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.