The Last Days in Sunderland

Tomorrow morning, I will be leaving Sunderland, quite probably forever. I may never see some very close friends again, unless they send wedding invitations, which is probably unlikely in most cases. My life as far as I know it is packed up into four bags, and I'm oddly unemotional about it.
For the plan-happy amongst you, I'll be in Leicester for two nights and a day and in London for five nights, and also in Bath for one day and zero nights. I'm sure I can find some internets in London, if not in my hostel, then nearby, so I'll post pictures as I feel like hogging the bandwidth and might give short daily updates if I don't feel like using a lot of internet. They'll probably run something to the effect of "Oh, my days, I just walked through Westminster Abbey. Westminster Abbey!" with a picture or two as teaser. You can substitute any historical thingy that I've always been interested in.
Like the Sherlock Holmes museum, which is within easy walking distance of my hostel. (!!! my expectations are so high that they'll probably be dashed. This will in no way diminish my picture taking habit or plans to purchase something to stick on the flap of my bag or something to commemorate the time I visited Sherlock Holmes's house.
In the meantime, I've been planning for my return home. Specifically, for The Questions.
Every traveller, whether to the next town for a few days or to the other side of the world, knows The Questions. I always struggle with these, quibbling with myself out loud about how hard it is to answer them before launching into an hours-long rambling story with enough rabbit trails to be the hundred acre wood. So, this time, I decided to plan ahead. And, disclaimer, Questions 2 and 3 are not generally asked to day-trippers, but other-side-of-the-world-travellers seem to get them a lot, and I always want to ask them, so I'm answering them.

1. What was your favourite part/thing?
I would have to say that this is one of my least favourite questions ever. It's really hard for my decision-making-impaired brain to narrow down a whole range of generally enjoyable experiences to just one, unless I had a terrible time, in which case the pessimist within insists that "leaving" was my favourite part. Usually, nothing stands out that much until years later, when I only remember the best part and have forgotten everything else but the worst.
In this case, I'm going to say "cheese and onion pasties, cheap nutella, being called "love", "darling", and "pet" without a southern american accent, and the friends I made."

2. What are you going to miss the most?
Similar to the first, but not the same. I'm really not going to miss being called love all that much, but I will miss being able to microwave a cheese and onion roll for a quick, filling, and delicious breakfast quite a bit.
And I will really miss my friends. I've never made such close friendships with people that I know for a very nearly fact that I won't see again. I've made friendships this close in high school, and I still count the Inklings as some of my closest friends ever; I've made friendships this close at Whitworth as we bonded over difficult classes and the odd batty professor and core, and I plan on being friends with these people for a very long time, and will probably be going to their weddings, even if they scare off all the timid whitworth boys. But none of this has prepared me for making friends, to a sibling-like point, with people with whom the only thing I have in common is that we lived in the same flat for four months. I almost can't remember not knowing Josie, Conor, Flo, and Adam. And I never want to forget them.

3. What will you not miss?
I will not miss the friggin exchange rate. I will not miss being unemployed. I will not miss being unable to understand the cashier's accent. I will not miss the sidewalk being paved with cigarette butts. I will not miss having a roommate (especially one that gets snippy when she's tired). I will not miss the University of Sunderland. I've been here long enough that I can think of these very, very easily.

4. What was your least favourite part/thing?
Easy. The impossible little frenchman. Not only could I not understand half of what he said, he didn't like me. The only time he showed any lack of somewhat haughty condescension, like I was a particularly stupid breed of moron who was soiling his oxygen, was when I dominated the GC software.
I don't like being thought of as stupid. It didn't help that I was completely unfamiliar with lab habits, lab report expectations, and the labs that were prerequisites. I have the knowledge. In fact, I solidly passed organic chemistry and its lab. But I didn't take PBM103 or any of the other first year biomedical science modules at Sunderland, which put me at a severe disadvantage when it came to figuring out what was expected of me.
The other thing that I didn't like was having a difficult roommate. I'm a little mad that she even signed up for a double room. When I asked her why, she replied that she had never roomed with anyone before and felt that if she was doing all these new, unfamiliar things, she might as well share a room, too. This was not fair to me. I was expecting someone who, like myself, had no need for the stupid little "how to not to make your roommate hate you" pamphlet.
I know, I know, life's not fair, but I'd like to have a word with whoever assigned us to the same room. Flatmates are one thing. People who are predisposed not to get along can still be in the same building; kitchen use just needs to be regulated. People who are predisposed not to get along cannot share a room without misery on both sides, if not open hostility and the urge to scream into your pillow, except you can't because she's sitting right there. The most annoying part was the vague superiority complex, except where english was involved. Look, all right, you've been to a million more places than I have, you know more about the world than I do, and you speak a lot more languages than I do, but at least I'm not rude, loudly, in public. The worst part is that I think we would have got along fine if we hadn't been roommates. It's certainly not that she's german. I've met several other germans, and I like all of them. It's just that we are not the sort of people who can room together without starting to hate each other a little bit.
That was a downer of a Question to put last, but it always seems to come up last. So...

5. Would you do it again?
Absolutely. I'd do a few things differently (get a visa or an internship with a stipend or something), but I'd do this again in a heartbeat. It wouldn't be the same — nothing ever could be — but I seriously doubt that I'll ever regret this. I might, in a fit of reverse culture shock, regret having turned my life upside down, but the friends I've made, the experiences I've had (including the ones I'll never wish on anyone)... I'll always pine for England, at least a little bit. I think it's fair to say that this has changed my life, if only in that I've done something that's made it so that only people who've at least done something similar can really relate to me for a few months. This isn't to say that I won't be friends with my friends that I left a whitworth or various and sundry other universities across the pacific northwest, but there's going to be a bit of a divide between the "us" who have lived abroad and the "them" who haven't.

Pretty things in Sunderland

I needed to do this post because of this.

Image swiped from my.ilstu.edu and modified by me.

After a day of feeling like everything was going wrong and walking down the road muttering about how much I hate this place, I decided to use the pictures I took of the cemetery before I went to bedford.

Here are pictures of the cemetery up the road. It's very pretty, and makes for a nice walk.

I was on the hunt for these, but I couldn't find any from much before 1800.

Huge group plot. I think it's for people affiliated with a church, like possibly a convent or monastery. 

All the stereotypes about cemeteries are true here. Huge crooked tombstones like jagged teeth... 

And then huge empty spaces.

Lots of the stones have broken; the pieces are all kept together.

A real, live holly tree. I think I was feeling a bit festive when I took this one. The tree was huge, by the way.

The ground here is really unstable. Almost all the headstones are tilted, and most of the monuments have sunk.

The "family burial ground" thing is kind of odd to me, somehow.

There are a lot of stones for people that were lost at sea or other far-away places.  Sunderlandians got around.

Marble: pristine. Stone: so worn you can't even tell there were letters there.

There are these huge old buildings scattered throughout the cemetery, with broken windows and fences around them.

Like so. I do like the little round bit off to the side of the main building, though.

Entrance? 

Fancy.

Lost at sea.

War graves always get me. "In memory of so-and-so, who failed to return"

Also, cat.

Our flat (now consisting only of Conor, Jessi, Flo, myself, and occasionally Adam) kind of adopted the Ginger Clanny House Cat, known alternately by us as Clanny, Kitty, Look Who Followed Me Home, Can We Keep Her, *tchk tchk*, and The Cat.

She follows us from further up the block, knows which flat is ours, knows which door inside the flat is ours, and also comes to the window to be let in. 

Jessi bought some ham for Kitty's consumption (because that made more sense than cat food?), and despite the inherent dietary flaws, Kitty's not sick and she keeps coming back and eating more ham, so... 

She's got a routine. Get into our flat, eat some ham, maybe have some milk (we have some spare containers of it, I don't know whose, and they're not bad yet, but they will be, so...), curl up on the chairs, and sleep until we put her out. 

I hate putting her out. I feel so cruel. Jessi hates putting her out more, though. She seems to be afraid of cats, which quite mystifies me, and flinches away whenever Kitty moves her paws, claiming that she never knows what cats are thinking.

Well, this is true. She's terrible about figuring out what mood the cat is in. But I blame the single claw attack she's suffered (at no physical damage to her person, I might add) on her not knowing the warning signs of sudden rage and repeating her offences.

So here's some more things that I liked in Sunderland, mostly to remind myself that I ever liked it.

British houses

That random door in the cool wall

Wall

Good flatmates

Cheese and onion pasties... Mmmm.

Old churches

Walls

Walls

More walls

Even more walls

I do not tire of these pictures

But I'll throw in a picture of nutella, only 99p for the small glass.

Brick walls in various states of decay

Mosaics in entryways

Wall

That park down the road

A "stumpery"

Wall! Leading to the prettiest place I've found in sunderland.

Wall

Pretty bridge and autumn colour (in december, but still)

Pretty river

You guessed it: Wall.

Not wall. Slippery death trap, actually. But it was pretty.

Natural wall from where the river was

Little secluded area

As excited as I am to be leaving Sunderland and returning to Whitworth, I'm still going to miss this place. Of course, staying doesn't hold much of an attraction for me, since almost all my flatmates, who became my best friends here, are leaving, too.
So I'll think fond thoughts about Sunderland as I've known it, with two brits, two germans, two americans, and an australian as my companions, and be happy that I'm going back to a university where more of the faculty is sane and likeable.

Northern Ireland — Friday 9 December to Monday 12 December

Friday started for me at 4 AM; at 4:30 for Conor, Josie, and James, and at 4:49 for Adam. For Jessi, Thursday never really ended. We all had varying levels of exhaustion, but I think James summed it all up when, as Josie told it, he plaintively said "please stop..." to her alarm when he couldn't figure out how to turn it off. However, Jessi was able to overcome her exhaustion by being really, really excited about ireland. I think she giggled and said "We're going to Ireland!" about once every five minutes on the forty minute drive to the airport. Thank God we weren't on the metro (same trip is over an hour)...
I love flying. There's something about it. I hate airports, at least the getting into them part, and I dislike the boarding processes, but once I've got my luggage stowed overhead and underseat and myself tucked into a seat, be it next to strangers, friends, or no one, I start getting really giddy. I stare out the window for everything, including the taxi to and from the runway. While I do get a little nervous during bad turbulence, I'm definitely not afraid of flying. Taking this into consideration, I've decided that I have a few backup plans for careers. If the whole scientist thing falls through, I'll try opening a crepe stand (one of those portable things, like hot dog stands: it'd be cheaper than a store, and if I have the money for that, I'm doing my tea/yarn/book store, not food), and if that doesn't work out, either, I'll be a stewardess. I'd get to fly all the time. Even if I don't get to look out windows and I have to put up with far too many upset babies and stupid passengers who try to sneak check-sized bags into the plane and stuff like that, I'd still be flying and even going to potentially cool places. I think it'd be worth it.

Still pretty, even in the dark.

Of course, I didn't get to see a whole lot, given that the sun comes up at about 8:30 and our plane left sometime after 7, but definitely before 8, but still. Flying.
Also, every time I fly, I think of that Weird Al song Albuquerque. The part I think of is 2:00-2:30 minutes, and you don't need to watch the rest unless you're a big Weird Al fan. It's a weird song.
We landed successfully, not too much turbulence, and got slightly lost in Belfast International. Eventually, we caught the Belfast International Express bus to Belfast and decided not to knock around Belfast with all our bags and less than 20 hours of sleep among six people. We managed to catch the sort-of express to Kilkeel just in time, and had a crazy bus ride south (although I had somehow convinced myself that it was north). My internal compass gave up its fight a long time ago, and I've kind of decided that my window is north. Ish. It's probably wrong.
In any case, we bought some groceries (as always, slightly impractical ones; we always mean to get useful staples and end up with pizza, crisps, and muffins) and ordered a taxi to 76 Brackenagh East Road, which I thought was spelled Brackney.
Also, I was completely wrong about my internal compass. My window faces almost due east, but we're north enough and it's winter enough that I think the sun never hits high noon, and lurks off in the south, making it pretty much impossible for me to figure out where it is. Also, too much city-stuff for me to see it setting, and heaven forbid I see it rising. Based on my rather belated walk a few weeks ago, the pretty part of a sunset around here is in the southeast (according to the google maps compass), so whatever. And Clanny House is oriented completely differently versus the coastline than I had thought. Gah... Now I'm going to get a headache whenever I think too hard about it.
Anyway.
We had to take two taxis because they didn't have a van around, so Josie, James, and I waited around for the second one. Our driver was an interesting character who's been all over the world driving taxis and trucks. I've discovered that the northern irish accent is way easier to understand than the southern (like Thomas's... It's like listening to the Swedish Chef from muppets (turn on the youtube captions for that video; it's not vital, but it's funny). I know he's saying words, and I'm pretty sure they're English, but for the life of me I cannot understand him. I don't get why Jessi thought his accent was attractive, because I personally am attracted to being able to understand people.).
The house is adorable. Adam described it as a "Nana house" and it really is, inside and out. It's adorable outside, and it's a little too small and filled with trinkets from long-ago travels as well as more recent trips and pictures of family. The area is what you'd kind of expect from Ireland. It's very green, full of sheep and cool little walls.

Classic.

It turns out that Ireland isn't green because of the native fauna, but because almost every arable patch of land has been turned into pasture or field.

Walls. This is part of the gate to the house.

Pretty good vantage of the countryside. I think that's the Irish Sea on the horizon.

Fields. Walls. I was pretty happy.

Sheep! Or, as Jessi always tries to call them, sheeps. My history prof succeeds at this because no one corrects her in the middle of class, plus it livens up the lecture.

More, um, sheeps. You can't help thinking that it's cuter after a few repetitions. It wasn't fun explaining moose and deer to Jessi, either.

The walls all have huge gaps in them, as seen in the background — no, that's not a hedge — and the left foreground. Our taxi driver said it was to keep the wind from knocking them over. They're new walls made of old rocks.

A ruined building, my guess is a barn, on Brackenagh Rd.

A nicely-lit view of Bingian, I think. 

 Within two hours of getting to the house, we had made pizza and tea and set up the TV. Er... We were also walked in on by a neighbour lady who was just "making the rounds, you know, checking that all the doors are locked" while Conor's grandmother wasn't there, and "didn't know anyone was there" (that's a laugh. She probably saw the taxi drive up, and she also probably knew that someone was coming for the weekend through the neighbourhood grapevine.)
As a flat, we hope to be like Josie's nan, who owns and runs a pub on the truck route in Australia, and who ran after a snake in the road and shot it at age 87, rather than creeping on the neighbours to keep ourselves busy. But probably, we'll end up watching TV all day.
Dinner was pretty slapdash. Since we can't really survive on toast, Josie wanted to make pasta with the tomato puree and the Quorn mince that she found, but she had to get creative on the pasta. There was a little penne and a pack of lasagna sheets, so she cooked the lasagna sheets to a little harder than al dente and cut them into strips, then combined them with the penne.
We tried to watch The Two Towers that night, but in spite of the epic battle to get the TV to recognise James' hard drive that ended in hooking my USB stick (yay IT day!) and James' hard drive to Adam's computer and putting the one of the three parts of the extended version (I was expecting two) onto the stick every time we finished one part, pretty much everyone fell asleep before the end. Conor and I managed to stay up, but I suspect that we may have had the most sleep.

Saturday, it was Josie's birthday. I did my best to sleep through the visit from Conor's distant relative. I'm terrible at visiting. Apparently, though, I missed her waltzing into the guest house where James and Josie were rooming before they got up. Again, with the not knocking thing. But she did leave us a steak and ale (or some kind of booze, I forget the exact word) pie, a dish of cheesy potato things, and a pack of four mini mince pies, which are delicious, by the way.
Adam, James, Josie, and I went dinner shopping, and prayed for deliverance on the taxi ride to the store. I mean, daaaang, these people are crazy drivers.
Ireland does not believe in vegetarians. Luckily, there was some Quorn chicken at the house, or I'd have been one protein-deprived vegetarian. After the store, everyone bundled up in preparation to climb what may have been "Bingian" or possibly "Binian", a mountain-y hill just north of the house. And it is north, I checked.
To get to the hill, we had to cross what appeared to be a field but was in actual fact a marsh. Everyone's shoes got pretty well soaked, Jessi went in up to her midcalf, Adam went in up to his knee, I did a hasty faceplant (the brunt was on my shins and my left glove; no facial or even torso contact with the ground), and Josie went in up to just above her ankle.
It was still a good time, and I have some great pictures.

View from the fence after we climbed up a path for about ten minutes. I don't think that the Irish Sea is in the background, but I could be wrong. I can't remember which way I was facing...

I liked the lone little shrub on the hill of grass and heather. And marsh.

We decided to aim for the dip, given that we started very late and the taller bit was completely covered with a cloud.

Adam and Jessi trying to avoid the stream.

Jessi got mad at me for that one, but it's not my fault she was in the frame... She was running to keep her feet from sinking into the ground.

Adam (back) and James (facing the camera) wore vans. The canvas kind. They did say that they don't have any hiking boots anyway, but still. 

All the white bits are water. The wet kind, not the snow kind that they look like in the picture.

James and Adam slogging. I think about twenty different routes to the base of the mountain were taken by the six of us over the half hour that it took to get from the gate to somewhere on the mountain.

Jessi in blue, Josie in pink, and I think that's Conor next to Josie.

The heather in the marsh was orange. I was impressed.

Heather over stream.

I thought that was a spring, and that it was all dry past that. Wrong! It was still pretty, though.

The red bits are soaking, the green bits are full of puddles, and the cream bits sink. Can't win. 

I guess it is pretty emerald under the scrub. Also, walls!

I always wonder what piles of rocks came from. I think I read too many westerns.

We were higher than we thought. I can see the house from here, but I don't know which speck it is.

I think this was of the big protrusion that I photographed earlier, when I wondered about big piles of rocks.

Looking up... fog.

Also up: Adam being a zen master. In Jessi's picture, he's got his thumbs up.

Why two? Cause it's pretty.

We had mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli and peas, and steak pie and chicken-ish pie for everyone but me, and quorn chicken in a vegetable gravy that I found in the cupboard for me. We also watched the (UK) X Factor (the cousin of American Idol and the older sibling of the american X Factor, and probably a relative of [Country]'s Got Talent) all day because it was Josie's birthday and the first round of the finals was on that night. Spoiler: for her birthday, her favourites both got through, and for the day after her birthday, her favourite favourite won.
Confession: I enjoyed watching and was excited when Little Mix became the first group to ever win X Factor, and the first girl group to ever be a serious competitor even though I haven't followed it at all and won't after this.
The only downside to the day, aside from widespread puddlefoot, was Jessi. I'm going to try not to go into detail, since I've already complained to pretty much everyone (sorry!), but she managed to be insulting to almost everyone and pick stupid arguments with everyone else. I do try to give her grace, since she's doing something that I have never done by going into a culture where no one speaks her native language, but it gets hard to stand down. I'm not the most graceful loser, and to end an argument with Jessi over opinion-based statements is pretty much to lose it, or at least have her feel that she's won. Which, of course, is chalked up by my brain as a loss, leading me to resent the fact that she doesn't seem to notice that she's doing this. She always laughs while she's telling you that what you would rather do in a totally hypothetical situation is flat-out wrong, and it tends to make me feel aggressive, which makes me nervous about having an honest-to-blog fight with her, because we do have a month and a half to go, and I don't want hostility. Besides, she's probably harbouring her own pet peeves about living with me, so I'll keep a lid on my irritation if she does.
Hey, lookit that! My "not going into detail" managed to be the longest paragraph in the whole post!
Josie and James had to leave the next morning, but Adam, Jessi, Conor, and I watched TV late into the night.

Sunday, Conor, Jessi, Adam, and I went to the Silent Valley park, which is apparently where the water in Belfast comes from. It was beautiful enough to overcome my frustrations with Jessi, and I was even in a good enough mood by the end of the loop to make a joke about her rhetorical question that I know the answer to without answering it and irritating her. I may turn into Sheldon from Big Bang Theory when people ask idle questions about science, but I'm working on not answering them if people don't request an answer. At least around Jessi, since she does it enough to annoy Conor, and I don't think my answering does anything to improve relations. Something about that glazed-over, vaguely annoyed look she gives me when I finish... (Was that sarcasm? It was?! I'm on fire tonight!)
Enough about Jessi. Here's pretty pictures!

The Bingian elementary school. Not a lot of kids in this area...

OMG Pwnies!

The walls were busy being built, I think. Either that or they were busy falling down.

Scrub.

Cool silhouette at Silent Valley.

It reminded me a lot of Muir Woods. The trees were smaller, but there was even a stream with a plaque on salmon spawning.

I took a water picture that turned out pretty!

It was prettier in real life... but this is pretty awesome, too. 

After we got back, we watched the final X Factor final while Conor and I made miscellany for dinner. We ended up having baked beans on baked potatoes, the potato and cheese thing that Conor's relative brought over, and the rest of the quorn chicken with peas and green curry sauce. It was pretty good, to my surprise (even though I made it. I don't trust curry, as a rule). Then we had mince pies for dessert, and they were incredible. I always suspected mincemeat of being full of meat (mince is british for ground meat), but it's actually all fruit. I even found a jar of mincemeat at Aldi, and it's got "suitable for vegetarians" on the label. I've got to say, that is one of my favourite things about this country. Vegetarians know what's what. Either that, or the government is tricking vegetarians into eating meat-based products for kicks. ...I still check ingredient lists, by the way.

Monday, we cleaned, made the beds, hid the TV, and headed to Belfast. We caught the bus just in time, and it was another double decker. Yes!
What I saw of Belfast was pretty nice. We ambled through a christmas market, which smelled amazing, didn't buy anything, lost Jessi, found Jessi, lost Conor, found Conor, lost Conor again, decided to leave, and found Conor. We were heading to St. Anne's Cathedral when Jessi got distracted by some fairy lights (which sounds way cooler than christmas lights) and we headed down a little shopping hallway. We were instantly drawn into a pub, where Adam and Conor worked on pints of Guinness for a while because it's supposed to taste better in Ireland. By the time we left, it had started raining hard, and we were hungry, so we ended up sitting in a cafe for a while longer. We had to get our bags from the welcome centre at 17:30, so we headed back there around 17:00, grabbed our bags, and headed to the bus station to catch the Belfast International Express (same one we took from the airport) by 18:00 so that we could catch our 20:25 flight. I was pretty bummed that we hadn't explored more city, and that it felt like we had spent more time sitting around than seeing Ireland, but it was okay.
Adam held us up through security. Tssk. He'd actually been expecting it, since his mild, quiet, unassuming, inoffensive demeanor tends to set off red flags for security at airports. He wasn't expecting his bag to be unpacked, but it seems that Newcastle airport has pretty lax security as far as liquids and aerosol cans go.
I did look out the window for this flight, but it was pretty boring since the sun was all the way down. I tried to doze, but I think the jet stream was in our favour, since the seatbelt sign was off just long enough for the drink cart to go around before we started our descent.
We took the metro home and waited on the train for about half an hour before it started, and I slept for a little while. I think we went straight to bed when we got home. It was a long trip, but a very good one.