So close and yet so far away

I finished writing my dissertation this weekend. I thought I would be more excited, but I am still a wreck. I turned it in to my supervisor today, who is known to be a critical marker, and am so afraid that he's going to return it to me with comments like "Ideas are incoherent. Lit review needs a serious rewrite. Your content analysis is a joke." See why I can't be excited? This is my last week left in Leeds to do work, but I am pretty much at his mercy in terms of how long it takes for him to read and mark it. Unless he returns it tomorrow, I will probably have to finish it at home, and I don't want to do that. I want to get on the plane and go home knowing that I am done with grad school. So until then, I just keep refreshing my e-mail, waiting for the note that could free me or have me chained to a computer for another month. I have never wanted to be done with something so much in my entire life.

A little insight into my life

Since arriving in England, I've been engaging in a little game. I like to play chicken with all the people that walk towards me on the sidewalk. Think about it. What side of the sidewalk do you walk on? I always walk on the right because that's the side of the road we drive on, so that's the way traffic flows. So in England, people should walk on the left side of the path, right? Well, they don't. According to my very scientific experiment, people haven't got a clue in hell what side they are supposed to walk on. Pure pedestrian chaos. Most go to the right, but some go to the left. It could be that there are so many foreigners in big cities like Leeds and London who are used to walking on the right that they are skewing my experiment. I will never know, and it's driving me crazy.

Yotel-ing it

So check it out. My flight home leaves in the morning from London, so I have to go down the day before and spend the night in London. I read an article about a new hotel that opened up in Heathrow airport called Yotel. It's modeled after those Japanese business hotels that are basically just cupboards that people sleep in. Now I could have stayed in a hostel in London, but I decided why not take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stay in a 7 square-meter cupboard at the airport. I get a double bed, bathroom, flatscreen tv and Internet in my tiny compartment, plus I get the ability to sleep in since I'm already at the airport and can avoid having some drunk guy wake me up in the middle of the night in a 12-bed hostel room. A win all the way around.

Is it crazy that I'm excited about this?

I drove on the left side of the road and lived to tell about it

Hello blog world. I'm back.

I had a great time with my parents. I met them at the hotel in London, we hugged, and it was as if I had never been gone. The only thing that was weird was that this place where I've been living was totally foreign to them. I forget I'm in a different country sometimes, everything just seems normal to me now. It took my mom the whole trip to figure out the money, which I don't even think about now. After spending a few days in London, we rented a car and drove south to Portsmouth so my dad could see the HMS Victory - the oldest floating naval ship in the world. It was something I could have cared less about, except that I like to think that my lifetime of my dad dragging me around to various historical and scientific sites, as well as every national park and wildlife preserve we pass on the highway, has in some way made me a more interesting person. I intend to do the exact same thing to my kids. If I ever meet a guy interested in naval history we'll have something to talk about for about five minutes. My favorite places we visited were the Cotswalds, which is where you will find all the cute cottages and thatch roof houses all situated in villages that are so cute and perfect you'll feel like you stepped onto a movie set. We also took a personal C.S. Lewis tour in Oxford with a guide that was a real character. It was so neat to learn more about Lewis, see his house, eat in the pub where the Inklings met, and sit in the pew he sat in for church every Sunday. I am determined to read more of his stuff this summer, and I want to see the movie The Shadowlands. Finally, we made our way up to the Lake District. I had been there before with Ashley back in the fall, but since we had a car and could go up all the deserted mountain roads, I feel like I experienced it all in a new way. It's absolutely one of the prettiest places I've ever been. My parents and I hiked up some peaks outside of Keswick. The climb was a killer, but there is nothing like sitting on the top of a mountain looking out at peaks and down at valleys and lakes and small little villages. On one of the peaks, we were above the clouds, and it was just such an incredible thing to experience the beauty of creation in a new way.

I didn't really take many pictures this trip, but here's a few.

Dad in front of The Kilns (C.S. Lewis's house)

Thatched roof cottages in the Cotswalds:

The beautiful Lake District: