Tu es tres RUDE.

So this weekend must have been France weekend, because I saw more French people on the tube in the past two days than I have my entire time here. And you know what I noticed? They believe they are entitled to taking as much space as they damn well please on the tube. Well, you DON'T. Let me grab the pole you're hugging so I don't fall into your companion.

Oops.

So look farther down, at the 27th. There is a new post there and I didn't know they'd be chronological like that, this is a post about my trip to Bath. Enjoy.

My British pet peeves.

1. People who get on the train at the tube station before allowing the people who are already on the train to get off.

2. People who walk to the spot directly in front of me at the tube station while I am waiting for my train. I was here first, a-hole.

3. People mispronouncing "Thames" and "Gloucester." I don't care if that's how it's spelled, it's not how you say it. Get used to it.

I'm a brilliant actress.

Sorry it's been a while, again. Still don't have internet, and it has come to my attention that they will be mailing us a router. So hopefully by Monday of next week. Great.

I went to Bath/Avebury/Glastonbury/Wells/Stonehenge last weekend, and I will put up a more detailed post about it later; I just want to upload pictures, and I like an idiot forgot to lug my laptop to the ICLC. Since the pics are on my computer I can't do anything with it until I get my laptop somewhere that I can access the internet. But all in all, it was fun and I learned about places I'd never have known about otherwise. Plus I saw some really awesome views.

Anyway, you may be wondering why I mention my acting prowess in the title of this post. Well, that's because today in Irish Lit I acted in a scene from Translations with my friend Alex. In this scene, we are both performing in English, but my character is not supposed to understand English. She only knows Gaelic. And because Friel, the playwright, was making a point, and a good one at that, the whole play is in English. Anyway. So the two characters in the scene are trying to communicate and it is sort of a love scene, pretty sweet actually. They are just talking back in forth in their own languages and they eventually come to some middle ground, I think. Look up the scene online or something. We did a pretty great job, if I do say so myself. Though we did stop right before the kiss at the end of the scene. It was fun at least.

In addition to this bit of acting, I also went to a very audience-participatory show last night, called The Masque of the Red Death. Yes, like the Edgar Allen Poe short story. In fact, the whole show was based on a bunch of Poe stories. It was in a big house, where usually there are a few smaller venues in the one place but this was the first time they used the whole space for one show. There were a bunch of rooms, and we were kind of set loose with each person wearing a mask that we were issued at the beginning. We had to go out in the house and find the action ourselves. I was scared at first, so I was hanging on my friend Kelly's arm through the first few minutes. We walked in and there was creepy music and very very dim lighting, then we moved on through the entrance, through a few rooms and finally we came to an opening. We set out looking for actors and boy did we find them. At one point we were in a room where a dinner scene was going on, and then some kind of orgy, and then someone got eaten. And at the end, the guy, a sort of older, corpulent fellow who had a beard and mustache and eyebrows that had wax in them making them go out from his face, grabbed my hand and dragged me along, separating me from my friends, through some other scene and took me to a wine celler room. He gave me a glass and said we were going to have a special drink, took out a decanter with a clear liquid and poured it into my glass. And you know what? IT TURNED RED WHEN IT WAS POURED. And he told me to drink it! Since it was clear he wasn't going to do anything until I drank, I took a sip of the wine, as it were. And he told me about the pestilence of the red death and what happened to people who got it, and then about a party, a masque, where only Prince Prospero's friends would be allowed to go to in order to escape the plague. And he invited me. And then he told me to finish my drink and leave, so I did. It continued like that for the rest of the time; I saw a few people murdered and a few fights/culminating scenes of Poe stories. All in all it was a pretty freaking awesome night.

I saw a bunch of rocks this weekend.

This weekend was our first trip sponsored by the school. We went to Bath, Stonehenge, and various other places, like Glastonbury Tor (520 feet in the air) and Avebury, another ancient henge that I think is just as old if not older than Stonehenge. One of them looked like a rock man:
And I also tried to climb a few, as did others in the group.

Then we went to Glastonbury, where there were the ruins of an abbey, and the possible original gravesite of King Arthur and Gueneviere. There's a tower on a hill there, called the Tor, that is supposedly the place where Arthur tried to rescue Gueneviere and failed--though there was supposedly water surrounding it at the time. It's 520 feet high, and we climbed the whole thing. The view was spectacular.

That night we stayed at the YMCA in Bath. Yah, like in the song. What? I didn't even know they had places to sleep. My bed was the most uncomfortable thing I've ever had to misfortune to sleep on.

The next day we went to the Roman Baths, which was pretty awesome. There was an audio tour for everyone, and Bill Bryson (my favorite man ever) had his own little comments on it for various places in the baths. It was great, to think of how long ago they were built and that they're still standing.

I also drank the water, which wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Or as bad as it looks in this photo. I actually chugged most of it, as I felt bad for wasting it otherwise. Plus we had to leave.

After that I went to the Jane Austen Centre with Nicki, which was cool, though there wasn't much there that belonged to Jane herself. I still enjoyed it though, and learned some things about her. Don't ask me what they are, I can't remember them. But I did get this naughty book called "Pride and Promiscuity: Jane Austen's Lost Sex Scenes" and it is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Then we went to Stonehenge. That was pretty awesome; they are a lot bigger than I thought they'd be. We weren't there for very long, but then again we were just looking at a bunch of rocks. I kind of regret not imagining what it was like when they were built more though, like putting myself back 5,000 years.

All in all, great trip.

Flat pictures.

Okay, so I finally got wireless internet in the ICLC, so I can upload my pictures of my flat to show you all.

This is my front door, from the top of the stairs on the street.

This is my kitchen, when you walk through the front door. The door is on the right in the second picture.

This is my room and my bed. That's Kelly at her bed! Mine's the messy one in the pic on the right.

Down the hall we go. Notice in the pic on the right that we have two fridges. By the way, that's Rachel in that same picture.

Here's our living room/TV area, where we watch all the movies we rent at Blockbuster. And our drying racks, since we have a washer but no dryer.

This is most of our bathroom. We have a shower next to where I was standing when I took the picture, it's just a stall really. Nothing too exciting.

And meet Henry, our vacuum. We have yet to use him. I think I would feel bad, really.

And now you all know what my flat looks like. If I left anything out let me know!

When lying is okay.

I was on my way home from ICLC last night, planning on making some delicious pasta, when I saw this guy kind of looking at me. Well, it was more like he was staring. So I move away and kind of turn, hoping he'll leave me alone. But instead he comes up to me and asks me how to get to somewhere. Now, English was clearly not his first language, so I couldn't understand what he was trying to say. He brought me over to the tube map and pointed out his destination, and I told him what line he was looking for. He thanked me and I was about to walk away, thinking our interaction was finished.

Nope.

He asked me where I was from. It didn't help that I had just read something in ICLC about how al-Qaida is targetting Americans in other parts of the world, including Europe. So I tried to prevaricate, saying I was from Bayswater, near Notting Hill. But then he said, no, where originally. What country?

My answer?

"Canada."

It was a strange interaction. He then asked me if I was Muslim, to which I responded in the negative, and how long I'd be staying here. So I lied some more. I said I was here for three months visiting family, and tried to end the conversation. Luckily his train came and I was free. It was a little unsettling, especially since I was by myself and the station wasn't that crowded. There were a handful of people around, but nothing like when I'm going to school in the morning or when I'm off to Duckworth. But don't you all worry, I can handle myself! I am Canadian, after all.