continuation

after sating ourselves at a local tea house, then we drove around wales a bit and tried to go to a very old church, but felt it would be a little rude to intrude on the funeral. so we headed north to spend the night in ilam. we decided that before we called on mr. darcy, we should actually get out and do some hiking around the peaks, which were gorgeous, and for which we most definitely were not appropriately dressed. we made it about a mile, but realized whilst i was standing in my chacos in a mixture of frozen mud and sheep feces while the rain was hurtling down in sheets that hiking in britain is very different from hiking in utah, and the scenery was very nice when viewed through the car window. so we headed back to the hostel, changed into some semi-dry clothes, had some hot chocolate, and then headed on a very meandering path to lyme park.

ilam (missing from all these pictures are the school children who were rambling around the county park, considerably better prepared for the elements):

view from the hostel window, overlooking another wing of said hostel.

not an eleanor cross, but still not too bad.

ilam town centre. 

ilam church graveyard.

windshield view

in case you're wondering whether lyme park is worth hunting down, either because you're not a bbc p&p fan or you think it's a bit over the top to go hunting down the filming locations, the answer is yes. it is. you can slip around in the mud while ogling the scenery and dodge the rambling deer and clamber to the top of hills and get some pretty phenomenal views.

case in point.

ditto.

some other visit highlights:

oxford. not shown: the little kids at rugby practice. kee was swooning.

turning on the christmas lights is a serious event.

for which you must be well hydrated.

greenwich.

free range AND free spirit.

i feel this way about greenwich too.

i have yet to pull myself out of my post-kee funk, though i'm trying my best to bludgeon my despair with as many christmas concerts/carol services/markets as i can afford (which is not many. but i did get in a goodly number of samples at a cheese evening at borough market the other night. you just have to sneak in through the throngs and grab quickly, then sneak back out before anyone registers how much you just took.). good thing ixoj and t-rav are coming in a mere 6 days and e in 13. spass und faszination indeed!

schwesterfest pt. ?

after that downer of a post, on to more exciting things (though still depressing because: 1. kee isn't here any more; and 2. i'm pathetic and haven't finished up this post and i'm not going to do her visit justice anyway because i'm just going to put up pictures and not tell you all about all the fabulous things we did. i'll give you a hint, though: ginger beer float. utterly mind blowing.) like kee's visit. here, in abbreviated form, are some of the things we did once we picked up our car and gps at the airport and made it out the parking lot (after ascertaining that, indeed, the rear view mirror was supposed to be angled in such a strange manner).

we skipped stonehedge and then did an impromptu stop at avebury, where you can hang out with the sheep grazing around the rocks. then we headed across the border to wales and disembarked at tintern abbey.

turns out we do look alike--it's all in the furrowed brow. 

view of the wye.

not too shabby.

because i don't have internet access at my apartment, my knowledge of world events tends to be pretty eastern hemisphere-specific (particularly those things reported in the evening standard, when i can get my hands on it while i'm walking home) and early-in-the-morning us events. this can be somewhat disorienting, especially when i get to the library in the morning and check facebook (admittedly an entertaining way to get a good recap of nd football games).

anyway, last night i went to a shadow puppet performance of one of the cheerier winter stories, the little matchgirl. this particular performance was conceived as a passion, so there was lots of bach at parts, as well as a melding of the anderson text and the crucifixion account--deeply moving on a number of levels. afterward i walked home through the former slums of east london, thinking about the incomprehensible vastness of human suffering, the pervasiveness of systemic violence. i didn't find out about what happened in connecticut (on the heels of the attack in china) until i got to the library today, after eating my oatmeal and stopping at costa for tea and getting my hair cut and browsing around for a coat. i don't have any pithy comments to offer up, just that, once again, while there is much that is good and beautiful in this world, it is also a place of unfathomable cruelty and pain and trauma, and it is important to remember that in tandem with the examples of goodness we seek in part as proof that all is not lost.

a tale of two schwestern

according to a myriad of insidehighered and chronicle of higher ed articles, as well as a plethora of blog posts and books, the way to get progress done on your dissertation is to write just a small nugget of it a day. most people recommend two pages. i have yet to put this no doubt excellent advice into practice on my own dissertation (especially since i'm currently full of angst and crisis over it, having realized that i really just want to write about diagrams (it'd be fascinating, crossmyhearthopetodie), and thus am throwing a mental temper tantrum every time i consider the monster hiding under my bed/in my closet/ lurking around every corner dissertation), but it struck me that it might be an admirable approach to blogging, not just kee's visit, but this whole london thing generally. you can consider it a haphazard and completely unreliable advent calendar, of sorts, which i suppose negates the idea of an advent calendar, since reliability does seem to be one of the relevant characteristics.

so, in short, kee came to visit. and it was divine, as proved by this visual evidence:

kee masquerading as cindy lou who.

her friend sara came up from paris for the first two days, and we did things like walk through brick lane market and eat delicious food, attend an organ concert at westminster, and stop off at a christmas market which promised to be all germanische which means that it had very expensive wursts. i managed to convince them that it would be nothing short of delightful to walk back to my apartment from westminster (although at a slightly more relaxing pace than the one i had taken on my way to meet them at westminster, since i realized partway through that there was no way i was going to make it on time, but during the weekends they have this particular habit of shutting down entire tube lines for maintenance. i might have outwalked even chules.). it was, undeniably, the correct decision. there was even a convenient wagamama right by the globe to quell desperate protestations of numbed toes and fingers.

Of course you would dress up like a star so that someone could film you in the graveyard of Christ Church, Spitalfields.

kee, heading south over the thames. 

christmas market, from the bridge.

yes, please.

Tower Bridge from the south bank, walking back home.

as a teaser for the recounting of kee's visit, i offer you this representation of when we found ourselves sodden on a hillside in the peak district. there was even a farmer with a tractor, though we didn't talk to him. and our car worked. and we weren't miserable, and weren't there by mistake. but we were very, very wet and cold, with utterly inappropriate footwear.

bad [food] porn

they'd better sell green and red m&m's here. otherwise christmas won't come.

i have a whole host of pics from kee's visit last week (this refrain sounds a bit familiar), but am only going to share a few today (i like to tantalize, titillatingly). blahblahblah (that's me being all academic) said that england and the us are two countries separated by a common language (where does canada fit in? they should protest. loudly.). entire, excellent blogs are devoted to the subject, as are a myriad of books which tend to be aimed at the american audience, since, as we all know, having any sort of uk accent at all immediately makes you more intelligent and sophisticated. anyway, point being that i was prepared for some translation issues (moreish. look it up.). however, coming from a family with serious english heritage, as well as from a country with a sizeable connection to the island, i failed to realize the much larger gulf between myself and my surroundings: the culinary one. i'm not even talking about jellied eels, and i like haggis. despite the fact that i grew up eating roast beef on many a sunday, turns out that a lot of culinary similarities are rather surfacey. for example, they sell bread pans here not by size, but by the weight of the loaf. (so what do you do if you're making a pumpernickel/rye one day, and an angel food cake the next?) and, as kee and i discovered when we set out to make jules' rolls-of-divinity for thanksgiving (you can have thanksgiving w/out the turkey. you can't have it w/out the rolls.), there's no such thing as shortening. you can easily find duck fat, lard, and suet (of both the meat and the vegetable varieties), but no shortening.

panic.

despair.

tears.

rage.

after scouring the shelves of at least five different stores, i finally settled upon the suspiciously-named and malevolent sounding 'baking fat' in the hopes that it would render the rolls at least somewhat recognizable. upon arriving home, i realized that i was also missing some other notable components to the baking exercise, such as the all important rolling pin. (they use them here; i just don't have any kitchen equipment and am too poor and miserly to buy any, choosing to spend my spare pounds on concerts where i can't see the stage and thus fall asleep.) this lack didn't stop me during my freshman, sophomore, or junior years of undergrad, and it wasn't going to stop me now (though discovering that someone had gotten a hold of my bank details and was draining my account via various tabacs in france almost did. it was the thought of the rolls that kept me going. and kee. and a viewing of white christmas.)

it's not instagram, but i documented a few elements of the process for you:

This is what 'baking fat' crescent roll dough looks like. i was going to save half the batch and make it for Christmas, but ended up taking it  out of the freezer the next day. 

The process. Hot chocolate helps with both the rolling process and the eating process.

The baking fat. One benefit to shortening (other than the fact that it takes right) is that it's generally white, which is less disturbing than the lurid orangey-yellow of baking fat, which makes it feel like you're actually dumping fat in what you're going to stuff in your face a few hours later. There are no tomatoes in the recipe. I was experimenting with various rolling pin replacements. The tomato can was helpful because of its weight, but ultimately the hot chocolate canister won out.

The final result. Not too bad. Not as good as jules', but they never are.

back to the hunt for the m&m's. mince pies are great and all, but pastry and cadbury's chocolate will only get you so far.

move over, macgyver

i know, i know, too much radio silence, and i have much to report: meetings with living distant relatives, cemetery hunting for dead distant relatives, trips to exotic places like sheffield, bonfire night fireworks, and more. loads of photos waiting to be introduced to the world. but i feel it very important to state for the record that there are definite drawbacks to living alone in a large, albeit at times unbearably exciting, city in which one knows precisely nobody. one of these is that when you slice your finger wide open whilst attempting to slice your egg bagel from the local bakery and realize in a moment of horror as you watch the blood pouring down that not only are there are no band-aids in your apartment but that you probably need stitches but you don't really have health coverage here and the hospital is a mile away and walking to it with a finger wrapped in a dishtowel would be awfully inconvenient...there is nobody to run to the store for you to pick up some gauze and tape and, hell, some glue because a trip to the emergency room would be awfully expensive.

never fear: as i started going into mild shock while sitting on the kitchen floor with said dish towel wrapped around said finger, i maintained enough self-awareness to reach up to the counter and grab said bagel because blood sugar levels or something, and, after eating both it and a couple of oreos, fashioned a bandage of some sort out of strips of dish towel (sorry, landlord) fastened with brown packing tape. it's not soaked with blood yet, so i think i can forego both the er and the glue.

first the hot water, then the oven, then the elevator w/out working lights (i can affirm that riding in an almost pitch black elevator is, indeed, beyond the pale of creepy to the territory of blood curdling), now my finger. despite its best efforts, i won't let this apartment destroy me. i shall conquer it.

this is war.

stuze my photodump

right. the blog. as an exercise in overcoming my deeply ingrained conviction that i can't blog unless i've written the greatest. post. ever., i'm just going to post these photos of the last few weeks to give you an idea of what i see when i leave the library. 

rainy malaysian festival at trafalgar square:

bloomsbury trees 

on the walk home:

thames views:

columbia flower market (3 bunches for a fiver):

sometimes i go on short walks and turn down the wrong canal and then the walk becomes 10.5 miles: