The Things They Carried

With a little more than a month left until I head home for the summer, I felt now would be a good time for some retrospection. But Keegan, you think, this blog is nothing BUT navel-gazing retrospection. You have done little but look back at events and the impressions made. There is no future tense in these blogs.

While that is certainly true, this is retrospection on a whole new scale:

Keegan's List of Things to Bring for Study Abroad

I am no expert on living in Wales, but I am becoming a bit of an expert on living abroad, and here are some things that I have found essential for survival here. Granted, some of these things are skewed because of my situation: 1) I have a girlfriend and family that are interested in me; 2) I have moved out of my home country for an extended period of time; 3) there is no public transport and I don't own a car; 4) etc. So without further ado, the things I carried.

1) A good sturdy pair of walking shoes: As I said, in a place without public transportation, and without any privatized transportation, like a horse or a trained emu, I have taken to walking everywhere. This has provided me with several opportunities to break trespassing laws, as well as a fairly encyclopedic layout of the land. Not only do I know how to get from A to B, but I usually know how to do so taking the shortest route that cars aren't allowed on (like illegally through sheep fields). None of this would have been possible or pleasant without my Nike Trail Runners. These sturdy walkers are great for most terrain, which is essential for a place surrounded by tons of wooded trails. There also come with a mesh upper layer for good foot temperature control; another essential for someone who usually walks an hour or two a day. Had I come here in my far cuter, but much less sturdy Chuck Taylor All-stars, I would have fit in better with the British, and their love of tiny shoes, but my feet would have let me know the price I paid for fashion. My Chucks are here, but I wear them sparingly, are rarely two days in a row.

2) A good backpack: I tend to go for the satchel, or what my sister has so ungraciously called my man-purse. My single-shoulder strapped messenger bag is very trendy, and for going to and from the library, I look really cool (which is essential). About halfway through being here, though, I found that the storage of my shoulder bag is less than accommodating if I want to, say, go grocery shopping. That requires a bag with more container space. Luckily, I needed to spend a night in London, so I needed to purchase a sturdy backpackers bag. This had the added benefit of holding a lot of groceries far more comfortably than my hands. Again, because I have to walk everywhere, I have to carry things I purchase, and it certainly isn't news to suggest that carrying a weeks worth of frozen meals in plastic bags is a recipe for disaster. Especially when you have to pack these bags, untrained the art of bag packing, leaving corners exposed just aching to tear through the flimsy bag, freeing your food on to the highway. A good backpack will solve all these problems. Qualities to look for include: thickly padded shoulders (why will become apparent when you are loaded down with ten pounds of frozen food), a clasp to hold the shoulder straps in place (these are found on all good backpackers bags), a large central storage compartment (unless you need it for school, avoid the padded, sewn in laptop section, as it will just get in the way), and two external pouches (for water bottle or camera).

3) A good map: I can't tell you how many times I needed to pull out the map the school gave me, which was less than adequate. Luckily, I have a very good sense of direction, and remember places easily. Otherwise, I may never have found my way anywhere. One thing that someone suggested to me, and I have yet to find is a map that details all the walking paths in the area. Aberystwyth, like many other European cities, is criss-crossed by walking paths, and it is only by sheer luck that I have started to map these out for myself. There have been more than a few occasions in which I ended up in a field I shouldn't have been in, or a neighborhood that literally went in circles. A better map would maybe have spared me these excursions, but then again, I never would have had the fun that comes with accidentally trespassing. Where a good map was even more important was in London. Personally, if I were ever to go to a major city, I would look for the Time Out travel guide. The one for London broke up central London into easily navigable sections that detailed even the smallest streets. As anyone who has ever been to London (or Paris, or Amsterdam, or Berlin, or any other really old city that predates modern forms of transportation), the landscape is scarred by these seemingly sinister looking alleyways that are really important methods of getting from one side of the city to the other quickly. Erika and I found ourselves in what I assumed was an alley, but consulting the map, it said that it was actually a wharf street. That was how we found some tasty gelato. With good maps come good finds for food and entertainment and the like.

4) A nice camera: As much as I know people love the pictures I paint with words, there is no replacing the picture. One might think that they need a sweet digital SLR with several lenses, and of course that would make for some amazing pictures. That would also require a lot of extra packing. There are times that you are not going to want to haul out all the equipment, and that is when a nice, reliable point-and-shoot camera becomes handy. I can toss my Kodak Easy Share into my satchel or backpack, and I am always ready to snap a neat tree, amazing sunset, or strange sign I pass by. Sure, I might not look as cool as someone who spends an hour adjusting depths of field and aperture settings, but I remember my purpose of these pictures. I'm not making a statement with these. I just want to show people where I live. A point-and-click is just fine for this purpose. That said, there are somethings that you should look for. A good battery life is important. My camera eats batteries like crazy, and I have taken to carrying loads of double-A batteries. Rechargeable batteries are nice, but then you need to remember to charge your camera before going out, which not all people are diligent about. A lot of storage is also helpful, as there maybe whole trips in which you can't upload the pictures. A camera that can take solid photos without the flash is also really useful. My camera does not adjust well to the dark interior lights, which sometimes tends to cast indoor shots in a weird brown color. Unfortunately, I can't alter the white balance or brighten the image, so those moments when the flash is forbidden becomes a problem. And finally, a nice screen. The screen on my Kodak Easyshare is super tiny, mostly because it is really old. A bigger screen would allow me to take less pictures, as I wouldn't have to wonder if I had gotten the image.

5) Skype: There has been no bigger aid in connecting me to my family than Skype. I talk to my mother about once a week, Erika about two or three times, my sisters and brothers about three or four times a month, and occasionally even my Grandmother, who I know likes this shout out. When she had to spend some time in the hospital, my Mom brought her laptop to the room, and I was able to say hello to her as she recovered (which I know made me feel better, and I hope made her feel better). My niece Emily and nephew Nate are totally unfazed by this technology. I think had I been their ages, I would have lost my mind talking to someone on an electronic box who was thousands of miles away. I showed the two of them how it was dark outside here while it was still very bright out there, and Nate was very nonplussed. He was more interested in the strange money I had, and Emily was more interested in making faces at herself in the monitor. Again, my experience is slightly different than the average study abroad experience, because I have really moved out here, and psychologically, there is a lot more space between me and my family and loved ones because I am not returning for good for several years (even though, I will really only be here about as long as a standard study abroad trip before I return home). Certainly, emails and social networking sights like Facebook close the gap between where I am and where I was, but there is something about seeing someone face and hearing their voice that really makes the distance seem manageable.

6) An iPod: Again, I spend a lot of time walking places, and the train to London or Birmingham takes anywhere between three and five hours. That is a lot of time to be left with one's thoughts. An iPod can nicely fill the silences when you just want noise. My iPod was a birthday present from a few years back, but is still a massive 80 GBs. This is a lot of space for most people, but it doesn't hold all my music. What is particularly nice about this size, though, is not the amount of music storage, but that I can hold a movie or two. When I dropped Erika off at the train and had five hours to spend by myself, which was not really the happiest moment of my time here, it was nice to get lost in a movie (50 Dead Men Walking). Also, because of the size, I have a lot of music to chose from, so I don't have to constantly reload my iPod (like the rechargeable battery, this is not something that would, to me, become an annoyance). For these reasons, I find the iPod Touch nice, but ineffective. The 64 GB model is close to $400. Granted, it does more than the classic iPod (the 160 GB iPod classic is $259), with a bigger screen, a camera, several hundred apps and games and things like that. But the small hard drive is going to cause more problems for me than is worth the apps and what not. Whatever iPod you choose, it is essential that you get a good case for it. My case is really crappy. There is a plastic screen protector and button cover that makes using the spin wheel and seeing the screen difficult. A good case is one that protects the device but still allows you to use it effectively. Another feature I wish it had was some sort of headphone storage. Wrapping the headphones around the case has ensured that I need new headphones about every few months. Still, for what it does, my case is decent in that my iPod still functions despite the crazy amount of use it gets. And this, finally, is why I suggest going for an iPod as opposed to any random mp3 player: it really works. This iPod is really old (about four years, which in device years is like 100), but it still gives me several hours of use without a charge, and has only needed to be reboot once. They are not the cheapest thing to buy, but the Apple people know how to make a portable device, and that experience pays off in the end.

7) A blog: The one question anyone gets when they have gone on vacation is, How was your trip? That question can become the bane of your existence as you will have to relive all the experiences you have in several hundred emails (especially if you have as loving a family as I have). People are genuinely interested in new experiences and everyone wants to know, first hand, what happened. If you can direct people to a blog, a standard story that acts as the answer to that question, you can save yourself a lot of repetitive story telling. Couple with that, your family gets more than just the Cliff's Notes version of your trip, as my entries about toilets and pants have shown. Erika has said, several times, that this blog really helps her feel more connected to me when I am gone. When people come to a space to read your adventures, especially the mundane ones, it feels as if I were sitting there right now telling you how my day has been (today, if you are interested, was pretty good). That's really what elbows itself into the cracks in relationships, creating large fissures than need be there: disconnectedness. When something is missed, eventually that part of you grows numb and a certain level of complacency creeps into the relationship (this is particularly true for intimate relationships, more so than familial relationships). This blog prevents that sort of complacency from setting in. I couple this blog with my obsessive picture-taking, uploaded to my Facebook account, and it's almost like my loved ones are here.

So that's that. Take it for what it's worth, but these are really the only seven things I would grab if my apartment set on fire. Everything else (a car, a phone, my DVDs and books) I could live fine without. Without the above, I would be, in more than one sense, lost.

Random Thoughts While Buying Pants

My brother-in-law Jason once told me that he finds the random stuff I write about interesting, and intimated that he might even find it more interesting than reading about bigger events that happen in my stay here. This blog, in light of that, is for him and those like him.

After mass, it was too nice to just walk back home. Anticipating that I would feel this way, I had packed a book and my note taking supplies, and after church, I went to The Cabin, a little cafe that I am growing rather fond of. The Cabin was sitting on the sunny side of the street at this time of the day, so I took a seat outside, ordered a roll with turkey and cranberry and a mug of tea. I read The System of Comics sipped my tea, and watched the people parade by me on the street.

Recently, I had gone to the Gregynog conference where I became fast friends with a group of MA students, primarily all of whom were British (some Welsh, some English). There, another American and I were ribbed for saying "pants" instead of "trousers," and the way we say "pants;" me, more so than Aaron, because of the Chicago accent I put on my a's (the same short /a/ sound as in "mat" or "pat"). I still contend that saying "sleeping trousers" is strange, but I was outnumbered.

They also laughed every time I said, "sandwhich," which phonetically sounds like "sammich." These same British people pronounce the /h/ in "herbs," and get annoyed when people (read: me) pronounce the /h/ in "Buckingham Palace." The more I talk to the British, the more I realize they have a strange relationship with the letter /h/.

At any rate, I realized, as I ruminated changing my vocabulary to include "trousers," that I needed some lower-body clothes that were not bluejeans. I own a lot of blue shirts, and wearing blue over blue makes me look, well, too blue. I try to avoid doing that as much as possible. Usually, I have a few pairs of brown, green or khaki colored pants (I'm sorry, trousers just sounds wrong) that I use for the plethora of blue shirts I own. Unfortunately, the one pair of flat front chinos I own (does it raise questions about my sexuality that I know they were chinos?) had breathed their last, and I needed some dress-casual, non-blue colored pants. The only other pair of brownish pants I own are corduroys, and with the warmer weather, they have become increasingly uncomfortable.

The short of it: I needed new trousers.

So I wandered into town, and found a clothing store. The men's section was on the second floor, and featured a small sections of non-denim leg coverings. One thing became immediately apparent: British men really like pants with lots of adornments. Most of the section was dominated by various colored jeans (mostly dark), and almost all of them had hundreds of cargo-style pockets dotting the legs. Often times there would be a big pocket with a smaller pocket sewn onto the outside. Even when cargo pants were popular in America, I avoided the super cargo-pants that had far too many pockets than one man should need. I try to restrain myself to a number of pocket that serve utilitarian purpose: I need two upfront for my keys, money and hands; I need two in the back for my wallet and iPod. Other than that, I find little reason for other pockets. British trouser makers disagree, evidently.

Beside covering their pants with tons of storage, they had a tendency to use really light colored thread on the material to highlight the number of pockets. Which seems ostentatious to me, as if to say: look at me! I'm clearly important to need so many pockets! It had the odd effect of turning the legs of the pants into a mosaic of material.

I find one small rack of greyish-brown pants tucked in the corner, and found a pair of 34 - Longs. If anyone has seen me turning my track career, they know that I am mostly legs. Having watched me do hurdles or long jump, one might assume that I had a second set of knees up near the middle of my chest, that connect directly below my shoulders. This has made buying pants really difficult. Especially since, until recently, I had been very slender, and needed pants that were longer than they were wide (a very unAmerican tendency).

When I left for Wales, I was a 34 W/32 I (far more American than when I was a freshman in high school and wore a 29 W/32 I). Putting on the pants at the clothing store in downtown Aberystwyth, I realized something sort of exciting: I can now wear the same pants I wore at the end of high school/beginning of college: 32 W/32 I. This was exciting indeed, as that was when I felt healthiest in my life. It seems having less food laying around my house and needing to walk up and down a hill to get essentials has done some good for me.

Another realization hit me: British like tight pants on men. Unfortunately, the one pair of pants that were unbedecked by pockets were straight leg, skinny jeans for men. I was suddenly faced with a choice: buy pants covered in pockets, or pants that highlight exactly how skinny I am. I chose neither, and left the store disappointed.

To make myself feel better, I bought an Magnum Classic ice-cream bar. Those people at the Magnum ice-cream bar company really know what they are doing when it comes to ice-cream bars. I usually hate ice-cream bars, but this was delicious.

I had also needed some groceries, so I walked over to the Co-op Grocery store, choosing quality over frozen food. On my way there, I passed a department store in which I had purchased most of my kitchen gadgetry. I bet the sell pants here, I thought, and went in expected to be surrounded by skinny chinos and uber-cargo jeans. Thankfully, they had a few pairs of flat-front, wider legged, casual dress pants. With a sigh of relief, I bought two: a grayish-brown pair, and a greenish-brown pair. Very earth-toney. After I got my groceries and walked home, I realized that it had been, overall, an eventful day.

Gregynog

This weekend, I participated in my first ever academic conference, and I could have done worse than the University of Wales Postgraduate Conference at the Gregynog House west by northwest of Aberystwyth. This is a remodeled country house that has all the old world charm of rural Wales.

The house is owned by Aberystwyth University and is used exclusively for these type of events. The Film, Drama, TV, Radio and Performance Studies conference was held there a few weeks prior, and the School of Dentistry were there at the same time as we were. There are a few conference rooms, an impressive library, a cafe, and hundreds of bedrooms that housed all of us.

It wasn't a particularly big conference: two panel sessions with two parallel panels per sessions and four papers per session for a total of 16 presentations. The whole shebang took around 24 hours. However, it felt like it took a lot longer.

This is mostly because Gregynog is sort of a land that time forgot. It is so far outside any recognizable town that most of my fellow presenters lost cellphone reception about twenty minutes prior to arriving. The house sits in the middle of 750 acres (1.172 square miles) of rolling hills and fields, and is surrounded by farmland for a good ten miles in any direction. When the bus left us there in the courtyard, we were literally stranded in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing except sheep and farms. This set the stage for the running gag about our lives suddenly being a horror movie. No one was to leave in anything smaller than groups of three.

The house looked really old, but in reality was remodeled to look much older. Regardless, it looked like a house that was owned by the gentry back in the day. Most walls had elaborate wall paper or paint schemes. Some rooms, like the one where we had tea, or Lizzie and Steph's bed room, was bedecked in ornately carved, dark wood paneling. It was the sort of place, as Aaron suggested, that made one look for secret passages in the walls. We may have spent some time during a tea break knocking on panels.

My room, shared with Matt from Bangor, was off the courtyard. Sadly, it looked much like any other room at any hotel that one might stay in. I was afforded the luxury of an en suite bathroom, with a full shower. It's a tough call: quaint charm or comfort. I spent some time with a group of people in one of the more majestically appointed bedrooms, and honestly I think that was enough. The next day, I liked being able to walk across the room to my large bathroom to take a shower.

The conference itself was impressive for how small a sample size it had from which to pull presenters. Everyone there was a postgraduate student in one of the former University of Wales' English Departments. The schools represented were: Bangor, Swansea and Aberystwyth. Evidently, Cardiff couldn't be bothered to join us.

I was part of the first panel that included Jamie and Ollie's presentation on metanyms and George Saunder's fiction; Aaron Poppleton's presentation on the role that the book as a physical object plays in literature, using Seasame Street's There's a Monster at the End of this Book and Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions; and Ikhlas Hadi's presentation on romanticized necrophilia in versions of Snow White. My presentation on the role space plays in comic narratives made strange bed fellows with these presentations, but there was a thin red string of multimodality that ran through the entire presentation.

The keynote speaker for day one was Dr. Matthew Francis from Aberystwyth who spoke on Arise Evans and his role as an unreliable narrator. Dr. Francis is writing a new novel through Evan's eyes, using his semiprophetic texts and his strange life as the backdrop.

Between sessions, a group of us wandered around the grounds. We attempted to find what was labeled as a lily pond on our map. On our way, there was a gate that lead into a sheep field, and Ikhlas just had to pet one of the sheep standing nearby. She made her way into the field, and the two lambs watched were with suspicion, baa-ing concernedly and chewing the low scrub grass more slowly. If she moved too quickly, the two would flinch and make to take off. She got pretty close to the typically skittish animals before a low gutteral baa-ing was heard to our left. From no where came charging, literally charging, a white sheep with revenge in its eyes. The two lambs made a wide arch around Ikhlas, who wisely decided to run from the field, and huddled behind the huge mother sheep. With that excitement behind us, we continued down the path towards the lily pond.

Which was not much of a lily pond, and more of a swamp. It's a little early in the spring yet for the lilies to be in full bloom or for the wildlife to eat the delicious green algae that covered the majority of the shallow pond. What we found, then, was an algae filled puddle filled with dead reeds. With a disappointed sigh, we made our way back.

The house staff provided us with three meals: dinner the day we arrived, and breakfast and lunch the day we left. Dinner was pretty good: beef wellington served with rice and a roasted root and pepper vegetable mixture. The portion size was typically British, and a little smaller than I would have liked, especially as far as the beef was concerned. The breakfast the next morning was a traditional English big breakfast: bacon, sausage, hash browns, beans (which I opted out of), and fried eggs. There was toast, cereal and fresh fruit. Lunch was a spicy chicken wrap and salad, which was surprisingly delicious. I had never been a huge fan of wraps, but these were really tasty. And of course, tea. There were two tea services that came complete with cakes and biscuits. I have decided that I love this tradition, and need to figure out how to install that experience in my home life. It will require ready access to scones.

I was sad to leave the house after my short trip out there. On the bus ride home through the mountainous countryside, the other presenters and I talked about living out in such a place. I could see myself living in the middle of nowhere, miles from civilization, taking my dog out for a walk in the south east fields in the morning to watch the sun rise over the mountains, and then again in the west fields to watch the sun set. I wonder what I could that didn't involve to much manual labor and would allow me to live in such a place...

Exciting News

When I was applying to Aberystwyth University, some people were astonished that I would pay to get my PhD, when so many schools will offer assistantships and grants to pay for someone to attend school. In America, I would agree, which was a large reason I turned down an acceptance to the University of Washington that came without any funding. The price tag there was roughly $50,000 for tuition and living expenses. Some of that, of course, would be offset by the job I might get. Still the school suggested that going to the University and living in Seattle would have cost close to $50,000 a year. With the possibility of a six-year program, I was looking at roughly $300,000 dollars in debt when I finished. This is a staggering number, and one that would have made many future plans null and void (like owning a new car or any sort of house).

The British schooling system, until recently, has been free. About five years ago or so, with the economy dipping, the University system was forced to strap a price tag onto the value of an education. Per year, British students pay between £3000 and £3460, depending on when they were accepted (the price is locked for the duration of one's stay). The current tuition is £3460 which is, as of today, about $5,318. From where I am, this is a surprisingly cheap price tag for what is almost certainly necessary for a meaningful job in America. My British friends are outraged that they have to pay at all.

And that price, £3460, is the British citizen's price, or if you come from a European Union country. Most of the European countries are part, save oddly, Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland; several of the newer Balkan countries, like Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania and a good chunk of the former Soviet states are either excluded or have chosen not to join. I'm told that the biggest concern here is often financial, and with the Soviet countries, there is a lot of concern about kowtowing to the West by joining the EU. Belarus, for example, is called a Republic, but is run like a communist country, with a state owned economy; Alexander Lushanko has been described by the rest of Europe as being a bit of a dictator. Not a likely candidate to join the No Dictatorship/No Communist Club (recently, they have been more interested in joining up with Russia anyways, another non-EU country; also, clicking the above link will take you to the English version of the Internet available to Belarussians). Turkey, Croatia and (here is a mouth-full) The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia are candidate countries, and will soon have access to the impressively powerful Euro currency (which, if given trends, will soon over take the Great Britain Pound; as of today, the rate was 1 pound = 1.14 euro).

Non-EU tuition to Aberystwyth is a paltry £8870 pounds (roughly, as of today, $13,634). Because my time here will be three, maybe four years at most, I will be paying significantly less than an unfunded American school. In fact, the total for a three year course here is ten thousand less than a year at Washington ($40,902 to $50,000). With the option of two unfunded schools, it made more financial sense to pack up, leave the country and relocate to the Welsh countryside.

Then, yesterday, I got the exciting news to which this blog refers: I won the Aberystwyth International Postgraduate Research Studentship Competition, which covers the difference between the non-EU tuition, and the UK/EU tuition, a savings of £5410 pounds a year or about $8,314. And, happily, if I continue to progress academically, I will get this award to cover the three years I am here, saving £16,230 or about $24,942 (almost half the price tag for a year at University of Washington).

To qualify for the competition, the University had to submit your proposal to the University, and the University selected up to six to grant this award. Originally, I was told that the fund was canceled due to money issues, so I resigned myself to paying the higher price tag. Yesterday, I received a letter that said, "Recent developments with this year's (2009-2010) AIPRS awards have resulted in changes that have only just been confirmed. I am pleased to inform you that you have been successfully in securing one of our AIPRS awards this year. This award will cover the difference between the Home (UK/EU) tuition fees and the relevant Overseas (non-EU) tuition fees and is tenable for the first year, subject to satisfactory academic progress. This fee difference is for the current session from January 2010 to July 2010 and hence the value of your AIPRS award for the coming year will be £3,094." If I am reading this correctly, the award was retrospectively awarded, and saves me money this year as well.

According to the letter, "The standard of this year's AIPRS competition was particularly high. To have been nominated by the Department of English and Creative Writing is a reflection of the esteem in which they hold your academic ability and potential for research. I must congratulate you on this achievement." Having been canceled, I assumed my chances at this were past. I feel, and this might be some pompous jackassery speaking here, that my proposal must have made a mark on some people, for them to give me money halfway through my first term here, rather than just bank the money for next year's award.

At any rate, I am pretty excited about this, and promptly added it as a line on my visa. I take this as a bit of validation. I get a lot of strange looks when I tell people that I am writing about comic books, even stranger looks when people find out I am writing about comic books for my PhD. I more often than not get this question: "You can do that?" What this award says to me is that, yes, in fact, one can do that, and one can get money that others are not allowed, if one does it well. I feel slightly bad that some of the students I took my writing class with, who are looking to actually better the world, don't get this money. But, then again, I think I will still sleep pretty comfortably.

We Break for Easter

In American Universities, we get one week off in the Spring and the Fall, a month for Christmas and roughly three months in the Summer. I thought that was excessive, and often times revel to my corporate friends about how much time I get off, especially when I was paid for it (which was some time ago). Here, the British really know how to take a break. Easter break, or Spring break as the secular people call it, has been going on for a week and a half now. My normally bustling house has been strangely quiet as just me and my Irish housemate have been knocking around in this open space for all this time. Recently, his girlfriend has come around, so now I find myself with even more time alone.

Couple that with my supervisor's abrupt vacation, I find myself with nothing but time on my hands. Luckily, I work four days a week, three of which for five hours at a time, otherwise, I am certain I would have gone on a killing spree using a pillowcase full of doorknobs, just to give myself something to do.

With all this time, I have needed to find something to do. I thought that my collection of DVDs (two 144 disc binders full of DVDs) would have lasted me a good chunk of this time, but I have watched almost all of them. The other day, on Easter no less, I watched Hotel Rwanda. Nothing celebrates Spring like the senseless genocide of nearly 1,000,000 Tutsi Rwandans. Some of my more favorite movies I have watched several times, including Iron-Man and the X-Men trilogy of movies. I watched Squidbillies (season 1 and 2), Metalocolypse (season 1 and 2), The Venture Bros. (season 1, 2, and 3), Heroes (season 1 and 2), Frisky Dingo (season 1 and 2) and Robot Chicken (season 1, 2, and 3). There are two movie theaters in Aberystwyth, and between the two of them, there are two screens. Total. I saw the movie at the Commodore, which leaves Alice in Wonderland. That is my exciting trip out on Thursday.

I read the four novels I bought and most of my comic collection. I started taking books from the library to read, and right now am making my way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson (which, though it is not my cup of tea, I find that I don't hate it). I have yet to turn on the stacks of criticism books that I need to get through, but I have thought long and hard about it recently. Come Friday, when no one is in the house, and I don't work, I might resort to reading dense tomes about literary theory.

All in all, I am running out of things to pass the time.

This sudden influx of free time would seemingly give me more time to explore the Aberystwyth, and certainly I would do that if two things were not true: 1) I work during the daylight hours four days of the week, 2) it has rained every day for the last two weeks or so. I want to make my way up Pen Dinas, the southern hill on the border of Aberystwyth, and possibly walk over to the science college, just to walk in-land a ways. There has not been a single day, though, since mid-March where it has been dry enough to venture outside for an extended period of time. Come this weekend, hell or high water, I am walking somewhere I can take pictures.

In the last few days, as my housemate is kept busy by his girlfriend, I have had to look for ways to occupy my time late at night and into the wee hours of the morning. My housemate had idly suggested that I check out the BBC's Wonders of the Solar System on the BBC i-player. To this point, because of a sternly worded letter threatening me with judicial punishment, I have avoided watching any TV because I don't own the very expensive TV license. The letter included the BBC i-player, but my housemates have assured me that no one will know if I do it. Desperate for some noise, I tuned into the Wonders of the Solar System and have not be disappointed.

Brian Cox, an English physicist with a penchant for well-worn Henley shirts, goes around and tries to find evidence for what it must be like in space or on other planets. So far, he has talked about the wonders of our sun, which is five billion years old and has another five billions years left before it expands and devours us all in a hellish firestorm of rapidly expanding super hot gases; and the likelihood of "life" on other planets.

I put life in quotes, because this is not complex lifeforms like you or I. Or even like any organisms that you or I can see on a regular basis with the naked eye. He was positing situations in which there might be bacteria on other planets, particularly in the caves on Mars and on the ice-moon Europa which orbits Jupiter (oddly enough, in the Universe's love for symmetry, counter to Europa, a completely frozen ball of water with 100 times as much liquid water on its surface as the surface of Earth, possibly teeming with life, is a completely volcanic moon, Io, that shoots plumes of hot magma 190 miles into the air).

Life, it seems, can exist with three conditions: 1) a collection of elements (humans are 40 elements); 2) a power source (for this solar system, most organisms get their juice from the sun); 3) somewhere to exist (here, and elsewhere, Cox suggests, this requires water). Water seems to be the one source lacking from other planets (save Europa, which is technically a moon, but is covered with water, surrounded by a smooth, shifting shell, like an enormous Gobbstopper orbiting the largest planet in the solar system). Mars, judging by the surface, was once covered with water, but since the planet died and the atmosphere dissipated, it all flew off into space. Cox then suggests that some water might be frozen in the caves, safe from the solar winds that are ripping the planet to shreds. On Earth, there are some species of bacteria that can exist in ice, secreting something to melt a tiny water bubble a few microns across in which to exist, so maybe there is something similar in the caves on Mars.

But that is how most good space-horror movies start. People go into the caves on the surface of some new planet and experience horrors unknown to Earth. Largely because of this fear, the caves remain unexplored by the dozens of electronic rovers that dot the surface of the planet.

So, 3000 miles away from home, with nothing but time on my hands, I find myself transported light years away from where I actually am, proving that, though I cannot leave (due to poor planning and lack of funds), I can still journey to far off places on my holiday. Just in a slightly lamer way.

Size and Scale

I took the train to London from Aberystwyth, and with transfers it took me approximately 5 hours to get from point A (on the western coast) to point B (close-ish to the eastern coast). I cut a wide swath through the fatter parts of the East-West parts of the UK, and the train runs in less than a straight line from Aberystwyth to London. Drawing a straight line through the area, I cover approximately 212 miles (the train covers about an extra 30 or 40 miles to hit the more lived in parts of the Midlands, going through Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Coventry). Having spent some time in the southernmost lands of Illinois, this sort of travel didn't seem all that strenuous to me, and I could imagine going there and coming home in a day if pressed, especially if a good chunk of the travel was done on train.

My British friends (I found out British encompasses all the countries in the United Kingdom, but is seldom used by anyone other than the English; for lack of a better term, I will refer to the denizens of Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the Channel Islands as British) do not see that as a short trip. After all, you go across two whole countries. You cover a good chunk of the British mainland. That is an all-day adventure.

At the pub tonight, it dawned on me why there is such a difference in attitude about travel. I was talking about this time I drove with my mother and brother from Chicago to Smithtown, New York. The trip took about 14 hours, and we passed through parts of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, a good chunk of Pennsylvania, some of New Jersey and New York (state), a total distance, according to Google, of 844 miles, nearly four times the distance I traveled to get to London. I regularly traveled from Carbondale to Chicago, a trip of nearly 330 miles, and one time I did the whole trip, there and back, in a day. It wasn't the most fun day in my life, but it was something I did. The thing is, these distances are relative. The trip to Carbondale, or the trip to Smithtown, these are trips across part of a larger whole that is America. The trip from Aberystwyth to London covers the entirety of the country.

It is an issue of scale. According to Wikipedia, the entire UK takes up 94,060 square miles of space, including the water. The land masses of Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England and the islands is approximately 92,800 square miles. To put that in perspective, there are ten states in America that are bigger than that. The entire UK wouldn't even crack the top ten states in land mass, falling somewhere between Oregon and Idaho. An interesting side note, Michigan came in at 96, 716 square miles, but over 14% of the total area is water, and when that was subtracted, it dropped to somewhere around the low 80,000s. This, though, is the kicker of all stats: the total land area (not without water, so usable land) of the 50 United States is 38 times that of the UK. That is, you could fit 38 Northern Irelands, Scotlands, Wales, Englands and the islands into America with a little room to spare. 3,537,438 square miles. Three and a half MILLION square miles.

My British friends often complain about the size of large cities in the UK, where London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast and Edinburgh are really about it for large scale cities. Manchester, Aberystwyth (to an extent), Coventry and others fall into a medium sized cities, and then there are a smattering of smaller towns that have some recognition: Bristol, Dover, York, etc. In America, there are hundred of major cities (50 captitals, and not all of those are even that large). New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the three largest cities, have about as many people as the six largest cities in the UK. There are less people in all of Wales than in the city of Chicago by almost a third (though, one shop keeper informed Erika that there were 10,000,000 breeding ewes in Wales, and several million more lambs uncounted; so the old joke that there are more sheep than people in Wales is accurate to an almost 4 - 1 ratio).

The size of America has shaded the way I view travel here. Los Angeles to New York is roughly 2,900 miles. Identifying with all of that space, all of those people, the size of it all, will shade the way that one sees anything.

Through New Eyes

In more ways than I thought possible, I have come to realize I am quite isolated. Obviously, in that I am three thousand miles from home and familiar things, and in more geographical ways, in that I am both surrounded by nothing but Welsh countryside and, more globally, a lot of water (as the UK is an island; but, technically, we could all claim to be isolated, as every land mass is surrounded by water - the UK is just a smaller land mass than most).

With Erika's visit, though, I realized that I was developing my British identity in isolation, as well. Certainly, as an American, I am experiencing and registering Wales and the UK life differently than my UK counterparts. As a full-time student, one who is here for the long haul, I am even developing more of a sense of connectedness with my surroundings than the other US students that I have met who are leaving in three months. When Erika was here, though, I was able to see, through her, the way that I was constructing my reality here abroad.

There were a couple of extenuating circumstances that allowed this to happen. For one, I am a PhD student, and most of the American students, and a good chunk of the other international students are here on short term stays, studying for a semester as part of a study-abroad program. A lot of these students, then, take similar classes and have clustered together in this way. Secondly, when international students are here for an extended period of time, the school tends to lump them together. While I might not have lived with other Americans, had I come here in October, as originally planned, I would have lived with other foreign students. I would have associated with this group of similar-minded individuals. Because I came here in December, I was put with three first-years, a second-year and an MA student. I have little in common with most of these kids (particularly the first- and second-year students, but recently, the MA student and I have gotten along swimmingly), and thus didn't really associate with them during the first formative months here.

In essence, through a series of fluke occurrences, I find that I have discovered Wales, Aberystwyth and London all on my own. I landed here alone, I traveled through England and Wales here alone, and I set myself up here alone. Most of the first three months here, I walked around alone, I ate alone, I shopped alone and so forth.

Once Erika was here, this became very apparent to me. As we walked along, most of the anecdotes or informative bits I knew I discovered on my own, were colored only by my interpretation and were then shading the way that she discovered London, England, Wales and Aberystwyth.

I don't know where I am going with this. Maybe, because it's Easter, my family is going about doing family things, Erika is back at home, my housemates are almost all gone (Breannian is still here, but his girlfriend arrives today, and he will be otherwise occupied), and my adviser is gone on break, I am feeling a little more isolated than usual.

London Calling: Part 2

After touring the plundered, national artifacts of countless civilizations, Erika and took a short Tube ride down to the Tate Modern, an art museum along the south end of the Thames. The Tate Modern is one of two British Art Museums (there are four Tates; the others in Liverpool and St. Ives) under the Tate name, the other called simply Tate Britain. The Modern is an amazingly huge building with a massive brick obelisk jutting out from the middle of the front wall.
"Now that is a Tower," said Erika, as we approach the Tate Modern from the Millennium Bridge footpath.
The previous night, having seen the Tower of London, Erika was a little disheartened by the lack of a Tower. The Panopticon style obelisk was certainly more tower-like, but it was completely empty. A huge tower for the sake of a huge tower.

The museum features work in the post-impressionistic art period and forward. Picasso, Warhol, later Monet, Klandinsky, the Expressionist, the Futurist and other sorts of strange art movements were all well represented in the sprawling galleries. Sadly, my two favorite German Expressionist (Paul Klee and Gustav Klimt) were left out, but I did get to see the insanely vibrant work of Wassily Klandinsky. I will admit it: I don't get modern and contemporary art. My tastes in art tend to err on the side of Impressionism. I could look at Monet's "Haystack" series for hours. A lot of the art was very strange. One room featured massive cartoon animal heads in various bright colors, cut from glass and steel. The animal heads, eight in all, were simple silhouettes ranging between 8 and 12 feet tall. Another room features a huge table and four chairs. The table was built just like any real table would be built, but was instead close to 15 feet tall, complete with chairs. There was one exhibit that featured sticks with various primary colored bands that ran up the length of the stick. Apparently, the artist would take his sticks to other galleries (back in his hay day) and "install" the project in rival artists' shows. The sticks, the sign said, expressed the freedom of art as they could be "installed" in a variety of way: leaned against the wall, laying down, nailed to the wall at various angles, etc.

It wasn't an entirely horrible experience, and I left with a slightly better appreciation for modern art than I arrived, but there were still a fair amount of head-scratching moments. Erika was happy, as she loves abstract art and the Tate Modern is stuffed to the gills with plenty of that.

While at the Tate Modern, we wanted to get some food, and wandered to the top floor where there is a restaurant. Erika expressed some concern as museum cafeteria food can sometimes be a little sketchy. This was no ordinary cafeteria and was more of a full service restaurant. Erika got a cold salmon salad and I ordered an assorted smoked meat plate with salad and a crusty roll so that I could make a really highfalutin sandwich. The food was beyond description good. We later found out that there was a dinner menu that we were too early for, but still, I could not have asked for better food. We followed that up with some desserts and tea (Erika ordered an apple crumble, and I got a scone with fruit preserves and clotted cream).

What makes eating at the Tate Modern that much better than even the best food was the view. We overlooked the Thames with St. Paul's Cathedral in the distance. The restaurant is on the seventh floor, so most of the skyline can be seen, but we were a few tables from the window so our view was slightly more limited. If ever in London, and you would like a delicious, albeit expensive, meal with a killer view, than the Tate Modern is certainly for you.

After that, we wandered by St. Paul's Cathedral, which looks a lot like the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. It was one of the more massive buildings I have ever had the privileged of walking by. We had hoped to catch mass there the next day, but we couldn't find the schedule. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to get in, but if the outside is any indication of the grandeur of the inside, I am sure it would have been a spiritually enlightening experience.

This little detour, and a miscalculation of time, gave us a rather hurried tour through Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square. We had hoped to see both, but needed to get to Haymarket St. for Waiting for Godot. We essentially ran through both to get to Leicester Square and Haymarket St. just in time for the show. We missed the first two minutes or so, and had to spend a chunk of the first act in the lobby watching through the glass. At an opportune moment, they hurried us in. Our seats were in the back row, against the glass at the far back of the first balcony. That said, we could see everything on stage, unhindered. Really, I doubt our experience would have been much worse sitting any closer.

The show was, simply put, amazing. Sir Ian McKellen is an unrivaled actor, and did a solid job as Vladimir. Roger Rees, who apparently grew up in Aberystwyth, was a nice compliment as Estragon. Matthew Kelly was a little overblown as Pozzo, but Pozzo is an overblown character. Ronald Pickup did an amazing job as Lucky, which is not an easy role to play. The treat, though, was McKellen. It is a rare opportunity that one gets to see such an amazing actor play a role he was seemingly born to play.

Erika was a little unsure of the play at first, and my description might not have helped.
"What's this show about."
"Two guys and a tree. They wait for Godot."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Really. Well, there are two other guys, but for the most part, it's two guys doing things waiting for Godot."
"Oh....good."
That said, she genuinely enjoyed the experience. Beckett's play is at times funny, and at times cripplingly sad. The whole time, though, it is distinctly absurd. McKellen, though, did a nice job of playing the absurdity down so that even though nothing was making sense, it all seemed as if it could have happened. It is a show that is closing soon, but if you happen to get an opportunity to see McKellen in anything on stage, I suggest that you take it, and without hesitation. You will not be left disappointed.

In the middle of the show, the oddest thing happened. At most American sporting events, particularly baseball, there are roving men with satchels of food, selling hotdogs, soda, beer, ice-cream and some small novelties. At the intermission of the show, two young women came down the isles and sold ice-cream cups at three pounds a pop. This is, evidently, a tradition, and I am not one to let an experience go by. While Erika used the restroom, I bought us a double chocolate chip ice-cream cup, and we enjoyed it together waiting for the show to come back on. It was surprisingly nice to have that refreshment served.

After the show, we meandered in the rain over to Piccadilly Circus, which is like the Time Square of London. Unlike Times Square, though, the buildings were really old. It was an odd juxtaposition to see these ancient buildings where I am sure old businesses and apartments were once held bedecked with huge TV screens and light-up billboards. Unfortunately, due to the rain, exhaustion and the darkness, we only managed to take a quick look before we headed back to Acton. The next day, we were on our way back to Aberystwyth.

London Calling: Part 1

I was in London, staying not too far from the city center, for three hectic days in 1996. Instantly, I fell in love with the city. The old world style, the history, the pace: everything seemed to speak directly to my soul. Of course, I was sixteen and had similar feelings in Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Germany and parts of Austria. Years later, though, after the frenzied tour had faded the call to London persisted. I returned to London for four days in 2004/2005 to celebrate the New Year. Instantly, even while still in the airport, that familiar feeling was rekindled, and then as an adult, I decided that I was going to live there. No matter what it took, I was going to move out there and I was going to be a Londoner.

Of course, life has an odd way of detouring you around your dreams. The situation at the time was not very conducive to moving to London: I had a job, it looked like grad school was going to be a second dream deferred, and I was in the middle of a long-term relationship that, my girlfriend at the time, made clear was not about to be moved. I gave myself one more attempt to apply to school, with the hopes that for my PhD I would move to England. Somehow I got into Southern Illinois University, and after three years there my situation was different: I was single, without any real job attachments, and needed a school for PhD work.

I applied was going to apply to 15 school (I ended up applying to 14), and in a moment of fancy, sent an email off to Aberystwyth seeing if they would be interested in an American studying comic books. To make a long story much shorter: I was accepted here, and my dream of living in London was this much closer.

Now, Wales is not really England, and Aberystwyth is a far cry from London. Depending on who you listen to, London has between seven million people and twelve million people (the discrepancy arises between the definition of where the city stops and what metropolitan areas should be counted). As a city is in the top 25 largest; as a metropolitan area it is in the top 20. Wikipedia, that bastion of unquestionable truth, claims that 1,130 people per square kilometer, which makes it more crowded that New York, but less so than Los Angeles (and a far cry from Karachi, Pakistan with roughly 10,700 people per square kilometer, or the top three most populated Indian cities). It should be noted that all three of my trips to London have not strayed much further than Zone 3, so my understanding of London is hardly encyclopedic. Still, this is as close as I have been in my life, and for now I feel good about it.

Patiently, I waited for someone to come visit me so I would have a good excuse to be released into London again, and Erika's trip in March was just the opportunity I was waiting for. She arrived on Friday morning, red-eyed from the overnight flight, and we stayed until Sunday afternoon. Again, like when I was sixteen and twenty-five, I felt London's pull calling me to move there for good.

We stayed in Acton Town (the Piccadilly Line and District Line have tube stops there), which was the furthest from the city center I had been. Initially, I was a little nervous. Assuming this city was no different than other cities, I was worried the further we got from the city center, the less safe the neighborhood would be. We picked The Windmill out in Acton after careful consideration from Hostelworld.com, which suggested it was in a safe part of town. Still, the Piccadilly Line from Leicester to Acton passes through some pretty sketchy parts of town, and I reserved opinion until we were settled. While I doubt I would leave my doors unlocked at night, I really like Acton. There were a wide variety of accents and nationalities which made me feel less like I was in a stranger in a strange land. The people were genuinely nice, particularly at The Windmill. Feeling peckish one night, we went to a pizza joint down the street from our room, and the young man at the counter forgot to charge us for the two sodas we ordered. While this could have been an issue, he gave us the sodas and let us leave with a smile.

We went to church that Sunday, and the mass was pleasant. The children, which were plentiful, were taken out of the church during the majority of the readings, and when they returned, half a dozen of them presented the new information they learned to the congregation. The people around us were very warm and friendly, warmly shaking hands during the sign of peace with very welcoming smiles.

Though Acton was nice, we didn't spend much time there. Most of our time was spent in the city center. That Friday night, after we took care of the bee in our room (see the last blog entry), we took off for some night sight seeing. We went to the Tower of London, the Tower Bridge, and walked along the Thames. I was reminded of an article that claimed one of the Queen's of England was presented to Inuits as a present. In her free time, she used to watch the Inuits hunt swans on the Thames not far from where we were walking. The same article claimed that these Inuits were the inspiration for Frankenstein's monster. I tried my damnedest to imagine what that must have looked like.

True to form, I was asked for directions from a group of Italian tourists. When they approached Erika and I, in perfect English, they asked where Trafalgar Square was. I had a vague recollection, and started off on an explanation that they needed to get to Charring Cross road. About three words into the sentence, I was stopped.
"Wait. We...Italians. Slower."
Luckily, Erika can understand some Italian from the years speaking Spanish, and between the three of us, we managed to tell them that we had no idea how to get where they were trying to get to.

The next day, we had grand aspirations to get up, go to Leicester Square early, get tickets to see Waiting for Godot, see some sights, return to see the show, and then finish with some quiet time in a local pub enjoying pub snacks. If you are in London, the TKTS booth sells discount tickets to see most shows, but the word on the street is one needs to get there early to get tickets to see the more impressive shows. Waiting for Godot is not everyone's cup of tea, so to speak, but this particular casting included Sir Ian McKellen of X-Men (Magneto) and Lord of the Rings (Gandolf) fame. One of my favorite actors from two of my favorite movie trilogies in my favorite play of all time: the trifecta of favorites. We returned from our adventures Friday with big plans.

As Hemingway said: "The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs." Saturday, when the alarm went off, getting out of bed was not an option. Erika was still in Central Standard Time, and I hadn't slept much in the two days prior to her arrival. We slept until nearly noon ("Come on," I said, "it's vacation."), and after a big breakfast at the pub, we made our way to Leicester Square. Tickets for Waiting for Godot were still available, and though Erika wanted to see Phantom of the Opera, I persisted. I promised she would not regret it.

After that we made our way to the British Museum. This museum is, of course, famous for pillaging treasures out of Egypt, Africa and other placed England traveled to in search of knowledge. Recently, especially in Egypt, there has been a cry for these treasures to be returned. Among the chunks of burial tombs, mummies, small coins and jewelry, the museum's marquee artifact is the Rosetta Stone. This stone tablet, with the same story written in three different languages, allowed for most modern translations of hieroglyphics. Inside the stone tablet, they found ancient, overpriced CD-ROMS that taught the early British explorers the ancient languages by the most advanced language acquisition software at the time.

Like the Mona Lisa, I found myself amazingly underwhelmed by the Rosetta Stone. It was less impressive than one might imagine. I always pictured a huge obelisk with enormous and meticulously detailed images engraved on the stone so black that light itself could not escape. In actuality, it was little bigger than a small table top at McDonalds. Due to several moves and being really, really old, the stone tablet was missing huge chunks, the largest of which was taken from the hieroglyphics story. The exhibit was mobbed. One small Asian man elbowed people out of the way making space for his enormous tripod and his long range SLR camera. Erika wanted to see it, so I pushed our way to the front and she was able to take a look.

What was more impressive was the collection of mummies that the museum had spanning all over the Mediterranean. There were mummies from Roman and Greek areas. Italian made mummies, and of course scores of Egyptian mummies. Despite having been on display for decades, these mummies were very well preserved. As were the enormous chunks of pyramids that dotted the museum floor, often times acting as entry ways, built right into the wall of the exhibit. Being among the remains of ancient societies, hundreds of years older than me, was really humbling. To bad Satan placed all of these tricks in the soil so that people would falsely believe the Earth is more than 6,000 years old. Nonetheless, these were some convincing lies.

To be continued...