I Prefer Showers

Over the weekend Vanessa Geil’s fiancée Sam came down from Edinburgh to watch the TX-OU game. I should tell you that before leaving home I actually purchased my first piece of UT paraphernalia ($9 t-shirt at Sam’s Club) in anticipation of the Red River Shootout, thinking that my display of collegial fanaticism might somehow influence the game. After all, this was my last season of UT football as an enrolled student (one can only hope…) and a victory was long overdue. We scoured London trying to find a pub broadcasting the game live, but apparently the World Cup qualifiers have a slightly higher viewership in Britain than American College Football, so we were forced to settle for a java applet on ESPN.com (totally lame). I suppose I could congratulate the Horns for preventing a slaughter and holding the Sooner offense back… but I won’t, because that’s loser talk! What really kills me is that they’re using Texans to defeat Texans… I mean, what is Oklahoma really? Take away natural gas exports and Oklahoma’s GDP is right up there with Giddings. If you tried to locate the centroid of ignorance and cultural waste in the North American continent, it would be 1.73 miles east of Stillwater. I HATE Oklahoma!

Sorry, I just needed to vent for a moment. Despite the loss, it was fun hanging out with Sam, and watching college football really cured my residual homesickness.



On Monday Shane, Erica, and I visited the Victoria and Albert museum, which sits across from the Paddington pad on the perimeter of Hyde Park. The museum was founded in 1852 to house art and design artifacts from the Great Exhibition of that year. The 145 galleries, containing four million exhibits, cover ten acres and spread over four floors. Like most London museums, there’s just too much to take in and you end up jogging past what would otherwise be landmark exhibits in the States, simply because you want to see sky after four hours. My favorite exhibit was the ‘plaster’ hall where the museum has amassed original plaster castings of all the great architectural and sculptural masterpieces from antiquity and the Renaissance (see above photo). In one of the massive rooms, dominated by Trajan’s Column, I managed to spot this little Norwegian gem (see photo below)… look familiar? This is a plaster casting from the tiny stave church I visited in Urnes, Norway (pop. 40), the ancestral home of one Alexander Soderberg – isn’t that incredible? I saw all the artistic wonders of Europe in about thirty minutes.



Tuesday Shane and I decided to check out the Roman enclave of Bath, site of the only geothermal hot springs in the United Kingdom (first photo below). The Romans believed that mysterious vapors emanating from the spring possessed unique recuperative powers, and the spa-resort of Sulis Aquis was built to capitalize on this belief. I got a good waft of the vapors and swear I smelt bromates, so I’m not sure what sort of healing the Romans expected – though I suppose skin irritants and free-radical carcinogens wouldn’t really concern lepers. We hopped on a huge double-decker tour bus, but since Shane and I were the only passengers, the tour guide sat next to us and gave us a conversational tour of the city. It really hit me how much my mom would love this place… all you do here is lounge around in spas and look at pretty flowers (second photo below). Bath is a relatively dense community surrounded by seven hills, and had there been any she-wolves nearby, I’m sure Romulus and Remus might have considered this a fine place to settle down.





Shane and I caught an afternoon train to Salisbury (of cafeteria lunchmeat fame) in order to see Stonehenge. Unfortunately, we arrived too late and missed the last bus to that mysterious stone circle, so we visited the Salisbury cathedral instead (photo below). How is it that unheralded little Salisbury managed to build such a magnificent structure? The cathedral contains one of only four remaining copies of the original Magna Carta grant; the British Library holds two and the final copy rests in the Lincoln cathedral. I knew that many of my friends back home were attending lectures while I romped through western England, so on the train ride back to London I assuaged my sense of guilt by catching up on my class reading assignments.



Thursday night I fly to Ireland where I’ll spend a couple days in Dublin and backpack through the countryside. I’ll keep you posted. Peace.