10/7 - 10/14 and Stonehenge

Note: I wrote this last week but never posted it.

I think I'll make this one a little quick, because I have to wake up early tomorrow.

I actually went to modules (classes) this week. They're not too bad. I have Linear Algebra + Calculus A (one module) this semester, which is just a cakewalk for me, because I've taken through Calc C. I have an independent study with my advisor, Tony Solomonides, for another math module. My other two classes are: Britain in the long 18th century and Intro to Visual Culture. I have both of those classes with John. My history teacher is actually from America, but she moved 35 years ago. We had a field trip around Bristol this week, which was pretty boring actually. But we met a guy in our class from Scotland, and had a couple of pints with him. His parents work in Dubai, and he was telling us all about the man-made islands shaped like the countries of the world and the indoor ski hills they have there - it sounds crazy. I'd like to go someday, I think.

I think Monday night was Nick's birthday - he didn't tell us until late in the afternoon that day. We brought our flatmates, Vidar, and Marta along,(everyone else had to be up early) and took him out to some place called Revolution for drinks and shots. Naturally we tried to give him the most random assortment of shots possible to get him to hurl. But Nick held up, and the bar closed before we could get him over the edge. I went with him to get cheesy fries, while everyone else went to bed a little early.

Tuesday I went out to Academy with Dali, Sud, John, Marta, Vidar, Nick, and probably one or two more I'm forgetting. They had a stage show that involved naughty nurses, which I'm not going to explain any further. This week, Vanilla Ice is going to be there, and no I'm not kidding. Unfortunately, I'm going away for the week and I'm going to miss it.

Wednesday night we played football again, and we have a growing crowd: Ed and Mikey came, some English guys, along with J.B. and Ben and everyone from last week. Mikey is a skater kid, and he's really good at football. Ed is kind of overzealous and wierd, but really nice. He sucks at football though. My team had all 3 Americans and Ed on it somehow, and we ended up losing 10-1 or something crazy. Tanj knocked me over on one play, and I scraped up my knee nice and pretty. Afterwards I cleaned up and we played a poker tournament in Ed's flat. I was doing quite well until Vidar took all of my chips in one hand. At least there were free chocolate pretzels, which was well worth losing the 5 pounds (kind of). I spent the rest of the night learning these 3 Indian girls names that I kept forgetting: there's Aanchel (on chell), Shreya, and Sehar (say hair).

Thursday evening my Mom showed up! She's here until next Monday. She just popped in for a little bit with Julie, and stayed at her hotel that night. She came again Friday morning, but I had to leave her alone for a little while because I had Calculus. When I got back, we explored around Bristol a little bit, went to Tesco and bought loads of food, and then went to "King William's Ale House" for some steak and ale pie. I left her alone for a little bit to go eat some Vladimir pizza down in flat 22. I ended up burning my hand pretty bad cutting one of the pies. I feel bad for my Mom, she must think I'm getting injured all the time over here.

Saturday morning Mom made French toast. I made the joke that it would just be regular toast for Mai-lys, and it turns out she hadn't heard of it before! She did a little research later, and it turns out its actually called "pain perdu" in France. And Americans actually used to call it German toast until the first world war, when it was changed due to anti-German sentiment. She left all of this in a note for me under my door. Mai-lys, your so smart.

So anyway, we all feasted on French Toast, and my mom made a pumpkin spice cake. It's nice to have some real food for once! We lounged about most of the day Saturday, because we have big plans: Monday morning we go to London, Tuesday morning we leave for Rome, and Thursday morning we leave for Paris! We get back on Friday. I wish we had a little more time in each city, but it'll have to do.

Saturday evening was the Rugby game! All the international students met up at a pub named O'Neills to watch. Lora put French flags on my face in fingerpaint, which in retrospect was a really bad idea on my part. Don't go to a English pub with French flags on your cheeks. You have to wait at least 15 minutes longer to get your drink at the bar first of all, and you spend that 15 minutes getting hassled by drunk English people. One guy kept giving me trouble, but eventually we hugged it out. France lost in the last few minutes thanks to the wonder leg of Johnny Wilkinson. All the French were miserable, which of course made the Brits even more cheerful. Mai-lys said she was going to go to Clifton suspension bridge and jump.

So we had a somewhat humiliating walk home, considering our losing teams colors were painted on our face and people were celebrating in the streets. After we went back to flat 22, where i showed off my supreme arm-wrestling skills and gave some flowers that weren't mine to Aanchel.

Sunday Mom and I went to Bath. We got there a little early so we could do a little sightseeing before we went on our guided tour to Stonehenge. It turns out I missed pretty much everything my first time there. I got to see a lot more Roman architecture, which was great. I got a Cornish pasty on top of Pulteney Bridge - I found out that it's pronounced past e, as in rhyming with nasty, which is just silly. Here's me in front of the bridge:
I also walked around in this little maze thing in a nearby park, and then we went to the King's and Queen's baths. There was some half-naked acrobats outside - my mom was more interested in that then I was. We also bought some fudge at some place that claimed it was the World's Best Fudge. It was too sweet - I've definitely had better fudge.

We left on our tour at 1 o'clock - there were about 15 other people in the bus I would say. The guide gave us all kinds of interesting info about the landscape on the way to Stonehenge, and we saw some cute little houses with thatched roofs on the way. Stonehenge itself was amazing. I didn't think we'd be able to get as close as we did. Everyone says it's just a pile of rocks, but it's much more really:

No one knows why they built it...my mom says it must be aliens. They gave us a free audio tour thing, and it explained how it was built. They used wood pile-ons to lift up the stones on top, which weigh...quite a lot. Slowly they would put wood underneath each side until it reached the top. That's your history/engineering lesson for today.

After taking about 200 pictures of stones, our tour moved on to a little village called Lacock. Lacock has a total of four streets, I counted. There was a cottage that had flowers outside, so I stuck some money through their post slip and got some flowers for Marta. The whole village can best be described as quaint. They filmed a couple of films there, including Harry Potter. We also got some ice cream from an ice cream truck.

After we got back to Bath, we took the bus back and called it an early night. We left the next day for London/Rome/Paris in a 5 day extravaganza that was amazing! I'll update on that soon.