itinerary and boarded a train an hour too early. Thus we were compelled to spend an hour layover in the city of Leeds, midway between York and Manchester. I passed that hour catching some patchy sleep stretched between two metal chairs on the platform. After another half hour of layover following our arrival in Manchester, I was able to snatch a solid two hours of slumber during the trip from Manchester to the Welsh town of Llandudno (a name whose true pronunciation I won't even attempt to convey via email). We waited in a smoky, greasy cafe for an hour for the second half of our group to arrive before dropping our stuff off at at the local hostel, getting some quick lunch, and catching a bus for the nearby town of Conwy.
Most of our time in Conwy was spent checking out the well-preserved remains of a castle built there, just one of several castles constructed as a part of Edward I's campaigns agains Welsh uprisings in the 13th century. Branching out from the main structure of the Castle is a stone wall that still practically encircles Conwy, which rests on the shores of a lake. We walked along the wall as far as the outer keep, entering the castle through a "back door" of sorts. Once inside, we were free to roam virtually anywhere in the structure. All of the eight towers were accessible by means of surviving spiral stone steps, and the view of the surrounding countryside was stunning. The wooden-framed structures within the walls were long gone, obviously, but the cellars and some structural walls were all accessible. Overall, it ranks as one of the single coolest things I've seen so far in the course of this trip. After an hour or two at the castle, we explored the rest of Conwy: more winding streets, a starkly beautiful lakeshore path, and the smallest house in the British Isles(little more than a lean-to with a door, window, and chimney). We rode the bus back to Llandudno shorty before dusk.
Back in town, we got dinner at a local pub, whose barkeeper ridiculed the frugal Americans for ordering water instead of more stimulating (and expensive) beverages. Then it was back to the hostel for the rest of the evening. Being unable to catch any coverage of the Olympics on television, we instead contented ourselves with snacks and games (we were the only ones in the hostel, which allowed us to be as loud as we wanted). Everyone was agreeable to an early bedtime after a long day.
After waking and having breakfast at the hostel, our group split into two; I accompanied the larger of the two groups, and we hiked up the Great Orme, a "prominent limestone headland" that juts into the Irish Sea from the coastline of Llandudno. As we climbed higher and higher, the view grew more and more glorious--mountains were visible behind us, and wind turbines and oil rigs dotted the horizon in front of us. Midway up the grassy, rocky climb, we stopped at a small church and meditated on the lonely, windswept graveyard. The final leg of the climb to the very summit of the Orme sloped up at a severe angle, and everyone was eager to catch his breath and pose for a photograph by a small pylon that stoon on the summit. From there, I split off on my own, because I wanted to check out the site of a Bronze Age copper mine nearby on the Orme; I was dismayed to discover that it was closed for the season, which I really should have anticipated. I contented myself to take a route back down the orme that strayed through a couple streets, meandered along a rock face, and brought me close to some nonplussed sheep (sheep droppings were ubiquitous on the Orme). After some lunch, I spent the afternoon wandering by myself, checking out some shops in Llandudno, ambling to the end of a long boardwalk that jutted into the sea, clambering around on the seashore, and walking the seaside promonade at sunset, with resort hotels on my right and the water on my left. After dinner, we caught an 8:00 train, where efforts to read "Wuthering Heights" were frustrated by the fact that we were caught between a group of noisy drunkards and some teenage girls who played music the entire time. Things were more peaceful after the connection at Manchester, and I was able to lavish all of my attention on the story of Heathcliff and Catherine and how they made life miserable for themselves and everyone around them. We arrived back in York shortly after midnight, and I flopped into bed around 2:00.
I slept in on Sunday morning, compensating for my slothfulness by attending Evensong at York Minster on Sunday afternoon. Once again, the service was lovely and I was chilled. Evensong concluded with a nice setting of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G (BWV 541) that swelled magnificently in the air, as if the organ were a living, breathing thing...forgive me, I always think of organ music that way. Returning from that, I had the treat of speaking to my parents and younger sister via Skype (thanks Karin!). I spent much of Monday wrapping up "Wuthering Heights" and neglecting to write emails to sypmathetic and patient people who are interested in my time spent abroad. Since it's difficult for me to find means to stay caught up on weekly episodes of NBC's "The Office" over here, I decided instead to watch episodes of it's British predecessor on YouTube, which are pretty entertaining despite being hard to understand at some points.
Tuesday evening brought another meeting of the Lad's Small Group; I discussed the implications of the Lord's admonition not to bear false witness (white lies and Santa Claus featured tangentially in this discourse). There were some new faces at this meeting, including a wheelchair-bound student named Ben, who had a penchant for devil's advocacy; after I casually mentioned that I hadn't yet exploited my new priviliege of legal alcohol consumption because I had no idea what to drink, he promised to act as my helmsman to help me navigate the virtual ocean of alcoholic offerings in the city of York.
Wednesday night was something of an adventure. I purchased a ticket for an orchestra concert at the University of York (a different school than York St. John's) and took the bus to the campus at the alloted time. Following two modernist, selections, a collection of lieder by Wagner, and the intermission, the orchestra performed a stirring rendition of Beethoven's 7th Sympony--well worth the £3 student ticket. I missed the bus to return to the city center after the concert, however, and ended up walking the empty streets of York for an hour to return to my flat. It was peaceful and moderately comfortable, so it wasn't that bad.
Not much happened on Thursday; Friday evening was marked by a social gathering at Prof. Ward's house. Another girl and I inadvertently arrived early, so we sat and talked with the professor and his wife for half an hour before others arrived. Inevitably, I ended up discussing bad genre fiction stereotypes with some of the fellow English majors in the group until about 10:00 before returning to my flat and hastily packing for our expedition to the Lake District. Yesterday morning we boarded a charter bus at 8:00 in the morning as drove for three hours to the village of Grasmere, stopping midway at the small town of Settle where I got some phenomenal fresh tea cakes at a bakery called "Ye Olde Naked Man Cafe"...I can only assert that the truth is stranger than fiction. The landscape was rolling and starkly beautiful, and almost everyone remarked how similar it seemed to the landscape seen in Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings".
Grasmere is the town where William Wordsworth spent his most artistically productive years. We toured that housed some of his manuscripts, the journals kept by his sister Doroth, and manuscripts by a couple other Romantic authors, such as Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott. After the gallery we toured Dove Cottage, where Wordworth resided with his family and whichever of the friends he constantly entertained was with them at the time, such as Coleridge, Scott, and Thomas de Quincey. After stopping briefly in the village proper, we struck out on a hike up the slopes of a mountain behind dove cottage. Again we were struck by the rugged beauty, and it was evident how Wordsworth found limitless inspiration hiking over those hills. Myelf and three other students lagged behind the bulk of the Calvin group, pausing frequently to take photographs of the breathtaking scenery: clouds hung over mountains in the distance, only intermittently allowing some bold rays of sunlight to pierce through and bathe the scenery below in patches of golden light. The way up the mountain wandered over short grassy turf and metal gates admitted us through the stone fences that ran all over the slopes of the hills.
Following the hike and the 20 minute drive to the town of Keswick, we checked into our hostel. With an hour or two until supper, I explored a bit of the town, following a pathway along a river to a private garden I probably had no business to be in and then walking down a couple streets to a town square. The hot dinner that the hostel was a godsend, and I spent the rest of the evening filling out postcards and reading, first Tennyson, then Alistair Maclean, before calling it a day at 10:30. After a hot shower and breakfast this morning, two other students and I took advantage of a couple hours of free time to check out the James Bond Museum in Keswick (neglecting Sunday church to worship at the altar of Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Pierce Brosnan). The museum wasn't too extensive, but I took several prohibited photographs of the actual vehicles used in many of the films. After that I wandered through town for a bit, discovering that a local theater was screening Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" right at the time we were scheduled to leave town. I was able to moderate my disappointment at this cruel twist of fate and met the rest of the group to go take a look at the house inhabited by Coleridge after he followed his idol Wordsworth to the Lake District. The house is privately owned, so all we could do was take photographs from a distance; the massive housecat that ambled out down the drive attracted more admiration that the large white house itself.
We had intended to take another, more prolonged hike through more hilly terrain around a nearby lake, but reports of snow in York persuaded our bus driver to depart ahead of schedule...a mere three inches of snow. Small potatoes to those of us accustomed to weather in the Midwest, but snowfall is a much more confounding phenomenon to the English. We still hiked for an hour or so, and again I was one of the students who fell behind for the sake of taking phtographs. At one point we stepped into a theater to avail ourselves of the restrooms, and it seems that the theater is managed in some capacity by Dame Judi Dench, which I found somewhat interesting. We boarded the bus again at about 2:30 and headed back to York; I napped for some of the trip and finished reading The Guns of Navarone for the duration.
Upon returning to my flat, I spent half an hour trying fruitlessly to secure some clothesline and adhesive hooks to my walls; washing machines and driers entail exhorbitant fees, and doing laundry in my washstand is becoming an increasingly attractive option.
Whew! Sorry this message is so long. I really will try to stay more current in my dispatches so as to avoid too many messages of this length in the future. I hope everyone who is reading this is having finding success and satisfaction as he or she attends to whatever it is they do. For my part, I do miss life in the United States quite a bit; England is fantastic, but it isn't home. I intend to enjoy every minute I'm here, and also to relish being back home at the end of four months.
I miss you all and think of you often!
-John Morton
It's only been a week? (February 6, 2010)
Hello all,
First of all, some contact information, for anyone who's interested.
Skype username: john.morton520
Mailing address:
John Morton
2 Cruse House
The Grange
Ramsay Close
Huntington Road
York, YO31 8ST
Some additional details: Greenwich Mean Time runs five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, and the weather resembles conditions of early spring in the Midwest. My thermometer currently reads 41 degrees fahrenheit. The coldest temperature reading I've observed was in the upper teens, and the warmest was in the lower forties. There is no snow in York, and so far we've enjoyed a decent dosage of sunshine, although it grows dark shortly past 5:00 every day.
I know my last message was quite lengthy; I expect they will all be relatively long, but I'll do my best to keep them succinct and interesting.
Most of Sunday was spent on a group excursion to the coastal town of Whitby. Although I was reluctant to leave bed, I met all the other international students on campus at 9:15, where we loaded up a pair of chartered buses and got underway. The drive to Whitby was roughly an hour of picturesque, rolling countryside, marked by little foliage except hedgerows--the proverbial British moors, if I'm not mistaken. As we approached the coast, a dusting of snow appeared on the ground.
Whitby is a fishing/touristy town situated on two sides of a small valley at the mouth of the River Esk, which flows in from the North Sea. The buses dropped us off atop the east side of the valley at the ruins of Whitby Abbey. The first abbey on this site was built in the 500s and stood until a Viking attack in 867. The current abbey was refounded in 1078 and remained until it was destroyed in 1540 as a result of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries; in the intervening time, it has been torn apart for building material and remained at the mercy of the elements. It's still a stunning sight, though; anyone who knows me well can tell you that I fall in love with every old church or cathedral I set eyes on, and I snapped lots of pictures of the ruins.
After seeing our fill of the ruins, some other Calvin students and I descended a staircase of 199 rough stone steps to the meandering streets of Whitby. Our first order of business was to get lunch--in this case, the stereotypical fish and chips at a small cafe. Having been advised that Yorkshire--and Whitby in particular--is the place to get fish and chips, this was one experience I couldn't resist. The verdict: I think fish and chips are probably about the same no matter where you order them--these were everything fish and chips should be, and nothing that fish and chips couldn't be.
Following lunch, we walked through the town, over a bridge, and up the west side of the inlet, passing all manner of gimmicky, tacky tourist shops on the way. A flight of stairs set in the hillside led to a splendid lookout over the North Sea and a statue of Captain James Cook, who grew up and had his apprenticeship in Whitby before achieving fame as an explorer. We also saw an arch comprised of two massive whale bones, perhaps twenty feet high at its zenith, a testament to Whitby's heritage as a whaling town. Descending the hill once more, two other students and I made our way to a small stretch of beach, getting a close look at the ferocious breakers that raged near the shore and along the wesmost of the two piers that project from the inlet out into the sea. Then we spent the next two or so hours wandering the streets, ducking into some small shops, and enjoying the brisk air. I caught sight of a sailing ship anchored in the inlet, so I quickly dashed over and took some pictures (since old ships are the only things I love more than old churches). This ship turned out to be the Grand Turk, a replica of the frigate HMS Blandford. She was beautiful, with a stunning blue, yellow, and black color scheme. At this point it was time to return to the rendezvous point back up by the abbey; I headed that way, making a quick stop to purchase a stick of rhubarb-flavored "Whitby rock", a type of hard candy that kind of dissolves once you moisten it in your mouth.
On my ascent back up the 199 steps, I overtook a young boy who was counting off each step very deliberately as he climbed it; I think he had miscounted somewhere on his journey. Back on the east hill, I had a few minutes to spare, which I spent looking over an old church and cemetery that adjoined the abbey plot. Then it was back in the bus and headed back to York. Our trip home followed a different route than our outbound trip that morning, taking us through the coastal town of Scarborough, which was the epitome of a tourist trap. As the sun set over the moors, I eavesdropped on a discussion some other American students were having with a native of Britian, basically talking about traveling and America and different countries; although I didn't contribute to this discourse, it really drove home the fact that I am away from home and amongst people who regard the United States from a viewpoint other than my own.
Not a whole lot has happened throughout the week; I've still been getting settled in to a new environment and a new lifestyle of independence. I've purchased more supplies and wandered around the city center some more, which adds up to quite a bit of walking. There are lots of details that need attention, so I'm just addressing them as they come to mind. I located a post office and sent out a couple postcards; I also exchanged some currency, receiving £23.28 in exchange for $40.00. I've begun to sample some of the local fare: I had a tea cake, which was light, tasty roll with currants and some sort of nuts; a sausage roll, which is a distant relative of a pig in a blanket; some cookies from a local bakery, which were quite good; and a couple of the well-known Cornish pasties. In spite of my purchase of a comprehensive street map of the city, I found myself wandering in circles in a misting rain for two hours on Tuesday afternoon; as if the narrow, twisting routes of the streets weren't difficult enough, the street names frequently change within a couple of blocks, and street signs appear in the form of colorless plaques affixed to buildings, which prove elusive to the eyes of one used to bright green signage, situated clearly in the midst of intersections themselves. It was frustrating, and by the time I plodded back to my flat, groceries in hand, I was ready to put the cold, soggy afternoon behind me with a hot mug of tea.
It seems that the academic system here is quite different than what I'm accustomed to at an American institution, much less an institution like Calvin College. Since York St. John's is a more career-oriented school than Calvin, with less emphasis on the liberal arts, the typical undergraduate program runs a mere three years. Including the two classes taught by Professor Ward, my schedule shows that I should be spending twelve hours in class every week. This seems like nothing compared to the 16 hours I took the two previous semesters at Calvin, and I wonder whether I'll have enough to do to keep me busy. Although I believe the enrollment at YSJ is about the same as Calvin's (about 4,000), the campus is much smaller and more compact. The predominant philosophy seems to be that the university supports the academic dimension of student life and makes little effort to support other activites; there are programs and student organizations in place, but they seem to be much more low-key than I have found them to be at Calvin. At an orientation session for student activites, nearly every event listed seemed to be little more than an occasion to drink, and the big attraction in the student union is the bar, which offers heavily-advertised £1 pints on Mondays and Saturdays. I may have to look around quite deliberately for any sort of involvement around here, but it's still the first week of the semester, and my initial impressions of the university are, of course, subject to change.
The two Calvin courses that I am taking are a British Literature course and a British Culture/History course. We started off the literature side of things with readings from William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, trying to get a flavor of the Romantic movement in the arts. Of the two, Coleridge appeals to me more; Wordsworth is pleasant enough, but Coleridge is more gripping and less pastoral. I'm looking forward to "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", which I have somehow managed to neglect thus far in the course of my education. Our British culture course has had us do some reading from a history text, which has proved much more intersting than I expected...I guess that proves that you really can't judge a book by it's cover. Going along with the Romantic poets in the literature course, we're starting out the culture course by focusing on the nineteenth century, with glimpses at the times immediately preceding and following that century to put everything in more context. The text appeals to me because the author realizes that history is nothing more than a story, rife with strange twists, bizarre characters, and delightful anecdotes. This is the way it should be taught.
The two courses I'm taking through York St. John's are a history course focused on the Roman and British empires (something of an odd combination) and an introductory grammar course. The Empires course is taught by a composed, soft-spoken sexagenarian, and I expect it to be interesting. However, for the first class meeting, all the tutor did was essentially read straight from a printed outline he had distributed to the class; I hope he doesn't follow this format every week, because if I just wanted to read an outline, I could do so without going to class. The Grammar course appears that it should be pretty easy as well; although I haven't taken grammar at all since high school, and I welcome the opportunity to refresh on all the rules, my first impression is that I won't be learning anything new. Hopefully I can take more away from the class than just that.
Today (Saturday) was more active than usual, and it came as a welcome diversion after a pretty unevent day of rain, laundry, and washing dirty dishes yesterday. I began the day by obtaining a York resident's card from a local library, a task which was made more difficult than necessary due to confusion over which credentials were necessary to receive the card. I had lunch in the city center, bought some supplies from a model shop (I hope to start work assembling a kit of some sort before long), and then rendezvoused with the rest of the Calvin students for a group outing to the York Castle Museum. This musem winds through an old prison complex that stands on the site of the original castle, which was built by William the Conqueror shortly after the Norman conquest in order to reinforce Norman authority over the local population. The castle appeared in a couple different permutations over the years, serving as the center of government for the surrounding area, a base for campaigns against Scottish uprisings, and the intermittent dwelling places of several kings. All that remains of it today are portions of the keep and a gutted watchtower nearby. The museum houses exhibits tracing the history of York from the British Civil War to the 1960s, with displays of medieval weapons, domestic life in the 1800s, a reconstructed Victorian street, an exhibit on the structure's past as a prison, an exhibit on agriculture in the area, and an exhibit on toys, as well as many others. Of particular interest to me was a self-effacing plaque about a man who reputedly lived to the age of 169, a report which seems just as difficult to contest as it it to prove. Following the excursion, I hashed out plans with several of the other students for a short trip to Wales this coming weekend, after which we had dinner at a pub; my meal was steak and ale pie, which wasn't very fancy but quite filling.
That pretty much wraps up my week. I hope this note finds everyone well back on your side of the ocean. You can expect another email around the same time next week, when I will have just returned from Wales. In the meantime, those of you with Facebook profiles can check out some photographs that I just posted, if you so desire.
Take care!
-John Morton
First of all, some contact information, for anyone who's interested.
Skype username: john.morton520
Mailing address:
John Morton
2 Cruse House
The Grange
Ramsay Close
Huntington Road
York, YO31 8ST
Some additional details: Greenwich Mean Time runs five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, and the weather resembles conditions of early spring in the Midwest. My thermometer currently reads 41 degrees fahrenheit. The coldest temperature reading I've observed was in the upper teens, and the warmest was in the lower forties. There is no snow in York, and so far we've enjoyed a decent dosage of sunshine, although it grows dark shortly past 5:00 every day.
I know my last message was quite lengthy; I expect they will all be relatively long, but I'll do my best to keep them succinct and interesting.
Most of Sunday was spent on a group excursion to the coastal town of Whitby. Although I was reluctant to leave bed, I met all the other international students on campus at 9:15, where we loaded up a pair of chartered buses and got underway. The drive to Whitby was roughly an hour of picturesque, rolling countryside, marked by little foliage except hedgerows--the proverbial British moors, if I'm not mistaken. As we approached the coast, a dusting of snow appeared on the ground.
Whitby is a fishing/touristy town situated on two sides of a small valley at the mouth of the River Esk, which flows in from the North Sea. The buses dropped us off atop the east side of the valley at the ruins of Whitby Abbey. The first abbey on this site was built in the 500s and stood until a Viking attack in 867. The current abbey was refounded in 1078 and remained until it was destroyed in 1540 as a result of Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries; in the intervening time, it has been torn apart for building material and remained at the mercy of the elements. It's still a stunning sight, though; anyone who knows me well can tell you that I fall in love with every old church or cathedral I set eyes on, and I snapped lots of pictures of the ruins.
After seeing our fill of the ruins, some other Calvin students and I descended a staircase of 199 rough stone steps to the meandering streets of Whitby. Our first order of business was to get lunch--in this case, the stereotypical fish and chips at a small cafe. Having been advised that Yorkshire--and Whitby in particular--is the place to get fish and chips, this was one experience I couldn't resist. The verdict: I think fish and chips are probably about the same no matter where you order them--these were everything fish and chips should be, and nothing that fish and chips couldn't be.
Following lunch, we walked through the town, over a bridge, and up the west side of the inlet, passing all manner of gimmicky, tacky tourist shops on the way. A flight of stairs set in the hillside led to a splendid lookout over the North Sea and a statue of Captain James Cook, who grew up and had his apprenticeship in Whitby before achieving fame as an explorer. We also saw an arch comprised of two massive whale bones, perhaps twenty feet high at its zenith, a testament to Whitby's heritage as a whaling town. Descending the hill once more, two other students and I made our way to a small stretch of beach, getting a close look at the ferocious breakers that raged near the shore and along the wesmost of the two piers that project from the inlet out into the sea. Then we spent the next two or so hours wandering the streets, ducking into some small shops, and enjoying the brisk air. I caught sight of a sailing ship anchored in the inlet, so I quickly dashed over and took some pictures (since old ships are the only things I love more than old churches). This ship turned out to be the Grand Turk, a replica of the frigate HMS Blandford. She was beautiful, with a stunning blue, yellow, and black color scheme. At this point it was time to return to the rendezvous point back up by the abbey; I headed that way, making a quick stop to purchase a stick of rhubarb-flavored "Whitby rock", a type of hard candy that kind of dissolves once you moisten it in your mouth.
On my ascent back up the 199 steps, I overtook a young boy who was counting off each step very deliberately as he climbed it; I think he had miscounted somewhere on his journey. Back on the east hill, I had a few minutes to spare, which I spent looking over an old church and cemetery that adjoined the abbey plot. Then it was back in the bus and headed back to York. Our trip home followed a different route than our outbound trip that morning, taking us through the coastal town of Scarborough, which was the epitome of a tourist trap. As the sun set over the moors, I eavesdropped on a discussion some other American students were having with a native of Britian, basically talking about traveling and America and different countries; although I didn't contribute to this discourse, it really drove home the fact that I am away from home and amongst people who regard the United States from a viewpoint other than my own.
Not a whole lot has happened throughout the week; I've still been getting settled in to a new environment and a new lifestyle of independence. I've purchased more supplies and wandered around the city center some more, which adds up to quite a bit of walking. There are lots of details that need attention, so I'm just addressing them as they come to mind. I located a post office and sent out a couple postcards; I also exchanged some currency, receiving £23.28 in exchange for $40.00. I've begun to sample some of the local fare: I had a tea cake, which was light, tasty roll with currants and some sort of nuts; a sausage roll, which is a distant relative of a pig in a blanket; some cookies from a local bakery, which were quite good; and a couple of the well-known Cornish pasties. In spite of my purchase of a comprehensive street map of the city, I found myself wandering in circles in a misting rain for two hours on Tuesday afternoon; as if the narrow, twisting routes of the streets weren't difficult enough, the street names frequently change within a couple of blocks, and street signs appear in the form of colorless plaques affixed to buildings, which prove elusive to the eyes of one used to bright green signage, situated clearly in the midst of intersections themselves. It was frustrating, and by the time I plodded back to my flat, groceries in hand, I was ready to put the cold, soggy afternoon behind me with a hot mug of tea.
It seems that the academic system here is quite different than what I'm accustomed to at an American institution, much less an institution like Calvin College. Since York St. John's is a more career-oriented school than Calvin, with less emphasis on the liberal arts, the typical undergraduate program runs a mere three years. Including the two classes taught by Professor Ward, my schedule shows that I should be spending twelve hours in class every week. This seems like nothing compared to the 16 hours I took the two previous semesters at Calvin, and I wonder whether I'll have enough to do to keep me busy. Although I believe the enrollment at YSJ is about the same as Calvin's (about 4,000), the campus is much smaller and more compact. The predominant philosophy seems to be that the university supports the academic dimension of student life and makes little effort to support other activites; there are programs and student organizations in place, but they seem to be much more low-key than I have found them to be at Calvin. At an orientation session for student activites, nearly every event listed seemed to be little more than an occasion to drink, and the big attraction in the student union is the bar, which offers heavily-advertised £1 pints on Mondays and Saturdays. I may have to look around quite deliberately for any sort of involvement around here, but it's still the first week of the semester, and my initial impressions of the university are, of course, subject to change.
The two Calvin courses that I am taking are a British Literature course and a British Culture/History course. We started off the literature side of things with readings from William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, trying to get a flavor of the Romantic movement in the arts. Of the two, Coleridge appeals to me more; Wordsworth is pleasant enough, but Coleridge is more gripping and less pastoral. I'm looking forward to "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", which I have somehow managed to neglect thus far in the course of my education. Our British culture course has had us do some reading from a history text, which has proved much more intersting than I expected...I guess that proves that you really can't judge a book by it's cover. Going along with the Romantic poets in the literature course, we're starting out the culture course by focusing on the nineteenth century, with glimpses at the times immediately preceding and following that century to put everything in more context. The text appeals to me because the author realizes that history is nothing more than a story, rife with strange twists, bizarre characters, and delightful anecdotes. This is the way it should be taught.
The two courses I'm taking through York St. John's are a history course focused on the Roman and British empires (something of an odd combination) and an introductory grammar course. The Empires course is taught by a composed, soft-spoken sexagenarian, and I expect it to be interesting. However, for the first class meeting, all the tutor did was essentially read straight from a printed outline he had distributed to the class; I hope he doesn't follow this format every week, because if I just wanted to read an outline, I could do so without going to class. The Grammar course appears that it should be pretty easy as well; although I haven't taken grammar at all since high school, and I welcome the opportunity to refresh on all the rules, my first impression is that I won't be learning anything new. Hopefully I can take more away from the class than just that.
Today (Saturday) was more active than usual, and it came as a welcome diversion after a pretty unevent day of rain, laundry, and washing dirty dishes yesterday. I began the day by obtaining a York resident's card from a local library, a task which was made more difficult than necessary due to confusion over which credentials were necessary to receive the card. I had lunch in the city center, bought some supplies from a model shop (I hope to start work assembling a kit of some sort before long), and then rendezvoused with the rest of the Calvin students for a group outing to the York Castle Museum. This musem winds through an old prison complex that stands on the site of the original castle, which was built by William the Conqueror shortly after the Norman conquest in order to reinforce Norman authority over the local population. The castle appeared in a couple different permutations over the years, serving as the center of government for the surrounding area, a base for campaigns against Scottish uprisings, and the intermittent dwelling places of several kings. All that remains of it today are portions of the keep and a gutted watchtower nearby. The museum houses exhibits tracing the history of York from the British Civil War to the 1960s, with displays of medieval weapons, domestic life in the 1800s, a reconstructed Victorian street, an exhibit on the structure's past as a prison, an exhibit on agriculture in the area, and an exhibit on toys, as well as many others. Of particular interest to me was a self-effacing plaque about a man who reputedly lived to the age of 169, a report which seems just as difficult to contest as it it to prove. Following the excursion, I hashed out plans with several of the other students for a short trip to Wales this coming weekend, after which we had dinner at a pub; my meal was steak and ale pie, which wasn't very fancy but quite filling.
That pretty much wraps up my week. I hope this note finds everyone well back on your side of the ocean. You can expect another email around the same time next week, when I will have just returned from Wales. In the meantime, those of you with Facebook profiles can check out some photographs that I just posted, if you so desire.
Take care!
-John Morton
Jet-Lagging (January 31, 2010)
Hey folks,
First of all, most of you are receiving this email because you requested to be on my mailing list. A couple of you didn't request, but I just figured you'd like to be in the know anyway. At least one of you was volunteered by another person, although I'm not naming any names...
As I am now able to access the internet on my own computer, I can provide an actual account of what I've been up to over the past three days: After some rushed last-minute packing on Wednesday morning, I drove to the airport with my girlfriend and met up with the rest of the Calvin group. After dropping off our checked luggage and going over some final details, we said our goodbyes to friends and families and proceeded through airport security without incident. This left us with about an hour to wait before boarding, which I passed by conversing with another student on the trip. Then we embarked on the first leg of the trip, a quick jaunt over to O'Hare in Chicago, starting out our trip the northeast by heading southwest. We arrived in Chicago and moved in a mass to our connecting gate, with a four hour layover ahead of us. Attempts to connect to the airport wireless internet proved fruitless, and I would have fallen fast asleep had it not been for a couple rounds of "telephone pictionary". As boarding time neared, I made sure I had everything prepared for the flight, gave Karin a final goodbye call, and finally got on the Boeing 757 which was to be home for the next six and a half hours.
We departed from O'Hare at 5:30, just as it was getting dark in Chicago; I found myself occupying a seat between two fellow Calvin students. Nothing interesting occurred during this flight; dinner consisted of the customary choice between chicken or beef, and wasn't that bad. A kids' movie was playing on LCD panels mounted through the fuselage (although I don't think I noticed a single child on the flight) which I ignored in favor of some jazz on the in-flight radio. Thankfully, I was able to sleep for an hour or two, while somehow we lost five hours somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.
After breakfasting and filling out an immigration card, we found ourselves approaching Manchester. The stark blackness was broken by mosaics of yellow lights indicating towns and cities across the English countryside; quite beautiful. I made it through immigration no problem. There was a bit of anxiety when I thought that I had lost my luggage, but it turned out that it had been grabbed off the conveyor belt by some Calvin students who had preceded me through immigration. With our baggage collected, we then exited the terminal and met with Professor Ward, our supervisor/liason/go-to guy for the trip. We rolled out of Manchester by bus shortly after 8:00, just as it was getting light outside. I remained half-awake for the beginning of the trip...then sleep overtook me.
I was in the midst of an engrossing dream when I was shaken awake by one of my fellows; we had reached the apartment complex which was to be home for me and about half the group for the semester. We wrested our luggage from the bowels of the bus, turned in a housing form, and were directed to our flats. I was welcomed to 2 Cruse House by a fellow student from the next apartment over, and he in turn introduced me to one of my flatmates. They seemed pleased to have an American in their midst, describing how they had previously hosted students of different nationalities. Evidently the two apartments hang out together a lot, and my flat had been the site of a party the night before, as was evidenced by the untidy kitchen, which still has not improved. My room was nice and clean, however, and so were the shower and toilet rooms. I had my luggage unpacked in barely any time and spent a few minutes attempting to connect my laptop to the internet. I sought help at the next apartment over, where my new aquaintances were unable to assist me. However, one of them volunteered to show me to campus, where I could take my computer to the IT department. We walked over to the York St. John's University and I got my computer taken care of in a matter of minutes; my new neighbor pointed out a couple buildings, then we parted ways and I returned to the flat.
I spent the next couple hours organizing and situating my stuff, then met with the rest of the Calvin students in the apartment complex to walk over to campus for an orientation session. This was just our final enrollment in our classes and into the YSJ computer system. A mundane PowerPoint followed, during which it was a painful effort to stay awake, but afterward I wandered around the campus library a bit and made a quick run to and from my flat to retrieve some documents I had previously forgotten. After a quick trip to pick up some basic groceries, it was back to campus for a reception for all the international students--a dragging, unstructured gathering during which I kind of brooded off to one side, munching peanuts and potato chips rather than attempt to socialize in my fatigued state. Thankfully the reception adjourned early and it was back to the flat, where I video-chatted with Karin, became thoroughly bewildered at the duvet that came in my bedding pack, and finally dropped into a much-needed sleep.
Friday began at 9:00; I flopped out of bed, checked my email, and fiddled unsuccessfully with the shower knob for five minutes before resigning myself to a quick rinsing of my face in the washstand in my room. More orientation sessions and lunch at the campus dining hall kept me busy from 10:00 until 12:30. At 2:00 I struck out on my own into the city center, which is the portion of York enclosed by old stone walls. I'll describe the city center in more detail later; for this outing, I managed to pick up some basic supplies like paper and towels and soap, and got into a brief conversation with a cashier who fulfilled all sorts of wonderful stereotypes regarding matronly British ladies. In my wandering I ran into a pair of fellow Calvin students, one of whom I joined up with to continue looking around. I bought a secondhand clock radio at sprawling antiques shop, and we ducked into a couple bookstores before coming back.
After depositing my finds at the aparment, I joined the rest of the group and we headed to the house our professor inhabits for the semester, which Calvin rents from the university, evidently. There we enjoyed a couple hours of conversation and snacks before departing; most of the students headed to a nearby pub; I was tired, so I returned to my flat and contented myself with Ramen noodles instead. Lights off at 12:30, right when I heard the sounds of a guitar and a chorus of male voices strike up from one of the rooms beneath mine.
With nothing previously scheduled this morning, I remained in bed until 10:00. Thankfully I was able to figure out the shower this morning, after making some inquiries of others living in the apartments last night, and felt like a new man afterward. Having the entire day ahead of me, I quickly consulted a couple maps and struck out around noon. My first two destinations were a Sainsbury's and a Morrison's, shops that resemble a Scott's/Kroger and Wal-Mart, respectively. I obtained more basic supplies there and then headed back to the city center, walking atop the old walls for part of the way. In the city center, I retraced some of my paths from yesterday, as well as investigated some new parts of the city. I made a second stop in a cool little model and hobby shop, and now I'm tempted to assemble a model kit or two during my stay here, something I haven't done in years. Throughout my wanderings, I saw a magician, a Punch and Judy show, and a pianist performing in the streets, which are restricted to pedestrian traffic in the heart of town. The high points of the afternoon were stumbling upon an old church nestled along the waterfront and hearing the bells of York Minster Cathedral toll 4:00. Again, more details on the city center in subsequent emails.
Back to the apartment by 5:00, where I instant-messaged with friends from back home for a bit. Then I returned to our professor's house for another social evening. The group was smaller, but we still had a good time playing games and eating refreshments for a couple hours. I returned to the apatment by 10:30, and composed this email in the time being.
That should give you all at least an overview of my activities for the past couple days. Tomorrow our entire group is doing a day trip to Whitby, which is the coastal town where much of Bram Stoker's Dracula takes place. I'll be sure to inform you all about that in my next dispatch. For now, I had better call it a night, so accept this hasty farewell, and I hope you take encouragement from the fact that I wrote out a prayer card for all my friends and family back home during my brief visit in the church this afternoon.
So long for now!
-John Morton
First of all, most of you are receiving this email because you requested to be on my mailing list. A couple of you didn't request, but I just figured you'd like to be in the know anyway. At least one of you was volunteered by another person, although I'm not naming any names...
As I am now able to access the internet on my own computer, I can provide an actual account of what I've been up to over the past three days: After some rushed last-minute packing on Wednesday morning, I drove to the airport with my girlfriend and met up with the rest of the Calvin group. After dropping off our checked luggage and going over some final details, we said our goodbyes to friends and families and proceeded through airport security without incident. This left us with about an hour to wait before boarding, which I passed by conversing with another student on the trip. Then we embarked on the first leg of the trip, a quick jaunt over to O'Hare in Chicago, starting out our trip the northeast by heading southwest. We arrived in Chicago and moved in a mass to our connecting gate, with a four hour layover ahead of us. Attempts to connect to the airport wireless internet proved fruitless, and I would have fallen fast asleep had it not been for a couple rounds of "telephone pictionary". As boarding time neared, I made sure I had everything prepared for the flight, gave Karin a final goodbye call, and finally got on the Boeing 757 which was to be home for the next six and a half hours.
We departed from O'Hare at 5:30, just as it was getting dark in Chicago; I found myself occupying a seat between two fellow Calvin students. Nothing interesting occurred during this flight; dinner consisted of the customary choice between chicken or beef, and wasn't that bad. A kids' movie was playing on LCD panels mounted through the fuselage (although I don't think I noticed a single child on the flight) which I ignored in favor of some jazz on the in-flight radio. Thankfully, I was able to sleep for an hour or two, while somehow we lost five hours somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.
After breakfasting and filling out an immigration card, we found ourselves approaching Manchester. The stark blackness was broken by mosaics of yellow lights indicating towns and cities across the English countryside; quite beautiful. I made it through immigration no problem. There was a bit of anxiety when I thought that I had lost my luggage, but it turned out that it had been grabbed off the conveyor belt by some Calvin students who had preceded me through immigration. With our baggage collected, we then exited the terminal and met with Professor Ward, our supervisor/liason/go-to guy for the trip. We rolled out of Manchester by bus shortly after 8:00, just as it was getting light outside. I remained half-awake for the beginning of the trip...then sleep overtook me.
I was in the midst of an engrossing dream when I was shaken awake by one of my fellows; we had reached the apartment complex which was to be home for me and about half the group for the semester. We wrested our luggage from the bowels of the bus, turned in a housing form, and were directed to our flats. I was welcomed to 2 Cruse House by a fellow student from the next apartment over, and he in turn introduced me to one of my flatmates. They seemed pleased to have an American in their midst, describing how they had previously hosted students of different nationalities. Evidently the two apartments hang out together a lot, and my flat had been the site of a party the night before, as was evidenced by the untidy kitchen, which still has not improved. My room was nice and clean, however, and so were the shower and toilet rooms. I had my luggage unpacked in barely any time and spent a few minutes attempting to connect my laptop to the internet. I sought help at the next apartment over, where my new aquaintances were unable to assist me. However, one of them volunteered to show me to campus, where I could take my computer to the IT department. We walked over to the York St. John's University and I got my computer taken care of in a matter of minutes; my new neighbor pointed out a couple buildings, then we parted ways and I returned to the flat.
I spent the next couple hours organizing and situating my stuff, then met with the rest of the Calvin students in the apartment complex to walk over to campus for an orientation session. This was just our final enrollment in our classes and into the YSJ computer system. A mundane PowerPoint followed, during which it was a painful effort to stay awake, but afterward I wandered around the campus library a bit and made a quick run to and from my flat to retrieve some documents I had previously forgotten. After a quick trip to pick up some basic groceries, it was back to campus for a reception for all the international students--a dragging, unstructured gathering during which I kind of brooded off to one side, munching peanuts and potato chips rather than attempt to socialize in my fatigued state. Thankfully the reception adjourned early and it was back to the flat, where I video-chatted with Karin, became thoroughly bewildered at the duvet that came in my bedding pack, and finally dropped into a much-needed sleep.
Friday began at 9:00; I flopped out of bed, checked my email, and fiddled unsuccessfully with the shower knob for five minutes before resigning myself to a quick rinsing of my face in the washstand in my room. More orientation sessions and lunch at the campus dining hall kept me busy from 10:00 until 12:30. At 2:00 I struck out on my own into the city center, which is the portion of York enclosed by old stone walls. I'll describe the city center in more detail later; for this outing, I managed to pick up some basic supplies like paper and towels and soap, and got into a brief conversation with a cashier who fulfilled all sorts of wonderful stereotypes regarding matronly British ladies. In my wandering I ran into a pair of fellow Calvin students, one of whom I joined up with to continue looking around. I bought a secondhand clock radio at sprawling antiques shop, and we ducked into a couple bookstores before coming back.
After depositing my finds at the aparment, I joined the rest of the group and we headed to the house our professor inhabits for the semester, which Calvin rents from the university, evidently. There we enjoyed a couple hours of conversation and snacks before departing; most of the students headed to a nearby pub; I was tired, so I returned to my flat and contented myself with Ramen noodles instead. Lights off at 12:30, right when I heard the sounds of a guitar and a chorus of male voices strike up from one of the rooms beneath mine.
With nothing previously scheduled this morning, I remained in bed until 10:00. Thankfully I was able to figure out the shower this morning, after making some inquiries of others living in the apartments last night, and felt like a new man afterward. Having the entire day ahead of me, I quickly consulted a couple maps and struck out around noon. My first two destinations were a Sainsbury's and a Morrison's, shops that resemble a Scott's/Kroger and Wal-Mart, respectively. I obtained more basic supplies there and then headed back to the city center, walking atop the old walls for part of the way. In the city center, I retraced some of my paths from yesterday, as well as investigated some new parts of the city. I made a second stop in a cool little model and hobby shop, and now I'm tempted to assemble a model kit or two during my stay here, something I haven't done in years. Throughout my wanderings, I saw a magician, a Punch and Judy show, and a pianist performing in the streets, which are restricted to pedestrian traffic in the heart of town. The high points of the afternoon were stumbling upon an old church nestled along the waterfront and hearing the bells of York Minster Cathedral toll 4:00. Again, more details on the city center in subsequent emails.
Back to the apartment by 5:00, where I instant-messaged with friends from back home for a bit. Then I returned to our professor's house for another social evening. The group was smaller, but we still had a good time playing games and eating refreshments for a couple hours. I returned to the apatment by 10:30, and composed this email in the time being.
That should give you all at least an overview of my activities for the past couple days. Tomorrow our entire group is doing a day trip to Whitby, which is the coastal town where much of Bram Stoker's Dracula takes place. I'll be sure to inform you all about that in my next dispatch. For now, I had better call it a night, so accept this hasty farewell, and I hope you take encouragement from the fact that I wrote out a prayer card for all my friends and family back home during my brief visit in the church this afternoon.
So long for now!
-John Morton
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