Kerfuffle (n.) - a commotion or fuss

Yes, dear readers, kerfuffle. England is a giant kerfuffle. For the country that produced William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Jane Austen, and Harry Potter, you've really got to wonder sometimes.
My family made it safely to Norwich, bringing with them not only their delightful selves but also my winter coat, homemade cookies, and this wonderful new vocab term, which they picked up in Cambridge. I of course got the flu and couldn't make it to Cambridge, but after three days of bedridden misery during which the housekeeper probably thought that I had died, I discovered that the cure for the flu is actually Cheerios and A Very Potter Musical. Who knew? Anyway, tangent. Back to the narrative at hand!
The crazy woman running through the streets of Norwich to the train station on the 23 December was in fact me. I wasn't supposed to be running, but let me take this moment to explain some of the possible scenarios that pop up when you try to be timely and efficient in England. (Yes, another tangent. Sorry about that.) It's like If You Giva a Mouse a Cookie, gone terribly wrong:
1. You go to the post office with the simple idea of mailing a Christmas present to your best friend in the States. You bring a box loosely taped, with her address in the appropriate place and your return address written in the top left corner. So far so good, yes? You bring said box to the counter and the postal worker tells you to put it on the scale before staring at it skeptically and asking, "You're going to mail it like that?" in the tone of a snarky postal diva. A little taken aback, you still trust the postal system and reply, "Well, it needs a bit more tape." He quickly interjects, "We don't have tape here. Oh, and is that the return address? You should probably write that on the side, otherwise they might get confused and send it back to you." Then he returns to whatever menial task he was doing while you stand there, dumbfounded that the post office a) does not have tape and b) employs people who might confuse the return address with the sendee address. What? So you end up buying a role of tape, taping the package so tightly that your friend will need dynamite to open it, writing RETURN ADDRESS in all caps on the side of said box, and handing the package and the tape to the postal worker, telling him, "Keep this for the next American who will expect this establishment to have tape."
2. You go to your friendly local SpecSavers to get another referral to the NHS eye clinic, since you missed your last appointment while you had the flu and the gentleman on the phone refused to let you reschedule without another referral even though you used your best "please take pity on my, I'm sick and pathetic" voice. After explaining this story to three different people at SpecSavers, a kindly contact lens specialist sits you down and gives you a complete eye exam instead of a referral. This is very generous of him and he assures you that you're not going blind, but that you might, but you don't actually need to go to the clinic, but you might want to, but you shouldn't have to unless you feel pain in your eye, but it might be safe to check anyway, and why don't you make another appointment for ten days from now? This means that you end up sprinting down Prince of Wales Road and are five minutes late to the train station, even though you planned to get there thirty minutes ahead of time and even brought a book for that purpose.*sigh*
Eventually I made it to the train station and to my family, which was too many kinds of wonderful to put into words. They had just come from a delightful day in Cambridge, and we got them checked into the most amazing bed and breakfast in the world. Seriously, if you're ever considering a vacation to Norwich, stay at the Arrandale House Guest Lodge on Earlham Road. Maurice and Olga, the owners, are the most delightful people in the entire world, and that is not an exaggeration. He's Irish and she's South African, so everything is this awesome hybrid of two cultures. Also, the place is gorgeous, and they serve amazing breakfasts. Kyle stayed with me at UEA, but we went for full English/Irish breakfasts every morning with Mom and Dad. We tried black pudding (tastes like haggis) and even had Christmas morning champaigne with Maurice and Olga. They would come and talk to us and forget about taking our breakfast orders because they had so many interesting stories to tell.
Our adventures in Norwich included eating delicious sticky toffee pudding next to a party of drunken senior citizens wearing paper crowns at the Wig and Pen pub, seeing most of Norwich's major historical sites, watching the Christmas episode of QI, and attending a midnight Christmas Eve service at Norwich Cathedral. The cathedral itself was absolutely beautiful with all of the Christmas decorations, and it was a very nice service. It was an Anglican service with the bishop and everything, so very different from what we're used to at home. And their Christmas carols are different! Same words, different tunes. I was most distressed until we got to "Joy to the World," which thankfully remained the same. Change is fine, but I am a stickler for Christmas traditions, including the melody of "O Little Town of Bethlehem." We spent Christmas day in our pajamas, just relaxing and doing not much of anything. It was lovely just to be with my family.
We celebrated Boxing Day, the origins of which are up for debate, by taking a very early coach to Bath, which is probably my favourite city in England. We ran into a bit of a kerfuffle over the directions to our bed and breakfast, however. I swore that we had to go one way, but Dad thought that we had to go the other way. We took a short cut recommended by one local, which proved to be the long way around, and then took a wrong turn upon the advice of another local. After dealing with British signage and directions for the past four months, I managed to not say, "Told you so," when Dad's way proved to be the wrong one. So we lugged our suitcases all over Bath and learned an important lesson: never trust a Brit with directions. Ever. Our bed and breakfast, once we located it, proved to be very nice. Most everything was closed due to Boxing Day, so we got dinner at a local pub and then retired early to watch marathons of Friends, which seems to be all that they show on TV here. The room that Kyle and I shared had a gigantic wardrobe in it that clearly leads to Narnia, and a shower that we could not figure out. I mean, the controls look like something from Doctor Who. Since I left my sonic screwdriver at UEA, we gave up and asked for help the next day. So, irony of ironies, we could not figure out how to bathe in Bath (don't worry, we got it the next morning).
We walked into the centre of Bath the next morning and walked around Bath Abbey, which is beautiful. Bath is such a pretty city, even though the weather was grey and dismal while we were there. It's also a very manageable city - everything is centrally located and it's very easy to get your bearings. I dropped Mom, Dad, and Kyle at the Roman baths since I had already toured them (check September's blogs for my first trip to Bath), and headed to the Assembly Rooms and the Fashion Museum. The Assembly Rooms were the place to see and be seen in Georgian Bath, and it's where many of the social gatherings take place in Northanger Abbey. See, you thought that I just connected everything to Harry Potter, but no! I can do it with Jane Austen, too! The Fashion Museum, which is in the basement of the Assembly Rooms, was really cool, and they had some very ugly clothes as well as an exhibition of Princess Diana's dresses. It's amazing how loved she is in this country, even now. The Assembly Rooms themselves were beautiful - there's the Octagon Room, where card games and whatnot would take place because everyone in Georgian England gambled, the tea room where refreshments would be taken in between dances, and then the ball room where the actual dancing happened.
My family very much enjoyed the Roman Baths, and Mom and Dad even sampled the delightful waters of Bath. Cheers! After a hasty lunch we embarked on a tour to Stonehenge and the surrounding countryside. It was freezing and we couldn't walk all of the way around Stonehenge because there are no shovels in this country so no one had cleared the path, but it looked very cool in the snow! After defrosting in the van, we set off to see some thatched cottages in teeny tiny villages, and then we visited the lovely village of Lacock. The entire village is a National Heritage site and it still looks like the quintessential nineteenth-century English village. There are no wires above ground, and if it weren't for the cars in the streets you would think that you had gone back in time. Film companies love Lacock, and it's been used in Cranford, Steven Spielberg's upcoming film adaptation of War Horse, the BBC's extremely long and ill-cast Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth (he wasn't the ill-cast part. And this is just my opinion - I know that there are many Austen purists out there who uphold this adaptation as something sacred. Please don't hurt me), and... Harry Potter!!!! I know, Jane Austen and Harry Potter in the same place. It was a Christmas miracle. Lacock has been used as Hogsmeade and as the Potter's house in the first movie.
Our busy day ended with dinner at Jamie Oliver's restaurant in Bath, and then Kyle and I found a television special on the 50 most annoying people/things/events of 2010. Some highlights included: Paul the Octopus, Sarah Palin, snow, and everything to do with the World Cup. About half of the team made it onto the list separately, the coach made it, and the entire team was the number one most annoying thing of 2010.
The next day also dawned grey and misty, but we took a walking tour of the city and got to see the Royal Circle and the Royal Crescent, the number one real estate locations in Georgian Bath. This was a good opportunity for me to realize how much useless knowledge I have amassed about life in Jane Austen's day. After lunch in a pub, we wandered around the city, seeing all of the things that we hadn't got to the day before, including the Jane Austen Centre, a store called FCUK (yeah, it required a doubletake), and the amazing Minerva Chocolates. This looks like something out of Chocolat, and it was amazing. They make their own chocolates in the store, and everything is so good! I'm already planning my midlife crisis, and it looks like the inside of that store. Or the cupcake truck. I've got time to decide still.
The late afternoon and evening were taken up by the coach ride to London, where we stayed right off of Brick Lane in the East End. I won't torture you with more London history, but if you'll recall, the East End and specifically Brick Lane, is home to most of London's Bangladeshi population, and it's an area with a very checkered history. Think prostitutes, Jack the Ripper, etc... I loved it. In a couple of years I think that the area will have been swallowed up by the financial district at Canary Wharf, but for now it's a really vibrant area with amazing food. And the fence opposite our window was plastered with fake newspaper headlines that read "Gollum to Wed Using 'Precious.'" I mean, does it get cooler than that?
I'll leave most of our time in London to my parents, who swear that they're going to make a picture slideshow and put it on our television to show people. We did cover a lot of ground, though: Westminster, the Churchill War Rooms, Picadilly Circus, Oxford Street, SoHo, Chinatown, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Borough Market, the South Bank, the Globe, Millennium Bridge, St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey, Abbey Road, and the East End. Whew! Lots and lots of walking! I managed to not get us lost ever, and I was very proud of how well I knew my way around. Point for me! We also took full advantage of Sandemans New London tours, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Sandemans is the company of Ninja Scot and the tour that I took in Dublin, and their London tour was just as good as those in Edinburgh and Dublin. If you're going to a major city in Europe, definitely check them out - they're fantastic. We did the Royal London tour around Westminster and then the Grim Ripper tour in the East End. I spent that entire tour scanning the area in case anyone tried to jump out at us while we were listening to stories about Jack the Ripper. I learned my lesson during the ghost tour in Edinburgh! But the only people who intruded were a couple of drunken boys outside of a pub. We actually spent a very quiet New Years Eve because a) everything in London closes around 5 on New Years Eve, b) we didn't want to stand outside for hours waiting for fireworks in the cold, and c) we had to get up early so that my family could get to Heathrow. So no stories of our amazing night out in London, but that's okay.
Trying to find somewhere to eat that night taught us an interesting lesson, however. Everywhere stopped serving food incredibly early so that their employees could clean up and get out to their own celebrations, which, while extremely invconvenient, is very nice if you think about it. If enough of the bars close, however, I'm not sure where these employees were planning on going, but that's okay. It was just so different from what we are used to in the States, where New Years is a huge night for restaurants. America tends to cater towards the individual moreso than the U.K. does - we expect to be able to go out and do or get whatever we want whenever we want, but employees in England expect to be able to sleep and enjoy their nights like everyone else, meaning that there's no bus or Tube service in the days surrounding Christmas, restaurants and stores are closed, and people stop caring about the almighty dollar for a few days. It was an adjustment. (This is not to say that England doesn't do other, really stupid things, like not letting you pay with a credit card to get into Westminster Abbey after 4.30 in the afternoon, or only selling eye drops for conjunctivitis but not other eye infections. Seriously. I cannot buy medicated eye drops here because I don't have pink eye, so no one is licensed to sell it to me. Oh, England... *seethes quietly*).
Anyway, minor inconveniences aside, it was a great vacation and it was so, so good to see my family. I may or may not have started crying in the middle of the Tube station after sending them on their way to Heathrow the other morning. It seemed like they just got here, and I was not ready to say goodbye yet! Six months is a very long time. I am definitely looking forward to it and I'm confident that I'll enjoy it, but I miss my family.
I'm taking a break from England for the next two weeks, however, and heading over to the Continent to see Prague, Bratislava, Vienna, and Salzburg. It's my Christmas present to myself. I hope that you all enjoyed the holidays, and Happy New Year!!! I wish you all the best in 2011, and good luck sticking to those resolutions! Mine are to think more positively in order to laugh off all of the silly things that England does, and to put others first more. Blogs are a very self-absorbed medium, as I expect all of you to read and care about my ramblings and adventures, so that might be more of a face-to-face thing. Unless you all create blogs, in which case I will endeavor to read all of them!

"What are men compared to rocks and mountains?"

The immortal words of Jane Austen...especially relevant this week as we got to explore outside of London (not that London isn't amazing, of course). But that will have to wait until Thursday. Wednesday was much more business as usual. We started off with a walk through the East End. The West End is famous for its theatres and for being the playground of the wealthy, but the East End has always had a bad rap in London's history. It started as the area outside of Roman Londinium, so it's always been separate and sort of mysterious. Later on it became an industrial center, full of slums, with overwhelming poverty and violence. Pick up a Charles Dickens novel--you'll see. In the Victorian era it was home to Jack the Ripper, who both made it famous and further degraded its reputation. The East End was also Cockney territory ("'ello, guv'nah," rhyming slang, and all of that), but it's been home to immigrant communities for hundreds of years. The Huguenots moved to the East End from France in the eighteenth century to become weavers, and a sizable Jewish population grew there during the Russian pogroms of the nineteenth century. In the past twenty or thirty years, however, these groups have moved farther out of the city and the Bengali population has exploded. The area around Brick Lane is called Banglatown because of the enormous concentration of Bengali immigrants who live there. The community has remained very close, with a tight center on religious and family values. Now, however, young "yuppies" are starting to move into old warehouses that have been turned into apartments, which drives up real estate costs and forces poor immigrant families out of the area. There you go, more than you ever wanted to know about the East End.
We had a class discussion (imagine that) after a quick lunch at a nearby pub, and then we had an awkward amount of free time. Professor Qualls doesn't really seem to have a realistic idea of how long it takes to eat lunch or how long it takes to go anywhere productive in the city. We wanted to go to the Tate Modern, but there wasn't time before we had to be at St. Pauls, so we got distracted by the Olde Sweet Shoppe instead. Good decision.
At 5 we attended Evensong at St. Paul's cathedral, and I got to sit in the choir stalls (called the quire, no idea why). The singing was beautiful, although everything involved so much pomp and circumstance. Following prayers, some of my friends and I hit up a grocery store to buy ingredients for dinner. Our favorite grocery store is called Sainsbury's, which is middle of the road. I've noticed that grocery stores are much smaller here than they are at home, I think because people tend to buy more fresh food here and therefore go to the store more often. For example, the only frozen vegetables available in London seem to be peas. I don't know why peas have been given this honor, but there you go. Anyway, I made avegolemono soup, and we had bread and grilled peppers. We had to fight the other group for the kitchen, which was a fairly political battle, but in the end everything worked out, and I got to have my favorite soup. After clean up we had dessert and cider in the garden, which turned into the hotel staff (who were having a fairly rowdy gathering already) giving us free bottles of wine, which led to drinking wine with Professor Qualls and Carol Anne in the kitchen until the wee hours of the morning. Good times. Tired times, but good.
Thursday, of course, was our earliest morning thusfar. We got on a coach for the two-hour ride to Stonehenge, which I was very excited about. I wasn't disappointed. Even though the walking path is literally ten feet from the highway (and by highway the Brits mean a narrow two-lane road through the countryside) and there were a gigabazillion tourists there, everything around the henge was still tranquil. I knew that Stonehenge was an engineering masterpiece, but I didn't know how sophisticated it actually is. First of all, the inner circle of stones was built around 3500 B.C., and the outer stones were added a few hundred years later, around 1600 B.C. Wow. Second, about one-third of each of the standing stones is actually buried underground. Third, the sun rises through a different space every month of the year--Stonehenge is a calendar. So incredible. I've come to the conclusion that the only rational explanation is magic.
After our brief time at Stonehenge, we piled back onto the bus and drove through the Salisbury Plains. I wanted to see the chalk horses in the side of the hills, but our road didn't take us that way. Before too long, though, we were descending into the city of Bath, which is absolutely beautiful. It looks like an old European city, with cobblestone streets and beautiful Georgian architecture in warm stone. So, so pretty. And it's legendary Jane Austen country (she lived there for several years, and although she didn't write very much there, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey both feature parts set in Bath. It was the fashionable place to be). We started off in the Roman Baths, which were built around 60 A.D. Bath is home to the only hotspring in the United Kingdom, and the Romans built the baths and a temple to the goddess of the springs there. It's maintained its popularity as a destination for people to go and take the "healing waters" of the spring.
We wandered through the museum and saw the Roman ruins, then Liz and I found our way to the Pump Room of Jane Austen fame. This was the place for all sociable people to see and be seen during the day in Georgian Bath. It was here that people formed acquaintances so that they could be invited to dinners and parties later. So Liz and I sampled the famous water, which was hot and tasted kind of nasty. Not sure about its healing powers, but I think that once is enough!
After the baths, the rest of the afternoon was ours, so Liz and I almost ran to the Jane Austen Centre, where we spent a lovely afternoon going through the exhibits and the gift shop. We also had proper afternoon tea in the Regency Tea Room run by the Centre.
I had a great time in Bath, and I definitely hope to go back. We didn't have time to see anything beside the Jane Austen Centre (again, Professor Qualls's concept of time is very different from mine), and I would love to see the Crescent, the Abbey, and the Fashion Museum, as well as just exploring the beautiful city. Check out my facebook for more pictures of Bath, because there are a ton!
Since Thursday was also Stephenie's 21st birthday, we caved and went to Hard Rock Cafe with her for dinner and drinks (21 is still exciting, even if it is in England), so it was a really fun end to a great day.
Friday was the Day of Museums. In the morning I visited the National Portrait Gallery and saw surprise! Cassandra Austen's portrait of Jane, along with the first part of the collection. I liked being able to put faces with names of various historical figures (like the entire cast of characters in Elizabeth). But we only had an hour or so there before we had to meet at Westminster Abbey for a guided tour, which was phenomenal. The Abbey is gorgeous, of course, and there are so many famous people buried there! I looked down once and realized that I was walking on David Lloyd George's grave, so I hastily stepped to the side. Probably walked over Charles Darwin. Who knows. Fun fact (or maybe not, you may be sick of these): every English monarch since William the Conquerer in 1066 has been crowned on the sight of Westminster Abbey. It was built in 950 by Benedictine monks, then Edward the Confessor made it a church in 1042. That didn't survive, so Henry III built a more magnificent church that included flying buttresses (I mean, how could you go wrong?) in 1216. Edward I was therefore the first king to be crowned in the actual church.
Lunch was in St. James Park, by Buckingham Palace, where we had to awkardly observe other people and take pictures for a class assignment. After our anthropological stint we visited Winston Churchill's War Rooms, the underground cement bunker where he directed World War II. When Churchill and his cabinet left the bunker in 1945, they literally just up and left all of their papers, pens, etc. on the tables (I guess I would too after being underground for the better part of five years), and those rooms have been preserved just as they were. It was really cool to see, and they have sound clips from meetings and even a phone call between Churchill and President Roosevelt.
Kaitlin and I hurried back to the National Portrait Gallery (by way of Big Ben) after the War Rooms, where we finished going through the collection. You'd think that two and a half museums (I count the Abbey as half a museum) would be enough, but no, we had to go to the British Museum before dinner to see certain artifacts. We're still working with the series "A History of the World in 100 Objects," and last night we saw the Rosetta Stone and a few other objects. The Rosetta Stone makes sense to me, but one of the other objects was a collection of clay cow figurines from Ancient Egypt. Really? Maybe I was just out of patience. The British Museum annoys me, because I feel like it says, "Oh hey, we stole a bunch of random stuff from all of these other cultures because we're the biggest, baddest, most imperial nation ever, and now that we don't have an empire anymore we're just going to stick all of this stuff in cases with little tags." Job done.
Today was less museum-heavy (thank goodness). We started out with another classroom discussion, this time about Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. For lunch we went to Borough Market under London Bridge, which is the oldest produce market in London. There were amazing amounts of food there, and it all looked so good! After lunch Professor Qualls led a walking tour of Southwark, which is on the South Bank of the Thames. Basically, the North Bank, where the Square Mile is, decided that everyone who was deemed "unworthy" could live on the South Bank of the Thames, so all of the criminals, prostitutes, dock workers, and *gasp* actors were shipped there. The Elizabethan theatres, including the Globe, were all built on the South Bank, in the red light district no less. The South Bank had become synonymous with entertainment and debauchery, as well as crime, by Shakespeare's day. All of London's major prisons were here, too, including Newgate and The Clink, which was so notorious that it has given its name to all other prisons. Lovely place, really. Now it's been cleaned up, and the late 1990s saw major efforts to develop it in time for the new millennium. This is when the Millennium Bridge, the new Globe Theatre, and the Tate Modern came into being.
Speaking of the Tate Modern, I visited it after our walking tour was done. I have come to the conclusion that modern art and I are just never going to get along. Ever. I came, I saw, I shook my head in confusion, I left. We had a lovely barbeque (although British people haven't seemed to have mastered the art of grilling in the thousands of years of their existence) courtesy of the hotel, and I decided that a quiet evening was in order. More museums tomorrow!
Author's note: If you're bored to tears by my random tangents into British history, let me know. I just find it all so fascinating, and I want to share what I'm learning with you.