England: Alternative Perspectives

Dear Friends,

Are you interested in reading multiple eprspectives about my group's time in England? I am not the only person out of our class of 35 to keep a blog about the time. Becasue we are a group of English majors there are many writers among us.

Here is a list of some of the other blogs:

1) A Chapter Called England: Carolyn was in my writing gorup for our Travel Writing class. Her style of writing is exuberant and full of passion. Everything she experiences goes straight to her heart and flows out through her pen. Her special love is Shakespeare and the theatre. Read her thoughts about The Bard!

2) Rachel's Rambles: During our reading of Pygmalion, Rachel assumed the role of "Sarcastic Bystander". After having spent a good deal of time with this young woman I can say that this acurately describes Rachel. In her blog, however, she is the central figure through whom we experience England. She narrates what she sees with humour, attention to detail and poetry. I got to be featured as a character in this post about a "sunrise" walk on the cliffs of Beer.

3) The Write Things: Ciera writes even when not travelling. She brings her love of literature and sharp critical thinking to her blog. She is a smart cookie who also appreciates photography and moments of beauty. But I really love her recent snarky post about 12 Things I Won't Miss About England. 

4) Further Up and Further In: Francesca uses her quiet humour to evaluate her time in England. I love the way she brings her observations into thoughtful musings about things like viewing everything idealistically or England living up to our expectaions. I giggled at the combination of truth and humour in this post about "Truths Universally Acknowledged".

5) I Want Adventure in the Great Wide Somewhere: Lauren writes incrediblly detailed and thoughtful posts from her sweet, keen perspective. I appreciate the time she puts into docuemnting our time faithfully and with an emphasis on her integration of our experiences and the sights we saw with her own faith. I like this post about our time in Beer.

I am on my way home to the Czech Republic. In a couple hours I board the plane. Currently I am sitting in a black leather chair overlooking the tarmac at the Dublin airport. At this airport I split from the gorup who is headed back to Chicago. I stationed myself at a corner of the path to customs and bid people awkward goodbyes. They were awkward because I know I will see them in a few weeks time anyway, but this is also the end of a shared thing. We may return to school and not talk much, whereas, here in England, I came into contact with most of our group at least once a day.

Well, goodbye for now, Friends. I will come back soon. In the mean time enjoy the links and get to know some of the other bloggers from the trip!

Love,
Lucy Rose

England: Manchester, Final Day

Dear Friends,

I am in a hotel in Manchester. Members of our group are scattered all over the hotel’s cafe reading, trying to connect to the internet or chatting with one another. This airport hotel is just another fine institution upon which we have descended in full force. We are bedraggled and creased from a two hour bus ride in which we sat stewing in our own damp clothes after we had waited for twenty minutes in the rain for the bus. We didn’t actually mind the wait in the rain that much because it gave us time to say a properly drippy goodbye to the Windermere lake and to the hills surrounding it. 

I walked out to the dock that juts out at the base of our hostel. I had my turquoise leather shoes on, which I am still planning on throwing away in a few hours when this trip ends. They got a hole in the sole when we tramped around on the moors behind the Bronte’s house and now rainwater is flowing in through that hole. Is that a metaphor? “The rain of life flows through the holes in the shoes of travelling…”

OK. Wheaton in England is over and I am feeling a little loopy. This trip has been a whirlwind of experiences. 

Some favourites:

1. Running along the Thames in the early morning and watching the sun glitter above St. Paul’s Cathedral. 
2. Sneaking off to a Costa Coffee in Canterbury as soon as the coach dropepd us off in order to write an email to Sheldon. 
3. Walking along the coastal paths of Beer in the evening. 
4. Visiting Jane Austen’s home and pretending to be her while walking through her gardens. 
5. Sitting with my fellow students and reading Pygmalion aloud complete with accents (a range of skill was exhibitied—from very skillful to incredibally poor. We are talking about “cockney” accent whcih freely flowed into a southern drawl.)
6. English breaksfast at every single hostel. Yes, 80% of it was from a can, but I actually love canned things. 
7. Tea and toast time! I have Lily and Elena, two girls from thsi trip to thank for this almost nightly ritual of eating and preparing tea and toast and eating it with whoever was around at that time. 

I will be back in the Czech Republic tomorrow afternoon. I cannot wait to see my dad when he picks me up in Prague. 

Last thing I will do before leaving: Throw away my turquoise shoes. 

England: Stonehenge Part Two

Anyway, I thought that I was going to learn some new things about Stonehenge, but I didn’t. I tried and failed to switch the device back to English. In the end I ditched the audio guide and let it hang from my neck like a nineties-era mobile phone on a string. Super cute. 

My Polish audioguide and I were swept along in the herd by the demarcated path around the stone configuration and I tried not to feel stupid, but I just felt like a sheep. We were part of  the Stonehenge herd (which is a fitting analogy because all the surrounding area of Stonehenge is farmlands and smells like it). I felt a small kernel of comfort from my Polish audioguide. Even though we couldn’t communicate very well, we were both foreigners and our friendship made me different from all the losers with boring old English audioguides. I was like Paul-Hugh taking pleasure in sounds only I could understand—wanting to be different and better. But I was failing. 

I tried to tell myself that I should just embrace the experience—there’s no shame in being a tourist. But the farther I crept along the packed path the more I realised that my problem wasn’t in being an uncool tourist amongst all the other uncool tourists. I was thrilled as punch to be one of a large flock of tourists at Anne Hathaway’s house in Stratford Upon Avon. I was totally cool with trailing along in a herd when we visited Coventry Cathedral. Why was Stonehenge different? I think that the reason was that I didn’t have to try. The site was so carefully managed that I barely had to exert any brainpower in order to explore. Even if I had tried to explore the Stonehenge site I probably would have been aggressively discouraged. My only option was to stay on the path which gently curved at a good twenty foot distance from the actual rocks. That and attempt to interpret Polish. 

I finally found a patch of grass to sit on. I had The Henge and a constant stream of tourists before me. I could let my Polish audioguide rest beside me on the grass for a few moments and I sketched some of the tourists. That was where Sophia and Nate found me. We all sat in the grass commenting on tourists until we realised that we had one hour before our bus left. I suggested that we walk back instead of the the three minute bus ride. Nate opted out because he had an interest in the museum, but Sophia was game. 

We marched away from Stonehenge past the wimpy bus riding tourists, the parking lot and lone man selling strawberries and toward the large mounds in the distance. My feet felt lighter and glad to free to walk wherever they chose instead of along the narrow path. Sophie kindly allowed me to put my audioguide in her purse along with her own English one, which she had never even turned on. The only trouble with forging a new path back to the museum was the amount of cow poop. While we were free to walk wherever we please, there was still lots of places we didn’t want to step. 

We felt like our ramble through the pastures called for a “The hills are alive” moment like in the musical The Sound of Music when Julie Andrews sings and dances on the hills of Austria. Sophia pulled up some Indian electronica on her on her phone and played it over the mediocre speakers. It was the closest thing she had to epic, hill sweeping music. It got swallowed in the huge space of field and sky, but we pranced as Julie-like as we could manage while still dodging cow pies.

—

The beginning of The Roof Climber’s Guide to Cambridge begins with a quote by Horace which translates from Latin to mean, “That place and the hilltops summon you with me”. 

The quote is taken from an ode that Horace wrote to a friend trying to persuade him not to go to war, but instead to come away and reside on the hills. The idea of the hills summoning a person makes me think of, well, Julie Andrews singing to the hills, but also of The Hugh. For him it was buildings at night, rather than hills, which summoned him. The leader of the Cambridge Climbers, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, once gave a list of the reasons why he climbed buildings at night: “The sheer enjoyment of climbing roofs and spires, spiced by the extra thrill of unlawful adventure; the happy companionship of my fellow conspirators; the satisfaction from reaching the lofty goals that we had set; and the sublime beauty of the college buildings from the rooftops by midnight.” 

Although Sophie and I did not have the added thrill of trespassing, we felt those things too—the “sheer enjoyment” of galloping like large, giddy school girls , happy companionship of being together, the satisfaction of blazing a trail through the field and leaving our bus-bound colleagues to wander a museum without us and the sublime beauty of the fields and sky. 

Both Paul-Hugh and I both started out on our excursions to climb buildings and to wander the fields instead of a museum with the intent to stand out from the rest of the sheep. We craved to rise above the teeming crowd of suckers, like the man in the painting called Wanderer Above the Sea Cloud by Kaspar David Friedrich. In it a man in a suit with a walking stick stands upon a mountain top and looks down at the swirling clouds below. He is alone and master of the universe below. It is a painting well suited to many narratives, but especially those which deal with people trying to be exceptional. I know this because it was on the cover of both my copy of Frankenstein and our family’s copy of The Birth of the Modern. 

It works for me too as it symbolises my desire to get out of the crowd and stand on a rock, rather than twenty feet away from one on a tiny path with a hundred other toruists. By walking across the huge field instead of taking the bus Sophie and I did end up getting away from the other tourists, but the farther we trudged away form Stonehenge, the less I cared about rising above anyone. It was more about enjoying my friend’s company being on the hills and impersonating Julie Andrews.

England: Stonehenge Part One

Dearest People,

I haven't been eaten by the Britons! Hooray! I am not dead yet! I disappeared because we have been staying in places with not internet. But now I have some and I will share this piece of writing with you that I did for my Travel Writing class. \it is super long so I will post it in two parts.

Enjoy!

Love,
Lucy Rose

Night Climbers, Stonehenge and Julie Andrews 
Part One

My younger brother Paul-Hugh is a night climber. He and his band of friends have tried to climb most of the buildings in our small town in the the Czech Republic. When we were both teenagers and living at home, there were evenings when cleanup from the family meal would drag on and he would get impatient to finish so that he could go climb. Our cleanup process was complex and lengthy— each family member was expected to pitch in. He couldn’t stand the tedium of the nightly puzzle to match the leftovers to the perfect size of Tupperware when he knew that his friends were already down in the dark, deserted town waiting to start. 

My parents gave both me and my three-years younger brother two first names. When Paul-Hugh was younger everyone used both of his names, but later he going by one or the other of the two names. Usually he goes by “Paul”, after my father, but my parents, other two brothers and I often refer to him as “The Hugh”. The word “The” makes him seem like a force of nature or a phenomenon as the titles “The Clash”, “The Tempest” or “The Big Bang” also connote. This title suits the brooding young man who enjoys a Byronic saunter over the mountains around our home and who delights in developing and producing a series of alien sounds with his mouth for the satisfaction of creating something that “no one else can make”.

Doing something that no one else can do has always been a fascination with The Hugh. I think that is one driving reason behind why he goes night climbing—he wants to get up to a place where no one else has been. 

Eventually Paul-Hugh began to offer to wash all of the dishes when he got home from his excursion so that he could leave immediately after eating. He didn’t often share his plans with us, because my mother would have worried had she known what they were up to. But he was proud of his escapades and told me about them afterwards. He would return at around twelve or one o’clock in the morning and creak in through our noisy front door and past our whining dogs. I would be sitting in the dining room still working on drawings for my art high school and he would get a box of apple juice form the fridge and sit down with me. He was would launch into a detailed description of the night’s escapades and provide me with a detailed account of how they had managed to climb whichever building they had chosen for that night. 

Once they climbed the roof of the old people’s home which used to be a monastery. The Hugh told me about how they had tried several evenings in a row before finally discovering a route which led them to the roof over the laundry rooms. He couldn’t hide his pride as he poured himself a huge glass of apple juice. It is obvious he was pushing back a smile in order to maintain his teenage suavity. The amount of juice that boy drank made me think that it was the magical liquid which fuelled his efforts like Popeye’s spinach which allows him to wrestle Olive Oyl away from his rival Bluto or the Grecian god’s ambrosia, which when drunk by humans, gave them immortality.

 
There was a group of men who climbed the buildings of Trinity College Cambridge and although they do not mention apple juice, my guess is they also indulged in copious amounts of the strengthening liquid to fuel their own night climbs. In the early years of the twentieth century they were pioneers of something that is now a popular sport. They called it Whipplesnaith so that people would not know what they were talking about and they would climb at night in order to stay out of trouble. The leader of the band of young men climbers was Geoffrey Winthrop Young. He was a mountaineer at the time when mountain climbing was just beginning to be an official pastime and a serious sport. Night Climbing was a way for him to keep in shape during school so that when he returned to climb the Swiss Alps in the summers he was ready for them.

Young published the first edition of The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity in 1900. He meant it to parody the Swiss guides to mountaineering that were just beginning to be published and popularised. The guide offers several different routes to getting onto the roofs of the college’s various buildings. Each chapter begins with a quote about something related to buildings or climbing and then the short chapter gives detailed instructions for the route. It even includes tips on the best techniques. Here is a line of advice given for climbing the chimney stack in Cloister Court: “Holding with the right hand to the summit tiles of the gable and turning the face to the chimney , the left arm must be stretched to its utmost round the stack until the parapet can be reached and grasped, the body and legs the while drifting aimlessly on the steep tiles.”  

Along with being intrepid explorers and skilled climbers the Night Climbers were pranksters. They would leave strange objects on the tops of buildings they had visited as a mark that someone had been there. An example would be a Santa Claus hat or a chamber pot on a statue’s head.

—

Unlike the stones at Stonehenge people are a lot less willing to stand still in order for me to draw them. I was sitting on the edge of the strip of grass designated for people to stand on in order to take photos of themselves in front of the rocks. I took my couple snapshots of The Henge on my phone, but then I settled down to draw the people. There was a son who took a photo of his mother being hoisted into her husbands arms in front of the stones. Their story was so much more captivating to me than the story of the prehistoric people who supposedly created the monolithic structure. 

Another thing that was stopping me from fully engaging in the story was the fact that my audioguide was in Polish. I had chosen Polish because I thought that I would enjoy hearing a Slavic language, which would remind me of home in the Czech Republic. I thought it wasn’t going to be a problem. I said to myself, “This’ll be great. I speak Czech. Polish is not that different. I can work on my Polish skills at the same time as I learn about Stonehenge.” Turns out that Polish is different enough from Czech, that I went away from my audioguide experience believing in the theory which claims druids were the ones who created the Henge for their rituals. A couple days later I was set straight by some friends (who had had the English version of the audioguide) after I tried to say something smart-sounding about the druids of Stonehenge. 

“Didn’t you listen to the audioguide, Lucy Rose?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you remember how they were saying that because of resent carbon dating we now know Stonehenge was definitely not created by druids?”

“My audio guide was in Polish.” 

“Do you speak Polish?”

“No.”

To be continued...

England: Beer Diaries VI

This is the last one, I promise.

England: Beer Diaries V

"Enough already with the Beer Diaries, Lucy Rose."
"No! More! You know you want more."

England: Beer Diaries IV

Even more Beer Diaries. 

England: Beer Diaries III

More diaries from Beer.

England: Beer Diaries II

Darling Readers Who Have Not Given Up,

I am back in a place where I have easy internet access. I really that there is a huge gap in my travelogue now. The gap is my two weeks in Beer. We were in this small fishing village for two weeks in order to focus on the classes we have been taking while here. Mostly our days consisted of class in the morning and wandering the hills and trails in the evenings.I made a careful documentation of those two weeks. I will share them over the next few days as well as give you some updates on my movements here in Cambridge.

Here are three days of events from the first week of our being there. It depicts our first full day in Beer, a day trip to Bath and a typical day.

Love,
Lucy Rose

England: A Few Photos From Beer

England: Beer Diaries I

Dearests,

I am sorry I have abandoned you for the past few days. We left Canterbury on Monday and after a trip to see Jane Austen's home we resettled in a tiny fishing village on the southern coast called Beer. Here we live in a hostel with no internet. I can walk into town and write from a coffee bar, but I won't be able to do this super often. I have been trying to draw about my adventures each day, however, so I can catch you up when I get the chance. We will be in this village for another week and a half.

Here are my diaries form the past two days:

Love,

Lucy Rose 

England: Canterbury

Dearests,

Today we were in Canterbury. We arrived yesterday evening at our hostel. We ran around exclaiming joyfully about the sheer number of outlets and the WiFi. It had been a long few days without them. 

This morning I went on a run through some of the residential neighbourhoods of Canterbury. I was in my running clothes and my calves were bare in my capris. For some reason I felt like a giant galloping next to all of the tiny, perfect English homes. I felt gangly and as though in my stalking along I was about to run right over a tiny British couple which would likely pop out of a rosebush or something. 

That didn’t happen, of course. But I still felt big. Once my mother told me that I had calves like a colt. Not my favourite analogy and I have never got over it, but I felt that way today. Oh well. 

Once everyone else woke up we had breakfast and classes. We walked into Canterbury to see the cathedral. It was stunning. My sketches are trite and foolish. They do not do it justice in the slightest. 

We saw the place where Thomas Beckett was martyred, just like in the play we read called Murder in the Cathedral. 

My favourite part was the crypt. It was in Romanesque style. The pillars were low to the ground and stout. Some dusty sunlight came through the basement windows and illuminated the barrel vaulted ceiling. It felt tomblike. Come to think of it that’s probably because it was a tomb…But what I mean is that in the whole cathedral it was the place with the least amount of visitors and the place where I felt the most reverent. 

We talked at dinner about the way churches are being used as tourist attractions. One girls said she loved the way that every hour the English cathedrals say a prayer over a loudspeaker system. Every cathedral we have been in so far has done this. It is a reminder that while we are touring the place and appreciating its history, it is still a functional house of worship. Tomorrow we will go to a worship service at the Canterbury Cathedral. 

Love,

LR

Here are my sketches from today:

England: Holmsbury St. Mary

Dearest Readers,

I have been trying to get you up to speed on my movements with my school group around England. The last stop I related was Penshurst Place. After Penshurst we were driven to a village called Holsmbury St. Mary in the middle of the English countryside. In order to give you a sense for the 48 hours we spent there I will share an excerpt from an email I wrote to Sheldon about it. It has been slightly redacted so as not expose any exchanges too personal in nature.

Dear Sheldon, 

I have finally gotten a hold of internet again! I am in Canterbury. I am so sorry I left you in the dark for these two days. Our hostel didn't have internet. I did write you a big fat letter though. You just have to give me your address. 

Today we traipsed around the castle at Dover. But the past two days have been by far my favourite. First we went to Penshurst Place and toured the beautiful medieval grounds and gardens. Then we arrived at our hostel in the middle of nowhere with no internet. It was glorious. We sat around reading our books for class, taking classes and in between we got lost on the moorish forest paths. 

In the evening no one had anywhere to go or any internet to distract, so we stayed in and read quitely in the main room. I went for long rambling runs in the mornings with a friend and had some solo sketching times in the evening light.

Yesterday I was feeling upset in my spirit and I needed to leave the company of everyone else. I took my sketchbook and prayer book out onto a path and did some talking with the Lord. It was very helpful. I also got to sit and sketch some of the remarkable exposed tree roots on the road. 

Went running again this morning. Saw a view of the entire countryside. It was gorgeous. I am actually reminded often of my home in the Czech Republic while here. Its not unsimilar. 

Please respond soon and let me know how we can consider a Skype talk soon. This Costa Coffee shop seems like it could be a good spot. I know that you are available in the later evenings. 

Dear One, I am always yours. 

Love,

LR

Here are the sketches I made while there:

1. This was form the first day. I snuck off to explore the woods as soon as our bus stopped at the hostel. I plopped myself down on a stump and sketched. 

2. This is from my devotional escape. I haven't finished it yet, which is why it is quite lightly shaded. The notes in blue are from a class. 

3. A group of us decided to read one of our assigned reading plays out loud. We sat around in a cluster of benches and stumps in the afternoon sun and read T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral. It is a strange play. I kept having to ask the others to pause and explain what was happening. Drawing this sketch of the bushes across from me helped me to focus and not get fidgety during the times when I was not required to read the part of Knight #1. 

 4. More tree roots from my solo pilgrimage. These always make me think of two things: 1) The first time I was in England my mother took hundreds of photos of the tree roots. When we returned she spent hours making a beautiful pencil drawing of one of the photos. It still hangs in our living room, 2) It reminds me of Alan Lee who did the drawings for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. He was the visionary artist behind the design of many elements of the films. He designed Arwen's necklace and the swords and some costumes and even set pieces. He is amazing.

Well, as my favourite British female comedian Miranda Hart likes to say at the end of her show, "So long and thanks for joining!" 

Love,

LR

England: Penshurst Place

My Dear Friends,

In my last post I told showed you some final sketches from London. Today I want to catch you up on what we have been doing since then. We have done a lot since London so my thought is to do three mini posts to catch you up. I'll share my sketches from each location and a brief bit about the time in that spot.

1. Penshurst Place: This is a country estate which dates back to to 1341. It was built from sandstone quarried nearby. In the time of the Tudors Henry the VIII was a guest there to Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham. Later the Sidney family took over the property. They were influential in the British court and politics. Sir Phillip Sidney was a true Renaissance man who had talents in the political and artistic realms. He wrote some of the poetry that we read for my 17th Century Literature class. Here is a snippet of his first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, two lovers:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show

That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain:

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, 

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;

We also read about Penshurst Place when we read a long ode to it written by Ben Jonson. In the poem Jonson enumerates the virus and beauties of the place. He waxes on about how the game on the grounds are so in love with their masters and the place that they willingly leap onto the weapons and give their lives to be eaten by them. He also talks about how the fruits and vegetables are so excited to be picked that they basically jump off the trees and into the baskets of the waiting people. Here is a snippet:

To crown thy open table, doth provide

The purpled pheasant with the speckled side;

The painted partridge lies in every field,

And for thy mess is willing to be killed.

To be honest, by the end of our luxurious few hours at Penshurst Place I was ready to write my own ode to it. We were given a tour of the gardens. They are divided into several "rooms" or separate gardens. One of the gardens was modelled after a jousting arena complete with staffs representing important coats of arms including the Sidney's blue and yellow hedgehog. 

Another garden was the former washroom and work yard. According to Carline Smith, our lovely turgid, the family would have was he their clothes in urine to bleach them and then dried them on bushes. You can imagine that it was precisely this detail which caught our fancy and which we discussed at length several times after. This garden was all plants of silver and green. 

Another garden was thousands of peonies in a row. Two other girls and I decided that we needed to prance along beside them in Julie Andrews Hills Are Alive style. It was glorious. 

I finally settled myself by the gardener's old cottage to sketch. I chose the spot because it had a small bench which hid from view of the other visitors and I could look out onto a small pond. My sketches are not brilliant, but I give you what I have:

1. This was a pen drawing of the house itself. I have been practicing my perspective and as you can see from this I have been struggling with that lately. I used pen on this one and would have gone into greater detail, but was interrupted by the tour of the gardens. 

2. This is my sketch of the head gardener's pond. It too it not up to scratch. I feel like this one needs a lot of work. Some areas are darker than others and it hurts the illusion of distance. It's rather patchy.

As usual, thanks for reading! I appreciate your tagging along on my travels with me. 

Love,

Lucy Rose 

England: London Sketches

Dear Friends,

We left London a couple of days ago. We lost internet access for the past little while. I wanted to show you the last sketches I did during my London stay, however.

1. These two pages are from a run I went on through the city and over Millennium bridge. I took my sketchbook and a pen. I also had a phone, my driver's licence and i-Pod stuffed down my spots bra. It was very lumpy and looked a bit odd. Anyway, I would run a few hundred metres and then stop for a sketch.  I can't say that it yielded beautiful or inspiring artistic results, because I was rushed and felt the need to get actual exercise. These tow images are of some people mudlarking. What is that? Look here to find out. 

2. This is a page of sketches I did during a lecture on Dorothy L. Sayers plays in the crypt of St. Paul's cathedral. We heard about these plays she wrote. 

3. This is a quickie I did at the Shakespeare Globe production of The Merchant of Venice. Very hurried and not great, but there you have it! Such a fun experience. 

I've gotta run back to our hostel for dinner. Bye for now!

Love,

LR

England: London Day Five (Yes. I skipped day. Big Whoop.) - East Finchley

Dearest Friends,

Today I went on a pilgrimage. I fulfilled a long time dream of going to the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley. It was a very lovely day. 

You may be asking, “What is the big deal about that cinema? Why did you take a 30 minute subway ride by yourself to get there?”

The answer has to do with one of my favourite things of all time: Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Film Review Podcast. It is a BBC production which airs every Friday afternoon. Two middle aged men sit in a recording studio and talk about the latest film releases. Mark Kermode is a doctor of film studies who wears his hair in a “quiff” and has flappy hands. Simon Mayo is a smallish man who is a radio presenter and famous British DJ. He tends to know less about film. His job is to read out emails and provoke Mark into talking about films. HE also interviews the various film stars and directors that become guests on the show. 

Mark Kermode always waxes on about how his very favourite cinema in all the world is the Phoenix in East Finchley. It is his favourite, because he has such good childhood memories from there. They have done a few live shows from there as well. So today I decided to use my free afternoon in London to go there and watch a film. I saw Second Coming. It was an independent British film starring the wonderful Idris Elba. It was beautiful, but it was SUPER long. There was only me and about five elderly ladies in the theatre. Two of them left halfway through! 

When the film finished I stuck around to order a coffee from the cinema cafe and sketch for a minute. Then I traipsed down the road to some charity shops to do my other favourite thing: thrifting. There were some more elderly ladies in the charity shop. They thrust dresses at me bidding me try them on. I humoured them even though I could tell they would be too big. I enjoyed tossing out bits of encouragement and advice to them as they tried some things on as well. It was so fun. At first I pretended to have a British accent, but later I petered out and got more American. 

I also wandered into an old book shop. I chatted with the owner and confessed my purpose in coming to East Finchley. He laughed and said, “Oh yes, I know that show.” I bought some very old post cards and a book of Seventeenth Century poetry. 

After all this I took the train back to central London to rejoin my group. 

It was a wonderful day. I loved getting out on my own and having a destination to explore. It was a feeling of accomplishment and discovery. I also enjoyed being on my own. That has been an interesting aspect of this England trip. I do not have a “person” in this group. I like everyone very much, and some people quite a lot, but I really don’t have a special friend. I have mostly been fine with this and content to move from group to group. In fact I sometimes, like today, seek out solitude. But I confess that this evening when I returned from our play I felt a little homesick for Joanna or Sheldon or another close friend from home like Barbora or Claire. 

In the end, it was an iddyllic day which included some of my favourite things: Sketching, podcasts, theatre, cinema and thrifting. If I could have shared it with another person that would have been great, but it was still valuable on my own. I don't think I could have convinced anyone to share my interest in East Finchley anyway! 

Love,

Lucy Rose

PS

Sorry I don’t have any photos for you today. I will include them at a later date, because the internet here at this hostel is terrible. 

PPS

Hello to Jason Isaacs. 

England: London Day Three - British Museum

Hello Folks!

Today we went to the British Museum. It was so huge! I didn't know what I wanted to do with the hour and a half that I had in which to look over the thousands of artefacts they have in the museum. In the end I figured I had time for about two or three sections so I picked the ones which most interested me and spent my time there.

My favourite part was the room devoted to the Enlightenment. That was very cool because it was a time in which people were very interested in collecting and categorising objects. The exhibit was divided into seven sections based on the particular interests of the time period: Religion and Ritual, Trade and Discovery, The birth of archeology, Art and Civilisation, Classifying the world, Ancient scripts and The Natural World. Each subject had a couple of cases devoted to one of these subjects. My favourite were the special boxes devoted to collections. For instance one man who sailed with James Cook collected seashell specimens and classified them into a large tray, which was divided into many tiny compartments, each of which was labelled. This was apparently the method used by Carl Linnaeus when he classified plants. I personally have special relationship with Carl, because when I was a little girl my brothers and I used to climb all over his statue in the Chicago Botanical Gardens.

I drew a little while I was there.

In the afternoon my group and I got extremely lot trying to make our way back from Notting Hill. Haha! It took us three hours to get home. We finally made it, however. It was a bonding experience. As my friend Aseye said it was the kind of experience that really brings friendships up to a new level. The other three girls and I definitely bonded over that period. We weathered sore feet, an attack of "hangriness" - anger which comes from hunger, and general weariness together.

One of the girls I was with has been blown about our trip. If you;d like to read about her perspective take a look here: http://whereintheworldiskatherine.blogspot.co.uk

My Darlings, I am sorry I do not have more drawings for you today. I have been absolutely worn out. I'll try to get more out tomorrow. 

Love,

LR