It's Raining

We all knew that the wonderful weather couldn't last. Since I arrived a little over two weeks ago, the weather has been amazing. Sunny every day, in the high sixties for the most part, and otherwise perfectly suitable for a California native. We have been extremely lucky, given that we had a trip to Bath with perfect weather, followed by a trip to Wales which our 80 year old program director described at one point as "the clearest I can remember". And he grew up in Wales.

What has been so nice about the trip thus far is they are taking us on weekly day trips to various exciting spots. The first week it was Bath, last week it was Wales, and tomorrow we are off to Stonehenge and a couple other places. Our program director and another Professor (Chris Pelling, who is a professor at Christ Church-- think Harry Potter dining hall) went around with us showing us a lot of cool sites. We drove through the Forest of Dean to Tintern Abbey, which was breathtaking. It is a old Cistercian monastery that became overgrown after the abolition of the monasteries in the 16th Century. The stone walls remain, but the ceilings and floors are gone, giving you breathtaking views of the sky and grass from within the building. Just check out the pictures to see what I mean. This abbey is the setting of the Wordsworth poem many of us read in high school english.



Following Tintern Abbey, we followed the Wye River for a while up to Symonds Yat, a hill overlooking most of the Wye River Valley. Some breathtaking views from that spot, and this was when Dr. Loughman made the comment about it being the clearest he has ever seen.



After stuffing ourselves on sandwiches (becoming a theme), we drove to Raglan Castle, which is an honest to goodness castle. It played a pretty prominent role in the English Civil War (the one with Cromwell), as it was the site of one of the last battles.

You can even climb to the top of the main tower-- I must say it was something of a childhood dream fulfilled.



Stepping even further back in time, we next drove to Caerleon, which is the site of some pretty well preserved Roman ruins (including an amphitheater). The nine of us enjoyed running around inside of it, and otherwise acting like we were little kids.

Lest you think we are actually on a semester long tour of England, I'll talk briefly about our courses. I still do not have a tutor or a tutorial, but we have been having weekly lectures for our British Politics course. Leslie Mitchell is very impressive, and I have been enjoying his lectures immensely. The workload is going to be very manageable-- two large papers over the course of the semester, coupled with reading that most of us have already done over the summer. Kasyn, Ian, and I had our first Architecture Tutorial on Monday up at Oxford Brookes University. It is with Dr. Matt Gaskin, who I immediately liked and think will be really fun to work with. He seems very laid back, has a wicked Scottish accent, and otherwise seems really excited to have us as students. Rather than making us write a huge number of papers, he is going to have us do a final project which involves designing our own Oxford villa.

As I mentioned, I still don't know a thing about my econ work, so that could be interesting. Hopefully later on this week I will find out more.

This weekend we move into our homestays, which I (and I think everyone else) have mixed feelings about. On one hand, I am really thrilled to finally meet and interact in a much more meaningful sense with a British family. But us guys will be at least a bus ride away from Univ, and all of us will be scattered about. So it will be much harder to organize dinners, pub-hopping, ect. And we will miss out on the residential college experience here, but not much you can do about that.

The rain has now turned into a downpour.

To see more of the pictures from our trip to Wales, click here.

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