Thoughts of home

I woke up this morning and took a few seconds to inventory the contents of my room. I'm already judging what's staying and what's going on the plane with me in my two hulking suitcases, and it's become a common, if not daily, activity. The problem? I've still got about three months to go.

I honestly can't find a single complaint about life in recent days. The weather has been absolutely spectacular--sunny and up to 24 degrees Celsius, which, I'm told, is pretty swell. The parties are constant. In the last few weeks I've tried tapas, water aerobics (conducted completely in Dutch), and this strange beer and Coke mixture that's apparently popular in Germany. I've spent my mornings people-watching in a local park and dressed up as a box of sangria for a theme party. I've been to Den Haag, Den Bosch, Leiden, Groningen, and Katwijk, and booked trips to Krakow and London and Amsterdam (yes, again).

But my mind just can't seem to stay here. Maybe it's because stuff back in the States has been demanding my attention--housing (Voute!), class registration (thesis = scary!), summer work at the Robsham (Rocco!), looking at my unkempt hair in the mirror and wondering how humongous it'll become before I can get to Newbury Street and get it re-shaped into something less horrifying.

Another thought: perhaps I've become a locational monogamist. It really wasn't until this past semester that I made the conscious choice to make BC my home and BC'ers my second family, but dammit, I made that choice. It's hard for me to fall in love with a place, and doing it in six months is...difficult.

I know that it's done me a world of good to come here, but I think I've already learned what I need to learn. I'm ready to come home.




P.S. Update me on your adventures, dammit!

Party Down Under

The students are finally starting to arrive in the city, so it doesn't seem as though there should be tumbleweeds floating down the road everynight. Been going out almost everynight since I got here in one form or another. Keep convincing myself that it's not really alcoholism until AFTER college. Orientation for the whole university starts this week. Apparently, it's a major shitshow of freshman. On the brightside all these amazing New Zealand bands are coming including The Black Seeds, which Brett McKensie used to be a member of. I love concerts, so it should be lovely.
It's so weird not having school for so long. My actual classes don't start until March 2nd. The other day we had "course approval", which makes you actually appreciate AGORA and UIS. Imagine having to walk around to get professor's signatures next to each course. To make it worse they don't know when the courses are, but you find out at the end that they all are at the same fucking time. After 2 hours of struggling, with a killer hangover and an empty stomach. I had acheived NOTHING. I went back to my flat to take a breather and figure everything out. Eventually, I chose almost all new classes. It was also really weird for me, because at school my class schedule is usually completley figured out for me. I have a new found respect for all you A&S kids who actually have to decide which classes you are going to take! In the end I signed up for: NZ art history, a NZ english class, Maori History (first peoples of NZ), and Neurophysiology. I'm planning on dropping Neuro like it's hot if it's too hard. This is my underacheiving semester.

Last week, I went on a two day hike/camp about an hour south of Dunedin (the city I'm in, for those who are oh so behind). It was a lovely trip the scenery here is beyond amazing. We discussed the difficulties of chosing locations for shooting LOTR due to all the gorgeousnesss. All the New Zealand students have such a skewed view of Americans, since most of the americans who come here are super outdoorsey, and love hiking etc. It's quite humorous, since i would not say that those type of people make up a very large percentage of Americans.
I will try to post photos as soon as I get wireless!

Italia! (and other things)

SO...I leave tomorrow night for a 9-day sojourn in Italy! Yippee! I'm traveling with three other internationals in my program--two Americans and one Swede--and we're flying into Venice, training to Florence, and ending up in Rome just in time for the Chorale's visit. In case you haven't picked it up from all the exclamation points: I AM SO EXCITED.

It's been a while since I updated here, and when last I did I wasn't in the best of mindsets. I think it's safe to say that I'm out of the woods in that regard. I'm starting to form a close group of friends and just give less of a shit about the inevitable frustrations of European university infrastructure (I could go on for days about that, but it's probably best not to). It's strange and kind of cool to have so much free time: time to go to the 500-year-old pub in the center of town for hot cocoa, ride my bike down hidden back roads, amble around the weekly market, travel to sunny Italian cities, etc. I miss being busy--it makes me feel like I have some kind of purpose--but it's nice to take a step back and just live for the sake of living. But only for six months. More than that and my brain would atrophy and I'd go all "Awakenings" on you.

Enough idle chatter. Let's see some pictures!

There was some big important football match on Wednesday, and all these bars and screaming drunk hooligans appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the town center. My camera died before I could capture the action, but here's a typical Nijmegen sunset (depending, of course, on the sun being out...which doesn't happen often) for y'all to gaze upon.

More sunset-age. We decided to bike to Germany on a whim (it's only about 15 km away) and we stopped to take in a bit of scenery in Berg en Dal, the last town before crossing the border.

Apartments leading down to the Waal River. The architecture around these parts is pretty drab (it got bombed something serious in WWII and virtually all the buildings are from the early 1950s or later).

I live in a hallway (gang in Dutch) of 15 single rooms that share three bathrooms, three showers, and a kitchen. Last night, I attended my first gangfeest (corridor party). They charge 5 euro at the door and clear out virtually all the furniture. Picture the most crowded, disgusting Mod party you have ever attended. Then multiply it by 16. You have a gangfeest. Substances spotted on the floor: mud, beer, broken glass, still-smoldering cigarettes, a crying Polish girl, blood. Lots of blood. No wonder my shoes are absolutely destroyed...sigh.

This is probably more indicative of your average night in Nijmegen. All the Dutch people go home on the weekends, so Hoogeveldt, my dorm--and pretty much everywhere around the university--is absolutely silent until Monday afternoon. Ergo, all the students party during the week. We have an international student party each Tuesday at Cafe Piecken, a bar literally 30 feet from my door. Then there's Thursday night, which usually means getting toasted at Hoogeveldt and biking to a dance club in town. Yes, we bike to bars here. We bike everywhere. In the rain, in the snow, sober, hammered, whatever.

Carnival decorations are starting to go up around town. Carnival's a week-long celebration before Lent starts. Think Mardi Gras, but with more costumes. Nijmegen's a teeny little city, so the masses flock south to Maastricht for the mayhem. I can't go because I'll be in Italy (poor me), but apparently the mayor hands over the key to the city to the Prince of Carnival and anything goes until the end of the week. I'll be seeing some festivities in Venice, but I'm looking forward to hearing about the insanity that is Zuid-Nederland for the next few days.

I think that'll do it for now. I want to hear more about all your adventures, so update, dammit. Londoners: I'm looking at two long weekends in mid-May or Easter break for visiting purposes. Let me know what you'd prefer.

Love you! Miss you!

A Tangent

Spring Awakening. Raise your hands, those who have seen it.
Keep your hands up if you liked it.

Mmm, okay, knew a couple hands were going down...

Keep 'em up if you'd go see it again.



So today, after packing a bag with a few days of clothes and some of the books I want to take home, I realized that I needed to get out of the room and do something. Something fun, something that I won't have to think too hard about, and something that I know I'll enjoy. Taiming of the Shrew or Twelfth Night? Not tonight. Something at the National? Nothing playing that I haven't seen already, surprisingly. Something edgy and new that I only know a little about? Too much risk.
I ended up landing an on-stage ticket for Spring Awakening. I won't get all boring about the show itself - though I will say that its quite cool to see from onstage. I just want to mention that even though it was a significantly weaker performance in almost every regard (despite the same director, choreographer, and design team from NYC)... I still loved it.

We might disagree about the merits of the show itself but think broader; shows or music or something in general. Have you ever seen something that just resonated - and then you found out that it wasn't a fluke? It wasn't just the performances, it wasn't just the people I was with, it wasn't "where I was in life"...

A magnificent feeling, to be affirmed in that way. To walk away from seeing a show that I know just about inside and out and still feel great - still feel the way I did inside after the first time I saw it or heard it or read it.

Wheels down at 6:30 (tentatively) tomorrow. I hope to see those of you at home at the V-Day party - god, it would really be swell to see all of you.

Missing you all and headed to bed with a mixture of excitement, trepidation, and insanity - catch you on the flip side.

Cannes

Okay, so in the spirit of travel - which we've (well, the abroaders) have all done at least once now (and some of us are about to do again, whether or not it will be viewed in posterity as a good idea) - I have an idea.

Obviously, in April, I'll be traveling the European countryside and heading places various and sundry as well as hosting some various and sundry travelers. Anyone who'd like to join either of those adventures is more than welcome.

But the real question is...

Who wants to go to Cannes in May? It runs from the 13 to the 24 of May. I don't know when my finals are (the two I have will undoubtedly fall in that time frame, with my luck) but I'm absolutely going for at least a day or two. Think of it - we can go to CANNES. We can see the world premiere of Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds - for those who like Tarantino. We can see other movies that will undoubtedly be awesome! We can hob-knob with famous types. We'll be in the South of France in May - I've heard that's sort of what heaven is like. You know, from people who've died and come back... and believe in heaven...

Let's start planning soon.

That Other Post I Meant to Post

Due to EXTREME weather conditions, the London Underground has moved up your update schedule to provide you with the best possible service! A list of line closures will follow. All lines will be delayed. Your regular update service will continue as soon as the rails are cleared.

SO! In case anyone has a life and isn't following the London weather reports, the city is COVERED in snow! And they have NO IDEA what to do with it!!! After living in Boston for a few years, it's actually quite funny to see a whole city shut down because of 4 or 5 inches of snow. People were rushing around, woefully underdressed, disoriented, and completely unsure of how to proceed with this strange white stuff falling on them from the sky! They all seemed to be expecting some public service announcement explaining that the snow was just a blip in the system and Parliament would like to apologize for any inconvenience and to please return home and stay indoors until further notice as we're not sure what sort of effect this strange whiteness could have on the human body!

Classes today ended up becoming kind of optional, due to the fact that the teachers couldn't figure out how to get into school, so I walked to school and went to my first class in spite of wanting desperately to just ditch it and go explore the snowy city! After an hour and a half of not really doing anything for fear of getting so the people who couldn't make it to school wouldn't be behind, I decided that since I was kind of dying being inside... I SKIPPED A CLASS!!!! I know, shameshameshame! We sent you there to learn something useful, not to just go gallivanting off into the snowy wilderness that is London being covered in more frozen precipitation that it's seen in Years, BUT!!! I HAVE NO REGRETS!!! IT WAS WORTH IT!!!

I grabbed a muffin for lunch, hopped on the nearest working train, and headed off to find Buckingham Palace! Then I found St James' Park! And the Houses of Parliament! And Big Ben! And the London Eye! And St. Paul's Cathedral! And tons of snowmen everywhere! I even got my picture taken by a professional photographer in front of the fountain outside Buckingham Palace because she liked how bright my coat was (and we swapped e-mails so she can send it to me and if you want to see it go to katenoblephotography.com)!!! And I took tons of pictures, including some for other tourists walking around! It was truly truly beautiful and honestly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity unless global warming continues to mess with the established weather patterns and it snows this much again... But I probably won't be in London for it if it does, so clearly this WAS once-in-my-lifetime, and I'm SO glad I did it!!!

I'm going to have to figure out some way of putting up pictures so that you guys without facebook can see them if you want to... Anyway, after the profusion of picture taking, I decided it was about time for another bus adventure, so I picked the first double decker that came along and hopped on it since my feet were absolutely frozen! It worked out very nicely, as I got a nice little tour (pretty much free since on Friday I bought a week long rail pass! It's already paid itself back considering my 6 rides already today) and I ended up at a nice little pub called the Globe that was near the Moorgate tube stop. One of the best pieces of advice I got before coming to London was that if you ever needed to find pretty cheap, decent food, just go down a side alley until you find a homey-looking pub where the conversation is louder than the music if there's any music at all and you should get a good meal and a pint under £10; nothing fancy, but always solid fare. Today's special was Gammon and Eggs with "chunky chips" aka potato wedges and YES! To all who know my eating habits, the eggs were cooked properly and eaten properly and I got to do my gooey egg yolk dance, but I did it very subtlely so as not to disrupt the general populace!!!

After a good lunch I stopped by Picadilly Circus to check on a book at Waterstone's and then to check on a silly apron I'm planning on getting, but the stall I'd seen it in before was closed and the book was out of stock, so I headed back here only to find my 6 o'clock acting class got cancelled along with my Physical theatre class tonight! All in all, I got an INCREDIBLE day simply by being a bum and skipping one phoenetics class. And I only bought a REALLY cute warm hat and a pair of incredible, thinsulated, fingertip-less adult sized gloves for a total of £4.99! What a smart and stylish shopper! Alright, since the building is closing early today, I'm off to go back to the hostel for some good old-fashioned homework-time! After I load the pictures on to my computer of course. ;) Loving you all and missing you!

[as a foot note, I found a pub that has free wi fi and big couches and is large enough to not care that I've been sitting here for hours! It may be some hours more too...]

That Post I Never Posted

At last! Here is the latest update on the life of London Caiti!

Part of this was written Sunday [editor's note: this means either 2 or 3 weeks ago.] but I don't have internet often so it's quite long, you may notice...

SO last weekend (weekend before last now!) I decided to do a bit of exploring on my own. I got up late on Saturday and set out to take a double decker bus somewhere! I didn't really have any idea where I was going, but the 27 busline looked like I could ride it a good long way without having to switch, so I decided that looked as good as anything. I hopped on near my hostel and spent about an hour and 3/4 riding on the top deck seeing a bit of the city, listening to music, and generally starting to feel more like myself in London. I ended up somewhere on the West side of London in Chalk Hill at the end of the bus line at something called the Stalls or the Horse Tunnel Market which was something of a combo vintage store, antique store, street festival, horse statue museum, and folk art show! There were giant chandeliers all over the place, as well as life sized bronze horse statues and fountains and all sorts of crazy market stalls with everything from goth/steampunk clothes to hand-carved indian furniture to old records and china tea sets. I even found some old Doctor Who novels that I thought about getting! The whole thing was IMMENSE, as well! Part of it was open air and part was inside a big building with carves walls and leather-upholstered ceilings, so as I was there the stars started coming out in between the stall roofs. I ended up grabbing some curry, rice, and an fanta from a vendor and catching the bus back home with a promise that I would have to take Tina there when she finally got into town! I spent part of the ride back writing, so I ended up missing my bus stop, but the end of the line was just about a 10 minute walk from home, so I just got a nice, though enforced, walk out of it!

Sunday I went down to the National because one of the girls got £5 tickets to go see August: Osage County! I was expecting a lot out of it since everyone has been talking it up for the better part of a year, so I was rather disappointed with the end result. Part of it might have been that I went to see a matinee, so the energy of an evening performance just wasn't there, but it just didn't have the honesty or the openness of some of the other shows I'd seen here. There were good moments in it, but the sound design was just plain AWFUL, and the script didn't wow me nearly as much as I was hoping it would. The opening monologue was terribly bland, and all in all, I would've much preferred 2 hours of the best moments from the play than the 3 and a half hours of luke-warm acting and writing that I got. Also, the final moment was the clincher of my distaste for the play, as one of my great dislikes is being bashed over the head with the symbollism stick. For those of you who have seen it: And then you're gone, and then you're gone, and then... This is the way the world goes round... Really? Really really? No thank you, I got it without the nasty bump on the head there. Ah well, it was still worth the cheap ticket to see it, and I didn't have to stand in line, so I've got nothing to complain about.

The week of classes was essentially just cementing us all into our schedules and really getting down to work. I won't bore you with the details, but let it be known that we were all just a little more sore and tired at the end of the week than we were at the beginning...

What with it eventually being Friday after a looooooooooong week of classes, a big group of people went out to a pub near LAMDA called the Curtain's Up, so I agreed to join. By the time we got there, it was so crowded we couldn't even get a spot at the bar, much less a table, so after standing around in rehearsal clothes holding my backpack for about an hour, I decided to head for home and a long-awaited dinner. I stopped by the store to get a bottle of wine to complement my pasta (ricotta and spinach tortellini out of a refrigerator pack. Don't you wish you were this classy?), got home, made dinner, put on The Producers, and proceeded to have a lovely wine, pasta, musical, chocolate-filled evening in. Did a bit of washing up, and went to bed early.

Saturday after a not-so-restful night of sleep I got up early-ish to go to the bank, try to get a phone or sim card, and meet Drew downtown. The bank was a success, the phone not so much, but eventually, after a severe lack of breakfast due to the fact that my eggs were stolen from my box in the communal fridge at the hostel, I got down to Piccadilly Circus where there was an inexplicable street performance of a fake, yet very well-costumed and rehearsed "Changing of the Guard" which included a straight-faced game of patty-cake, fake ballet, and all sorts of silliness! It was excellent. There were Cockney-sounding street performers there too in black outfits with white buttons in patterns ALL OVER them! After several unsuccessful encounters with payphones, finally met up with Drew and went to an uber-fancy place for lunch! The food was absolutely delicious, and I had my first encounter with real, honest-to-goodness Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. To Dan's credit, I thought he'd just been clever and made up the name for the play, but no. It is a real type of tea! And I did rather want to buy some… Alas, I did not. Perhaps one day in the future I'll have to go back and get some!

Anyway, after lunch we went to a GIGANTIC bookstore called Waterstone's that was literally five stories tall and had a sale of 3 books for the price of 2, leading me to purchase 3 new books: Empire of Sand by Robert Ryan, Labyrinth by Kate Mosse, and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Will be sure to report back when I've finished each! Afterwards we set out for Drew's school since he'd queued all morning for our tickets and so needed a nap, and since the show didn't start until 7:30pm, so I got to call my Dad on his birthday using Drew's Skype (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!!!) made a light dinner while Drew slept and soon afterwards we were on our way to the National to see War Horse.

Before I go on, I just want to mention that all I'd heard about War Horse was that it was good and it was about a boy and his horse during World War I. The best phrase I can find to describe what it actually was was sweetly and innocently honest and simple. The plot itself became quite confused in terms of who was where and when and how, but the emotions behind it were perfectly clear. It's based on a children's book, but they managed to translate it to stage in a way that keeps its roots. It doesn't become a gruesome play for adults just because it's set during WWI, but rather it keeps the mask-less clarity of children's literature. This boy and this horse love each other, not in a slightly creepy Equus way, but in a boy-and-his-noble-steed sort of way. They each save the other's life many times, and in a way they each pull the other through. It was really a play about devotion, being completely and totally devoted to another being, and it was really and truly beautiful. The horses were all puppets, and for the most part the work was executed superbly! There were a few moments of it not quite working, but the puppet became a character to the extent that at one point I was WEEPING for the horse, more than I've probably ever cried in a play before. The whole play is set to a soundtrack of sorts of what I saw to be the narrator's voice as the main character after he's home from the war. He had a beautiful, native singing voice that was the sort of sound one connects to the land of England itself, and the songs were perfectly suited to him, and to the chorus of the full cast (over 30 men and a very few women, darn it.) that would occasionally join the song. Our seats were literally two chairs to the left of center in the very front row! It was the PERFECT play for it too! While it was intense, it wasn't painfully so, and it let us see the workings of the puppets, the expressions… the most amazing goose-puppet-and-operator! Drew described the whole thing as cinematic, and I must agree. The scope of it was enormous, including 3 languages, several countries, an enormous cast, beautiful and intricate puppets with 3 operators each… The set was absolutely minimalist, but perfect! It was all complemented with charcoal drawings made for the book.

Afterwards we headed to the Sherlock Holmes pub just down the Thames from the National. It was a good old-fashioned pub with no music or TV and just lots of people sitting around and talking, so we stayed for awhile and then went our separate ways.

Sunday I mostly just went on errands again, but I GOT A PHONE!!! For anyone who needs it, the number is 075 5260 3409 cause London numbers are ridiculously long! I also went to a thrift store and to the sounds of Mama Mia blasting through the speakers, I picked out my clown outfit. It's amazing. I got gold spandex/denim mix high waist slightly flared pants, a bright green shirt with little buttons on the sleeves and giant painted mushrooms along the bottom, a weird headscarf thingy that's got velvet and tassels and a flower print on part of it, and a washed-out denim thigh-length coat with slightly matted fake fur cuffs, all for the grand total of 4 pounds! Add a red nose and golden stilettos and you've got Ernestina Sweeney, my first costumed clown. She likes knitting, tap dancing, and impersonating animals. Oh clown class, how I both love and fear thee! Which is actually true of most of my classes...

Classes this week have been going well. We had a substitute teacher for Alexander today, which was nice to have a bit of variety, and we were working on the floor and table for about an hour out of the hour and a quarter class, so I feel like we all got much more out of it than we have been. Stage combat was today, and we're learning the most BAMF fight in the history of the universe!!! It's rapier and dagger and looks amazing. This week started something called "Early Birds" which is an extra, optional class on Monday at 9am that my roommate and I decided to try out. It's basically a really intense workout first thing on a Monday morning that does everything the other classes could have possibly missed. Which is pretty much entirely muscle groups that I didn't know I even had. One of the exercises (after we've all gone for a 3/4 mile sprint) is as follows: Stand in second position (feet more than shoulder width apart, pointing out). Bend your knees so you're in a plie. Now jump. Now do that 7 more times, and on the last one turn a quarter turn, and do that 8 times... Repeat until you're facing front. Tired yet? Now do it 4 times each way, then two each way, then one each way, then jump and do a full turn. I hurt.

We're still working on our scenes from the histories. I've got one of Henry V's monologues, but not the Band of Brothers one. In a week and a half we're switching to Restoration comedies, and we're switching teachers to someone who's been described as the "that's shit, do it again but good." type, but in a good way. Apparently everything he directs comes out very precise and VERY good. I'll be sure to fill you in on it when we get there! We're actually putting on a full play, apparently, with basic costumes and lights and everything! Not sure if we get a set yet, but we'll see. I'm looking forward to it quite a bit!

Well, here I am at last on a Wednesday afternoon. We've been dismissed early from our last class, so I thought I'd finally get around to typing this all out since I'm sure you've been waiting on pins and needles for the latest installment! Soon I will tell you all about the lovely production of Twelfth Night with Derek Jacobi as Malvolio that I saw last night, but for right now, my fingers are about to fall off and I'm sure you have better things to do than to read more of this, so farewell my dears!