Reflections -- 22 February 2012 (slash 25 July 2012)

I wrote this a few months ago (in february, in fact, and it is now july) and then forgot about it. I just got turned into an "ISEP Ambassador" (in something of a fit of irony, given the issues a bunch of us had with ISEP) which reminded me of this, and I also have to resit an exam which is making me think about having studied abroad again. So here's my reflections from just a month after having studied abroad.


Tomorrow, I'll have been back for a whole month. It's kind of crazy.
I'm already so absorbed by school that I have a hard time sitting down and thinking about England. Fortunately, I have a lot of homework to avoid, so it happens more than it should. Right now, for instance, I should be thinking about inorganic chemistry.
So.
I was pretty close on my "what I won't miss, what I will miss" predictions. I really miss the people; I get excited when I hear australian accents before remembering that Josie is in Leicester, and it's weird being on facebook and seeing people from Sunderland friend people that I don't know and go places I'll probably never be.
And, yeah, I miss the easy Sunderland workload (but not the work itself) and cheese and onion pasties. I miss being somewhere where people know what a pasty is... and how to pronounce it. It is fun to explain the "putting stuff in pastry" phenomenon, though. Also, the "irish" pub that moved in across from Whitworth is reported to sell at least meat pasties, so I'll be checking that out sometime.
I don't miss the exchange rate at all, but I'm still confused when I cross the road. I have to think about where I would be sitting if I was driving, and where the center line would be, and therefore where a car will come from when it hits me. Ah, it'll be from behind. Better get on the grass, just in case they aren't paying attention. Note: this is only on campus. I'm very careful when I cross the street from my house to the Whitworth side.
I'm doing pretty good on the "not talking about England ad nauseum" thing, except when I get together with other long term study abroad-ers, and then none of us want to shut up. I found one girl who went to australia and knows the university that Josie and James went to, which was amazingly exciting, although it would have been cooler had she gone to their uni. I also met a girl who went to Northern Ireland (and who confirmed my suspicion that the northern accent is much easier to understand than the republic's), and who shared my frustrations over "I'm from Washington. No, not DC. Yes, there is a state called Washington. Where is it? Um, it's by California." conversations as well as my longing for pasties.
I've stopped saying "uni" so naturally and dropped back into "college", even though I use uni as a texting abbreviation.
I do miss being able to say "chips" and have people think "delicious, deep fried, soft, thick potatoes" instead of "crispy potato slices".
On the other hand, I've settled back into Whitworth pretty well. I've made new friends, even.
I blame my newfound gregariousness on having been somewhere where no one knew me. For the first time ever, there was no familiar face, no one I knew from church or liberty or whitworth, and I think I branched out without knowing it. If I wanted a familiar face, I had to get to know people. So I did. It helped that everyone else was dealing with the same sort of thing, and so were more willing to share my effort, but I could have made no friends. I know people who did just that, and I'm ridiculously proud to say that I'm a successful human being now. Last year, in Duvall, I did not make a single friend in my dorm.
This year, in England, I made several.
Of course, it's still hard for me to just strike up a conversation with someone, but I've definitely made strides in the "being able to function in the real world" department.

London -- Sunday 22 January

Today, I took advantage of the fact that the trip that Megan and Gina are on is a church-centric trip and went to mass at Westminster Abbey and a eucharist service in the evening at a "new monastic" church called Moot. Details may follow.
My slight inclination towards a cold, in the form of a stuffy nose and cloggy throat when laying on my back, turned into a serious cold that turned my nose into a snot-pumping machine ("I'b sick. I need SOUP," although it was CHIPS in my case); I wasn't exactly on top of my game. This was not helped by the fact that I woke up at 0430 by some late-night partiers returning and being... noisy. I was planning on going to St Paul's for the early morning service, since I was up anyway, cough cough shut up cough, but I had to buy kleenexes. I ended up getting a whole box, which I carried around the whole day. I used about half of it, and it's coming on the plane tomorrow. I missed the service because my sickness and exhaustion and lack of having anything nutritious in my stomach (just night-draining snot and some "pineapple" juice drink, oh boy!), and decided to hunt for some chips. For some reason, they were fixed in my mind as the thing that would make me feel better. Unfortunately, while I was too late for the service, I was too early for anything to be open, much less serving a lunch menu.
I had a lot of fruit smoothies today. Sorry, bank account.
I met up with Megan and Gina and the tour group at 10:30. The service was interesting, and explained the line in Good Omens about Crowley looking a bit guilty, like someone who hasn't been to church in a long time and has forgotten which bits you stand up for (this is at the beginning of the second little prologuey thing, when Hastur and Ligur begin to recount the "Deeds of the Day" before giving him the infant anti-Christ). My enjoyment of it was lessened by my being sick, since my head is so clogged up that I get dizzy when I stand too fast and my ears keep being plugged.
I was hoping to hit the Twinings store when it was open, but I also wanted to go on the harry potter tour, which ended up being less awesome than I had hoped. I did see some cool stuff that I had wanted to see and learned some non-harry potter stuff (didn't actually learn a whole lot about that...) about London. I saw the great fire monument, for instance, and got some nice pictures of the Tower Bridge. I also ended up with some chips. They weren't too great, but they were quite filling. By the time the tour ended, we were on the other side of London from Twinings and it was 10 minutes to closing. Sad day. I got pictures anyway.
We went to Moot, and it was... interesting. They were basically anglican with some different formatting thrown in. The study trip group described it as a mix between the monastary they stayed in in France and the anglican churches, with some modernity thrown in. It was nice.
After that, I trailed the group to The Blackfriar Tavern, which was out of their only vegetarian entree. I went with the fried mushrooms and the tomato soup instead, and the fact that I'm sick probably helped my hunger to be sated. Plus, the soup was acidic enough to burn my poor, badly-chapped lips. My nose and lips are horribly chapped; remember that half a box of kleenexes?
Now, I've been switched to a new room, my luggage is all present and accounted for, and I have booked a taxi to the tube station to avoid putting myself in a terrible mood before I even have to deal with people by dragging my uncooperative luggage around. I've given myself lots of time to navigate the tube station, and I should arrive at Heathrow well within the recommended two hours prior to my flight.
It's weird, that I'll be leaving England for the foreseeable future. I've done so much and made so many friends here that it's really weird to think that we're all separate now.

Bath -- Saturday 21 January

Firstly, forgive my capitalisation. I'm on a very sluggish computer and feel lazy.
So I went to bath, with the intention of taking a jane austen walking tour. Unfortunately, I didn't plan out my tube trip to Paddington (I'm at king's cross, if you feel like looking it up on a map), and the line that would have taken me there in about twenty minutes was down (I took the wrong line anyway, and only discovered the faster way after I realised that my connection wasn't), so it took me an hour to get there. Just in time for the train that was an hour later! Unfortunately, I'm bad at timetables (obviously), but fortunately, the conductor didn't kick me off at the first stop (it was Reading, pronounced redding, which threw off the asians in front of me).
Bath, once achieved, was pretty nice. I soundly missed the tour, but decided to have a look around, find the jane austen centre, and get my flip phone unlocked.
It has not been a good week to be my technological crutches. Computer: stolen. Earbuds: one little rubber cushion thing lost (kind of defeats the noise-cancelling effect that I love when my roommates are noisy; I have to use an earplug to even begin to block out the noisy french people, the snoring guy next to me, and the coughing guy in the bunk below me), my SD chip is quite full, and, to top it all off, my cruddy little brick pay-as-you-go phone decided to die last night. I tried putting it on the charger, thinking that it might have used up all the battery in the two hours since I'd checked the time, but to no effect. I tried switching my sim cards, since both phones are samsungs, but my t-mobile phone was locked and angrily informed me that I was using the wrong sim. Since I needed a clock, I put the US sim back in, making sure it was on airplane mode. While we have t-mobile over here, I doubt the US network would smile upon me, and I wanted to avoid the roaming charges.
So I was on the hunt one of the many little, slightly unofficial phone stores that advertise repairs and unlocking, resolving to do whichever was cheaper. In the end, it was £10 (the exact amount of cash I had) to unlock the US phone, which promises to come in handy anyway. Besides, I've really missed that keypad. I hate the one on my brick.
I digress. After leaving my phone with the capable-looking store lady, I went in search of a cheaper SD chip. I couldn't roam bath, with its wealth of "roman stuff", without memory space. Luckily, I found a 4GB chip for just £8, a vast improvment over the £13 for a 2GB that was in the phone repair shop.
After collecting my phone, which works beautifully with the new sim, other than all my UK contacts are gone, I went in search of the Jane Austen Centre.
I finally found it, and it was pretty well worth the £6 I paid to get in. The presentation was informative, and the exhibition was nifty. It was a better deal than the sherlock holmes museum, actually. Of course, Jane Austen was a real person... I even got a picture of one of the places where she actually lived, just up the street from the centre. I think they went for the house they have because number 25 is a denstist office now, and that's probably quite different from in the early 1800s.
I also got another badge for my bag; it says "I [heart] Darcy"
Fact.
I caught the proper train and resolved to search for the twinings store, and also one of the older pubs in london, as per the Big Bus Tour (on the same street, if memory served), mostly to see where they were and if I could access them Sunday. I found twinings AND the pub (Ye Golden Cock or something -- Ah, Ye Olde Cock, and funny story about the Ye thing: older versions of english had a character for the "th" sound, sort of like greek with the "ch", I guess, and it looked sort of like a Y. When printing came around, they just used the Y instead of making a new letter block for the TH thing. Hence "Ye Olde Everything", now pronounced with as yee, but properly pronounced as the. The more you know...)
I found them both and took pictures just in case; I will go back to twinings, but the pub is less certain. I'd like to eat there, but it's not vital.
If you're an arachonophobe, you will want to skip this paragraph. If you weren't, you probably won't be after this.
I've been shooing a determined spider away from my computer area for about half an hour now. I don't feel like going and getting a big enough piece of paper to squash it, and no one else feels threatened by it (cough jessi cough), so I just make sure that the little crawlings on my neck are from my hair in the draft rather than a smallish arachnid. He's really not that big.
Sorry to the arachnophobes in my readership.

NO MORE SPIDER TALK NOW. IT'S SAFE.
So, tomorrow I'll be frequenting a few churches (a service at st paul's by myself, then a service at westminster with Megan and Gina and the rest of that trip), and dragging megan and gina to yarn and tea stores.
I'll probably post tomorrow night, but after that, I think I'll have to pay for my internet.
Because I'll be in airports!
Laters.

Oh, ps. I just realised that my computer was stolen on a thursday. I hate thursdays.

Oxford — Thursday 29 December

I went to Oxford! Home of one of the oldest universities, around which the town was built (hence the massive number of pubs in the town), a bunch of museums, and the original Inklings club.

The first thing in the morning was me planning out my trip, which I had supposed would be solo, since Josie (former flatmate) and James (her boyfriend) would be busy seeing James' aunt and cousins, and possibly an uncle. However, James' dad got sick and called off lunch, so I had the privilege of overhearing a conversation I would never hear in America: 

"James, would you like to go to Oxford today?"

"Sure, why not?"

I'd looked up bus fares (there's one from bedford every half hour; it's £11.40 for a return and £10 for a single), so James' dad was nice and drove us to the bus station. It was pretty crowded, but I had a bit of a "we're going to oxford, we're going to oxford, we're going to OXFORD!" mantra running through my head.

First thing off the bus. You know the old school that is constantly referred to in popular culture?

I found it.

We drifted around the corner, and I was instantly drawn in to a fleamarket thing, which had at least three booths with cheap books. One had paperbacks for £1, but they were lame. Another had paperbacks for £2 or 3 for £5. 

I got four of those. £7 is kind of cheap for books at the bookstores; I got four for the price of one! And what books... 

Seeing as I was looking for The Eagle and Child pub, home of the first Inklings, the very place where Tolkien submitted portions of The Lord of the Rings to his companions, including CS Lewis (author of one of my favourite book series to this day), I was hoping to find a cheap standalone Lewis. I found Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Horse and His Boy, which are both great, and Voyage of the Dawn Treader is possibly my favourite of the Narnia series, but I already have that one. Unfortunately, no other Lewis books could be found, and the only Tolkiens were individual LOTR books, which I also already have. I thought about taking a Thomas Hardy (author of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which is an extremely well-written book that I hate and haven't finished; he also frequented The Eagle and Child, although I don't think he was with Inklings), but since I don't like the one book of his that I have read part of, I decided against it. 

In the end, I had picked up Wide Sargasso Sea, a sort of prequel to Emily Brontë's Jane Eyre, which is one of my favourite books; I also love Wide Sargasso Sea in its own right, and a Sherlock Holmes compilation with a story I've not seen (A Study in Scarlet with The Sign of the Four, the latter of which I already have, but this was £2! And I haven't seen A Study in Scarlet anywhere else. Don't judge me for my Sherlock Holmes obsession; besides, I only have one more of the full-length stories to find.). Having two books, I wanted a third (only £1! I've missed second hand books... Oh, how I've missed them) and was contemplating some other fancy, dead authors' works when I rounded the corner of the stall and found Terry Pratchett books. 

You know, the ones with the weird covers? The british editions of the celebrated (knighted for services to literature, actually) british author? Yeah... I was helpless against their siren song of awesomeness. I would have got all of them if I had unlimited money and a greater weight limit on the plane back; as it was, I went with The Colour of Magic (the very first discworld novel, which I already have, but not with the u!) and Wyrd Sisters (which I hadn't read). I did turn down Guards! Guards!, Reaper Man (quite possibly my favourite; it came to Sunderland with me and has been read twice), and a whole slew of early ones, all of which I have. Wyrd Sisters it was. So far, it's pretty good, and I would have finished it on the bus if I hadn't gotten quite carsick and had to shove my head between the seat in front of me and the window.

Anyway, the rest of Oxford, in pictures!

There was some lovely architecture.

Big old buildings with plants and latin everywhere.

And spires. If you could put a point on it, people did.

I believe that this is a monument for some anti-Catholic martyrs from the Reformation. The inscription on the ground wasn't helpful, and the writing on the monument was hard to read and had too many roman numerals (what's D, anyway? I was good up until the D. M, CCC, X, L, and I were fine, but D? Bah.) for me to tell when this all went down, but a bunch of people, probably at least three, were burned on that spot (holy cow, that very spot, shivers) a long time ago because of the corruption of Rome and something about the holy, true, and possibly great and good Church of England.

 Then, I saw it. It was across several lanes of traffic, but we made it without dying.
The Eagle and Child. My personal mecca. And it wasn't just for me; I have about a million ties to Inklings. My group of friends in high school, with whom I am still close (actually, my closest friends and one of my favourite and most influential teachers), had an Inklings club that sort of emulated C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien in that we met in coffee houses, annoyed the staff, and talked books, others or our own. We also named ourselves after them. Then I have two fairly good friends at Whitworth who named their theme house Inklings after Lewis and Tolkien's club. I had to go. I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn't.

GAH! So much excitement!

This picture actually took quite a while to take; these two guys kept standing right in front of me, and walked around me when I turned around to have the picture taken from the other side.

THERE IT IS I'M RIGHT THERE GRIAUDNGEUDWGLFL

Pretty sure this is an actual page of notes or manuscript; it wasn't labeled and the pub was super busy, so I was trying to get my pictures and get out of the way. Also, was standing WHERE THEY STOOD right then...

There you go. 

WHERE. THEY. STOOD.

We were planning on eating there, but it was so busy and Josie was so hungry (I was, too, but I was so excited that I kind of forgot that I was hungry, and I suspect that James was pretty hungry as well, but Josie was the most vocal and had been hungry since half an hour into the two-hour bus ride) that we started hunting for food. We ended up at a little cafe that showed promise, although we were sorely disappointed. 

ANYWAY, I'm working on not dwelling on negatives in life, and it didn't really ruin the day, so we'll talk about something else.

Like this sign that I saw on the way to the Museum of the History of Science.

So, Oxford has these beautiful grounds, and I figured out how. Who wants to be a student at a uni where you're not allowed to flop about on the lawn?

I believe that some of Harry Potter was filmed at Oxford, and I believe it. It would give a proper sense of age, grandeur, and scholasticism to a place like Hogwarts.

James and Josie and a really, really old vine that covered at least twenty feet of building horizontally.

Gorgeous grounds; do not touch.

Museum of the History of Science. The fencepost columns all had rather startled-looking busts, presumably of scientists. I forgot that I had taken some pictures in Sunderland, so I couldn't take pictures of these guys. Sorry.

I wish I read Latin. I can pick out a few words, and the Vs tend to stand in for Us, but I really have no idea what they're going on about.

Disclaimer: most of the museum was actually quadrants and astrolabes. I wasn't too enraptured. However, I'm a scientist, or close to it, so I dragged my lovely friends through it. Lucky for them, I'm not that big on museums, and this was the only one I wanted to see.

Einstein Blackboard!

Explains the blackboard, or at least the point of the equations. Basically, Einstein derived, I think in that basement or at least in the building, or at least in the city, the equations that show the universe's expansion.

I love old periodic table things.

The basement of the museum had the chemistry and physics stuff; the two were quite closely related for a long time. When you get down to atoms, they're still related.

Latin, again. I'm guessing that the sign is almost as old as the room.

After this, we ambled around, contemplated walking tours, all of which were full or expensive, and tasted some fudge (all the fudge here is toffee and/or vanilla. I've only seen chocolate fudge of any kind in the fancy store we found the samples at, and they didn't have chocolate out for sampling. Jerks.).
We went through a covered market; the first stall had, quite literally, pounds and pounds of Stilton. I don't mind the smell so much as I used to, but it was really, really strong here. We also found the restaurant that Josie had really wanted to visit, but she was somehow completely full. Which is too bad; I was looking forward to it. Ah, well.

We got back without incident, other than me getting carsick on the way, but I kind of brought that upon myself by reading without having first medicated myself. Then we spent the evening rather nicely, just chilling with the cats and tea and Man v. Food, which was a vegetarian's nightmare.
Oh, and the Sparks (James' last name is Sparks, by the way) have TWO cats that like having attention paid to them! They don't like being picked up or cuddled, but they're so cute... Tinky (full name Tinky Winky, named by the then-5-year-old neighbour kid whose cat gave birth to the litter of five; Dipsy and Lala were renamed by their respective families) is black and Socks (the kid ran out of Teletubbies) is a grey tabby with white front toes, back feet, and chest.
Not gonna lie, I was really excited when I saw a grey tabby. He's stripier than Pete, with fewer spots; he's also much less chill and doesn't like having his tummy rubbed. Also, he's much skinnier and has a much longer tail with no kinks in it.
Still.

Conor's coming down from his family's in Oxford tomorrow afternoon (we didn't see him today because they live a ways out of the city centre and we're seeing him tomorrow and over new years), but I probably won't post until I'm back in Sunderland, so probably after 2 January. 

Happy New Year, everyone! This is the year the world ends, so live it up!

Jessi Insulting People (at a football match and the Durham Lumiere Festival) — Saturday 19 November

The title was inspired by this video:

I started off my day by printing the e-ticket for the football match, which I got in october. After something of a debacle with the people handing out the real tickets, due to our large and unwieldy group of nine (it took about three counts for them to get all of us), we got our real tickets and split up into normally sized groups. I stuck with Jessi, since I know her, and she stuck with Felicity, who tends to act like she knows what she's doing. It was her idea to storm the castle, by the way. I made a new friend in Lauren from australia, who stuck with us for the rest of the day.
We took the bus to the Stadium of Light, the brand new pretty football stadium that sunderland just built. We all got excited and Jessi took a lot of pictures. I took one, too.

Outside the stadium.

 When we couldn't find the turnstiles listed on our tickets, Jessi performed her first insult of the day by accident. She has this habit, which is starting to get on my nerves (1. w-curve. I should be getting fed up with everything pretty soon, not just the university itself. 2. We are not the most compatible of people. It could be way worse, but it could definitely be better. I refer you to the end of the edinburgh post. This is not a repeat of the rant.) of saying "for God's sakes!" in this really angry tone when she's confused, frustrated, or just angry, and even when she's in a good mood. In any case, the numbering system for the turnstiles is pretty weird. She vocalised this by asking if they couldn't count here, "for God's sakes!" when we were standing right behind a stadium worker.
Oops. He laughed it off, but it wasn't the best foot to start off on.
Getting in was exciting, followed by being disappointing. We were over an hour early, due to intelligence that the stadium would be bedlam, but no one was there. Our search for food led us to "food kiosks" that sold no chips (in the french fry sense of the word) at all. We reflected that perhaps we ought to have gotten food beforehand. I would just like to say that gesa stadium's concessions are way better than the stadium of light's. I suspect that it's becuase of the fact that SoL is still recovering from being hideously expensive, but I feel that chips would be a good start.
We waited forever for the match to start, and I forget how we amused ourselves. Our seats were up in nowhere, but we still had a pretty good view of the field.
As a group, which included Flo and Lisa and a few other germans as well as some people that some people know, you know, we lost interest pretty quickly. Flo and Jürgen, who sat on opposite ends of the "lauren felicity jessi me" group, kept yelling over us in german. Jessi later explained that they'd been commenting on how much better they were at football than the teams. Unsurprising, somehow. Felicity instituted a pretend drinking game to keep herself busy: drink every time people clap when we don't know why, every time someone falls, and twice when random people come onto the field. She lost count pretty quickly.

Way up in nowhere seats.

Mascots. I think they're the black cats or something.

Players coming out onto the field

The asian (not sure whether japanese or korean) who kept being in the way.

Getting ready to kick off...

And kicked off.

 As halftime approached, we made plans to outside to the food vendors we saw, eat, and come back in. We made extra sure we had our tickets, and asked a stadium worker if we could go outside and come back in.
No.
Okay... we tried another guy.
No.
Hmm. We tried the guy at the door.
No.
Jessi tried another tactic: reasoning. She's not very good at accepting defeat. Unfortunately, she started off on a very, very bad foot. It was more of an elbow as far as feet go. She asked if we couldn't go outside, say to get food or something, and then come back in? I mean, what if someone forgot something in their car?
If I learned one thing from concessions work, it's that herds of children with change are the worst. But I also learned that most of a stadium's income is concessions. Gesa stadium doesn't allow outside food for this reason. I'm actually not sure if you're allowed to go out and come back in, now that I think about it.
We knew, as soon as she mentioned food, that the answer would be no, even if it could have been yes. Which it couldn't have been; they use a turnstile that scans ticket barcodes, so they can't really just flip a switch, I'm thinking.
We returned to the game rather peevishly. Something exciting happened while we were in the entryway to our seating area, but the score was still 0-0 when we got in. When the game went into overtime, we all decided to head out, even if there was no way we'd beat any crowds at all.

Crowds.

More crowds.

We actually ended up walking all the way back to clanny, hungry and cold, but happily planning dinner and Durham, which would involve being all bundled up in winter clothes and real gloves and scarves and hats and warm socks. Oh, yeah. It was going to be friggin' sweet. And warm.

Durham's Lumiere festival (click here for much better pictures) was awesome. The group ended up being Lauren, Felicity, Adam, Jessi, and me. We took a cab, deciding against a return booking because we weren't sure when we'd want to head back (depending on how awesome or terrible it was), but we were pretty confident about our ability to not spend too much money on fare.
When we got there, we decided that maybe we should have, you know, looked more closely at the website before getting there. We had no idea where to go or what there was to see; we'd kind of expected to just follow people around until we saw all the cool stuff.

Following people. Lots of them.

Giant blue glowing thing!

That statue is there all the time. It was there when Jessi and I went to Durham, at least.

Snowglobe!

We had acquired a pamphlet with a map of all the cool stuff, and were headed for the rainbow bridge and lit-up cathedral when we were informed repeatedly that we couldn't go the way we were heading; we would need to turn around and go over the bridge from hell, which we had already crossed and deemed not fun. I say repeatedly because we stopped where we were standing when he first said that we couldn't go, which was just past where he was standing, and tried to deliberate. Taking our complete and total lack of motion for insurrection, he told us that we couldn't go that way for our safety five or six times in about a minute. And he wasn't just talking to the people behind us, he was looking straight at us. As a rule, I felt bad for the event security/police (not sure if one, other, or both), who had to stand there all night and repeat themselves to over-excited and occasionally belligerent crowds over and over and over, but this guy was less than informative. Okay, first in our minds was the huge, mob-like crowd on that bridge. That was not fun, and I, at least, got a lot of elbows to the shoulder. So, we looped around. Upon reaching the entrance of the rainbow bridge, which had acquired something of a mythical status in our minds (this thing was turning into the friggin' bifröst), we were informed by a portly security/police man that the whole thing was one-way.
Oh. That would have been good to know. Jessi performed her third insult of the day by saying "Are you f***ing kidding me?" loudly and angrily as soon as he said that we couldn't go across (in her defence, we had been walking for a while). He replied that he was not "f***ing kidding" (which made me feel kind of bad for him; poor guy had probably been dealing with this sort of thing for two days already), which did not bode well for our trip across. Way to endear yourself to the security guard so that he doesn't think that we're going to sneak around him.
The entrance to the bifröst was guarded by two security/police men; one of them was the portly one that Jessi insulted. The skinny one kept vanishing. It is perhaps for this reason that we decided that we could sneak past him, no problem; we also saw several people doing the same thing. We stood in a little huddle for a few minutes, waiting for the right time. Finally, Jessi made her move. He saw her, and made a little "Oi!" noise, but she was actually running by this point, and he probably decided that one person was better than leaving the entrance and having all of us get across. We all got across anyway, as soon as his back was turned all the way. My camera didn't really capture all the awesome, but it was awesome.

This was the brochure picture. It didn't quite look like this, but it was still awesome. 

So pretty...

So close...

Even closer!

On the bridge! We win!

The awesome was increased by Felicity's immense sense of self-satisfaction at our successful rebellion; this was increased every time she noticed that we were going against the crowd.
We saw a bunch of human figures (made out of some kind of white stuff) suspended above the street, and took pictures of them in between being kept out of various attractions, like the "ring of FIRE! thing that we glimpsed (jessi made it past one guard but was repulsed by a second while the rest of us were stopped by the first), and the lit-up cathedral.

First

This guy was sitting down.

I think this one was floating down on his back.

Lady.

Sitting on top of a building

Flying

Zooming down the street, if he'd been moving.

We also saw this lovely addition to the festival.

This one was my favourite.

The cathedral was really, really cool. Unfortunately, my camera didn't take any good pictures (the earlier link for much better pictures has some really nice ones).

I cranked the light fill all the way up. The cathedral is not usually red.

Jessi got in her fourth insult by saying that the guy in the white hat was ruining her picture, but he heard and turned around. It's kind of true; the white really stands out in the picture.
After the show, we decided not to go through the cathedral because of the really impressive queue. We ended up going back around through the cathedral yard to stand in line because the rings of fire were that way.
There was a cool display, which Jessi declared to be "just like Harry Potter!" and it was pretty magical. They had suspended candles that were in white shirts all through the nave, and there was a guy making eerie, monk-y music all by himself with a lot of microphones and a guitar.

The pictures make them look even more mysterious and floaty.

It was really cool sitting in the middle of this. Even with hundreds of people crowding around, it was oddly peaceful and quiet.

From below

I don't know why they used shirts.

One man monk choir

After taking a while to sit, rest our feet, take pictures, and admire the lights, we set out for the rings of fire.
We found them.

We hadn't seen this before. It was in the courtyard of the cathedral.

A fire fountain?

Fire! It was everywhere.

We decided to look for what appeared to be a lit-up dance floor, but ended up going to a completely different display. On the way, we saw this:

We felt that this should stay up all the time.

The display where we ended was cool too, and there's a picture on someone else's camera of me looking incorporeal. Mine was out of memory.
After this, we were hungry, so we looked for a pub with little luck. We saw this on the way, and figured that we should have seen this one before the everything will be alright one.

"the future will be confusing"
This was accompanied by a mixed-up alphabet. We don't know why.

We also saw this pretty waterfall thing on the way to food:

I've heard it described as the waterfall fountain. It's off a bridge, I think.

The one we did find with seats available only had toasties (like grilled sandwiches, I think), and they didn't have those, either. We moved on to a takeaway pizza place, where we all got the same pizza (margarita, or cheese) by accident. After this, we decided to look for a van cab (since they're the only ones that will seat five). Jessi wanted to call the one we took to get to Durham, but we figured we could find one that was only a few pounds more expensive. We ended up paying a lot more than we should haveThis was a cause of bitterness that I will gloss over, because the night was really awesome and we really did have a lot of fun.
After all, we crossed the bifröst! Without permission! And we stormed a castle yesterday. We're unstoppable.