It's been an amazing week in Bristol, yet again! I'm feeling much more settled and I'm no longer worried about getting lost every time I step outside. (If you know how bad my map reading skills are, you understand the initial concern here). I'm becoming more and more English as the time goes on which can mainly be seen in the fact that the weather is a prime topic of conversation at least five times a day and I drink a ridiculous amount of tea. (Decaf green tea with honey--maybe that isn't so British...) I also had a conversation with a girl in my math class for ten minutes before she realised I was American, so maybe my southern accent is fading?
Classes started on Tuesday which I was excited about since I had been out of school for five months -which everyone knows I don't deal with very well. It's fitting that my first class was Probability 1 which sounds simple but then my professor started speaking in what seemed to be a different language but was actually him just explaining geometric patterns in numbers or something to that effect. The words I did understand very clearly were, "There will be no need for calculators in this course since you should all know this backwards and forwards already." I think you know what my expression was at this moment. Needless to say, I'm getting a tutor for this one.
My second course of the day was Intro to Philosophy. Of course my math professor kept us over the time because he was really excited about that 'no calculator' rule and continued lecturing so I was running up Saint Michael's Hill in the rain to my next lecture and was still late. That didn't go over very well because I think it ruined the zen mood in the lecture hall of the philosophy course. We pondered over our own existences for a while and then my day was finished. The next day I had some pretty profound thoughts as I made breakfast -my flatmates can back me up on that.
Wednesday is my favorite day of the week because I get to attend a third year seminar on Intellectual Culture of the 12th Century. My professor is 100 percent fantastic and I genuinely wish I could just take a million classes with him. (For those of you at UNC with me, he's like a younger version of Armitage and in history instead of English) We had tea and digestives (that's a cookie if you can believe it) and mulled over medieval humanism, love, monastic life, etc. Basically, it was awesome!
Thursday was just weird. I went to my philosophy seminar and I'm not really sure what happened...I think that's how I'll be with most philosophy classes. We spent an hour discussing the meaning of meaning. Then I went to my math lecture again and sat in the front so I could hear over all the people coughing with "fresher's flu". The best part of the academic day was when I walked into my philosophy lecture and the guy lecturing had the BEST accent ever and had dreadlocks and braids and basically looked like a character from Avatar minus the blue. His lecture was great and I met a really sweet girl from London so it was a win win.
Later on that afternoon, I was supposed to do some reading but my flatmate Josh persuaded me to go to Brandon Hill park. It is my new favorite place in Bristol. You can climb to the top of this tower and see the entire city and the park is so green and beautiful. Epic.
On Thursday night I went to the Freshers Ball with my flatmates Linda, Hannah and Lucy. We had a great time pulling out our American dance moves that we practiced in the kitchen the night before. (Sorry to put that embarrassing fact on the Internet y'all)
Saturday I went on a daytrip with the international students to Avebury and Stonehenge. One thing I've learned is that while it was really easy to sleep on buses in America, if you fall asleep on a bus in England you will always miss something cool. Avebury has huge stone circles and is bigger and older than Stonehenge, just not as famous and y'all know what Stonehenge is so I don't need to go into much background there. I met another American girl, Arianna, and we spent the day together which was great! Avebury was a really quaint, gorgeous countryside village and there were tons of really cute sheep walking about with us. The Salisbury Plain is a pretty part of the country and it was nice to be out of the city for a while. Just a testament to how crazy the English weather really is in the three hours we were at Avebury, it was sunny, raining, sunny, then hailing. You never know what you're going to get here.
Stonehenge was really amazing. I know so many people say its a bit underwhelming but for me it was just as incredible as I thought it'd be. As we walked around Stonehenge taking pictures and listening to the audio tour, the coolest thing happened -a rainbow appeared in the sky directly over the stones. It only lasted for two or three minutes but it was absolutely beautiful. As we were walking out to the bus some guy I passed said, "Yeah it was made by giants who left their game of dominoes in search of food." I'm always advocating for the existence of unicorns, dragons and giants so I had a laugh at his interesting theory on Stonehenge.
I've only been in England for two weeks but I can't even begin to convey how amazing it has been. I came into this experience with pretty high expectations. As most of you know this has been my dream since I was little, but the best part is my life here is even better than I imagined it would be. Thank you to everyone for your love and support thus far!
Pictures from the week
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| At Avebury |
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| At Stonehenge...freezing. |
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| Cooler than a double rainbow if you ask me. |
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| Freshers Ball |
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| I love tea! (and Sainsbury muffins) |
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| Walking up to Brandon Hill |
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| View from the tower. |
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| The tower at Brandon Hill |
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