(Only about 10 million pictures of) WALES

Hello FRIENDS!

I know, I know, it's been too long. So how about I write a ridiculously long post to make up for it? Okay? Okay!

To start off, last week was EIGHTH WEEK. This is a big deal at Oxford. Each term is only 8 weeks, so after week 8 Oxford folk are pretty much free for like a month until next term. For SCIO students, however, it means we get a spring break before doing 4 more weeks of program. But as this next part of the program does not have tutorials and DOES have field trips, it's lookin' pretty great. We still have papers and all that nonsense to do, but we are hoping it will be less intense... question mark?

In any case, by eighth week everyone's brain is pretty much dead. This could just be me, but I seem less dumb if I claim everyone else was like this too. I kept trying to put words in my papers that didn't actually exist. Sometimes I succeeded. I actually got a paper back that said, “I don't think this is a word.” This has led me to question whether Oxford is in fact making me smarter, or simply destroying any precious brain cells I have left. I also had trouble talking a lot of the time, leading me to capitalize on the built-in excuse that it was eighth week. This was almost as good as the first week excuse of jet lag. Honestly, my mental states in both weeks was about the same. 

This pretty much sums up eighth week:

So really attractive, basically.

But to make this whole eighth-week-of-death experience even better, it was SUNNY ALL WEEK. Have I mentioned that this never happens? This, my friends, is known as the irony of the universe. All I wanted to do was frolic, and all I could do was find a decently sunny room to write papers in, and stretch out in the sun like a cat. You do what you can.

The moral of this story is that spring break was pretty much my salvation. As you may have heard from the word on the street, I spent it in Wales. We got there by van, which was the first time since I was driven to the airport to come to England that I have been in some sort of vehicle that was not a bus. It was an exciting time for me.

The first thing I did upon arriving in Wales was sleep for 12 hours. This was a good choice. Then, after I was somewhat cognizant, we explored various castles and mountains. It was BEAUTIFUL. Pictures are pretty much alllll you need to understand how great this place was...which is why I have 10,000 pictures...

Day One: The town with its funny little castle

Sign that Jake and Max flagrantly disregarded:

Oh, those rebels:

Jake doing his satanic dances in the bottom of the tower:

Day Two: Went to a Church of Wales service and Caernafon castle:

Day Three: Conway Castle and hill. Beautiful beautiful beautiful. I can't help putting up a million pictures.

 

Day Four: But alas, we used up our sunshine days the first two days we were in Wales, so Tuesday was destined to be disgusting. Unfortunately, this was also the day we were scheduled to do a mountain hike. I just consulted with a fellow Wales-tripper, and we have agreed the name of the mountain was somethin-somethin Ridge. It was a six hour hike and was incredibly foggy the entire way up. This led to a lot of remarks like “Hey, I bet this would be a great view!” or “I can see how this would be beautiful without the fog!” Simon told us this was the lowest visibility he'd ever experienced on this hike, so we were basically a part of history in the making. But the fog wasn't all bad, as it was kind of cool and mysterious, and made us all feel very trek-to-Mordor-y (Side note: Hazard a guess as to how many Lord of the Rings references you get when climbing up mountains with a group of English majors. I guarantee you it is more than that.) And our immediate surroundings were way beautiful; the problem was we couldn't see much more than said immediate surroundings. However, Simon has promised to show us pictures of the views we allegedly saw on his computer back in Oxford, so all's well that ends well as far as I'm concerned. Plus, the misty-drizzliness gave us the benefit of feeling very hardcore, as we were all pretty much soaked by the end of the hike. I fully embraced this hardcore hiker persona AKA I felt totally justified and/or awesome buckling my backpack 

around my waist. All the cool kids were doing it. 

The belt-bucklin' crew:

Check out this view! Yeah!

There are actually much cooler Mordor awesome pictures of this, but they are not on my camera. See Facebook.

In keeping with my family's Yellowstone traditions, I sang various hill-related songs from the Sound of Music pretty much every day. The day we climbed this mountain, as a kind of slam-bang finish to our mountain-climbing careers, we all sang “You Raise Me Up”. Needless to say, it was inspirational. Not as inspirational as my rendition of “The Climb” would have been, but I'm sure I can whip that out in some other desperate situation.

Day Five: Harlech Castle and home! Lucky for you, my camera died this day, so you'll have to take my word for it that it was beautiful.

The village we stayed in:

The whole vowels-to-constants ratio doesn't really make sense to me.

 

Also, the old people in Wales are extremely nice. They like to invite you to coffee and give you free fudge samples, and if you can't decide between the steak and ale pie and the Welsh black burger, they will tell you to get the burger and give you some steak and ale pie for free. Which I am all about. Also, sometimes they try to teach you how to make the weird spitting sounds needed for speaking Welsh. This is not always as successful as the fudge-eating, but is at least educational, even though you are destined to fail repeatedly, living up to your status as a dumb American tourist.

A Tribute to the nice old people of Wales:

That concludes my Wales adventures; tune in next time to see how my post-term life is going.