Notes on England
Oct. 18th, 2009 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerFirst, a question: does anyone know if King's Cross, St. Pancras Station, or the subway stop associated therewith are open overnight? And if so, are they busy? (This is a research question. I may force the twelve-year-old protags of the World's Worst Novel to stay in the station overnight.)
In other news! Homestay was excellent, despite my predisposition to loathe it, based purely on the fact that all the brochures said that everyone loves it. Note to self: being an anti-lemming does not in fact make you an original; it merely means that you arrange your life in defiance of fashion, which is just as pointless as arranging in accordance with it.
It was quite interesting living with an English family. We really did have tea every three hours or so (and it might have been closer together if we hadn't occasionally vacated the house to go see the local castle. And the mayor. I have no idea why the mayor wanted to see a motley crew of international students, but meeting her was great fun. She had a red robe! Which was lined with muskrat fur, which they called musquatch fur, except not really because the fur was fake! And she wore a golden chain of office which was probably worth more than the contents of my room, not excluding my computer!)
The tea came with hobnobs, ginger biscuits, and a philosophical discussion about the differences between English biscuits and American cookies. (Biscuits are crispy. Cookies are chewy and usually bigger around.) Tea with breakfast, also, and a remarkable selection of jams for the toast at breakfast time. I've taken quite a fancy to marmalade.
I've also taken a liking to sharp cheddar and port, although the second is probably out of my price range. Food is expensive! I've always been on a meal plan before, which makes the amount of money the food costs much more theoretical, and thus I had not quite realized.
Probably the best word I learned was "doolally" (doololly? doololley?), meaning crazy. Also "crackers," which means crazy too. (I wonder why there are so many slang terms for crazy? Nuts, bonkers, a few crayons short of a box. I've heard that we come up with slang terms for things we value, but I think that's wrong - I think that we come up with slang terms for things we consider powerful and perhaps frightening. Money, sex, madness: all cultural bugaboos.)
Also I've been reading Jane Eyre! Which is marvelous! Whoever wrote the footnotes was a bit of a twit, though, on a note in one of the middle chapters he SPOILS THE ENDING, which to be fair I already knew because of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair [which I didn't think was terribly impressive, but perhaps it would have been more so if I'd been acquainted with Bronte; although Mr. Fforde did have the unfortunate tendency to make all his male characters fall in love with his heroine, so maybe not) , but STILL.
In other news! Homestay was excellent, despite my predisposition to loathe it, based purely on the fact that all the brochures said that everyone loves it. Note to self: being an anti-lemming does not in fact make you an original; it merely means that you arrange your life in defiance of fashion, which is just as pointless as arranging in accordance with it.
It was quite interesting living with an English family. We really did have tea every three hours or so (and it might have been closer together if we hadn't occasionally vacated the house to go see the local castle. And the mayor. I have no idea why the mayor wanted to see a motley crew of international students, but meeting her was great fun. She had a red robe! Which was lined with muskrat fur, which they called musquatch fur, except not really because the fur was fake! And she wore a golden chain of office which was probably worth more than the contents of my room, not excluding my computer!)
The tea came with hobnobs, ginger biscuits, and a philosophical discussion about the differences between English biscuits and American cookies. (Biscuits are crispy. Cookies are chewy and usually bigger around.) Tea with breakfast, also, and a remarkable selection of jams for the toast at breakfast time. I've taken quite a fancy to marmalade.
I've also taken a liking to sharp cheddar and port, although the second is probably out of my price range. Food is expensive! I've always been on a meal plan before, which makes the amount of money the food costs much more theoretical, and thus I had not quite realized.
Probably the best word I learned was "doolally" (doololly? doololley?), meaning crazy. Also "crackers," which means crazy too. (I wonder why there are so many slang terms for crazy? Nuts, bonkers, a few crayons short of a box. I've heard that we come up with slang terms for things we value, but I think that's wrong - I think that we come up with slang terms for things we consider powerful and perhaps frightening. Money, sex, madness: all cultural bugaboos.)
Also I've been reading Jane Eyre! Which is marvelous! Whoever wrote the footnotes was a bit of a twit, though, on a note in one of the middle chapters he SPOILS THE ENDING, which to be fair I already knew because of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair [which I didn't think was terribly impressive, but perhaps it would have been more so if I'd been acquainted with Bronte; although Mr. Fforde did have the unfortunate tendency to make all his male characters fall in love with his heroine, so maybe not) , but STILL.
