You'll NEVER guess what I did yesterday!

What am I least likely to do while I'm here?

Besides camping [shudder]. I immediately declined when that opportunity was offered.

That's right, hiking! And I did it yesterday, for six hours!! Half of that in the RAIN. My cooperating Geography teacher, Cerys {care-iss}, has been working with a group of students on a study of rivers, and since the project requires actual field work, she arranged a "field trip" to the Shropshire Hills, [the link is to a ridiculously long explanation of the area's geology, and is mostly for my gran] to study the development of small river from its source-springs, on down. She asked me if I wanted to be the second required staff member, and it really isn't like I'm in a position to decline, plus I had no idea what I was getting into. Also, she's been so awesome, I didn't want to disappoint her. So instead of me grumbling, here are some photos:

Hills, with the students left in the shot for perspective.

Cool hill tree.

 More hills. Also Cerys.

And the photos I really like, pictures of the students mid-jump across the stream:

A Civilized English Evening Out

My cooperating ELL teacher, Jane K, took me out yesterday to David Austin Roses for afternoon tea! Because apparently English people do still indulge in tea time (I had no clue---it's not like we still do barn raisings or, you know, something more culturally relevant [cut me some slack, it's 8 in the morning]). Aaanyway, afterward, we walked around the not-yet-in-bloom gardens, and she showed me this trick kids do with rose thorns, "rhinose":

Jane, with a rose thorn on her nose.

Then we fetched her son, Sam, from school and he showed me his Daleks---he has the 18" one with voice control; I'm quite jealous!---and we watched Thunderbirds, which I'd never even heard of, and which is SO kitsch (or as Jane says, "naff") that I, of course, loved it immediately!

We topped the evening off by meeting her not-husband, Mark, at the Foaming Jug pub, where for once I wasn't the one who knocked over the drinks [Sam], and where I demonstrated how lousy I would be in a crisis-situation, because I just sat there, eating my fries/chips and moving my purse out of the way of the spillage.

Jane, reacting to the difference between Mark & Sam's desserts. [posed, btw]

I would post more often...

but the internet here SUUUCKS!!!!!!!!! It takes me---no joke---somewhere between 5 and 8 minutes to load a single image, and because the connexion is so bad, when I hit "Publish," it usually resets and I have to go through through the posting process all over again!
However, Bud had a great idea: go to Starbucks and use their internet. I'll have to pay, but at this point it is so worth it!

Exterminate!

Yay! Look at my Dalek!! I ordered it (used) off eBay.uk because they're way cheaper here, and then realized it's probably going to be expensive to ship home on account of its size (12" [its holding a ballpoint pen for reference]). But it moves and talks, so I don't really care :)

The BEST Thing about England...

...is that tax is included IN the price!! So when the tag says £1, the price literally is £1! I don't have to guess at whether I can buy something that costs £4.80 because I only have £5 and my total will actually turn out to be £5.20 or whatever. (See, even just reading a sentence about that process was ridiculous!) It took me a few days to get used to it [by that I mean "to remember," not "to accept"], but oh, man! you have no idea how fabulous something as simple as cost can be!!

The Not-so-PC Mission of the RWS

The Royal Wolverhampton School was originally created, by a bunch of rich philanthropists, as an orphanage for a large collection of children who had lost their parents in a cholera epidemic. So there is a fountain in the front yard with several small, I supposed you could call them friezes, depicting the mission of the school. They are all very nice, like "Feeding the Hungry," except for one---my favorite, of course---which is hilariously inappropriate in contemporary society:

It is now a private boarding school. (In England, private schools are called either "private schools" or "public schools"; public schools are called "state schools.")

Stats

LOCATION: Wolverhampton, the West Midlands, England, the UK

TIME DIFFERENCE: 8 hours --- when it's 8am here, it's 12:00am PST

SCHOOL: The Royal Wolverhampton School

ADDRESS:

   Chelsea Wunn

c/o The Royal Wolverhampton School

Penn Road

Wolverhampton, West Midlands

         WV3-OEG

England

SKYPE ID: chelsearw21

Weather: So this is what traditional Spring is like!

It is not "winter" here. Several people told me it would be abnormally cold, like up in Canada or something---but really, on the "bad" day it was only about as cold as a non-rainy, overcast, spring day in Washington. Mostly though, it's been very mild and sunny; I hope it stays this way!!

Par exemple:

Peruvian Flute Band!

i.e.:

Nah, I'm kidding. They're obviously an American Indian flute band. Still, I bet they keep the giant guinea pigs away...

Food Review: HP, the British A1

I LOVE A1. (Bud knows, because he's now in possession of my giant Costco bottle of the stuff.) So you can imagine how excited I was to discover HP, the British version of A1!

Overall Review - It's okay: not bad, not excellent.

Taste - A1 with more sugar. I don't like the sweetness (I'm not a big fan of savory/sweet combinations)---it could use a good dose of worcestershire to drown it out.

Below is an image from a grocery store, Waitrose, which is the equivalent of Haggen, a normal grocery store, but a little fancy and a little more expensive. Almost no other single brand, single style product in the store is stocked in such ridiculous quantities as HP and Heinz ketchup. Green olives are a close second.

"London Airports Closed Due to Volcano Ash"

If Dad had not booked my tickets a few days earlier than I suggested, I could have been dealing with this: biggest shutdown since WWII. What crazy good luck!!

As many closely-concentrarted Starbucks as I'd find at home.

Bull Ring, Birmingham [Thursday]

Initially, I had no desire to visit the Bull Ring (I did not come here to see the malls) but as you can see on Wikipedia, there is some neato architecture in the area, so I figured I might as well. It's pretty bizarre to see so many beautiful, old buildings situated *right* in the middle of commercial districts devoted to materialism. For example, here is the Church of Saint Martin, visible between the east and west wings of the mall, and with the Bull Ring public market (not seen) immediately behind it:

The mall/shopping parts are CRAZY! I am *not* exaggerating when I say there are like, five different H&M stores scattered throughout the mall and the side streets. I--of course--enjoyed checking out all the jewelry. And I really got a kick out of the first floor of this department store, Selfridges, which has a layout that is a little tricky to describe so I won't, and which sold fun, trendy food, and knick-knacks and housewares. In a candy section, there was a Bull Ring bull made of jelly-bellies!

Being a factory worker during the Industrial Revolution would have SUCKED!!!

Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham  [Thursday]

Today I visited the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. It's all fancy, expensive metal & gem jewelry, so I didn't buy anything (that's more Christel's scene) or even visit any shops; I visited the area because of the museum! The guided tour was awesome!: the museum is in the front rooms of an old jewelry company, and the tour goes through the back factory areas which are *exactly* as they were left in 1981 when company paid off the workers and shut the doors. But it's pretty trippy to see, because since the owners and employees were super old-school and set in their ways, they hadn't done much to adapt with changing manufacturing or business technologies, so the workshop looks like something from the early 20th century, and the office (which I don't have pictures of) looks as if nothing had been changed since the 1940s.

I wish this was a better photo, but you can still kind of see the workshop exhaust fan's corroded blades from sulfuric acid fumes (part of the metal working process).

Military Time

The standard time format in England is military. (I wonder what they call it here... Or, actually, I wonder what they call our AM/PM format.) Bud suggested changing my clock to match, so I can practice, but I can't figure out how to get my computer to switch to a 24hr format. Nevermind -- Dad helped me fix it :) .