Yes, yes, I know. I am a terrible, terrible blogger, and I apologize. In my defense, however, my quest to fight off the boredom of the five-day weekend has started to work! This is mostly because I have actual work for my classes, which is a nice change. So I've been reading and working on papers and presentations, continuing to fail grandly at archery (I hit the target more than the floor last week! This is definite progress), I've started yoga to counteract the stress of archery, and I am now in my third week of volunteering at Norwich Castle.
The interior of the Castle is part art museum, part Norfolk history museum, and the learning department does a lot in terms of activities for school groups and families, so I help with different activities and do some preparatory work behind the scenes. It's actually really, really fun. My first week I was there for an Ancient Egyptian themed day, so I spent my day helping eight year-olds make Egyptian collars out of bits of paper. They were excited once they realized that I was American, and I heard lots of stories about cousins, friends, etc...who moved to the States. Last week I was at the museum for an Ancient Roman/Iceni day, so all of the interpretors who I met were dressed either in plaid and blue face paint or in togas. It was great.
I was allowed to follow one of the groups in the morning in order to observe some of the activities. Their first stop was with a woman dressed as an Iceni chief, and she got them to think about how the Iceni lived compared to how we live today, and told them about the Roman oppression of the Celts. As an overarching idea for the day, the kids were supposed to be thinking about whether or not it was fair for the Romans to tax the Iceni so harshly - they took half of what the Iceni grew, raised, or made. The kids had never been exposed to this part of the story before, as the Romans are the ones who wrote history, and they portrayed the Iceni, as well as other Celtic peoples, as uncivilized barbarians. It was really interesting to see where the kids ultimately placed their loyalties. One little girl, fresh from learning about the Roman tax, told "Brutus," the Roman soldier who led the next rotation, that he and his people should just go home because the Celts were perfectly well off without them, thank you very much. He looked bewildered for a moment, but recovered quickly and said, "Kids, I'm going to tell you something about life: it's not fair. You want to know how to make it more fair? Get a sword."
This past week I was at Strangers' Hall, which is a beautiful Tudor hall that has served as a home and meeting place, and is now a museum. We had a group of nine year-olds down for a Tudor day, and they learned all about feasting, dancing, Tudor dress, and weaving. As I've mentioned before, Norwich was England's second city because of the weaving trade that grew up here when the "Strangers" came from the Low Countries. They used Strangers' Hall as a meeting place (fun fact: they also introduced the canaries that gave their name to the Norwich City Football Club) and brought their weaving technology with them. The kids were supposed to imagine that they were Strangers in Norwich in 1565, and during the day they learned about how different people in Norwich would have reacted to them. It was a really, really good program. I helped with the costumes in the morning, so I played lady-in-waiting and laced girls into bodices and petticoats, and then in the afternoon I helped with the craft activity, which was making paper looms and weaving. I had a great time, actually, and I got to spend the whole day in this beautiful Tudor hall, where ten year-old me would have had a field day letting my imagination run wild.
I love working with the kids, and I think that it's so important for them to see history brought to life like this. It's the difference between reading a Shakespeare play in English class and seeing it performed. The interpreters are great, as well. They're so dedicated to teaching students - most of them are former educators - and our lunches always involve several cups of tea and a chat about something historical, such as whether the Romans really were too oppressive and what they contributed to Britain. It's an indulgence for my inner history nerd.
So, excuses aside, we have now come to the travel adventure portion of the blog! The Dickinson Humanities Program, under the sometimes misguided leadership of Professor Qualls, who this time led us through several inches of mud instead of sticking to dry roads, ventured forth in the very early English morning to York. York is a beautiful city, made even prettier by the fact that the sun was shining. Quick historical rundown for you, brought to you by the fine people at Lonely Planet. York was originally home to a Celtic tribe that was then pushed off their lands by the Romans in A.D. 71. Gotta love the Romans. They used York as a garrison and Emperor Hadrian, of wall fame, used it as a base for his northern campaign. It was a very important city - Emperor Constantine was crowned in York in 306, which is pretty impressive. The next few hundred years are a bit of a hot mess - some Anglo-Saxons happened - and then the Vikings took York in 866. They renamed it Jorvic (from the Roman Eboracum) and made it the capital of their trading empire for one hundred years. The next major development in York's history was the arrival of the Normans, when the charming, gentle-hearted William the Conqueror up and torched the city and much of the surrounding countryside in an effort to show northerners that he was boss. Nice guy. The Normans then set about rebuilding York in the twelfth century, and eventually it came to be the beautiful city that it is today.
York Minster, which is the largest medieval cathedral in Northern Europe. It was built between 1220 and 1480 and is second in religious importance only to Canterbury Cathedral. Don't worry - you'll see more of it!
Turns out that Guy Fawkes was born here!
This is part of the Roman garrison that stood at York, as indicated by the red stripe, because apparently the Romans liked that kind of thing. The sarcophagi are also Roman. The Roman wall was then built up by medieval residents, and it's now one of the most complete medieval walls in the country.
The ruins of the Abbey of St. Mary's.
Our tour guide took us along the medieval town wall for a bit - here we are on Robin Hood's Tower. The poor guy had no idea what he was getting into. He told us that there was no reason for the name, but he did not count on having me in his group, or on the fact that I had been reading Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography on the train that morning (it's for a paper, I swear!). So, dear readers, I will enlighten you so that you will be less ignorant than my tour guide. The early Robin Hood ballads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries actually have Robin's home as Barnsdale, a village in Yorkshire. He frequently meets people coming from York and goes there himself sometimes. His location isn't cemented as Nottingham until later.
Check out these awesome flying buttresses shining in the late aftenoon sun. We climbed the tower in York Minster to see some stunning views of York at my favourite time of day.
What we could see lookiing North - the Yorkshire moors and the Kilburn Chalk Horse! You can't make it out in my picture of the actual landscape, and I could just barely see it, but it was there!
The Shambles, probably the most famous street in York. It used to be the butchers' street, apparently.
Because I strive to put Lord of the Rings references into everything that I do.
The Jorvic Viking Museum, where you could smell real Viking smells! Not that I have the most discerning nose in the world, but to me it smelled like my brother's room after he gets home from basketball practice. I'm just saying (sorry, Little Man). We were all a little bit punchy by this point, and Stephenie bought runes, which we proceeded to read at lunch.
All in all, it was a very successful trip to York, and we had a great time. By a happy chance, Caitlin and Sarah chose the same day to visit York from Durham, so we met up for dinner and a pint, which was a blast. York is an absolutely gorgeous city, and definitely worth a visit.
I know that I've been a horrible blogger of late, and there is much that I have to catch up on still. But now that things have kind of taken off and I've been doing more, time seems to be moving so much quicker. It's gotten to that point where things are happening too quickly, and June seems so much closer now than it did even a few weeks ago. I'm starting to think about what will happen when I have to leave everything that I've built up here, and it's absolutely terrifying. This has been the most amazing year of my life, and there is still so much to look forward to and so much living to be done before June. I just wish that I could press the pause button, because I do not want it to end. Everyone says, "Oh, don't think about it - you have time!" That's all very well and good, living in the moment and all that, and I do try. But it's impossible to ignore that niggling voice in the back of my head. It's made me think, though - society makes it impossible for us to really live in the moment. Even now, when my professors, family, and Global Education office are all telling me to live for the present, I still have to worry about summer jobs, classes for next year, accomodation, thesis topics, graduate school - how am I supposed to stay in the moment with all of that accumulating behind me? It's hard - a kerfuffle, one might even say.
But I have tried really hard this year to appreciate every day and to live in the moment as much as I can, and this is honestly the happiest that I've ever been. In that vein, I'll leave you with some wise words from John Keating in Dead Poets Society:
"Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary."
It's not easy, but this year has shown me that the extraordinary is there, even in the little moments. We just have to find it and shut the door on all of the pressures that want to tear us away. At least for a moment.
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