Éireann go Brách?

So I survived finals. I survived saying goodbye to Faraday House and the awesome people who run it. I survived the preliminary packing for home. And now I go to Ireland (Ireland!) until the 6th.  I’m still the world’s worst blogger, of course, and have a backlog the size of Pittsburgh to catch up on, but…I’m going to Ireland. If you know me at all, you’ll know that I’ve been waiting my entire life for a chance to go; it’s like a pilgrimage, like returning to the homeland. Which…I’ve never seen before. But shh.

Ireland! Back on the 6th, guys; then one last day in London, lots to get done, and home.

(Well, Syracuse, at least. Close enough.)

Excuses, excuses

Istanbul will “follow soon,” eh? Yeah, I’m a big fat liar. But it’s not (entirely) my fault, because let me tell you, that whole “Oh, I’m only taking fifteen credits, easiest semester ever” thing? Completely false. The past few weeks have been an absolute blur of papers and final projects and awesome London-y things, and…I don’t even know when I’ll have the time to catch up on bloggin’ it all. Probably when I get home. Which is a scant three weeks from today. Oy.

But rest assured, I’m keeping extensive mental notes on everything that’s happening. The retelling will be epic. Be excited.

Aaand back to work. See you…um, soon?

Roman Holiday (Part Four)

[The last of the Italy recaps, finally. Istanbul to follow soon!]

Sunday, 9 Mar: Rome, Sweet Rome

Our plan for Sunday is mighty ambitious. We’ve basically outlined a walking tour of the entire city to see all of the things we’ve missed: we start at the Vatican (where Flatmate Megan attended an early mass – we meet her there), walk over towards the Castello di San Angelo, along the Tiber for a while, across the river, by the Ara Pacis (which is enclosed in a gorgeous modern building with a disappointingly high entrance fee) and the Mausoleum of Augustus, up to the Piazza del Popolo for gelato and a sit at the base of the obelisk, up the adjacent steps and along the outskirts of a part, over and down the Spanish Steps for a quick street-café lunch, to Trevi Fountain to make wishes and throw Euros into the water, back over to the Colosseum and up the Via dei Fori Imperiali to take daytime pictures of the Forum from the Capitoline, then over to the Circus Maximus and, finally, down to the Baths of Caracalla to gawk at the mosaics and accidentally watch seagulls mating.

…For those of you keeping track, we walked ALL OF ROME. All of it. No, really – all of it. It’s incredible, of course, and I’m thrilled that I got to see the rest of the major landmarks (I really don’t think we missed a single one), but by the time we leave the Baths, it’s getting cold and I’m practically dead on my feet. Plus, I’d started feeling kind of ill around lunchtime (the details, you don’t need to know), so I head back to the hostel to lie down for a while, while the other three hit up the Santa Maria Maggiore, the beautiful old church we’ve walked past every day on our way to breakfast. By the time they return bearing dinner, I’m feeling considerably better. We’re all quite exhausted, and spend our last night in Rome on the roof terrace again, huddled in blankets, pondering Deep Things and talking into the darkness.

Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople

By 4:00 tonight, I’ll be on a plane to Istanbul. Istanbul! (Am I packed? Nope. Flatmate Kathleen and I just had a discussion about how this semester has utterly changed our perspectives on travel, namely re: our respective tendencies to overprepare. Never before would we be this lax about it. Throw some clothes and a toothbrush in a suitcase, done. It’s kind of nice, really.)

This means, of course, that we’ll have to take a break in the ongoing Spring Break Chronicles. I’m sensing a pattern here: whoops, have to go on break, I’ll talk about London when that’s done. Whoops, have to go to Istanbul, I’ll finish telling you about Italy when I’m back. But when do I post about Istanbul? When will I have the time to get caught up?

Apparently, I’m the world’s worst blogger. Awesome.

Hee. But no, I’m beyond excited for this weekend (Istanbul!), and I’ve determined not to let the scary amount of classwork I have upcoming distract me from having an awesome time. I’ll take far too many pictures and buy too many souvenirs and eat too much food and it’ll be perfect. And I totally have the They Might Be Giants song stuck in my head. I think I need to go listen to some Dvorak while I pack or something. Away! See y’all Sunday.

Istanbul! (Not Constantinople.)

Roman Holiday (Part Three)

Saturday, 8 Mar: There’s No Place Like Rome

Today, apparently, is our Vatican day. We spend the morning in the Vatican Museum, which…well, it goes on pretty much forever. There’s just so much stuff in there – so much stuff – that it’d be impossible to actually study it all, to give it the attention it deserves, and the museum is a constant mass of people. We pick a lovely day to wait outside in the line (sunny, blue skies, finally), and get there early enough to gain entrance pretty quickly. Once inside, I’m totally fine through the Egyptian and Greek and Etruscan collections, but by the time we reach the endless galleries of Christian art, the endless rooms with magnificent carvings and painted ceilings, I’m hungry and I have to go to the bathroom and my body is rebelling against the Museum Walk – you know, the terrible slow shuffling motion that, after a few hours, becomes unbearable. We keep turning corners and seeing more and more seemingly infinite series of galleries, and even though I pride myself on having a greater museum attention span than most, by this point my brain has totally shut off. Even worse, the crowds inside the museum are making it impossible to just rush through to the Sistine Chapel (the anticipation of which is the only thing keeping me sane), forcing us to move at an infuriatingly bovine pace. Let’s go, I want to shout at the tourists, forgetting, of course, that I’m one too.

Finally, just before the Sistine Chapel, we find bathrooms (sweet relief), and book it through the last few rooms to the grand prize awaiting us at the end of the line. The Chapel, of course, is jam-packed with people, but after a couple of minutes we find spots on the long bench at either side of the room. Sitting down, I’m much more able to appreciate the ceiling – which is, of course, incredible, and thanks to its most recent restoration in 2000 (or thereabouts), is exactly as you would hope it to be. The ceiling is impressive purely by its scale, of course, and by association with Michelangelo, but the more I look at it, the more details I start to notice, the more I start to appreciate it. Michelangelo’s sense of humor comes through in the most subtle touches – the expression of a face here, the angle of an arm there – and the overall composition and rendering is textbook Renaissance. Religious art has never been my favorite field, aesthetically speaking, but the Sistine Chapel is really incredible.

Roman Holiday (Part Two)

Friday, 7 Mar: Romeward Bound (which I really should’ve used for the title of the last entry, but oh well)

Friday dawns grey and…wet. Again. Some more. Always. Great. But we have Big Plans, and I for one certainly don’t plan on letting a little rain stop me – I mean, I usually live eight months out of the year in Syracuse, New York, which is the Unfortunate Weather Capital of the World, so what’s the big? After a croissant and cappuccino from the café down the road (here’s a hint: when traveling, find a hostel that gives you breakfast vouchers) (and here’s another one: Italy makes great cappuccino), we set out to buy a three-day pass for the Metro and head for the Pantheon.

Public transportation in Rome serves as an interesting comparison to other cities’, especially after living in London for two months. The subway system has two lines (London has at least a million) that create a giant X under the city, at the center of which is Termini station. The problem with this? The X, while it’s an attractive enough shape, leaves huge swaths of the city out of convenient reach of the Metro. The Tube in London may seem a mess of lines and stations and buskers, but by golly it gets you where you need to go. I’m sure the buses in Rome supplement the service provided by the Metro, but it’s just…interesting, to see a completely different approach to mass transit. The Metro stations tend to be dimmer and generally sketchier than in London, the trains more…I don’t know, sketchy. It gets the job done, I suppose, but it certainly makes me appreciate (and I’m almost homesick for, in an odd way) the London Underground.

Whoo, tangent. Anyway: the layout of the Metro means we have to get off at some stop that’s really nowhere near the Pantheon. I like a walk as much as the next person, though, and even though it’s cold and wet, we splash our way merrily through the streets of Rome. No, it’s fine. My fingers are supposed to be purple like this. No, really.

Roman Holiday (Part One)

So I’ve been back in London for a few days now, and it’s taken me at least that long just to wrap my head around the past week-and-a-bit (and to get over the cold I picked up on Thursday; “thanks,” woman sitting behind me on the plane back from Venice). But now, spring break is winding down – classes start up again tomorrow, and as long as I can be productive in studio today, I’m actually pretty ready to get back to work. It’s been a good break.

Speaking of which: Italy. Oh man, you guys. It was so awesome. If you know me at all, you’ll know I’m a huge classics nerd (taking Latin for four years will do that to a person) – Roman history is probably my favorite, and certainly the era about which I know the most, so you can imagine how much fun I had, especially in Rome. We were champions, packing our days tighter than I would have thought possible, but that means that the resultant retelling is going to take a while. And involve reeeally long entries. I think we’ll do this in installments, again, because it’s not November yet and I’m sure you have better things to do than read my novel-length ramblings. Heeere we go.

[Also: pictures are coming soon. “But you said that last ti…” I KNOW JEEZ BE PATIENT. They’ll be here. Someday. Promise.]

See, here’s the thing

It seems that Weeks Five and Six are going to have to wait a while (it’s okay, they weren’t particularly exciting weeks; mainly they involved a lot of schoolwork), because tonight, after I get home from class at around 8:30, I am going straight to bed until around 2:00 tomorrow morning, and the reason I have to get up at such an ungodly hour is because I am going to Italy. On a…7:30 a.m. flight. Oy. Back-timing it from there, we want to be at the airport around 5:30, which means we have to catch the Gatwick Express from the Victoria station at 4:30, which means we have to get to Victoria (by bus because the Tube isn’t open that early) by around 4:00, which means we need to take a bus from Hyde Park Corner at…oh, some point before then, which means we’ll be out the door of our flat and walking down Knightsbridge with our stuff at around 3:30. These are all a.m. times, remember. It’s…going to be a rough day.

London Retrospective, Week Four

(4 Feb to 10 Feb)

Classes continue, business as usual, except for the part where our instructions for certain classes include things like “Meet in front of St. Paul’s.” You can’t really…do that, in Syracuse, you know? By now I’ve established a fairly consistent pattern in my weeks – classes Monday through Wednesday, group-project meeting(s) on Thursday, field trip on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for homework and one or two jaunts around London. It’s a pretty good arrangement, I think.

This week’s field trip is Oxford, and, since I’m a nerd, I’m incredibly excited to see the famous university and its town. Yeah, yeah, it’s where Harry Potter and The Golden Compass were filmed, blah – I’m more interested in the fact that it’s where the The Golden Compass, as in the novel, is set, and in the history of the actual place. The coach ride is about an hour and a half, and as I’ve discovered, it’s one of my favorite parts of the day, a chance to catch up on music-listening and watch the scenery flashing past. Today, because of a reported accident ahead, our driver pulls off the motorway onto the country roads, and it becomes quite evident where the term “scenic route” came from. Broad green fields sitting under the sun, the fog still in the process of burning off; wooded hills gently receding into the distance; narrow roads I’m surprised the coach can even navigate, birch trees closely crowding either side. Villages – actual villages – nestled romantically between the woods and the fields. It’s so picturesque it’s hard to believe it all actually exists; “Come on,” I find myself thinking, “there’s no way it can be this pretty.” But it is, and that’s the incredible thing, this beautiful and green country just sitting there, existing, content in itself. We drive through Henley-on-Thames, a (ridiculously) gorgeous little village bridging the river (famous for its boat races), with all the old houses sitting sleepily in an odd mixture of sun and mist from the water.

London Retrospective: Week Three

(28 Jan to 3 Feb)

Okay: Week Three. It’s the second week of classes, and I’m still getting into the groove of things – it’s more difficult than usual for me to figure out how to manage my time. This is understandable, because a) my schedule is considerably less intense than it has been in previous semesters; no class until 2:00 on Tuesday? What? And b) I’m in London. It’s kind of distracting, you know? My group for a project in studio makes a visit to the British Museum (we’re designing an exhibition for the Grand Court), and it’s so much easier just to wander in awe than to take photos and think about circulation patterns. “Hey, want to get dinner after class?” turns into a solid three hours of conversation and laughter at The Shakespeare’s Head (a pub close to Faraday House; not great on authenticity, but they have decent prices and good burgers) before I realize that I have to read a play for Irish Lit the next day.

It’s still only the second “official” week of the semester, though, so my workload is fortunately pretty light, and as we’ve previously discussed, the weekend rolls around pretty quickly. The Friday Field Trip this week is to Windsor Castle – the oldest continually occupied castle in England (or maybe the world; I can’t remember) and, it must be noted, the Queen’s favorite residence.