Sorry it's been a while since I've written! Between cafe-work, dissertation-work, and (of course) a bit of travel, I've been a busy girl lately. Lots has happened since I posted last. First, work at Toby's has changed quite a lot, because Toby isn't there anymore. He's not even 40 yet, but he's been running the cafe for 22 years and decided to move on to other things. Sadly, when he left, so did his father, who called me dahling, sang songs about my name whenever I walked by him, and constantly made slightly racist jokes about my Irish last name. So, we're under new ownership now, and although the place still looks the same, both the customers and the staff who were around before the changeover feel the difference pretty acutely. Toby was a larger-than-life presence with a special knack for connecting with the customers and making the whole day fun. It's not that work isn't fun anymore; I still enjoy going in everyday and the new owner is nice as can be. But we don't have that constant banter going back and forth across the counter that we used to, and with the additional difference of most of the students having left town after exams, those of us left have a lot to adjust to. As a sort of tribute to the good ol' days (my whole three weeks of them), here are a few pics from Toby's last week. You can see more here.



Toby's from across the street, on a rare sunny day in Bristol


Toby, in his element


Me, with the proud result of a cappuccino-making practice session -- check out the height of that foam!

I've been working pretty much every day, but I had most of last week off to go to Spain and Portugal with Michelle and Chryselle, two of my chaplaincy friends. It was a glorious trip! We flew from London to Seville, and when we got there it was still light at almost 10 p.m. and we were almost immediately hit with the luscious smell of the oranges hanging on all the trees lining the streets. We spent a full day sightseeing in Seville under a cloudless sky, then took a bus to Faro, Portugal to spend a couple of days at the beach. We came back to Seville and almost a full day to continue exploring on Saturday before catching a flight back late in the evening. The whole trip exceeded our expectations by a lot (and we'd been daydreaming about it for weeks), and all of the practical matters went off without a hitch (well, with the exception of my coach journey back from London --but what can you expect of British public transportation?). Here are a few pics of the highlights, and you can see loads more here.


Michelle & I with our sangria in Seville


Chryselle & I at the beach in Faro


At the Alcazar, Seville -- this place completely blew us away!

Thanks for reading, and I promise I'll write again soon!

Can I help who's next?

I've worked food service long enough to know that, for a student working part time, the real benefit of a crummy job is not the paltry minimum-wage paychecks (although they do have to be the main motivation -- I wouldn't work these kinds of jobs for free). Speaking from the perspective of an overprivileged student, it's hard to describe the "real benefit" in a way that doesn't sound snobby -- "seeing how the other half lives", etc. -- and because it's undeniable that class differences keep the food service industry running, I don't mind admitting that there is some truth in these descriptions. Over the years, it's done me good to do simple, practical work that doesn't take much of a brain and generally has no room for people with intellectual pretensions. If that sounds bad, I should also point out that working fast food has probably caused me to question the meaning of my "full-time" occupation -- making much of literature written a couple millennia ago -- more often than it has caused me to doubt the value of my part-time work. At the end of a day in the library, I may or may not have learned anything particularly enlightening to myself, and odds are very good indeed that the day's work will never have any great meaning for the world at large. On the other hand, when I finish a day's work at a cafe, I know that I am at least part of the reason that dozens of people who came in hungry left not-hungry. That's a quantifiable, useful result. To put the case dramatically, when taken collectively, we food service workers help to keep people alive. It's a rare liberal arts student or professor who can say that.

Starting work at Toby's has brought all of that rather heavy reasoning -- applicable to menial workers the world over -- back to me. What I've especially enjoyed over the past couple of weeks, though, has been the utter Britishness of it all. To be efficient in a fast-paced English cafe, it's no good hanging on to certain American habits of speech and manner that just confuse people and throw them off (and invite constant teasing from co-workers!), so I've adapted quickly. On my first few days, for example, I got ribbed constantly for the way I pronounced tomato and basil. It's not as easy as you might think to get the vowels right, either: in tomato, the 'a' should sound like the a's in avocado, but if you use the same a in basil, you're talking like the queen: if you're not royalty, it should sound like the a in apple. Then, there are a whole class of American expressions that won't get me teased but will slow me down at work. The English will do a double-take if you ask them if their sandwich is "for here or to go." In Britain, the customary (although more long-winded) question is, "is that to have in or take away?" I've also learned to stop asking if people want butter on their sandwiches (the idea is still incomprehensible to me) because to the English, this is a given rather than a gross-out. Just slather it on, no questions asked! There are also certain words that just do not signify the same thing in American and British English (a Saussurian concept -- hm, maybe this does tie into my research after all). Salad is a good example. For an American, salad is a bowl full of lettuce and/or spinach with a variety of other vegetables, croutons, etc. mixed in and dressing on top. For a Brit, salad is a garnish of lettuce -- literally a few leaves -- and possibly a slice or two of tomato and/or cucumber depending on the situation. We're talking the amount of veg you'd automatically get on a hamburger from McDonald's. A salad, by contrast, is the full-on American deal. So if someone asks for salad with their wrap, throw a mouthful of bunny food inside the thing and roll 'er up. That simple.

Those are just the functional basics. If you want to sound like you belong, you have to be more subtle. In a casual joint like Toby's, most of the time, don't say thanks -- it's "cheers." Those from blue-collar backgrounds and through-and-through British say "ta," but you wouldn't catch a Bristol Uni student or a foreigner using that one. When it's busy, don't yell, "Next!" or "Can I take someone's order?" but, "Can I help who's next?" (don't let your intonation rise on the end of "next," as always when asking questions Britishly). Don't pronounce baguette the American way -- bag-ette, but instead, big-ETTE, quickly and with the emphasis on the last syllable. Ciabatta isn't pronounced with the Italian vowels as Americans say it, but the second a is like the one in apple. Also, refer to nearly everything sweet and containing flour as a cake (regardless of its lack of resemblance to that dessert you stick candles in and eat your birthday) -- except for chocolate croissants, one of which is a pain-au-choc (and for goodness' sake, when you do pronounce croissant, do so in a way that does justice to the French you had at school, even if your father is a bin man!).

As you can see from this sampling, I've learned a lot in the past couple weeks. Perhaps more than I've learned in my actual research (and the more I work, the more I feel that "research" deserves quotations marks around it -- or "inverted commas", as they say here). Maybe that should worry me; or maybe it just means I'm achieving some kind of useful balance in my life. I'll report back on that question in a couple of months...

The price is right.

In general, 2 pounds and 2 pence won't buy you much here in the UK. However, as I discovered during a fluke and fleeting Ryanair sale a couple of weeks ago, that was exactly the price of a round-trip flight to Dublin, all taxes included! So on Tuesday, I got up early, caught an 8 a.m. flight, and found myself in Dublin by the time the museums opened. I spent the day roaming around the centre, then headed back to the airport after dinner and was back here at my desk in Bristol by 10:45 that night.

In general, Dublin itself was less amazing than the fact that I was able to get there and back for the price of a cup of coffee. Still, it was a good day, the most pleasurable parts (as usual) being the most unexpected.

I can only give my impressions of the centre of Dublin, as I didn't have time to get farther afield, but in general I didn't find it overly charming. It looks and feels like what it is: the stag party capital of Europe, overrun with foreign tourists, including a sizable community of easily identifiable American studiers-abroad (the women are the easiest to spot: North Face fleece jackets, Ugg boots, straightened hair, designer handbags, obnoxiously loud voices, usually talking about past or future nights out). Apart from the tourists, the streets and parks were generally filled by beggars, homeless, and a lot of people generally down on their luck. It's hard to enjoy a day in a place where it's so obvious that people who spend their lives there are certainly not enjoying themselves. I don't think I expected a pristine, cheerful city -- this isn't the impression that Ulysses and Dubliners create, and Joyce is the major source of my mental picture of Dublin -- but the overall grottiness of it all (to use a favorite Anglicism) was striking nonetheless.

But, as I said, there were highlights. St. Stephen's Green was lovely in full bloom, and I enjoyed a wander through the National Gallery, which has a fine collection of 20th century Irish paintings. There was an especially good exhibit of Jack B. Yeats, whose work I'd never seen before. I got a kick out of walking through Trinity College at lunchtime and watching the students sitting out on the grass reading or chatting and generally doing their thing. Student life is pretty much the same the world over, of course, but it's fun to see in different places.

The highlight of the day also came with a reminder of a useful travel tip: follow large groups of senior citizens (except into the 4:30 dinner buffet). They usually know what's up. This is exactly what I did when I ran into a slow-moving bunch around the back of Dublin Castle, which I was wandering around because I didn't want to pay to go in. I followed the old folks through a gate and across a pretty little garden to the Chester Beatty Library, of which I hadn't heard, but admission was free, so I decided to have a look. I still don't know how this Beatty fellow made his money, but he must have had absolute boatloads, to judge from the selections from his collection that were on display. On the top floor of the building, I found an amazing exhibit of some of the oldest extant papyri of the Gospels and fragments from the first collection of Paul's letters. It was pretty thrilling to be able to make out the Greek letters and even a word here and there. There was also a huge 11th century (I think) illuminated manuscript of Augustine's City of God and several other interesting fragments of third and fourth-century Christian texts. Thanks, oldsters, for the hot tip!

Another high point came after a rather disappointing visit to the James Joyce Centre (different from the museum, and certainly not worth the price of admission). Budget traveler's trip #2: if you don't want to pay to go into a famous church, come back for Mass/Evensong etc. and see it for free. I pulled this one with Christ Church, and it turned out to be a really charming experience. I arrived pretty much right on time, and no one else was there except the guy leading the service (he was filling in for the Dean, who was absent, and the choir was also out of town). At the last minute, a couple other American tourists wandered in with bags from the Guinness Factory and sat down by me. And that was the whole crowd! The service leader read his part, and the three of us rather uncertainly read the respondents' part off the sheet we were given (it was obvious that none of us were Anglican). We may have missed a few words, but I guess we kept the service from getting canceled that night!

After Evensong, I wandered down to have a look at St. Patrick's Cathedral and then had an absurdly overpriced dinner of bangers and mash and a pint of Murphy's in the Temple Bar quarter before getting the bus back to the airport. Well, not the bus, as it happens -- the bus failed to show up three times in a row, so a few other panicked tourists and I ended up sharing a big cab. It was worth the extra fiver to make sure I got home. And that was the day! I slept like a dead person and made it through the next day at work with the help of a couple double espressos. Hooray for the perks of my new job.

Would you like butter and mayo with that?

Big news over here: I have accomplished my #1 lifetime career goal!! No, I haven't been given an honorary Ph.D. or anything, don't get too excited. But I started a job this week in a real, proper cafe, and I am a bona fide barista! Anyone who knows what it's like to work fast food for SIX YEARS will understand that I am absolutely not exaggerating my enthusiasm here. It seems almost too good to be true.

I'll back up a little bit. I'd dropped off some CV's earlier in the spring without any results, and just last week I started the process again after handing in my essays. I was beginning to despair after the little cafes and bars on Queens Road and in Clifton Village didn't seem interested. So, last Friday, I was sitting in the library reading Seneca and feeling a little depressed when my stomach started growling, and I decided to go to Somerfield and buy some Mars Planets (best candy ever, even above Sainsbury's Fizzy Fangs) to cheer myself up. On the way, I walked past Toby's Deli Cafe, and I noticed a sign in the window advertising for counter help. I went in and asked about it, and the girl at the counter told me to wait for a minute to talk to the manager. The place was really cute and funky, with the walls of the dining room covered in photographs of customers and Christmas lights hung all around. Pretty soon the manager came up, offered me a cup of tea, and sat down to chat. He looked at my CV, joked around with me about American politics, and asked me to start on Tuesday. So that was that!

In a way I regret that I find it nearly impossible to describe my new job without comparing it to Sonic, because Sonic was about as good as it could be to me, but so it goes. Anyway, instead of a dorky logo polo shirt and visor and regulation length shorts, I now get to wear any sort of black shirt I want, and that's as much as they care about. And, instead of making cherry limeades until the acid eats the skin on my fingers away, I make...real espresso coffee!!! It was surprisingly easy to learn to use the machine, froth milk, etc. I do not mind admitting that I feel extremely, smugly cool as I do so. The other, bigger part of my job is making sandwiches, which is most of our business, and a charmingly British affair. That is, mayonnaise and butter are the leading ingredients in just about everything we make. Most popular fillings: chicken mayonnaise, tuna mayonnaise, coronation chicken, chicken tikka - basically, all equal parts of meat/fish + mayo. And it goes without saying that you slather the bread with mayo or butter, and very often both. But we have plenty of yummy healthy things, too, for those who fancy them, like roasted veggies, goat's cheese, sun dried tomatoes, pesto, hummus, etc.

The best part (besides the coffee thing) is the great people I work with. Toby's is run by Toby (duh) and his father, and they're both very laid back, fun and jokey. They either call me "babes" or "gorgeous" in a completely un-creepy, almost fatherly way (Toby actually calls pretty much everyone "babes", male and female). All the other employees are great, and the customers, mostly students who are posh enough to be able to afford an $8 sandwich or a $10 baked potato for lunch, are all really friendly.

So, if you can't tell, I'm pretty stoked about my new gig. Academia, I'm warning you, you're up against some serious competition.

Get out of town.

I finally got my last two essays turned in this week, for better or worse. I get so fed up with my agonizingly slow writing process, and this usually results in the need for a sort of ritual cleansing of my writing area as soon as I turn a big paper in. As soon as I came home on Friday I fell into a cleaning frenzy, including dusting, vacuuming, organizing my papers and recycling tons of old notes, weeding out library books on topics I don't want to be reminded of for the forseeable future, taking out the trash, organizing my closet, cleaning my sink...it was pretty intense. I felt lots better afterwards.

My week wasn't completely neurotic, however! I had one of the best days since I've been here on Thursday, when I made a day trip to Oxford. The ostensible reason for the trip was to attend a lecture on "The Decline of Poetry in the Fourth Century" (which nobody really believes happened -- the decline, that is, not the lecture). The lecture was fine, but the best part was meeting up with a friend who's a postgrad at Merton College afterwards and spending the afternoon and evening with her. The weather was beautiful by the time we left the lecture, although it had been pouring when I went in -- typical England! We stopped to get ice cream at a famous place across from Christ Church, then walked through the meadow and down along the Thames, where we found lots of cute fuzzy ducklings and several teams of rowers out (including, it must be said, some very fine looking young gentlemen in flattering uniforms). We made sure to be back at Merton by 6, because it was Ascension Day, the only day of the year when the student are allowed to climb all the way up onto the roof of the chapel! They only let 100 people up, and we were numbers 99 and 100 -- whew! It was the most amazing experience -- the views from the top were stunning.



A priest performed a short service, and there was a small choir to lead several hymns. Afterwards, there was quite a swanky little champagne reception on one of the lawns, complete with people playing croquet. We had to leave in time to be at the dining hall promptly at 7 (Oxford runs with military precision) for dinner. It was just like you imagine: everyone in robes, professors at the high table, grace rattled off in Latin...and unimpressive British food. But never mind that last bit. The whole thing was so darned cool to see.



After my friend had to take off for a dance rehearsal, I had an hour or so to kill before my train, so I wandered all around town just as it was getting dark. It was really something to see into the Bodleian from the outside and to observe how the character of the town changes at night after the tourists clear out, leaving the streets to industrious looking students and chavvy teenagers just bumming around, pretty much in equal parts.

It's days out like Thursday that make me realize how lucky I am to be here. The Brits would laugh at me for saying this, because it seems so ordinary to them, but train rides in particular are a sort of spiritual experience for me. I'm not sure why, but I think Britain truly looks its best through a train window. Plus, I love the idea of communal travel: it's so much more interesting to travel among a bunch of strangers (mainly ordinary, respectable looking folks, unlike with Amtrak at home) rather than being sealed off in car all alone. I also think it's hard to underestimate the power of public transport, along with the dominant habit of walking everywhere here, for building a national identity. I see so many more people on any given day here -- just passing them on the street or sitting next to them on a bus, for example -- than I ever would at home. You get a real feeling of being a small part of something bigger. I think America (well, the non-urban parts) could use a dose of that.

My observations are running a little long tonight! I'll cut it out with the words and leave you with some pictures. Click here to see an album that includes pics from Oxford. Happy weekend to all!

I'm um, y'know, famous.

I got my 15 minutes of fame this morning on BBC Radio Bristol, talking to Trevor Fry about my impressions as a "young American in Britain" of the Pope's recent visit to the States. Luckily, I didn't say anything overly stupid, and therefore I don't mind letting you have a listen to a replay of the show if you're interested. Click here to get to the BBC Radio Faith page. Then click on the "listen again" button in the top right corner of the page. Once the broadcast opens, click ahead 15 minutes at a time until your get to the 3 hour 45 minute mark. You'll have to listen to a cheesy oldies song and directions to a garden show for a couple minutes, but then I'll come on. Try to ignore how many times I say "you know." Although I don't think I provided SW England with any particularly profound insight, it was pretty neat to get to see the inside of the BBC building and meet a local radio celeb -- especially cool because I listened to Trevor Fry's morning show all summer before moving to Bristol to get a taste of the local flava. And now I know that he is a very friendly middle-aged guy with long highlighted and straightened hair.


Girls' night out at Po Na Na

Not much else to report for the moment. I'm locked in mortal combat with an essay due Friday, and about to make my opening sallies against another one due the same day. It's a terrible time of year to have to be chained to the computer, as thing are really starting to get springy here in Bristol. I went for a run yesterday afternoon, and when I got to the Downs I found that the whole town had been out playing football, having picnics, and patronizing the ice cream man in the gorgeous 70 degree weather without me...what gives?? Anyway, after this Friday, hopefully I'll be up there right along with them.

You snooze, you lose.

I'm taking a few minutes out from research at the library to post this afternoon, hoping that it will wake me up from a literary-theory induced stupor. Although I would be more productive if I could stay awake, it's been nice to switch gears and get back into the business of essay-writing today after a week of obsessing over a presentation yesterday. All of us MA's have to make a 15-minute presentation this week on our plans for our dissertations. The scary part is that they are in front of the whole classics faculty (well, supposedly -- in practice it's really just the 6 or 8 who can be bothered to show up) and all the other postgrads, and we are, of course, subject to the dreaded Q&A period at the end. Those two aspects have been enough to get all of us suitably stressed, and I'd put everything else pretty much on hold until I got through mine. The title of my paper (and working title for my dissertation) was "Augustine against the Clock: Time, Language and the Economics of Salvation." I think it went about as well as could be expected, and people seemed positive about my ideas.

I had a good excuse to take the night off yesterday because a friend from Edinburgh is in town doing a short course at the uni. We went to a pub I like in Clifton Village and had a lovely time catching up. Not to depreciate all of his other charming personal attributes, I must note that spending a few hours listening to his Aberdeen accent was music to my ears! The posh South of England accent is fine, but it just doesn't stir the soul in the same way, evoking the sound of bagpipes in the distance...a sip of aged single-malt...the low of a hairy coo...OK, I'll cut it out.

In other news, I have another speaking engagement coming up, this one much less stressful! I'm going to be on a faith chat show on Radio 1 on Sunday morning, because they want to hear an American's impression on the Pope's visit to the States. I'm very happy to oblige, and there will be lots to say about such a successful visit and the positive benefits I think we'll see from it. More on that later, if I don't say anything stupid that makes me want to forget the experience entirely, which, knowing myself, is a very distinct possibility!