Night Fall

It's easy to forget that the UK is actually further North than the entire continental United States. The weather is so temperate compared to what we experience in the Northern reaches of the States. You don't need a winter jacket, just three layers or so. Your ears don't bite from the cold. You can't see your breath. It doesn't snow.

But you can see our proximity to the arctic circle in how quickly night descends in the winter. It's 6 o'clock now, but I've had midnight darkness since 4:30. Twilight starts between 3 and 4, depending on whether or not it's overcast. I bike home from class at 3:30 three times a week to wonderful sunsets. But it's only 3:30, c'mon!

It has wierd implications that I still haven't gotten used to. When you leave at 1:30 in the afternoon, to head into town, you should pack your lights for your bike, unless you're coming back within 2 or 3 hours. I'm not used to thinking about night at 1 in the afternoon.

And there's still 2 months till Winter solstice. How bad is this going to get? And what do they do in Scotland?

Christmas Dinner, English Style

It's not even December and Grace and I are attending our second Christmas dinner this week tonight.

Christmas starts early in the UK, and I blame the lack of a Thanksgiving. After Halloween, there's nothing on the horizon except the big day itself. So the lights start creeping up and the stores start to sell Santa gear. For the last three weeks city center has had lights up and a giant Christmas tree. And they take lights seriously here - they sparkle ontop all the street lights yes, but they also hang between all the buildings and overhead along the streets.

Anyway, Michaelmas Term (in American, Fall term), ends Friday, and everyone leaves not long after that. So the college starts having Christmas formal dinners and the economists are having a dinner tonight. Grace and I went to Fitz's college formal on Monday. Technically it's a Christmas dinner for the undergraduates, but we can't make the Graduate one, so we made do. Also, we bought tickets for this one before we understood there was a difference.

We arrived for dinner a little before 7:30. Some people were dressed as angels and christmas presents, but most people, myself included, wore nice clothes and their gown on top. Inside the tables were laid out with candles and stuff again, but they were arranged into 12 tables, each of which had a number. We sat at table 12 with a few other Graduate students we knew.

English Christmas dinner has some distinct traditions. There are little confetti poppers at each table, and you pull a string and it shoots a bunch of confetti into the air with a loud pop. So there were 120 of those going off througout the evening. And there is also a wrapped "present" at each plate, called a Christmas Cracker. You pull on one side and someone else pulls on the other and it too opens with a pop. Inside is some cheap little toy (Grace got a plastic hair pin with a cat on it and I got a star paper clip) and a paper crown which you wear for as long as you want.

And there's traditional food. After soup and rolls Grace had a traditional main course - meat wrapped up in meat on top of ground up meat on top of some slices of meat, with gravy. I had the vegetarian version, a pile of vegetables on top of some kind of bread thing and vegee gravy. Then there was traditional dessert of mince pies and Christmas pudding (we don't like either). Christmas pudding tastes sort of like steaming hot ginger bread, but it looks like chocolate cake which I desperately wish it was. After dinner there was coffee and mints and - a speech by the outgoing undergraduate president.

Basically she thanked a bunch of people.

Then she led us in the 12 days of Christmas. Each table sang one of the days (that's why there were 12, get it?). Luckily we were the last table and only had to sing once. There was a lot of one upsmanship going on, with one table yelling their part, then another table standing on the chairs and yelling their part and another standing on their tables and yelling. When it was our turn to sing, Grace and I were the only people at the table not to stand up, and I feel bad about that. It was a nice tradition though.

Tonight promises more of the same. I heard poppers were being bought, and similar meals sound like they're being prepared. Grace brewed up some eggnog and trifle this time around. The brits are eager to try eggnog. It's another thing they're seen a lot in the movies but haven't actually seen in real life.

Anyway, once December is here people start to leave. One girl at the table advised that Christmas holiday is pretty boring around Cambridge. By the time Christmas actually arrives, Grace and I will be on our own no doubt.

One more thing. They unambiguously talk about "Christmas" here. I've heard no mention of Hanukkah or Kwanza. Or even New Years. It's Christmas break and it's Happy Christmas, not Winter break and Happy Holidays. And the economists are unambiguously throwing a Christmas dinner and inviting everyone without bothering to check anyone's religion. What's strange is people are most likely less religious than in the USA. I think it's something like 60% of people in the USA regularly attend a religious service versus 6% in the UK. But Britain has centuries of Christian tradition, so it's more like a culture thing. Professors wish you a happy Christmas when you take their last class. There's no thought given to political correctness about it. Political correctness is a huge issue in Britain, but this part seems to have slipped off the radar of everyone.

It's one of those things, like the monarchy and fox hunting, that I might have different feelings about if it was my country, but since it's a "foreign land" I sort of enjoy the differences.

Dentistry!

I got about one fourth of my major dental needs taken care of yesterday, when I got two cavities filled. It sucked and my face still hurts, but at least now I can chew on that side of my mouth again. Matt went insane when I said that to him, like everyone doesn't chew on one side of their mouth at a time. No, we're all flippin' animals chewing with both sides at once... please.

Thanksgiving

Last night Grace and I had 17 people over for Thanksgiving dinner (we were the only Americans). We set up three long tables end to end to end until the flat was entirely occupied by one long table. Grace cooked everything, which included sweet potatoes, stuffing, vegetarian and meatey gravy, cornbread, pumpkin pie, apple crisp, deviled eggs, guacamole, mashed potatoes, buns, cookies, cranberry sauce, and an obscene 29 pound turkey. Our guests brought the drinks (16 bottles of wine, all gone). Some of them made mulled wine, which is sort of like a hot sangria.
Things got started around 8 and Grace and I finished cleaning up at 1. For awhile we stood around eating appetizers Grace had made (pigs in a blanket, deviled eggs, guac, and cookies) and enjoying the mulled wine. After everyone had arrived we set up the table and Grace carved the turkey. We loaded up our plates buffet style and once everyone was seated I told the tale of Thanksgiving (something abour Settlers starving and not getting along with the Indians and then after winter coming together and sharing a feast with them). Then Grace said it was an annual tradition in America that everyone went around the table and said something they were thankful for (and it had to be unique). After that the food got going in earnest and we just ate and talked till midnight.
It was a really good time. A real success.

Photos of the day, along with some more walking photos are at Flickr

Weekend Update

This weekend, Matt and I did another long walk. We had to bike about three miles out of town to the Gog Magog Downland. It was a really nice 7 1/2 mile through lovely fields and a beautiful nature preserve at the height of its fall foliage. On the way back into town though, my bike tire went flat, so we had to walk 2 1/2 miles to the bike shop. That's a full 10 mile walk, like last weekend. We have been very fortunate to have beautiful sunny weather for our last two weekend walks.

It has only just now begun to feel like fall here. We hear it has already snowed in Iowa, and we miss the sight of it. There's nothing like being snug indoors while snow falls thickly outside; or going outside to freshly fallen snow like a fluffy pile of frosting over everything... we miss it, but at least we have pictures. I don't think it's going to snow here in Cambridge much.

We are having a traditional midwest American Thanksgiving dinner with some friends and some people from Matt's economics program. Time to show these Brits what AmERica is all about: food, and lots of it.

Eminent Lectures

This evening Grace and I went to a lecture given by the Right Honourable Lord Bingham about "The Rule of Law." Lord Bingham is roughly the UK equivalent of Chief Justice Roberts. The lecture was actually. . . really good. Lord Bingham basically started off saying that everyone agrees the Rule of Law is a great thing, but it turns out to be hard to define. He then went on to give an 8-point definition of what has to be true for a society to say it respects the "Rule of Law." This sounds really dry, but he showed how, according to his, quite reasonable definition, both Britain and the United States might not actually be in accordance with the Rule of Law.

For instance, one necessary condition to "Rule of Law" is that all citizens are equal under the law, except when there are objective differences in the parties (for instance, children can receive unique treatment). Both the US and Britain currently deny certain legal rights to non-citizens of their countries - Lord Bingham thinks this is unwarranted, since the key distinction between non-citizens and citizens, insofar as the legal system is concerned, is that non-citizens can be deported. And the ability to be deported isn't relevant to suspension of Habeas Corpus or the right to a speedy trial, to know the charges against you, etc. Anyway, it was a good lecture - you felt you were hearing an original, relevant argument.

Even the questions section afterwards went well. Normally I dread the questions section of lectures. At ISU, we always got people who would ramble on for 10 minutes, with no intelligible question at the end of it all. Or people would get hostile, because they were Fundamentalists and the speaker was an athiest. Here though, questions were respectful and interesting.

But, oh my God, the end. Everything was over. It was time to leave, but before we went, the MC of the whole thing said he wanted to "invite the head of the Law department to give a vote of thanks." The man came up, and things got ridiculous.

I don't even know what to say about it. He says it all so well. Some choice quotes (from memory):

"I would like to thank Lord Bingham for his wonderful lecture. I can honestly say that the lecture was elegant and exquisitely analytical. . ."
"I made some notes about the topics covered in the course of Lord Bingham's lecture. Lord Bingham's remarks ranged from. . ." [reads a list of some 10 topics]
"It was all tied up in an argument which, if I may say so, was brilliant."
"I can not wait for Lord Bingham's lecture to be published, so that I may read it again, for a second time, and give it due thought and serious contemplation. . ."

Grace and I were stunned. It kept going. It KEPT GOING. We looked at each other, but no one else seemed to think all this butt kissing was unusual. Later we found out it wasn't.

I want to go to more lecture series.

Bike Crash

Bikes Bikes Bikes.

I've got a new one. I gave the police a week, but three country-wide manhunts later, I was still walking to class, and that takes a half hour. So I got a used mountain bike this time. It's got shocks and all. I'm going to invest in a heavy duty chain - not a cable, a metal links chain. They'll need a blowtorch to get through this thing.

Speaking of cutting through bike cables, my bike was stolen because someone cut through my bike cable. Probably. Maybe I didn't actually attach it to the post. You doubt yourself when your bike is gone. It had gotten a flat a few days before, so I finally got around to patching the tire only to have it go flat on me again. I left it chained (?) to a bike post in downtown overnight, but the next day, she was gone.

Anyway, I've got a new one. And I was going to take it on it's maiden voyage out to get some pizza and see a movie (incidentally, we saw "The Prestige" which I liked more and more the next day. The theatre was cool, because you could buy beer and bring it into the theatre in a sweet plastic pint glass. I just had M&M's though, because it was the first place I had seen that sold regular M&M's). So we had to get down to the pizza place by 7.

At 6:30 I went down to attach bike lights to my new bike. You have to ride with lights at night in Cambridge or it's a £30 fine. I've already gotten one £30 fine for biking in a pedestrian area so I didn't want to take any risks. Anyway, Grace came down ten minutes later, but on the way she accidentally dropped her light and it cracked. We went back to the apartment to get some scotch tape and we taped the thing together.

We were running a tad late then, so we hurried off. After five feet though there was a crash. Grace's light, the same one, had somehow come unattached from the bike clip thing and fallen to the concrete. This time the bulb was broken. So we went up the apartment again and grabbed an extra light we keep up there.

So now we were late, and we took off. I got going pretty quickly on my new bike cause I wanted to give it a bit of a test. Anyway, I got pretty close to the pizza place when I realized I had lost Grace. So I waited for awhile and she wasn't coming and it became clear she hadn't just missed a traffic light or something. Then I saw her walking her bike down the sidewalk.

I went over and it turned out that she had crashed. Her back brake is pretty shoddy, and we've been meaning to get it checked out (new bikes have a problem that their brake cables stretch out a bit and if they're not tightened up they can become unresponsive). Anyway, Grace was going along and she came to a busy roundabout and realized she had to stop quickly.

Well her back brake failed and she went over the top of the handlebars, banging her knee and her shoulder. She's still got a nasty bruise on her shin. Mostly though she was embarrassed, because there was a lot of traffic.

When we arrived at the pizza place we told the story, but we were trumped pretty quickly by our friends. One of them had just seen Professor Stephen Hawking out around town and the other had stories of far, far worse bike crashes that his mom had witnessed while biking around Vietnam the past week (someone got so hurt she puked when she saw the wound).

At the end of the night, after the movie, Grace forgot her bike light in the theatre, but we went in and got it.

Anyway, Grace isn't too beat up. She played Cricket again tonight with a girls team she joined. Apparently she's got a lot of natural talent for the game. Her teammates insist she's the best on the team. I think she should go pro.

Rambling

Checking the Map,
originally uploaded by msclan.

Today Grace and I embarked on a ten or eleven mile walk through the English countryside around the town of Ely. It took us a little over five hours, with a pint at the end and extremely muddy conditions. On the trip we saw many things - old Churches, little villages, lakes, rivers, fields, trains, trees, rabbits, and a Cathedral. And a mysterious burning pile of refuse. And a squirrel shimmying along a telephone wire. We didn't see many people at all. No one else out walking anyway.

We found the walk at our library and we're going to make an effort to do some kind of similar walk each weekend. We like doing it. When we have a long vacation, we would like to go back to Ireland and try tackling the Dingle Peninsula walk, which takes seven days.

I put some pictures up on Flickr. I made a new photoset called "Rambling" which has all the pictures.

Depressing Thought of the Day

Matt is a physicist so he speaks the truth about the natural world to me and we were chatting one day about it and it turns out that in space, if you were to, say scream, no one would hear you! There is literally no sound in space. Think about it. Sound is just the vibration of continuous waves of air molecules against your ear drum which vibrations are interpreted in your brain and are perceived by your conscious person as an audio sensation. In space, there is no air, no vibrations, hence, no sound. So all that cosmic movement, expanding, stretching, grinding, pulsating, churning, exploding; it's all happening in complete silence and no one will ever, no matter how advanced we become, be able to hear our great universe speak because we will never distribute air molecules throughout the universe in a uniform enough pattern to create the same conditions under which we can experience sound here on earth. How depressing is that?

I play cricket!

Yesterday, I went and played real English cricket on a really casual girls team. It was well fun, and I think I was pretty good for my first time. A lot of the moves are exactly what you would do in tennis, so they felt familiar.

Also, many congratuations to the Democratic party and to the people of the United States for, finally, not shooting yourself in the foot on election day. Well done.

Bicycle Thief

My bike is stolen.

CREEPY!

Check out this website:

http://mattandgrace.com/

These poeple are us only not us at all! And they have our domain name! Damn it! Matt and I will just have to get graceandmatt.com.

Darwin College Formal

The day before Guy Fawkes day, Matt and I and a bunch of people from "Team Economics" (the other people in Matt's economics course) went to the Darwin College formal hall dinner as the guests of three people who are members there. We got dressed up very nicely and wore our wool coats and our new hats and gloves and scarves. It's getting cold in Cambridge! (More on that later.)

The evening started with sherry in the parlour. Then dinner in the hall. They refilled our wine glasses three times. People kept dropping pennies into other people's drinks. Then you have to drink it all up in order the save the Queen from drowning. There was a good deal of Queen immitating. The first course was stuffed eggs with some kind of red sauce and salad. Main was chicken with a mushroom and madiera sauce. The alternative vegetarian option was stuffed aubergine (eggplant). Then we had a lemon tart for dessert. Matt tried to tell people about the time he went to Key West and brought back a real key lime pie all the way back on dry ice for his parents. But they had no concept of the distance. They don't seem to understand that Iowa is bigger than the whole of England. After dessert, there was a cheese course! And finally, port and coffee back in the parlour. Followed by Hoegaarden, a lovely Belgian wheat beer that I've been drinking a lot of here. That's a lot of drinking! After all that and some sitting around chatting with TE people, we met up with Gareth and his girlfriend Deb at The Eagle pub and had a short chat before going to the Sino Tap to get dumplings. The Eagle is famous for being where James Watson and Francis Crick first announced their discovery of DNA. It's a weird, old, rambling pub with lots of nooks and crannies. They have a pub meal on Saturdays and a heated outdoor patio, but we have never been able to avail of the meal. It's probably one of our favorite pubs in Cambridge and it's a local favorite too. The other bar/pub/restaurant (?) is the Sino Tap, which we were told was formerly the only gay bar in Cambridge. But now it's a weird mix of nice old pub and chinese food restaurant. I was still hungry after we went to the Eagle. In England, pubs have to close by 11:30 so after that there's pretty much nowhere to go in town but a club. Except there's this weird little Sino Tap that doesn't seem to follow any regular rules about pubs. It's always seems to be open at any time of the day or night and it's always serving food and there's always at least one dog in there roaming around and trying to get your beer!

Now about Cambridge being cold. When we first got here, people kept telling us that Cambridge gets cold like the Arctic in winter! That we get all the winds of Siberia! So be prepared! We thought they were joking and also we're Iowans. It is extremely difficult to impress us about cold weather. So in our minds, we were thinking, 'Whatever. Cold by English standards is late spring in Iowa. I'll probably only need a sweater and a jacket the whole winter.' It turns out that maybe those people weren't joking. Because since then we have discovered that there are quite literally no geographical barriers between here and the Ural mountains. And when the wind blows, it does indeed blow down from Siberia. So maybe it will get kind of cold.

Speaking of Iowa, damn I have had some awesome Halloweens. Halloween in England is not a big deal. Maybe because five days later, they have a big event where they burn a Guy's effigy on a huge bonfire. Around Halloween this year, Matt and I got sad and missed home a little more. It just didn't feel like Halloween. It wasn't cold enough yet and the trees are still green. They don't do trick-or-treating here. I wish they had because there are lots of kids where we live and I love giving out candy as much as I loved trick-or-treating for it when I was a kid. It's such an American thing, something that we all look back upon with great fondness. We hear that in the UK, people have started doing a messed up version of trick-or-treating though. Teenages go around to people in restaurants and shops, not in costumes, and ask them for money! People actually turn their porch lights out and pretend to not be at home to avoid them. I can't believe how much they've perverted our perfectly innocent and cheeerful tradition! Brits.

Guy Fawkes Day

"Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot."

Five hundred years ago Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the house of parliament and every year since the British celebrate the event with fireworks and bonfires where they burn Guy Fawkes in effigy. Grace and I were in attendence.

We were pretty excited because it was the first non-American holiday we had ever celebrated, and we had real British friends to show us how to celebrate the event properly. It's not complicated really. You show up and watch the fireworks and then the bonfire. Since it's winter, everything is over by 8 o'clock. There was a carnival in town as well, but we went to eat.

The fireworks were really good though. I thought we were really close and a lot of the time you had to really crane your neck back to see everything. There wasn't really a grand finale though - the whole thing was spectacular, but then it was over. Someone was on a PA system the whole night, counting down till the fireworks in a calm and cool voice. When the fireworks finished he just said, "Well, how about that folks? Let's hear it for that display."

And then they lit off the bonfire. Sadly, effigies were nowhere to be seen. Apparently that part of the tradition is falling away. The bonfire was this enormous stack of wood palates. They were probably stacked fifteen feet high and once the fire really got going the flames leapt thirty or forty feet into the air. Everyone was kept quite a way back by two fences, but you could still feel the heat off the thing. It burned fast and furious, reducing the palate to a third of it's size in ten minutes. I had never seen a fire on that scale. It's quite a thing to see.

I had hoped Guy Fawkes day would be an event where the British people would revert to their ancestral origins, whooping and hollering around a fire without clothes on. That's not the case.

I put up 12 pictures of the whole thing on our flickr website. They're under the Cambridge photoset.

Snooker

After econometrics class this afternoon the economics team was standing around deciding what to do. It was decided we should go play snooker, an English cousin of billiards, if you don't know what it is.

I've never played snooker, but back when Grace and I were studying in Ireland they played the world championship on television for days on end. It's like eight ball, only on a much, much bigger table with smaller balls and smaller pockets and more balls and different rules. When Mike and I were in Hong Kong there were snooker tables in the basement but we were overwhelmed by the seemingly endless rules to the game when we looked it up online.

So we went to the Cambridge Union and up to the snooker room. The snooker room used to be something else probably. One whole wall was shelves of books, some of them ancient, ancient. The newest ones were from the seventies. They were not arranged lovingly, but stacked and crammed onto the shelves in any way they could. If you looked closely at the titles they were all pulp fiction or outdated science books. It was a like a graveyard for books that have no relevance anymore. Another wall was shelves of even older books, most of them music scores.

Anyway, the only lighting for this room were the two hanging fixtures over the two massive snooker tables - the tables were seriously as big as four pool tables. So, with daylight saving time, it was night by 5:30. So it was really dark, the only light was from the snooker tables and the city outside. And outside the windows happened to be all these ancient building - old colleges, one of the oldest churches in Cambridge and so on.

The clock in the room was stopped at twenty past seven and looked as if it had been stopped that way for a long time. While we were there, we pretty much had the place to ourselves. When we left, we walked by old black and white photographs of people in 1920's outfits eating at the restaurants and bars in the lower floor of the Union. The people were different, but the tables and set up were the same.

Nothing changes in that place, and I was a little creeped out by that.

Stupid English Showers!

Stupid English showers and water heaters! Yesterday, I was taking a shower and the hot water ran out from our hot water tank. Hot water tanks in this country are the size of (AmERican) extra large pumpkins. AmERican hot water tanks are the size of minivans. I ran out of hot water in the middle of my shower yesterday and I started yelling and Matt came over and I made him boil water in the kettle, mix it in a big bowl with cold shower water, stand on the toilet seat, lean over into the shower cubicle and pour the water over my head so I could finish my shower. And the sad thing was, that was the nicest, hotest shower I've had since I got to this country. I miss my long, super-hot showers when it's cold outside that I used to have in the States. Appreciate lots of nice hot water while you have it, before soaring petrol prices render even AmERican showers lukewarm and painfully short!

Halloween Pumpkins

While down in Bournemouth Grace's family bought a little English pumpkin. It was the kind of thing you might put on your mantelpiece - in fact, that's exactly what Grace's family did with it (by the way, that extra arm belongs to Grace's cousin).

But there was something much funnier about the pumpkin. Upon close inspection, you can read the pumpkin's label:


"Extra Large Pumpkin - Ideal for Carving."

It turns out this is a damn big pumpkin in the Queen's country. Big enough to warrant the term EXTRA large. In the United States of course, this pumpkin would easily fit inside a medium pumpkin. When I think of an extra large American pumpkin, I think of something you have to use a wheel barrow to move.

America #1!

Fantasy Congress

Our good friend Andy told us about Fantasy Congress and we signed up. Basically, it's exactly like a fantasy sports league, only it tracks the activities and success of your chosen team, composed of members of Congress. You pick 12 representatives and 4 senators and then... it's on. We highly recommend any interested parties to go to www.fantasycongress.us and join the team, (whose name was decided DEMOCRATICALY through nomination and election) "Iowa. We So Corny". (Give us a comment and we will send you the password for the league.)

Matt's team is called "The Manly Reps" and it is composed of the men of Congress who are hyper-manly.

My team is called "Evilia Domestica" and it is composed of Republicans who are recorded as being relatively active within the last few months. I assume all their actions fall under the description of "Evilia".

In other news, Gareth and Gareth came over for dinner and we discussed the differences between our political systems (British vs. American). It seems that people here don't really understand our government. How can we claim to be a democracy and yet one third of the power in our government is given to nine people who are not even politically accountable for their actions? Gooooood question!

New Photos!!!

London Sunset
Originally uploaded by msclan.

Don't get so excited, it's just five photos of Grace and I in London. And the one at left is one of them, so there's just another four.
But, I rearranged the photos. Now they're divided into between Cambridge photos and trips outside of Cambridge sets. We've been in country for so long that a set of "United Kingdom" photos just isn't enough.

Busy Times

It's been a busy week.

Monday was my Matriculation dinner, and Grace and I stayed out "late" (we went to bed around 1:00). Grace got up the next morning at 4:30 to catch the 5:25 bus to London. That was so early I felt sick.

Grace stayed in London on Tuesday, seeing Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and the British Museum. I went to class.

The next day Grace went down to Bournemouth, where her mom was staying with family. Wednesday night I went out with the economics people, where I decided to sign up for a Cambridge Radio show (I still have to undergo training).

Thursday I became obsessed with finding A) pants and B) The new Blood Brothers CD. No luck on either front. I was told pants long enough for me are not even sold in Cambridge, but I could order them from the website "High and Mighty.com" (not even joking). I also tried to finally withdraw money from my bank account, which I settled on Tuesday. No luck there, either. I had my first French class on Thursday morning (did I mention I signed up to learn French?) I also bought a bus ticket to Bournemouth.

The original plan was that I would leave Friday afternoon, after my last class finished at noon. But those crazy Cambridge people moved a two hour class to Friday at 2, which I missed. They also moved a second two hour class to Monday, so I would get to miss more classes.

Anyway, Friday morning I biked all over town in the rain. I had to get a new mailbox key, so I could open the letter from the bank with my PIN code (did I mention I lost my keys?).

Finally, at 1:45 I embarked on a journey to Bournemouth, by way of Victoria station, London.

Nine o'clock, I arrive and we have a big dinner.

Saturday morning, something like 6 am, the kids wake up and start running around. We were staying in the living room, where the TV is, so we had to get up quickly. We went to an Alice in Wonderland themed amusement park that day. Yes, there was a hedge maze. Yes, it was really muddy and we got completely lost and had to take the emergency exit to get out.

That night Grace's Uncle decided to buy some fireworks. I helped him lit them off and the kids went nuts.
(Interesting side note: in the realm of fireworks, the UK is far less concerned with their citizen's safety than in the US. Everything we lit off would have been illegal in Iowa. Still, they require children to sit in car seats until the age of 12.)

The next day we went to the cinema. We all bought tickets to "Open Season," starring the illustrious Martin Lawrence. Then we all went to eat at KFC's. It was a big deal, because one of the boys had never been there. Everyone sat down, took off their coats and unpacked the strollers. Then they realized KFC's wasn't a good place for vegetarians and they decided they would go to Pizza Hut instead (despite my protests). There was a 20 minute wait to eat at Pizza Hut.

Then we went to see the 2:30 show of Open Season. Grace fell asleep through most of the movie.

That night we tried to get an extra microwave into one of our suitcases. That was stupid.

Grace's family watched old VHS tapes of her two uncles' weddings. It was a cultural learning experience for me (and Grace).

The next day Grace, her mom, and I went to London. The plan was a little half baked, but it worked out. We left our suitcases with the people we know in London. Then we went on a walking tour of London (tangent: if you add two 'g's to the word "London" you can turn it into "Longdong").

Grace's mom took 2 rolls of pictures of Buckingham palace. This would prove to be indicative of her picture taking habits.

Again Grace saw Buckingham Palace, Downing street, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Thames and the British Museum. We also saw the temple church which FEATURES PROMINENTLY IN THE DA VINCI CODE.

London is really hectic compared to Cambridge (Grace describes Cambridge as "bustling"). We got on another bus, delayed till 8 o'clock. We rolled into Cambridge around 10:00 and went home.

The next two days I had to scramble to catch up on my homework and classes. I only saw Grace and her mom a few hours, mostly in the evening. I helped them get into King's College for free, which Grace's mom really liked.

Tomorrow, I have French again. And if I have time, I'm going to try and get some pants (trousers).