We were so thankful, we gorged ourselves twice.

Lindsey arrived on Tuesday, just in time for Thanksgiving! She came bearing supplies for our full-on American-style feast -- canned pumpkin and white marshmallows, neither of which we can get here. Did a massive grocery shop at the big Sainsbury's on Wednesday afternoon, then got an early start on Thursday morning making the pumpkin pies and chopping potatoes. Lindsey took over as Thanksgiving chef extaordinaire when I had to go to class from 4 to 6, and when I came back the feast was almost complete. We had chicken (the only inauthentic part -- just didn't feel like dealing with the whole turkey thing), mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, rolls and pie with "aerosol cream" (sketchy-looking but still delicious Reddi-Whip). We had to explain the whole Thanskgiving phenomenon to my housemates (and reassure them that it really is OK to put cranberry sauce on the rest of your food, if you like), but they caught on quick -- who could argue with a day dedicated to stuffing yourself? Before dessert, we had a wine toast and all went around and said what we were thankful for, which turned out to be a really nice touch. People were a little skeptical about the pumpkin pie thing, but it was a big hit.



And then, we did it all over again last night! Matt's friend Courtney, an American girl from Missouri, coordinated another big Thanksgiving dinner for 15 or so people and assigned everyone a dish to bring. Not all of the Brits knew what exactly what to make of their assignments -- it's been a while since I've seen something as funny as two English guys trying to make cornbread, of which neither of them had ever heard -- but everything came out amazingly well! We had real turkey, and Courtney made an amazing pecan, fig and rum pie. Lindsey and I made delicious candied sweet potatoes, complete with marshmallow topping.

Lindsey has been doing some sightseeing on her own this week as I buckle down and try to get things under control before we take off for Scotland on Friday. She's made it to Bath, is in Cardiff now, and will hit London tomorrow and Monday. So, meanwhile, I'd better get crackin'. But first, here are some pics of Thanskgiving(s) in Bristol!

Sign me up.

It's been a long weekend of work here, but it's felt good to get back into essay-writing mode again. Sometimes I forget that this is the fun stuff: when the tens of books and hundreds of pages of notes littering my room come together to make something coherent, and all the passive absorption of facts, arguments and narratives gives way to active synthesis and creative presentation. Yeah, this grad school thing is a pretty good deal.



This afternoon, Matt and I took a little break to have a proper English high tea. We had the obligatory sultana scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam, as well as cucumber finger sandwiches with the rind cut off the cucumber and the crusts removed from the bread, and cut into dainty little triangles. I almost gave poor Matt a heart attack by getting ready to put mayo on the sandwiches. I should have known by now -- the all-purpose British condiment is butter. At least here in the house, they slather it on absolutely everything. I wonder if the queen eats butter-and-cucumber sandwiches? Very posh, I'm sure.

Tonight I took my first step towards starting a pro-life society here, something I've been slowly working towards since I got here. We had a great talk after Mass this evening by a woman who's the head of public health in Southwest England, talking about a lot of important issues including the shockingly high abortion rate (200,000 per year -- and the NHS pays for 90% of them!), and Fr. Robert let me stand up after to recruit students to start doing something to change things, or at least get people to start thinking about the issue. It is truly amazing how little abortion is actually on the political or moral radar screen in this country. You just never hear anything about it. Out of 30+ people who attended the talk, I had only three interested people sign up. And all three guys -- no women! There's a lot of work to done here, especially with changes to the Abortion Act being debated right now. But starting small is better than doing nothing at all. Thumbs up for life!

Reading, schmeading.

Thank goodness for reading week. "Reading Week" has actually been a bit of a misnomer for what I've actually been up to for the past seven days -- "Obsessing over Personal Statements Week" would be much more appropriate -- but I have managed to make some headway on coursework, and to make a quick trip to York on Wednesday!

It was going to be a whirlwind trip to begin with, but it ended up even more so because my train up got cancelled. Grrr. I got on one an hour later, which got me there at 1:45, so I had six hours to explore the city before heading back. York is very, very charming, with the medieval buildings and pretty Yorkshire countryside combining to give it a real fairy-tale feel. The city centre is very compact and a quick walk from the train station, so I had no trouble finding the Minster, which is just as amazing as everyone says. Daylight was burning, so after a preliminary gape I wandered out to the city walls (which stand on the old Roman ones), which you can walk along the top of for a great view of the Minster through the back gardens surrounding it. Next I found the Yorkshire Museum, in the middle of some really charming gardens by the river, because my guidebook said it had some impressive Roman goodies...eh, not so much. There was, though, a pretty gratifyingly grisly head of still-styled 4th-century woman's hair on display, which justified the price of admission. I headed back east and South afterwards to see Clifford's Tower, what remains of York Castle, and an old, narrow street called The Shambles which used to be packed with merchants and flowing with filth but is now lined with chocolate and tea shops. Speaking of which, possibly the highlight of my day was having proper afternoon Yorkshire cream tea in a little tea room just off the Shambles. Two thumbs up for scones with clotted cream and jam! Just after dark, I went back to the Minster for evensong. The inside really is spectacular, although in the dark I couldn't really get a good look at the stained glass windows, which are made of the biggest pieces of Medieval glass in Europe. It was a treat to see the girls' choir singing with the men's choir -- some of these little girls must have been 6 or 7 years old, but the sound was amazing! After evensong, I had a quick chips & cheese dinner at supposedly the oldest pub in York, then scurried off to the train station to come home. Not a bad tour for six hours, eh? See York for yourself here -- I took lots of pics.

Other than York, it's mostly been work this week, with breaks for a few fun things like going ice skating with some of my coursemates and, of course, forcing some of my housemates to watch the X-Factor last night. Now, I'm counting down to Lindsey's arrival on Tuesday -- two weeks of fun coming up, along with a proper American Thanksgiving and a trip to Edinburgh for St. Andrews Night!

Bring it on.

Today begins my reading week, one of the great features of the classics & ancient history academic calendar. That's right -- even though we've only had five weeks of class, they figure our brains msut be completely shattered by now, so they're giving us a week off to recoup. Which means a whole blessed week of time to work on grad school applications and begin work on essays that are due in the next month. And, because seriously, you have to goof off just a little in a free week, I'm going to York on Wednesday for the day to see York Minster and all sorts of Roman goodies. I'll have almost four hours to read on the train each way, so it's actually quite the responsible thing to do.

This week has had its ups and downs, one of the more crushing downs being the sudden, inexplicable death of my 6-month old iPod yesterday. This leaves me, the bereaved iTunes junkie, with only the Arctic Monkeys' latest album, Trisha Yearwood's Everybody Knows, and "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran accessible in my library, because my music files didn't transfer properly to my new computer before I left. Don't get me wrong, that's all solid stuff, but it's not much variety to last me till Christmas when I can restock at home. Aargh.

There's nothing like a good chaplaincy pub trip to make things better, though, and we had a couple of good ones this week. We had some delicious Banana Bread Beer ("I'll take another for breakfast!") at Wetherspoon's on Monday night, and last night we went to the famous Cori (Coronation) Tap in Clifton Village to try some of their famous strong cider. The bouncers who checked our IDs at the door were appalled by the lack of Englishness in our group, and I got called a "flatlander." I was vindicated by the second bouncer, though, who looked at Steve's ID and groaned, "Illinois? That's even worse!" Darned right!

Today is Remembrance Sunday, which has been anticipated for a couple of weeks by lots of people (and all the TV presenters) wearing red lapel-poppies to support veterans. The big memorial service at the Cenotaph in London will be later this morning, so maybe I'll go watch some of that.

Matt and I got roped into cooking dinner for CASSOC tonight, and we decided to make jacket (=baked) potatoes. What does one put in a jacket potato, you might ask? Baked beans, tuna fish and/or cheese, apparently -- not sour cream or cottage cheese or any of the normal stuff!

Well, in the spirit of reading week, I'm going to get back to Prudentius' Peristephanon, a collection of horrifically gory poems describing the deaths of early fourth-century martyrs, including one in which St. Cassian's students rip him apart with their styluses. Ugh. On a more pleasant note, here are a whole bunch of random pub pictures for your entertainment.

Pyromania.

Halloween here isn't exactly the sugar-crazed affair that it is at home (definitely more about booze than candy), but we managed to have a pretty good celebration on Wednesday. Daniela carved a couple of pumpkins that we lit up during dinner (and, when the lids began to burn from the inside, we lit the stems for good measure and made weird pumpkin torches). None of us had costumes, but we spent a good half hour hanging out in front of the union watching students in fancy dress come by and get scared out of their wits by a friend of Matt's brother, who was dressed up as a pile of trash bags sitting along the street and would jump out at groups passing by.

I had two presentations this week, one on reception studies for the MA Theories and Approaches class and on reception of the Aristophanes myth in Plato's Symposium. They both went fine, although due to lack of material for the latter, I eventually resorted to using Mariah Carey and Jewel Lyrics for filler. They were actually strangely appropriate -- it's a very pop-music notion that each of us has an "other half" out there that we're just waiting to find. Pssshhh.

Another fun language thing started up this week: a spoken Latin group on Friday afternoons! My Greek prof is leading it, and quite a few of us turned up for the first session, which mostly consisted of him talking at us in Latin and us asking each other how-do-you-do and what's-your-name questions (Quid agis? Quid est nomen tibi?). Surprisingly, it wasn't very difficult to get used to being jabbered at in pretty simple Latin. Hopefully we'll be able to have more sophisticated conversations soon.

The PhD application process is now officially underway. Writing personal statements, as usual, has been accompanied by feelings of worthlessness, existential angst and insanity, along with urges to jump out the window and/or chuck school altogether and join the circus. The strange part is that I find all this almost comforting: it's so familiar from last year that getting back into the mindset has been like getting reacquainted with an old friend. How sick.

Luckily, there have been some fun things going on to get me away from the computer, including the Bonfire Night fireworks last night on the Downs. (Guy Fawkes isn't till tomorrow -- remember, remember, the fifth of November -- but Bristol celebrated on Saturday night.) The fireworks got off to a good start at about 7:30, but they stopped abruptly after a few minutes after a shell went haywire and exploded into the crowd in front of us! A couple ambulances came screaming in, but nobody seemed to be seriously hurt, and they started the fireworks up again after half an hour or so.



The great fall weather here continues to hold out, and I've had some of the most beautiful runs and walks ever in the past couple of weeks. Check out pics of Halloween, pretty fall leaves, and the Bonfire Night festivities here!