I haven't disappeared!

So I've been terribly remiss about posting, yet again. I can assure you it won't get better lol. The last two weeks have been pretty busy. Two weeks ago my Aunt and Uncle came into town for five days. I hadn't seen them in about five years so it was so great to catch up and hang out. They're just really cool people and really fun to talk to and seeing them helped me a lot with my homesickness. They took me out to dinner every night (from this really good, affordable Thai food pub only two tube stops away from my hall, to a fancy, absolutely delicious, foam-filled French meal that is not quite in my price range lol, but as Aunt Liz said, is a great place to have my multitude of dates bring me haha) which was so nice of them and we did a lot of sightseeing - they treated me to one of the bus tours around London, a ferry ride down the Thames, and a visit to the Tower of London and the British Museum. I had such a good time with them and was really sad to see them go.

Then last week I had to catch up on all the school work I had been putting off to spend time with family lol. Unfortunately at the same time I got really sick. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me for the first several days, but it felt like I had strep throat. I went to the doctor who saw me for (no joke) less than five minutes and told me I was going to be alright, just gargle salt water. Monumental waste of time. So I waited it out and then at the beginning of this week it calmed down to a simple cold and I'm about over it. But being sick and feeling like crap without friends or family around? It kind of blows. No one to listen to you whine :)

Class is still going well and yesterday I went on my field trip to Westminster Abbey. It was sooo cool. They unrolled the carpets covering up the cosmoti mosaic floor (which they rarely do as it is) and their conservator told us all about the floor. It's the area of the church where they do royal weddings, funerals, and coronations. It was really quite interesting and it was pretty large, about 25 square meters. Once she finished her introduction she told us that (if we took our shoes off) we could walk on it to get a closer look. I seriously can't explain how surreal it was to be able to inspect 800 year old mosaics like that. The tourists who were watching us got pretty jealous too lol. She also took us to look at the tombs of some of their most famous kings, like Richard the Lionheart, and showed us more mosaics in the tomb area. She also showed us their conservation lab. It was simply one of the best field trips ever.

Other than that I have really just been spending all of my time reading. This grad school stuff is hard believe it or not lol. I still don't have access to my money and I have been here over a month now! It can't be too much longer though.

I finally got my student oyster card so that I can get a discount on a monthly tube pass. I have been riding the bus, and after a full out brawl between the bus driver and some teenager last week which caused the driver to pull over and stop on the side of the road indefinitely, I would like to get back on the tube!

I'm kind of bummed out though because Halloween is so not a big deal over here at all. It's my 2nd favorite holiday, so it's sad to see it kind of just skipped over. My mom and stepdad sent me a care package with some Halloween candy and a Halloween card in it last week though which was so nice and cheered me up!

Anyway, I guess that about sums it up for now and I'm sorry about the delay. Take care everyone!

Happy Friday!

So I'm finally finished with week one of classes, and I'm still here. That's always a good sign!

Before classes started though I went to Stonehenge last Saturday. It took about an hour and a half to get there by bus and some hungover kid puked all over himself across the aisle from me about 30 minutes into the ride the way up there. That was fun, let me tell you. Anyway, the day was pretty cold, in the low to mid 50's and drizzling. Which I assume is really the way you should see Stonehenge (or at least that's what I kept telling myself as my teeth chattered lol). It was quite similar to the way I remembered it. A bunch of cool rocks with fields as far as the eye can see. with the exception of the major highway running right past it, which unfortunately takes away some of the magic. Apparently within the next ten years they are planning on burying that highway and making it into a tunnel instead, that will make it a lot nicer up there I think. Yet again I took tons of pictures and I think a few of them turned out ok.

After Stonehenge we went to the old city of Salisbury about ten minutes away. It was great. All of the buildings were old but had been converted into banks, grocery stores, libraries, you name it. We got a grand tour of downtown by this adorable 80 year old English woman who we could barely keep up with she walked so fast and kept telling us about how we're going to hell.

The tour ended at the Salisbury Cathedral which is just breathtaking in person, it's absolutely enormous, it has the largest steeple in England and is about 700 years old. The inside was beautiful with lots of stained glass. There were sarcophagi all over the place and everywhere you walked you were walking on top of somebody's burial, which was slightly unnerving.

Besides the large group of self-entitled, spoiled, pampered, undergraduate American brats that made the rest of us look terrible (seriously, they were horrid, I was scared to talk lest I be grouped in with them), the trip was really great and I enjoyed it a lot. I mean, there's no point in going to school in London if you're not going to check out all of the famous sites!

Monday was the start of classes. The way it works in my program is that you have two core courses and one option each semester and they want you to test out various options and see which one you like more. They actually suggest you sit in on a bunch of classes and then decide. So on Monday I went to sit in on a pottery and ceramics course. It was a nine o'clock course which meant I had to be up at 7, which was a nightmare lol. The tube got backed up quit a bit but I still got there with ten minutes to spare. The class was quite full (with only like 18 people in it lol), but come quarter after we still didn't have a professor, then come 9:30 someone showed up to tell us it had been canceled. Grrr. So I went home and went back to bed. I'm going to have to try it out this Monday instead, hopefully he'll email us if he cancels again!

It wasn't until Wednesday that I had another course, also at nine in the morning, one of my core courses on the context of conservation. It went really well and didn't feel the two hours long that it was, thank God! The way classes work over here is kind of interesting too. You go for two hours to lecture and they give you a break in the middle specifically to go refill your coffee. Then, later in the week there are small discussion groups with about 6-7 people. And we don't have just one teacher. We have someone in charge of the course, but lots of people come in to talk to the class, even from outside the university, from other schools or museums, etc. There is a lot of reading, 90 hours was proposed for this course. And then a 3000 word essay and a poster project. I started my readings that night, dreading having to read that much. But it's surprising how easy it is to read that much, and stay awake while doing so, when you're actually interested in the subject!

Thursday I had two courses back to back, yet again starting at nine (this may just very well kill me). The first one was my other core course - conservation management. Which really means just decisions in conservation, how you decide how to conserve an object. In two weeks we are actually going on a special field trip to Westminster Abbey where they are going to let us look at this special mosaic they have that they currently keep under a protective carpeting. Not too bad for a short midday field trip! I can't wait. We also have an inhuman amount of reading for that class lol, but it's interesting, so it works for me. We also have to write another essay in there, but we also get to do a risk assessment report for one of the museums here as the other part of the class.

My other class was on archaeometallurgy, one of the options. I was going to take this one definitively, but it's a lot more geared towards how the artifacts were made and the metals extracted than the objects themselves. So I'll have to see if I want to switch it with the ceramics option next week.

Overall it's been a really great experience so far and I'm excited about it all. Still nervous and doubting myself, but that's just the way it works in a new situation!

Take care everyone!