Flamenco Dancing in Madrid

In Madrid, Tony and I went to one of the most famous clubs for Flamenco Dancing in the world. Here a few clips of the amazing dancers.

Street Band in Madrid

Look at that clarinet go!

Christmas Videos in London

Covent Garden Fiddlers


Covent Garden Fiddlers

Westminster Abbey Boys' Choir

Thankgiving, Ring Night, Oxford

Happy Belated Thanksgiving, everyone!

Well it's a little hard to celebrate a holiday that doesn't exist here, but we seemed to find a way! My housemates and I decided that we were too cool NOT to have a Thanksgiving dinner, so we all started planning the big day about a month ago and it all came together wonderfully on Thursday! I must say, I'm pretty impressed with us. Everyone made 1-2 things for dinner using one kitchen with one oven and 4 stove tops on a day that we all had classes, with no major disasters. Well, there was a pie that was dropped, but it was rebaked in time. WOW. I made mom's stuffing and it made the whole house smell just like Thanksgiving at home, and it tasted perfect; just like Mum makes it! And the best part was that people who hadn't even eating the stuffing all their lives liked it, so it was a definite success. Anyway, the reason I called it 'in Hell' in the title is because my house is a little obsessed with Gordon Ramsey, especially the reality TV show Hell's Kitchen, so halfway through our cooking experience we decided to have a Gordon Ramsey Thanksgiving and Brooke happily filled the role and proceeded to insult everyone and yell dramatically about our shit cooking skills. Traumatic as it sounds, it was actually quite fun. I just felt like I should explain that before anyone goes off to see the pictures in my album, as the pictures might seem a bit alarming without an explanation. No, she's not really about to cut off my hand, she's just pretending... I think. Anyway, the Ivys lent us a table, table cloth, and hot plates to help make our Thanksgiving a complete success (we decided against candles, as they would probably give Mrs. Dr. Ivy nightmares about house fires for the next week) and we had a wonderful dinner with fantastic food. I pretty much laughed the whole night; I actually started getting cheek cramps.

Anyway, the next night was RING NIGHT! Now for those of you who don't know about what a big deal class rings are at R-MWC, let me fill you in. Back at home, juniors get their class rings. This is such a big deal that we have an entire Ring WEEK, and a first year student picks 'her junior', decorates her door, they leave each other presents, and at the end of the week the firstie makes a scavenger hunt for her junior, and at the end the junior finally gets her ring. And then once the ring is obtained, she has to get it turned in full rotations towards her pinkie a certain number of times (100 plus the year of graduation, so mine is 110 times) by some specific people (like her best friend for the first turn, her enemy for the 13th, and the person she will marry for the last, who turns it the last full turn and then back the other way to 'lock' it). While she's still at the college, the lamp faces in towards her to represent the knowledge flowing into her, and when she graduates she turns it outwards to show the knowledge she is giving the world. If she's unmarried or not engaged when she gets her ring, she wears it on her left hand and saves her last turn until her soon-to-be fiance proposes, and he turns it and locks it before taking it off, putting on the engagement ring, and then putting her class ring on her right hand. Basically, it's a Really Big Deal. A ring is far more than a ring at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, it's a symbol of a student's achievement of the class, honour, intelligence, outspokenness, and maturity of a true Randolph-Macon Woman. Knowing that I was going to miss Ring Week was a big draw for me to stay on campus for this semester instead of coming to Reading, and that's saying a lot. After all that said, and all that pressure put on the poor Ivys to make arguably the most important night of our college experience measure up to our first-year expectations, they did a fantastic job. We had a wonderful dinner at a nearby fancy hotel where alums were present (I love alums and always love to see them; they are a fantastic and irreplaceable link to the college's respectable past and they've always been wonderful to us, especially during the first-year protests) and told of their Reading experiences. One of them graduated in the 70's, and I happily received my ring from her. After we all got our rings, Mr. Dr. Ivy announced that he and his wife were considering retiring after our group and asked if we could, just this last time, sing the school song on their last Ring Night with the last class of Randolph-Macon Woman's College. So we all stood in a circle and locked arms and I didn't make it past the first two lines, I started crying so hard. Beside me I heard Reena doing the same thing and saw glassy eyes from Mrs. Dr. Ivy, the alums, and many others around me. After the song was over, Reena and I hugged and cried for about a minute, then we turned one another's rings for the first turn. And, just writing this, I'm tearing up again.

After running around frantically getting everyone to turn our rings, we all went out to the dance floor for the disco. I wasn't expecting to stay past midnight, but I was having so much fun with my Randy-Mac women (past and present) that I didn't go home until the last taxi came at 1. The Ivys even graced our dance floor for one of the last dances, and it was beautiful. I'd write more about it, but there's no capturing it in words. Just imagine the best night of your own life with a group of people you love, and you'll know how my night went. After we all went home, we were planning on singing R-MWC spirit songs at the top of our lungs for the next hour, but only made it halfway through the fight song (I go to Randolph-Macon WC, I will always have my virginity, I will study for eternity...) before we all decided it was no use and we'd better at least make it to our beds before we passed out from exhaustion (give us a break, we'd been dancing for 4 hours).

And then the next day Reena and I went to Oxford! Yea, probably not the brightest idea ever after such a night, and we didn't make it very long before every joint in our bodies started protesting from the soreness and the frigid cold of the day, but it was still wonderful. We found a book store which I think was taken out of my dreams and recreated brick for brick, and which I will most definitely be returning to at least once before the end of Christmas break. We didn't look around the college much for the aforementioned reasons, but we made it to the Alice Shoppe that Reena wanted to go to (she loves Alice in Wonderland; it's the store where the original Alice used to get her sweets as a child) and the Eagle and Child which I wanted to go to (meeting place of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, my childhood heroes) then called it a day. We then stumbled our way back through Oxford, the train, and the bus home and spent the evening warm and snug on the couch with a pot of tea. Ah, perfection.


I hope everyone's Thanksgiving was lovely! Thanks once again for reading, and stay tuned for Christmas adventures in England, France, and Spain, this time with special guest star Tony Shannon!



With Love,
Kattherine (<--a happy medium)

Sem Trip #1

Hi everyone!

It's been awhile since my last update; since classes have started I've suddenly found myself with much less time on my hands. Gosh I don't even know where to begin, or remember where I left off last time! I guess I'll just dive in and hope I don't confuse anyone.
So last week we had our first seminar trip. The R-MWC (plus others) group has its seminar class World in Britain all year and one of the best perks is the weekend long trips that we take throughout the year. Our first trip this year was a marathon: we left Friday morning at 8am and didn't come back until 7 or so Sunday night. We visited Stonehenge, Montecute House, Wells, Bristol, Bath, and Lacock. Yikes. And away we go!

Ok, so day one: Friday. We left the houses at the bright and early time of 8 in the morning and, after about an hour of driving through countrysides that seemed to have come straight off of the cover of Dad's copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and a good bit of napping, our couch bus rolled over a hill to reveal a very familiar pile of rocks ahead. We all piled off and immediately pulled our scarves and coats tighter; it was freezing! We got our audio guides (which I admit, I didn't really listen to) and set off to look at some 5000+ year old stones. There was a very small rope forming a large circumference around the henges so we couldn't get close, which was a bit of a shame, but it was fun enough to see it from a distance. My house and I basically entertained ourselves by taking pictures that I believe are nothing short of epic. For those of you without Facebook, I'll be sending you pictures from the weekend so you can see them. So yea, Stonehenge was loads of fun and pretty exciting, thanks not only to the stones but also to my amazing housemates. There is a sad story from this tale, however... I was wearing my favorite pair of shoes ever for this trip. These shoes have a history that I simply can't go into detail here because it would take too long, but I will say that I've had them since freshman year of high school and they've gone with me literally everywhere. Well, I had a feeling they were nearing their end due to the English rain (they soak it up like a sieve) but it was when a small piece of the bottom of my shoe came off at Stonehenge that I knew it was time to start saying my goodbyes. But hey, they've been to Stonehenge, and a part of them stayed there; that's gotta count for something.

Anyway, moving past the tragic story of my shoes. After we'd had our fill of old stones (and after we had lost feeling in all of our extremities) we piled back on the bus to head out to Montacute House, an Elizabethan stone-built house. It was interesting; the rooms were pretty nice and it had a large collection of portraits from the English monarchy. We wondered around the gardens outside a little bit and then went in to the house's cafe for lunch, then off to Wells! In Wells we spent most of our time walking around the Wells Cathedral, in which we got a detailed tour from our architecture lecturer Mr. McHardy. It drew on a little long for my tastes at times, so I wandered around a little bit by myself. Eventually we went out to wonder around the town for a little bit, I bought truffles at a chocolate shop, and then it was getting dark and time to head to Bristol to get settled into our hostel.

The Youth Hostel in Bristol was right on the river less than a 5 minute walk to a great area with good restaurants. The hostel was divided by gender (not that it mattered much since the group is 99.9% female, the male of the group, of course, being Brooke [she's not really, that was just my lame attempt at a joke]) and my room was the whole 153 group: Brooke, Sarah, Robin, Sam, Reena, and myself. Yep, 6 girls in one room, and we couldn't be more excited if we tried. I honestly didn't forsee myself finding such a group where I'd actually WANT to be with the 5 of them all the time; it's pretty awesome. After dropping off our stuff and relaxing a little, we met up with some of the girls from 141 and went out to an Italian cafe for dinner. Exhausted, we came back to the hostel and passed out.

That was day one.

Now, onto the rest of the weekend. Don't worry, we did far more in the first day than the others, so this hopefully won't take too long. On Saturday we set out early again, this time to the city of Bath. Our first stop there was happily the Roman Baths, where I spent at least an hour and a half walking around and listening to the audio guide (yes, I did!). After learning about the Roman Bath system in classes it was so exciting to actually walk through one! I even remembered some stuff from the baths in Pompeii and managed to look smart in front of the group. The baths themselves still had water pumping into them from the natural underground spring and it was so warm that the whole area was steaming; it would have looked inviting on that cold morning if it wasn't also bright green with unidentifiable most likely single-cell organisms floating around in it. After that, we passed through the Pump Room and just had to try the warm mineral water from the spring. It tasted like eggs and felt like milk, but I guess it was an experience I had to have...

We had the whole day at Bath so we walked around to find things to occupy us. Sarah, Robin, and I found a craft store at a church and, being nostalgically reminded of our own church craft fairs, went in. It was very cute and definitely reminded me of the New Hope October Bazaar, pretty much my most favourable memory of that church, which isn't say too much but still says something, back at home. We wandered upstairs and they were having a Charity Christmas Card sale. England is very good to its charities and one of the things that it does is have Charity Card Sales in churches. How it works is there's a long line of charities represented, each with stacks of different kinds of Christmas/holiday cards you can buy for your friends and family. You can pick the charity you want to support, get cards from that section, and then all the proceeds to the charity. I got a pack of cards from the MS research charity, and then we moved on our way. Dr. Ivy had purchased tickets for our group in two places besides the Roman Baths: the Fashion Museum and the Royal Crescent. My little group of 3 headed first to the Fashion Museum, which featured costumes (not what we would call costumes in the States; that's called 'fancy dress' here... can you imagine how embararssing it would be for a person from England to be invited to an American party with 'fancy dress attire'? That thought always makes me laugh) from a wide range of time periods, including some Victorian dresses which were quite nice. The highlight of that was definitely the room where we could try on our own corsets and dress skeletons (I'm horrible and have completely forgotten what they're called), and you can see pictures from this adventure in the album I'll send out. After corsets and a light lunch we headed to the Royal Crescent, which was more or less an old house. It was quite pretty, but honestly a bit like all the other old houses I saw all weekend, so I'm going to move on now.
The next most amazing experience in Bath was Sally Lunn's, a famous little bun shoppe that took us 15 minutes of waiting in the rain to get into, but was worth every minute. The three of us got a small table and ordered a pot of tea and a bun each, all covered in cinnamon and served with clotted creame. This is no ordinary cinnamon bun, but is even better. I can't even describe how it tastes, but it was so amazingly satisfying that I'm making myself hungry just thinking about it right now. We spend 2 hours in there with our tea (they gave us another kettle free of charge) and it was absolutely lovely.

We left Bath at about 5:30 and headed back to Bristol. Victoria, Elysia, and I headed out to dinner at a local sensation called "Flavourz", which was a buffet with Indian, Chinese, Italian, and Mexican style options. Sounds sketchy, I know, but it was actually amazing, and the first time I've had Chinese food since I've been here, or been to (or SEEN) a buffet even. I once again walked to the hostel and quickly passed out.

And now on to day 3. We spent the first part of the day wandering around Bristol, and we visited the Red Lodge and Georgian House, both old English homes elegantly furnished with period pieces and a lot of portraits. In all honesty, though, I was feeling a bit worn out on old houses and portraits, so after those two I sat down in a cafe (called The Boston Tea Party) and let the rest of the group wander off as I drank a pot of tea, ate a chocolate muffin, and wrote in my journal. It was actually quite wonderful and peaceful, and though I love my housemates dearly, I needed some time on my own. After I felt like I'd imposed on the cafe long enough (though there were plenty of people doing the same thing around me), I went to start walking back to the bus for our rendezvous. I walked past the city council and a Cathedral and it was absolutely gorgeous; the beauty of the ivory colours and modest fountains were only furthered by the bright yellow and orange fall leaves that covered the ground and the tall trees around the small open garden in front of them. I walked along the path alongside it for a bit, then continued on to the river where I met with Sarah and Robin, who were buying crepes from a stand. We all got on the bus and headed off for Lacocke.

I didn't really know what to expect of Lacock; the only things that I knew was that it was once an Abbey, was then a school, and is now a stately home/museum. I ALSO knew that many parts of the first and second Harry Potter movie were filmed there and, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, that fact excited me far more than the former ones. When we got there we split up into smaller groups and Robin, Sam, Sarah, Reena, and I started wandering through the house, followed shortly by Mr. Dr. Ivy. Shortly after beginning we realized that this was far different from all the other houses we'd seen: not only where the decorations far more ideal and interesting (for myself, at least) but the guides in each room were absolutely amazing. One of them tried to 'sell' us a terribly gaudy chandellier, broken Chinese bowl (alas, it was dropped by the delivery boy just moments before it was to be given to Queen Victoria), and a Royal Pardon (imagine the things we could do with THAT... we'd never get deported!); the next tour guide told us all about where Harry Potter was filmed and also fascinating bits actually relevant to the history of the house. We were also lucky enough to have Dr. Ivy at our heels, and he delighted us with an impromptu tour as well. After an surprisingly wonderful time in the house, we headed out to the Cloisters, where the Harry Potter bits were filmed. We got far too excited about all of it; yea, we're in college.

After all that, we wondered around Lacocke Village, which served as Hogsmeade in the third movie and has been featured in countless other films and shows since due to its overly picturesque appearance. It was absolutely, positively the epitome of what I'd imagined a small English rural town would be. We (same group minus Reena, who'd gone to the museum) went into a local wool store run by a little old man whose hours were "10am to 4ish, everyday but Sunday" and whose posted etiquette rules consisted of "Dogs are welcome!" We eventually found an adorable tea shop and ordered another kettle; they all got scones, and I decided to try the "lumb", which turned out to be like 3 small buns stacked on top of one another with cinnamon between, almost like the Sally Lunn bun. After enjoying a short time there we had to run off to the bus for our return journey. We came back to Whiteknights Road, I walked into 153 and dropped my bag, my purse, and myself, and don't feel like I've moved since. Well, election night sure woke me up, but that's another story entirely.

Long story short, it's a wonderful world.

I'll hopefully write again soon; thanks for making it this far.

Cheers,
Katt/Katherine

Arriving in the UK

Finally in England. I've been here for a week now, and so far I've accomplished the following:

. unpacked and settled
. become addicted to tea and now drink it, with milk and sugar, at least twice a day.
. set up an account in an English bank; Barclay's, don't fail me!
. ridden on the top floor of a double decker bus (which looks like the Knight Bus, might I add)
. taken the bus into town at least 5 times, so I've figured out the local public transportation system.
. discovered why toilets here are called "water-CLOSETS".
. went to a pub at least 5 times
. got phone numbers from 3 different British guys
. met a DJ in a pub and convinced him to talk about Random-Naked Woman's College on air
. played snooker with a few drunk Brits in a pub
. ate at meat pie at Sweeney & Todd... twice.
. went grocery shopping
. bought a British mobile phone and service
. applied for about a million jobs in the Oracle
. got a job in the Oracle
. got my Reading school ID & email
. read the Times and discovered how passionately the Brits dislike Palin
. Learned all about British politics and decided I'm living here forever
. discussed Doctor Who and his ability to save us all from global warming with a professor during class
. started classes, kinda.

It may not look like much, but it sure feels like it. I'm happy to be in England and I love it here, but I'm not as overwhelmingly excited and thrilled about the whole thing like I was before I left. I think that's because I've been exploring the town of Reading this whole time, which is a lovely place but not exactly something that I've wanted to see my whole life. Once I actually make it to places like London, Globe Theatre, Abbey Road, Stonehenge, etc, I'll start getting that excitement again.