Home sweet home

I made it back safe and sound! I've been home for a week now and have been thinking about updating for a while, but I'm lazy, and I can't really blame that on jetlag. My flight to Dallas left from London, so I decided to go to London a day early and spend some time there. However, when I made that plan, I forgot about the fact that I had 100 pounds of luggage to carry around. That's not an exaggeration, it was actually probably more than that. Traveling was a nightmare. I could barely pull/carry all my luggage, and I had to stop every 10 minutes to catch my breath. It was only by the grace of God and kind strangers that I made it through the train station, the streets of London, and the tube to the airport. Let's just say I've got the girl in distress act down pat, although no dramatization was really necessary - I was in distress.

I ended up being disappointed because my pre-planned day in London was ruined by torrential rain. I guess God wanted me to leave England with a reminder of what I was really leaving behind. Today I saw pictures from the British Open going on in Scotland right now. Everybody was huddled up in blankets under umbrellas. Now that I've been back in 100 degree heat and have gotten back into my life, those pictures seem very bizarre. I feel like England is already a faint memory, when I only left it a week ago. I can't believe I too was in Scotland wearing a jacket not long ago.

Oh, a couple days before I came back to the US, I went up to Edinburgh, Scotland and had a great time. I think the only real regret travelwise from this last year was that I didn't get to do any traveling up in Scotland. I wanted to see the highlands and do some hiking, but I just didn't plan my time well enough.

I can't believe my time in England is over. It's good to be home, but it's always sad when something you looked forward to for so long comes to an end. Now I have to find something new to anticipate. That shouldn't be hard seeing as how my life is basically a blank canvas right now. I've applied for four jobs so far and had one interview already on Friday. I'll let you know more when one of my plans comes to fruition. In the meantime, I get to hang out and spend time with my family and friends. I also have some work to do on my dissertation still. My supervisor came up with a few things for me to work on, and I didn't get them finished before I left. I am trying to get it all finished this week so I don't have to think about it any longer.

I think that's about it for now. Love to you all! Please let me know if you're in the Dallas area, I'd love to see you!

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:

I'm so excited (and I just can't hide it)

I am taking the train to London tomorrow to meet my parents! I am so excited. It doesn't feel real that in the next 14 hours, I will see members of my family again. It's been more than 8 months. In the last eight months, I've learned to be independent and to not miss being around family. I've gotten used to making my own decisions without having to call one of my parents or the best friend first. And in 14 hours, my two lives are going to collide. I'm so excited to show my parents the world I've been living in and have adapted to over the last year. I've just in the last few weeks started to realize how much I will miss England. I'm excited to go home, but I finally feel like I've come to understand this place, so I'm sad to leave. I'm going to miss my church here, my classmates, being a Fulbrighter, going to the town square and shopping streets on Saturdays, beautiful gardens, the newspapers and media frenzy here, taking the train, and sitting on the bus and watching the old women gossiping around me. The old people and little kids are so much cuter here because of their accents. I love watching the little kids running around in the school uniforms and hearing them say the word "Mummy." I'm going to miss all the quirks and sensibilities of the people here. I'm also going to really miss London. It's one of my favorite cities in the world, and I can't wait to play tour guide tomorrow.

End of the semester

Some things just never get easier. I thought after I made it through exams and took a day off, I would be eager to dive into my dissertation. Time is ticking if I want to be able to finish it by the end of June, travel and go home on July 10. Unfortunately, it's been 4 days and I still can't find the desire to get started. I have never struggled as much with school as I have this year. I don't know what the deal is.

Enough about school. I went to a rugby match last week, which was a lot of fun. I think it was more interesting than American football because it moves faster. When someone is tackled, they have to let go of the ball and someone else picks it up, so the game doesn't stop every time someone goes down. Anyways, a rugby match was one of the things I had to check off my "England" list before I leave. Now I just have to learn to play cricket and my circle of English sporting experiences will be complete.

The picture is too small, but I would say check out their shorts.

The day after finals, I took the train out to the picture perfect town of Ilkley, which is in the Yorkshire moors. I could have taken a friend with, but I decided that I wanted to do some solo hiking. I walked up into the moors, which are really craggy and rocky and high, and just sat on top of some rocks, looking down on the valley and spent some time with God. It just felt like the right way to end the semester.

Other than that, I have been going to a lot of end of the year parties and banquets put on by friends and different departments. I have earned the (affectionate) nickname of "grandma" because I'm usually one of the first to leave a party. I can't help it if I like to be in bed around 1 a.m. I can't do the party till 4 a.m. thing like most of my friends here seem to do. This is a good example of cultural differences. Any time some one has a party, I, along with the Brits, show up about 30 minutes after we are told to arrive. The Europeans come about a half an hour later. Then the Indians show up about another half hour later. And the last people to show up, probably about 2.5-3 hours after the party is supposed to start, the Greeks, Spaniards, and South Americans in our group show up. My international group of friends can never all meet and get some place on time. It just doesn't happen. We all have very different ideas of what is supposed to be proper party etiquette. My Estonian friend doesn't go to a party with out baking and bringing a cake. She usually doesn't start said cake until the party is supposed to begin. Another interesting cultural tidbit ... The English have a thing for dressing up in costumes. They call this "fancy dress" and they particularly like to dress up to go for pub crawls (in Leeds it's called the Otley Run. 18 pubs in a row, and you are supposed to have a drink at all of them. There is a lot vomit on the streets near the end of the row of pubs). Any given night of the week in Leeds, I will pass at least one slutty nurse, one pirate, one jail bird, and one super hero on the streets around the university. Apparently those are the popular themes for Otley Runs. The other night at the pub, there was a whole group of guys wearing just shorts, blue body paint, and smurf hats. At the same pub, there was also a group of monks and pregnant nuns. What's funny, is that no body blinks an eye. You just see people in fancy dress and think, oh they're out for a fun night, and go about your business. So there you go. It's your cultural information about party customs in England.