I’m so good at this blogging thing, you guys.

So.

As you may have guessed, I’m not in England anymore. Actually, not only have I been back in the States for a few months, but I’m about to return home again from Wooster for spring break.

I kept telling myself that I needed to update here, and now I am. Sort of.

This isn’t going to be a full post, just a placeholder to remind myself to fill people in on what happened in my last two months at Lancaster, and also as a notice that I did not randomly drop off the face of the earth.

Things for my future posts when I eventually get to them:

• London/Paris/Amsterdam
• Funtiems with the LGBTQ* Society
• Bonfire night and tiny hats
• My amazing and wonderful flatmates
• That one time James Earl Jones said I was a unicorn
• Also other London things
• Edinburgh
• The ISP holiday party that started off awesome and left me a poor broken soul by the end of the night
• Opening day of The New Albert (technically under Funtiems with LGBTQ, but this was such a long and bizarre night that it deserves its own post)
• And maybe more?

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So Hannah, how are your classes going, anyway?

Well, I’m glad you asked, Empty Void of the Internet!

Since I’ve been back for the fall term, I’ve been taking three classes to make up a full courseload:

 

How do I summarize the entire month of October…

Welp, Imma give it a go anyway. Which I’ll probably split up into several posts by subject, but we’ll see how that goes.

Let’s start with the basics.

Returning to England (from Amsterdam) wound up being smoother than I feared it might be. Customs didn’t interrogate me quite as much when I landed at the airport, possibly because it was Manchester and not Heathrow, I got my luggage almost right off the bat, just managed to nab the next train up to Lancaster after some annoyings with the ticket machine and running about five times as far across the airport as I thought I’d have to, had a fairly uneventful ride up, and returned to find Lancaster more or less as I had left it: gray and wet. Turns out I’d just missed the latest bus to campus and could either wait another hour or catch a cab up, so I wound up making use of my prior knowledge of the town and did neither. Instead, I walked to the city centre (which was about 5-10 minutes away) where I knew I could catch more buses to campus. So I saved myself 9 pounds and/or an hour’s wait and made it back to campus where I hauled myself all the way to Cartmel College at the butt-end of campus where I’m spending the Fall term (I mean that in the best way. It’s the southernmost point, but it has amazing views of the surrounding countryside.)

So then Fresher’s Week happened. Monday was basically a slew of information sessions covering nearly everything we already knew from the pre-session, Tuesday was class registration in the most ghetto way possible (literally standing on line to sign physical sheets of paper. I was on line for the English and Creative Writing department for a full hour and a half before I made it to the desk, thankfully I had other summer folk there to chat with, mainly about how tired and frustrated we were), Wednesday was the Survival Guide which was interesting and almost made me feel like a freshman again but I accidentally went to the one for the main students and not the international students.

Then I caught a cold, or as the locals call it, Fresher’s Flu.

I was going to do things like Fresher’s Fair (where all the clubs and societies show off their wares) and try to get other fun things done, but I just didn’t have it in me when my nose was stuffy/runny, throat was sore, and sneezing and coughing were quite regular. This lasted well through my first week of classes and even in my second week I didn’t feel particularly up to socializing. I’ll save you most of the angst about my social life for another post, but let’s just say that the sheer size of Lancaster is turning out to be something of a problem. At Wooster, I’m sure to run into at least one person I know on any given walk between any two buildings. Here, I can go days without running into anyone else I know, even my flatmates. Fortunately this has been remedied somewhat in the past few days, but more details on that later.

Actually, more details on everything later.

 

Guess who’s not dead?

Hello again!

Sorry about the…one-month hiatus. Holy crap, I honestly didn’t plan to be away that long. I’ve been caught up in a somewhat calm whirlwind of going all over Europe (just three countries, really), returning to Lancaster and adjusting to a whole new academic schedule and having even less of a social life than I did in the pre-session.

I’m hoping to do a vlog to sum up London, Paris, and Amsterdam (maybe one video for each city), but since travel and funtimes have been pretty few and far between since I’ve been back, entries may be a tad sparse from here on out. I hope not, though, it’s just that I feel like since I’ve been back it’s not like “yay, I’m in a foreign country that I love!” but more like “oh, back to school, I guess.” I was honestly excited to come back but the past three weeks have felt spectacularly uneventful.

Although I can probably blame a chunk of that on the fact that I just got over Fresher’s Flu that I picked up during orientation week. All work/sick and no play makes Hannah a dull girl.

More later when I don’t have a thing I want to go into town for tomorrow afternoon, and when I’m not angsting about everything. Or PMSing.

 

“All of time and space, anything that ever happened or ever will…where do you want to start?”

Fasten your seatbelts, folks, this is gonna be a long one.

(Note: this post was typed separately over the course of about 9 days, starting Sunday September 18, because I just had that much to talk about. Also, I’ve been out and about a LOT this past week.)

I’m actually typing this in Word on the train from Swansea, Wales, to London’s Paddington Station because I don’t have internet but I do have a power outlet and I’ve been falling far behind again on my posts. This one actually isn’t going to start where I left off last time because this weekend is something that I really want to write about while it’s still fresh in my memory.

As many of you probably know, I love Doctor Who. I’d known about it for a bit, but I have Dave back at Wooster to thank for actually making me watch it at the beginning of Freshman year. Something I’ve been wanting to do for almost a year is go to a Doctor Who convention. The two big ones in the US, Chicago TARDIS and Gallifrey One, always get rave reviews from my friends who go there, both in terms of the presentation and content of the conventions events and the fun, friendly atmosphere they always find there from mingling and making new friends. Unfortunately, Chicago TARDIS (while somewhat reachable from Wooster) always seems to fall on Thanksgiving weekend and Gallifrey One is all the way out in LA and would cost me quite a pretty penny, even though I’d know a bunch of people who would be there (online friends and such.) Now, I’d actually never heard much about British Who conventions, although I knew they existed.

 

Vlog: A funny thing happened on the way to the convention…

A little over a week ago, I was chilling in a Welsh train station waiting for my connection to Swansea to show up. Then this happened:

I should probably mention that this train was also only 2 cars long.

 

And sometimes, I even have something resembling a social life.

Last week was our last week of the International Summer Program, which I actually miss already despite the fact that we had a big cram of classwork. Our final social was a fun and inventive one: a potluck dinner where we prepared foods that “reminded us of home.” After giving it some thought in terms of things I could actually make (like cornbread), I realized “wait. What’s the most New York food I can think of? Bagels and cream cheese with lox. And I can get them all at Sainsbury’s.” So after our annoyingly dull local trip last Thursday, I traipsed over to Sainsbury’s and got a couple dozen bagels, cream cheese, and smoked salmon. I thought that I was probably getting too much, but even with that I knew I still didn’t have enough for everyone (and I knew not everyone would take some), so I left with that.

 

Let’s go exploring! (Liverpool)

Or as I like to call it, Beatle-land. Or as I also like to call it, That Place Where Everyone Has a Strangely Different Accent Than the Rest of the Country.

So. Our last big field trip. We started off the day with a brief tour of the National Slavery Museum (because our fourth week topic was, strangely enough, not World War II but post-colonialism. Again, this has a lot more relevance to the UK than it does to the US, so I guess it makes more sense.) After that, we were free to explore the docks for an hour and grab lunch before meeting back for a city tour. I wound up breaking off on my own (again) while doing just a touch of group-hopping (again.)

 

Let’s go exploring! (York)

This was a post that should’ve been made nearly a week and a half ago, but I spent all of last week prepping for this past weekend (more on that in another post) and, of course, our final exam. York was our last big Saturday trip and, unlike Whitby, I didn’t do nearly as much group-hopping as I thought I would. I started off with a group of some of my friends as we hunted for the National Rail Museum where Davey had raved about its old-style cafe surrounded by old steam engines. So we went searching…

 

Let’s go exploring! (Local edition part 3)

Moving right along…(wow, I really did have quite a few of these LGE! posts to catch up on, didn’t I?)

Let’s see some more pretty pictures: