Oh my GAAAAAAAAAWD

Holy shit, how the time does fly.

It seems like only yesterday it was early January and I was traveling around London with the parents and girlfriend, not updating my blog. Then all of a sudden it's early April and I'm in Barcelona, not updating my blog. Where do the months go?

Well here I am, in the Barcelona bus station, waiting to catch my ride to Valencia, which kicks off the real travel-y part of my post-Oxford...travels. Let me get you up to speed on what's happened and where I've been:

After Oxford, I went to Dublin for a few days around St. Patrick's Day with some American friends. Dublin is an incredibly expensive place. We figured there would be a bit of a markup, but goodness. A pint of beer at virtually any pub in Dublin was at least five euros, often more. That's pretty ridiculous. Other than that, Dublin's pretty alright: we got to see the Book of Kells, which as a history nerd made me giddy. We also got to tour the Guinness storehouse and see how they make the stuff. The tour came with a free pint at the end, as well as all the handfuls of barley you can eat (it's actually pretty alright!). The last real highlight from the trip was Christ Church Cathedral, which is basically the official church of the city, even though it's Anglican. Go figure.

After Dublin, I came back to Oxford and had a few days left to prepare for traveling to Spain. That meant either throwing away a lot of the stuff I had in my room or sending it back home in boxes, since the bag I bought to travel around Europe was much, much smaller than the bags I had brought stuff over in from Minnesota. I sent a lot of stuff home, and it wasn't cheap: it probably cost me about the same as an extra flight from London to Minneapolis. That said, there was a lot of stuff that was pretty irreplaceable, and a lot which would have cost more to re-buy when I got home, had I destroyed them. So I spent a lot of money on that. Then it was off to Spain!

I woke up at 9:00, thinking I had plenty of time to catch a bus to Gatwick from Oxford, for my 12:40 flight to Lisbon, where I would transfer to Barcelona.

Then I found out the flight was at 12:10.

Then I went to the bus station and saw that the bus to Gatwick had just left five minutes early. The next bus wouldn't come for an hour. Crap.

I ended up getting to Gatwick at 12:05, ahead of schedule according to the bus driver. I checked in quickly, as there was no line for TAP (Portuguese airline), where I was told they would try to hold the flight for me, but if I didn't make it in time it would be my own fault. Cue me sprinting to the security check, only to be told I had a corkscrew in my backpack (I had packed miscellaneous stuff like that in a hurry, dammit) and that the entire bag needed to be searched. So that took about five minutes. Cue me sprinting through the rest of Gatwick with my negligibly-lighter backpack and a plastic bag full of dirty clothes, realizing with each step that gate 43 is, in fact, on the complete goddamn opposite side of the airport from where I checked in. Bear in mind all the Regent's Park soccer games I was going to play in this term were either canceled due to weather or scheduled to be on the same day as one of my tutorials. Also, I had a cold from lugging box after box of stuff from my house to the post office. Also, I hadn't had any breakfast. Needless to say, running was not a pleasant experience.

I rounded the corner, where I saw gate 43 glowing in front of me, and despite all the televisions on my approach telling me my flight was "Doors Closing", the official-looking woman standing at the end of the moving walkway asked if I was going to Lisbon. A glimmer of hope! Yes, I'm going to Lisbon. "He's here!" she says to the lady behind the desk. "You made it, good!" the other one says. By the time I got there, they had held the plane for me for a good 10 minutes. Whatever people's bad experiences with some airlines may be, I could not have been more impressed by how awesome those ladies were to me. The moral of the story is this: make sure you know when your flight is, play it safe when you live 2 hours from the airport, and fly TAP. TAP is good people.

My flight from Lisbon to Barcelona, by contrast, was incredibly easy. I had a five hour layover and a nice, air-conditioned airport to relax in. Trying to maintain my vegetarianism, I had to resort to eating Pizza Hut Express. (That's a difficult task for me, since I used to work in one of them at Target, and I know how those pizzas are made. Hint: it's not exactly a hand-crafted artisan pizza.)

I got into Barcelona the night of the 24th and met up with my friend Eli, who's studying at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the city's premier university. His brother Luke came in to visit a couple days later, and our friend Justin, who is studying this term in Belfast, came in for his Spring break the next week.

It's hard to believe it's really been so much time, but I've spent three whole weeks in Barcelona, mostly unwinding. The weather is amazing compared to England, with the exception of a few chilly or rainy days, and there's this thing called the Mediterranean Sea. I can find a wall by the beach, dangle my bare feet over the water, and read my book. It's incredible. There are also parks to see, particularly Parc Güell, designed by Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudi, which has some great views of the city.

Living in Barcelona is pretty cheap, especially compared to England. They have 40oz bottles of beer for 73 cents at the supermarket. That's a pretty low-cost investment which can last most of the night on its own. That said, Spanish beer isn't great. It tastes like Mexican beer, but less cheap and watery. It really made me miss The Cricketer's Arms, my neighborhood pub of choice in Oxford, where my friends and I would go a few times a week and get a pint or two of St. Edmund's ale. Delicious, wheaty, real English beer.

I was incredibly shocked by the lifestyle of the Spanish, or at least of most Spanish students. Eli and his housemates typically have no class on Fridays, and boy do they take advantage of it. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, they'll typically stay out until at least four or five in the morning. The good weather certainly makes this easier, but it's still mind-blowingly late compared to what I'm used to from England. There, my friends and I would pretty regularly stop by the pub on our way back from dinner. We'd get a few pints, agree we were all tired, and walk a few blocks back home and fall asleep or get back to work. Not so in Spain, where any drinking before 10:00 p.m. is considered stupid, since it will make you too tired to go out late, and ending the night before 2:00 a.m. makes you a weirdo. Frankly, I prefer England's pub culture, since it's much more relaxed and quiet, and more conducive to conversation between friends. When Justin was visiting from Belfast, he expressed a similar feeling. The main thing I can't comprehend is how people can do the bar scene here more than one night in a row. I can do it maybe once a week if I want to, but afterward I need at least two or three days to recover. Maybe I'm getting old.

I didn't take too many photos while in Barcelona, since I was here for Semana Santa (Holy Week), which is the busiest tourist week of the year, and I didn't want to make myself look too touristy by having a camera everywhere I went. There are a lot of pickpockets in Barcelona, see. My stay in Barcelona was mostly supposed to be fore relaxation, anyway. And I certainly did get to do a lot of that. The three weeks flew by really quickly, and now I'm off to Valencia, city of El Cid, Rodrigo Diaz. There will be a lot more historical sightseeing there than there was in Barcelona, I'm sure, and I'm only there for two nights so I'll have little choice but to hurry to get it all in.

After Valencia, I'm flying to Sevilla, the major hub and effective-capital of the Spanish empire. I'll be spending almost a week there, hopefully visiting essentially every museum, library, and monument they have to offer, and with any luck I'll be able to get some research done for my senior thesis next year, which will be on the Spanish Empire.

I'll take lots of photos from here on out and post them to share as soon as I can. I'll also be sure to upload the photos I've yet to put up from Bath, London, and Dublin. Stay posted!

Oh hey, I'm not dead

Hi everybody. On the off chance you're still reading this, rest assured I am alive and have not been murdered in an attempt to find the thieving crackhead who stole my laptop and iPod. In fact I have a shiny new laptop and will hopefully be getting a fancy new iPod Touch when I get back, all for free! (Actually I profited from the thing, since the insurance company sent us more for my new toys than we paid, even though we told them exactly how much replacements would cost. Very curious.)

I don't have time to upload pictures of the last, oh, month and a half of my life just now, but rest assured I will get around to it someday. I still have trips to Stirling and Edinburgh to relate, as well as my awesome fun visiting Bath and London with the girlfriend and parents.

This term I'm taking a tutorial on Early Modern Spain and Latin America, which is awesome and extremely fascinating. It's going very well and I'm always fascinated by the new topics. Unless something goes horribly wrong in the last four weeks, the course has reinforced my desire to study colonial Latin America in graduate school and pursue a doctorate in it.

My other tutorial is on Republican-era Rome, starting with the Second Punic War and ending about a hundred years before the establishment of the Empire in 27 BC. It's very different from what I've studied in the past, since I've never done ancient history before, but my tutor is very helpful (and patient!) with my silly elementary questions and it's quite a bit of fun.

Check back soon (okay, who am I kidding) for more updates: they WILL come!

Burgled!

Hi everybody. Some tragic news, brace yourselves. My house has been broken into and my laptop and iPod were stolen. I had theft insurance so I'll be getting cooler new ones, but my blog entries I had written and saved on my computer were lost, so I'll have to wait some time before updating my blog about our trips in Aberdeen, Cruden Bay, and later Stirling and Edinburgh. Look back in a couple weeks and they should be up; my camera wasn't stolen and all my pictures are still on there.

Elgin and Burghead (but mostly Burghead)

Hi all! This is a short blog update to balance the epic work (if I do say so myself!) that was my Inverness entry.

On Sunday morning we left Inverness via train for Elgin, a small city to the east, going with no idea what we’d find in the city proper. We wanted to throw our stuff down and hop on a bus for Burghead, a coastal village. We had a few addresses of small places to stay, but nothing seemed to be open and no place opened their doors when we knocked. It was snowing heavily and it was fairly cold and we were anxious to find a place, so we went back to one of the bed and breakfast establishments we saw when first walking into town. Elgin is a small town of about 25 thousand, but like Inverness it has a fairly robust mall for its size and it hardly feels like it’s missing much. The traditional distinction between city and town involves the presence of a cathedral, and Elgin has an old, destroyed or abandoned cathedral, so it’s technically a city. I’m not sure what happened to the cathedral; it’s possible that during the reformation it was deliberately dismantled. Either way, we didn’t spend a lot of time walking around Elgin and once we put our stuff down in our room we headed off to the bus station to go to Burghead.

Jarred had read online about a site called the Burghead Well, which is an old Pict well from the fifth century or so with no real known purpose. We took a bus into Burghead, right on the coast, and walked over to the seawall to take some pictures.

We had spent two and a half hours waiting in the dark on the side of the road in Corrimony the night before, and we were glad to be out of the cold that night, but nothing could prepare us for the cold that is the North Sea coast. Because oh my God. It was the bitterest chill imaginable. We stood around shivering, took pictures for probably three minutes, and ran away cursing Neptune for causing that kind of cold. We knew buses came to and from Elgin every hour, and we had originally expected to spend an hour or so walking around and tracking down the well, but the town was so small and the well was marked off well (haha!) so we decided to go see it and get the hell out of that God-forsaken town.

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The well itself was, despite the cold, pretty neat. It’s essentially in someone’s backyard, though it’s surrounded by a low stone wall, and to get in to see the well visitors have to ring the doorbell of a nearby house and ask for the key (“Open at every reasonable hour”). The key is apparently held safe by the residents of the house, and their job seems to be to give the key to visitors and have people sign the guestbook. We collected the key, walked down the alley and opened the gate and had a look at the well, which was essentially a giant hollowed-out cavern. It was pretty cool, and it was probably about what you would expect from the Picts: some rocks in a dome, with a giant hole in the middle. Predictable, but still neat!

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We wanted to get some food and catch the next bus back to Elgin, so we walked into the bar and had a pint of beer, but they didn’t have any food so we just watched the Celtic match on TV before leaving. Our number three goal on the trip was to not get beaten up in a Scottish bar, and the people in the Burghead bar were very friendly (and surprisingly easy to understand!) so we managed to get away without any problems. Mission accomplished! Check out the full set from our whole hour in Burghead here.

I was going to take photos of Elgin Cathedral, but we were so cold and our feet were so wet that I just decided to get some food in the mall and come back to the room and shower and sleep. Unfortunately our bed and breakfast didn’t have internet access so I couldn’t update my blog or check Facebook or anything, so we ended up sleeping a lot of the afternoon before going off to an Indian restaurant across the street inside a converted church.

Next on our itinerary was Aberdeen, where we spent two nights with one day in the tiny town of Cruden Bay, where Bram Stoker wrote and is said to have taken inspiration for his description of Transylvania. Check back for that update soon!

Inverness and hinterland

Hi everybody, I hope you like long blog updates, because I have three days of travel around Inverness to report on.

Inverness


Our first real stop in Scotland was Inverness, the largest city in the Highlands and Islands area of the country. The city sits right on the mouth of the Caledonian river where it empties into the North Sea. We got in at about 7:00pm local time on Thursday night, so we didn’t have a lot of time to explore, but we did fortunately find a non-sketchy hostel with free wi-fi and a very nice cat to pet. The city is really beautiful, and we spent a while on Friday morning walking around the city and taking some photos. We didn’t spend enough time to actually figure out anything of the history of what we were seeing, but the snow made it nice to look at and take pictures of. The weather was really not unlike Minnesota, and the smell of the cold snow really brought me back.
I got some good pictures of the river, what I presume is St. Andrew’s Cathedral, and the castle.
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It was a nice time, but aside from stopping for food and staying at night, we didn’t spend a lot of time in the city. Still, it’s a nice city, and it’s small but hardly lacking anything. Check out the full set here.

Drumnadrochit

We spent most of our time in the area hiking around and doing a little sightseeing. Our first expedition was on Friday, to Urquhart Castle on the northern tip of Loch Ness. We took a bus to the tiny town of Drumnadrochit, and walked through to the loch, taking photos on the way.

This part of Scotland is really cool to walk around, because the weather is not unlike Minnesota, but there are a lot of mountains everywhere, so it’s really great to take pictures of it all, and it looks amazing without being unreasonably cold. When we were at Drumnadrochit it was snowing, but it wasn’t too cold and it only made the pictures cooler. We finally came over the hill and saw the castle on the loch, and as you can tell it’s not much of a castle anymore.
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It’s said that St. Columba converted a Pictish leader at his military camp there in the sixth century. This was long before the castle itself was built, but the site’s use as a military camp goes back about 1500 years, and it was pretty cool to know that St. Columba – who’s a hugely important early medieval figure – had walked there before. The ruins of the castle are really extensive and there is a surprising amount of space to explore. Each room of the ruins is marked showing its original purpose, and we weren’t guided along on a fixed path, like at Oxford Castle. It was great to walk around, take our time, and get lots of photos of the loch, the ruins, and the mountains.
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After we left the castle, we had planned to go on a walk through the Urquhart Bay Woods, a local trail through the forest, but our feet were starting to hurt and neither of us wanted to “get dead in the woods”, as Jarred put it. We had about three hours to kill before the next bus came for Inverness, so we assumed we could stop in and relax at one of the cafes we saw in Drumnadrochit when we first arrived. A reasonable expectation? Apparently not! As it turns out, literally everything in Drumnadrochit closes at 4:30 or 5:00. In Oxford, most things close from 5:00 to 7:00, but restaurants, cafes, and pubs always stay open late, so this came as a bit of a surprise and we found ourselves with no idea what we could do for the next few hours, since we were cold and sore. Thankfully, the post office/general store was open until 5:30, so Jarred got coffee and I got some chocolate, which I knew from my boundary waters days to be a great source of rejuvenation. Check out the full set, pre- and post-chocolate, here.

Corrimony


We eventually caught the bus back to Inverness, and we were so tired from all the walking and standing that we ended up falling asleep at about 7:30, hoping to get up early for Saturday’s expedition: Corrimony. The plan was loose: we wanted to take a bus to Corrimony Road End, walk to the Corrimony Chambered Cairn, and then play it by ear.
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The cairn is a burial chamber that dates back to the third or fourth century, and it consists of a low pile of small, round rocks with an open chamber in the middle, surrounded by about a dozen larger, upright stone monuments in a circle. Presumably it’s a modest draw during the summer, but we were the only ones brave enough to trek through the snow and see it that day. We crawled inside the cairn (and I do mean “crawled”; the tunnel leading into the middle of the cairn was so small we had to get on our hands and knees to get through. We had a good time looking around and dancing on the graves of the dead pagans, before setting out to go further along the road. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do from there. We had about five and a half hours to kill before the only bus for Inverness would be coming by at 7:15, and since it gets fully dark by 4:30 this far up, we wanted to get our hike on while we could. We followed the road, stopping to take pictures of the farms, the mountains, and the streams alongside it.

We didn’t know if there would be a public trail, but by the time we got to a small gate that wasn’t locked and which opened up into the forest, we didn’t really care. After all, in the US we’d be liable to be shot at for trespassing, but up in Corrimony the worst we’d get would be a longbow arrow through the thigh. A small risk to take! We walked along the path, took lots of pictures of the trees and the stream as we went through the forest, and finally came to a sign that told us we were walking through a nature preserve maintained by the Scottish government. We kept going and the path left the forest and took us over a small hill or mountain, and we found ourselves overlooking a huge, empty, snow-covered valley surrounded by mountains with a frozen loch in the middle. It was, simply put, probably the most astoundingly gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.

We spent a long time taking five steps, stopping for pictures, taking five steps, and stopping for
more pictures. It was absolutely incredible.

We also ran into a lady who had been in front of us all afternoon and who was now coming back the opposite way with her three dogs. Neither Jarred nor I are particularly good with dogs and we were worried they were going to maul us and chomp on our skulls, but they were incredibly nice, as was the lady who walked up after them after a couple minutes. She told us that the path kept going for another five miles or so but that we shouldn’t go far past the loch, since it was about 3:00 by this point and it would be getting dark soon. We walked down to the water, took some more pictures, and stopped a while to take it all in. We also decided such a special hiking trip needed a special picture to commemorate it. We started out with a high-five with my camera’s self-timer, but wanted to go bigger, so we decided to do an ‘80s-teen-movie-style jump. The problem was timing it, however, and it took us probably a dozen tries to get a picture we were satisfied with, but it was so worth it. In one of our jumps, my camera’s lens cap flew out of my pocket and we couldn’t find it for the life of us, so we decided it was a worthy sacrifice to the photo gods and headed back to the main road, content with the last photo we got.
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We assumed at this point that we could go back to the town of Corrimony and relax for at least a while until the shops closed, at which point we would only have to wait an hour or so to catch the bus back to Inverness at 7:15. What we didn’t know, though, was that the town of Corrimony doesn’t really exist at all, and that the three farmhouses we had walked by on our way to the path constituted its entirety. The fork in the road we had thought would lead to a town when we first got in the area was now gated off, and we realized that we would be waiting for the bus for three hours.

The day had been gorgeous, and it wasn’t even very cold, so this wasn’t a worry at first; it was a nuisance but one we were prepared to deal with. The problem is that when it gets dark in Scotland, it gets very cold, and three hours is a long time to wait if you’re wearing soccer flats, which I firmly believe were deliberately designed to keep the wearer’s feet cold and to absorb all liquid around it. We spent most of the time alternating between dancing and singing on the side of the road, for the entertainment of passing drivers, coming up with creative swears for the nonexistence of Corrimony, and standing in silence hoping an earlier bus would come.

Thankfully, the same bus we took into Corrimony came by on its way from Inverness, and we flagged it down and explained to the bus driver that we had already bought a return ticket and just wanted to not freeze to death, so he was nice enough to welcome us onboard and not make us wait for him to come back an hour later.

We got back into town finally, went to a tapas bar, where I got authentic Spanish tortilla for the first time in years, and went back to the hostel to sleep. It was a somewhat traumatic experience waiting in the cold like that, since the only shelter nearby was a half-built wooden shack on the side of Corrimony road, but it was still worth it for the wonderful sights we got. Check out the full set here.

I’m writing this in the small city of Elgin, about 40 minutes from Inverness by train. We took a trip earlier today to the tiny little village of Burghead, which is a wonderful little town on the coast of the North Sea and also probably the coldest place on Earth. So stay tuned for another update with photos from that trip!

Christ Church and Balliol colleges

Hello, all!

As I type this I’m sitting on a train to Glasgow, the last stop on my trip with my friend Jarred to Inverness, in northern Scotland. We’ll be bumming around for 10 days, seeing all kinds of historical sites, great landscape, and hopefully some pagan monuments for the winter solstice.

But first, I need to cover some of the visits I paid to two of Oxford’s oldest colleges, Christ Church and Balliol.

Back in September, in “0^th week” – the week before classes start and when students typically receive their first paper assignments for the term – my housemate Corey and I paid a visit to Christ Church College to meet our tutor for our course on the crusades. Our tutor met us at the gate and took us through the quad to the chapel in the back. Christ Church is extremely old, and the chapel itself holds the remains of St. Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford (both the city and the university). Frideswide is a relatively unremarkable saint from the eighth century, who is said to have performed miraculous healings and later founded a priory in the region, of which she served as abbess until her death. It’s a pretty standard story, but it was still neat to see her actual tomb.

The stained glass window showing Frideswide’s life was made in the nineteenth century, and it’s appropriately straightforward, save for a neat little anachronism in the last panel which shows her death. In the background of the image, behind the bed of the dying Frideswide and in another room can be seen a flush toilet. Our tutor told us that it was put there because of a Victorian obsession with cleanliness at the time of the window’s creation. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the saint herself – the British just liked toilets.

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After we left the chapel, we stepped back out into the college’s main quad, which is incredibly huge and impressive. Normally visitors have to pay to get in, and we didn’t realize that as students of the university, we weren’t considered visitors, even though we didn’t belong to that particular college, so we wanted desperately to get all the photos we could since we hadn’t had to pay to get in this time. We took some photos of the quad, and really liked the fountain in the middle, so we decided to walk up and take some close-ups of it.

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After just about a minute or so, an old porter of the college (sort of like a guard, but with a bowler hat! It’s adorable) came up and asked us if we were visiting the college. We thought we were, so we didn’t think to show him our student IDs. He asked us what we were doing at the fountain, and we confusedly answered that we were just taking some photos of it. He pointed out signs that said “No visitors beyond this point” which were all over the outside path of the quad, and asked us why we thought we could ignore those signs. If you look at the high-resolution versions of my photos of the quad, you can clearly see and read the signs, but in our defense we genuinely didn’t see them. We tried explaining to him that it was just an honest mistake, and that we didn’t see the signs but would go back to the outside path right away, but the old guy wasn’t having any of it. “Do you take me for some kind of fool?” he asked, furious that we had “lied to his face”. We really didn’t want to argue, and we weren’t about to break the rules when we hadn’t even had to pay for a ticket in, so we just said we were going to leave and apologized again. “Don’t think I’m an idiot,” he said as we walked away. It was probably rude of us to turn our backs on him and just walk out of the college, but we weren’t about to argue with him or apologize any more, since his hat and gut made looking at him an exercise in containing our laughter. So we ended up only seeing about half the college’s grounds, and we left unnecessarily, since if we had shown him our Oxford IDs he would’ve just walked away in the first place.

The moral of the story: Porters are silly, old, surly, petty little men. Or at least that one is. I like to think all of them are, though. Check out my full Christ Church set here, including more shots of the quad and lots more stuff within the chapel.

My tutorials for my crusades course met in Balliol College, which is another very old, relatively large campus within the city centre, and by the point we had our first tutorial I realized I was free to walk into any campus since I was an Oxford student and my ID didn’t even say that I went to Regent’s Park, since I’m a visiting student.

Balliol’s main quad is much smaller than Christ Church, but it’s still quite nice. It’s very green and has lots of flowers planted about as well. I took a few photos of the quad (including one of a man with pink pants who just needed to be documented) and then moved into the chapel. Again, the chapel is much smaller than that of Christ Church, and there are no saints on display or mentioned, but it’s nonetheless in great shape and very photogenic.

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After taking lots of pictures of the chapel, I went to the main campus behind the quad, which is much bigger and resembles an American campus like Macalester with its paths, fields (which students are actually allowed to walk on!), trees, and disconnected buildings. It was really busy, but it’s nothing remarkable if not for the age and history of the college itself.

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The college was founded by the Balliol family, a noble Scottish house from the late Middle Ages that died out long ago (though the college, of course, has stayed open). The school dates back to the thirteenth century, and the message to visitors near the entrance says it goes back to 1263 and “has a claim to be the oldest college at Oxford”. Notable alumni and professors include Adam Smith, Aldous Huxley, and Richard Dawkins.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to get kicked out of Balliol, although that would have presented serious problems as I had to return there each week to meet for my tutorial, so it’s a good thing there were no problems. Check out the full set here.

Jarred and I will be doing all kinds of great stuff in Scotland, starting with a few nights in Inverness, which is on the north tip of Loch Ness, so expect multiple blog updates in the next couple weeks. It’s just a matter of finding a place where I can use the internet that doesn’t make me pay by the hour, at this point!