Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Things to Know: International Edition II

- Did you honestly expect there to be just one? Really?

- I have a backlog of postcards and such that I need to send but haven't been able to get to the post office to purchase international stamps.

- Such is the pain in the ass that you need a special stamp - I think - to be able to mail things home.

- Mads might wind up with about four post cards in one go. The rest should be more normal.

- I booked my hostel for London. I feel quite proud of myself for that. Everyone else is now scrambling a bit.

- I have been nicknamed "Wallace" by my flat mates. This is actually a fairly inside joke concerning me and my new found love of Welsh cheese.

- The Welsh make good cheese. No joke.

- I am a closet history buff.

- If you hadn't figured that out from the two courses from Kadane that I took - The Enlightenment and Stuart-Tudor Britain - then you clearly missed something.

- My favorite period to study in history is the American Revolution. It will always have a spot in my heart.

- The movie The Patriot has nothing to do with this. Really.

- The Welsh alphabet has two more vowels than the English one.

- The above is kind of interesting because if you look at road signs and such, you honestly wouldn't think so.

- I can make it a week and a half on twenty quid worth of groceries. And there were school supplies thrown in there, too, so less than that if you want to get technical.

- Mama sent me cookies.

- The FOCI just attempted to climb onto my head to better see the screen because I mentioned something about cookies.

- Being 300 feet below the surface of the earth was absolutely amazing.

- Only in Wales can you climb a mountain one day, and two days later be in a coal mine.

- Cadair Idris is the second highest mountain in Wales - Snowdon is the highest.

- I climbed Cadair Idris. I have the photographs and postcards to prove it.

- I mentioned this in my earlier post, but if you aren't privy to being my actual friend on Facebook, feel free to check out my Photobucket - all the photographs from my time abroad are posted.

- This whole cookin' gig gets easier the more you do it.

- I finally learned how to play Skip-Bo.

- The reason I finally learned was because we play it as a flat - usually before we watch a film together - as something to do in the evening.

- Though sometimes the Skip-Bo has the potential to get quite violent.

- Can't wait to see what we do with Uno.

- That is the kind of flat I live in, and I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.

- I'm doing my Dramatic Texts homework. Finishing it, actually.

- Might possibly be a cross between Intro to Stagecraft and Craft of Fiction. Which is just awesome.

- I thought you might like to learn some Welsh:
pont - bridge
ffenestr - window
llyfr - book
eglwys - church

- Welsh is not really based on anything that anyone familiar with the English language might readily identify. It's more like Spanish - there's a familiar and an impersonal, and a male and a female.

- I have never been so thankful that I took Spanish because of this background knowledge, which one of my fellow classmates - and fellow Americans - was completely lost on.

- And none of that even remotely sets you up to deal with mutations.

- There are three types of mutations: soft, vocal, and nasal.

- The language is difficult, but musical.

- Gwy a aeth catraeth oedd ffraith ei lli. (Men who went to Catraeth were full of vigor.)

- This makes reference to one very bloody battle in which Wales lost the land that is now the northern part of England.

- "Don't bother with Botox - do the Welsh alphabet in the morning."

- I believe I mentioned before that signs in this country are bilingual - if the Welsh is on top, Welsh is the predominate language of the area. If the English is on top, English is the predominate language of the area.

- The Scottish Highlands are where you have to go if you want to hear people speaking their native Scottish Gaelic.

- Irish is making a comeback.

- I am expanding my horizons and my wealth of knowledge.

- They put an ethernet jack in my room yesterday.

- As a result, my room smells like burnt plastic and there's a fine, white powder that you can kind of find in places from where they sanded and all that good stuff.

- Law and Order: UK is absolutely brilliant.

- My fascination for it has nothing whatsoever to do with my humongous crush on Jamie Bamber. Not. At. All.

- The last part of the previous is complete bullshit, in case you hadn't guessed.

- And yes, the picture of Jamie Bamber as Archie Kennedy still dominates my desktop background.

- Let me tell you that man has aged like wine. Good, classic, vintage wine with an English accent and nary a gray hair to be found in that red-gold head of hair.

- No, of course there's no drool on my computer.

- I have a pair of fuzzy socks that are rainbow striped that my mind classifies as my "surgery socks" because they were the ones I wore to and from the hospital when I had surgery nearly two years ago.

- None of my flat mates have really asked about the amount of OTC medication that I take on a regular basis. They don't find it a big deal.

- I live with seven other people. Six of them feel more like family than the complete strangers we were only two weeks ago.

2 comments:

Connie said...

Tell me more about the 7th roommate.

Can we be friends on FB?

Wallace. LOL!

Molly Louise said...

She doesn't really socialize with us. I've seen her three times in two weeks.

And yes, I really am known as Wallace.

"The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't."

-Joseph L. Mankiewicz