All Swank and Stuff

Linsday: “Ana’s gonna watch 13 shows!” Why yes, yes I am.

Television is the undiscovered treasure, the art-lover’s jewel, declares no one. Television will not win you a Nobel prize, get you recognized by the masses, or a shot at the California governorship.

At that’s just for the people in television.

For the people who watch it, there is even less respect: why would you ever spend your precious, young years on something as foolish, vapid, silly, trashy, expensive, time-consuming, and pointless as television?

Nobody has asked me with quite that proliferation of adjectives, but the implication is a little clear when they say, “Thirteen? You’re going to watch thirteen shows?”

Why yes, yes I am.

Well, that’s silly, television is silly—but I disagree. We’ll leave my defense of television for another day. 

So why, despite the fact that television is silly and stupid, do I want to watch thirteen television shows every week from the start of January to the end of May? While taking sixteen credits at Whitworth, working minimally, writing a story, and occasionally seeing the sunlight? (I list those things as if they the caps to a grand and impressive list of accomplishments. Look again: they are standard responsibilities of any young person. I should not applaud myself for taking them on. And, again, I’m listing them in order to tell you I’m adding thirteen television shows to that standard list of occupations.)

But why? Because there are thirteen sets of people I want to hang out with every week. I want to know what coat Kate Beckett will be wearing (that, most of all), I want to see what happens to poor Don Draper’s children, and I’m dying to know Liz Lemon’s big secret. I have spent time with all these people, and they matter to me.

Some of them I have been visiting for years, like Dr. House and Rick Castle, and others I’ve first encountered over the Christmas break, in a suicidal attempt to add more families to my bevy of them. Of course, it’s all suicidal, but that is the heart-racingly pure folly of being nineteen, isn’t? I am dumb and nineteen, and I’m going to do it.

And here, on this blog, having been repurposed from an admittedly more studious study-abroad blog, I’ll document the adventure of these thirteen families and myself. I’m not going to stuff you full of reviews and recaps, because you either watched them or you didn’t care. But I’ll tell you how it’s going, and I’ll pick the best episode of the week. And along the way, I’ll probably find time to tell you why I think television is both wonderful and necessary, if not the undiscovered treasure of the art world.

So if you’re going to come along on tolerate this adventure, we’ve got to know what we’re up against. Here are the thirteen extra occupations of my semester, organized by network.

ABC

Castle

Revenge

Cougar Town

Modern Family

Happy Endings

 

Fox

House

Bones

Glee

 

NBC

30 Rock

Up All Night

 

CBS

Criminal Minds

How I Met Your Mother

 

AMC

Mad Men

 

And shows I’ll drop in on from time to time, because hey, who doesn’t have time?

 

Community (NBC)

The Middle (ABC)

Saturday Night Live (NBC)

American’s Next Top Model (CW)

Psych (USA)

New Girl (Fox)

Sherlock (BBC)

So the gauntlet has been thrown.

She said dramatically, adding less awesomely, by me, because I happen to like TV. If you check back, you’ll be welcomed to the world of quiet and polite insanity, as well as police detective wearing high heels, pseudo-Oprahs babysitting Christina Applegate’s baby, the Hamptons being destroyed with words, and serial killers meeting their makers. Oh, and Tina Fey.

Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Going out with a bang, a bump, and an oxygen mask

Soon enough I will have to sit down and stroke my beard, or else gaze moodily into a rainy skyscape, in order to sum up and conclude my study abroad adventure. It’s a staggering task that will certainly be nice to complete, but currently I’m on a plane and I have no seatmate.

 

Should I back up? It’s like one of those movies, you know: they reveal something strange and then rewind, rewind, and all the time there’s a bitter taste in your mouth because you’re being played with. Nobody likes their story cut up into little pieces and fed to them out of order. 

 

So, I’ll start right at the beginning and then I’ll tell you the strange thing.

 

Last year, the idea began to occur to me that I was interested in studying abroad, and—

 

Just kidding. 

 

We don’t have to go back so far. I’ll simply tell you that today and tomorrow are the ghastly wretched travel days of all days. Why they seem so horrible when they are not back-to-back with my outgoing journey—in fact, eleven weeks removed from it—I don’t know, but let me tell you, getting from London Heathrow to the always lovely Fresno Yosemite International Airport is an unfortunate task.

 

I began on the tube with my family, trekking out to Heathrow (was that today? it seems an age. Just thinking about it makes me want to shave my beard and well, I’m a girl). We parted at Terminal 4 and I was left to decipher the world of Delta on my own.

 

Not that that’s particularly difficult. Mainly there was a seven hour flight and then dragging through customs, baggage claim and recheck, security, etc. etc. I was geekily overjoyed to great my country: I turned the data on my phone and did not turn it off; I text messaged people, I used toilet seat covers, I used dollars. All these things were grand and charismatic novelties. Even in the throbbing haze of a headache I could not help saying to the security agent, “It’s the first time I’ve been in America in eleven weeks!” I said to a man waiting with me for a ride, “They call it an elevator here: what about that!”

 

He turned out to be British.

 

But the point is, the salve of American soil is worth almost nothing without my own bed, without a shower, without the sweet and consuming lure of a steaming bag of Orville Redembacher’s. These are the things we live for, team. So I was tired and, to be frank, fairly miserable, up until half an hour ago, on my flight from Boston to Salt Lake City.

 

The kind and mustachioed gentleman sitting on the aisle beside me got up to use the bathroom. I’m not sure if he made it or not, but at some point in a very small part of him all hell broke loose and he dead fainted in the bulkhead area of our 757. Dead fainted, flat on his back, eyes wide open and unseeing. He made no move to get up.

 

For some reason I remember specifically a man in the front row, right next to the disaster, reach over his head to the control panel and press the attendant call button three or four times in swift succession. Buckled into our tiny torture seats, all but the very first of us unable to see, we strained like spectators at an elementary school fist fight. 

 

Thickly made-up flight attendants of various ages congregated swiftly. The first leaned over the man (I think I heard them say Robert, we’ll assume so for convenience) and said, “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

The logical, down-playing, Valerie Quiring part of me expected him to perk up, say, “Oh I was just a bit woozy!” And everyone would move on with their lives, their movies on-demand and private miseries. 

 

But Robert was legit totes not okay.

 

He lay there, his head almost beneath the edge of the front seat, and stared at the ceiling without really being conscious after all. It took him a good ten seconds to come around. Finally he began to sit up, and the flight attendant said, “Are you okay? Do you know your name? What’s your name?”

 

But seriously, this is what happened.

 

Before I could discern any possible explanation, the attendants were swarming, and a man in the front row was vacating his seat to provide room for an oxygen tank. An attendant with quick frantic fingers was unwrapping plastic from one of those Tonka yellow oxygen masks, the ones from safety videos that are reserved for safety videos, the Lost premiere, and that’s it. They never make appearances in real life.

 

And then, naturally, because what else would it be?—I was in an episode of House, (specifically the one on a plane where everybody catches a killer disease) and the voluminously coiffed flight attendant, imposingly and bleachedly blonde (I have missed America) picked up the intercom phone and interrupted my Arcade Fire by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, if there is a doctor or an EMT or anything like that on the plane, would you please press your attendant call button?”

 

Robert and his wooziness were not messing around.

 

Then the Valerie Quiring side of me died out completely and the Richard Castle, Peter Packard, Ana Quiring side of me came out and I knew that the world was going to end. 

 

Okay, perhaps not, but I was confronted with that perpetual taunting flight pattern map and forced to consider. We were over Iowa. Caroline Swinford is currently in Iowa, although she drove there with her family and loads of books, and did not crash land with defibrillators flashing and the entire cabin becoming infected with a killer seahorse disease or something of the sort.

 

I understand that Robert was having a rougher flight than me, but I was not entirely happy with the progression of my day thus far, and the idea of a nightcap on the cornfield outskirts of Cedar Rapids was not entirely amicable to me .

 

In any case, back in the reasonable universe, an older, plaid-clad doctor presented himself from the rear of the plane, as well as a young bespectacled woman from first class who I intend to make my new best friend. In the third row of seats, I was unable to see much of what was happening, although I caught phrases like “Hi, my name is Emily, I’m a doctor, and we’re going to see what’s going on with you.”

 

“We’re just going to check your vitals, sir.”

 

“Do you want to lay back down?”

 

I think his nose was bleeding but I can’t be sure.

 

And now, 40 minutes after all this madness occured, Robert is still laying in the space between the first row and the lavatory, a thick wad of tissues in one hand. Emily the doctor has given up her first class seat for the one closest to him, and….

 

And I’m not entirely sure what’s going on.

 

A trip to Cedar Rapids looks unlikely, for which I am grateful, but I find myself mildly unsatisfied by the completely unequalled plane drama I have witnessed. Questions remain unanswered. First of all, what the heck? Then, also, why did a random fifty year old dude faint on his way to the bathroom? Why were his eyes open? Is it catching? Will Emily be awarded a purple heart or something? Will I be interviewed as the girl sitting next to him, and give a wide-eyed serial-killer-neighbor soundbite: “he was so normal, I didn’t suspect a thing!” ?

 

And, of course, I’m imposing drama on this. I’m sure Robert is just a spy who is practicing his immunity to iocane powder, or something equally innocuous. But the point is, when you’re traveling, you’ll do anything for a little diversion.

 

Unless that diversion includes Cedar Rapids.

 

(Get well soon, Robert-or-dude-with-a-similar-sounding-name!)

What happens when I fail at biking and spend an entire day on a quiet Irish island

A disclaimer here for strong cursing which is quoted, culturally accurate, and narratively necessary. Baby cousins should probably stop reading now.

I wrote this in the bar in my notebook, and now I’m transcribing it.

—-

Right now, at this moment, I am sitting alone in a bar on the island of Inis Mor. Across the room, one elderly man is behind the bar, two others sitting at it. The bartender is dusting the top of a dormant television. The patrons are idling around creamy black Guinnesses. All three are speaking the Irish language to each other, and the only discernible word is “fuck.” Apparently it’s the same in same—the irish’s favorite—in any language.

I’m here because it’s raining, and the only place on the island to go besides a coffee shop I’ve already spent two hours in. When my group set out to explore the island on renter bikes, the ferry ride left me feeling unequal to the task, and I left myself behind. So I’ve been roaming Inis Mor, rough dulling pencil in my hand, earbuds trailing out of my pocket. I promised Katie I’d draw, and draw I have. First, to the tune of four Irish coffeeshop women having some sort of morning break and chat at a neighboring table (and though very kind to me, let me tell you: Irish coffeeshop women are bitchy. Delightfully, cattily so, privately to themselves, in a way that made me smile). Then I sat on a soaking whitewashed stone fence and sketched an abandoned house with the thatched roof falling right off it.

(Now, at the bar, they’re laughing. Whenever the word “fuck” makes consecutive appearances, they laugh more. The patron on the right, in a presumably local woolen sweater, is beginning another Guinness. They are leaving me completely alone.)

We had a bus ride to the ferry this morning; from Galway, and I sat next to jaQ and skirted by the coastline. Alongside the ocean ran layer upon chunky layer of famine walls, on both sides of us, as far as the eye can see. Jenny taught us about them in her presentation yesterday: during the potato famine, which defines this country in a way that’s startling and pervasive, they kept the poor and starving in jobs by paying them to build dry stone walls to nowhere. They stacked big rock on big rock, with little ones in between. The holes in the walls let the blistering wind course through without toppling them. And on this bus ride, these aimless, ragtag, desperate fences pierce the landscape and slice it again and again. They have never been taken down.

(And now a voice is speaking Irish on the radio, and the second Guinness is slowly, demurely, disappearing. Behind the bar is a framed Bank of Ireland soccer jersey, a sign that says

OS CIONN 18 AMHAIN
STRICTLY OVER 18’S

, and a Boston Red Sox pennant. Next to me an Irish mother and son, aged 11, are doing homework in English. It is hot in the bar and the windows are splattered with rain.)

When I looked at those famine walls, I did not weep or want to for those workers, fingers purple and cheekbones sharp and serrated like knives. But I felt their footsteps, and more than that, the landscape felt them, down to the roots of the ocean and the docile cows, matted dirty ponies. The ground, especially, felt them; carved with speckled rock every ten feet, not knowing which lines are still useful now, corralling the ponies, and which are the roamings of another expedition to nowhere—keeping in good to avoid immigration, to avoid separating the family, to avoid America. Really, those walls are an expedition to Ireland.

And did they find it? They died, limestone cracking against their cleaver bare cheekbones; but here I’m sitting in a bar on an empty soaked island, almost the only person in the room speaking English. The bartender spreads his arms, rests them on far-flung and formidable taps: Guinness, Carlsberg, Smithwick’s. He let’s a Guinness rest a minute, foam itself out, and them hands it wordlessly across. He works on a piece of gum against a silver front tooth. They are talking about soccer (Ireland won the other day) or tourists or the new president. I don’t know, because their throats clog with thick Gaelic consonants and stutter over the long conglomerate words. And here, with my back drying against a green wooden booth, I’ve got to conclude that everybody’s—mine, and the wall builders’—expedition has confronted, rewarded them with Ireland.

Wilhelm Sasnal's heart-breaking painting that I love

That’s the thing about modernism. You can never find the door.

And then, back in London. I spent a strange and hazy twenty-four hours alone, which were populated almost entirely by Scrubs on youtube (a panacea for any travel-related burnout that ails you), British versions of “Who’s Line is it anyway?” and, of course, by Peter and Sophie.

Because, what else would I do but visit them with London all to myself on a Monday?

They have a house, you know, on Warwick Avenue (Warick, of course, because the pronunciation lessons go on). It is Sophie and her husband Nathan’s house, and they named it The Gables. I visited it for the first time when I visited three years ago, and when I returned nothing had changed, only in my mind they have aged, changed, grown in dimension and complication. They have inhabited the house in new ways, in my imagination. It is a gorgeous house, I tell you. You have seen how I’ve graffitied FaceBook with endless photos of it from every angle.

I was alone and strange and absolutely gleeful on the pavement of Warwick Avenue. I had to duck out of the way as somebody parked by the house, by the Rolls Royce and the Range Rover in the driveway, and greeted someone who came outside. The leaves were changing and they were yellow, lingering on the stark trimmed branches against the creamy towering house. I walked down the street, beaming, imagining, and stumbled upon a neighborhood restaurant right against the scenic canal that dumps into Little Venice (the reason Sophie’s neighborhood has its very own Tube stop, other than my personal convenience).

It was lunchtime, and I traipsed into the very still dining room, decked in nautical decor, and had lunch. The food was excellent and the service cordial, but these features were distant echoes in my mind behind being in the real life habitat of some people that are real life, if only to me. It was absolutely splendid and one of the best parts of this whole trip. Make fun if you want, but it is true.

Afterward I walked into the Lancaster Hall Hotel, my old haunt of seven weeks ago, and ran immediately into Katie Creyts, the last cast member and character of this ongoing saga. Katie is an art professor, a wearer of red glasses and a maker of strange faces while on the computer. She is somehow irrepressibly young, and very smart and very fun. As Caroline would say, “We like Katie.”

She dragged us happily through a whirlwind of contemporary art that blurred and spun in our vision. It was lovely. We went to three or four museums and probably 10 galleries in three days. My feet have thoroughly disowned me and I almost disowned this blog, but I have seen so much art that I feel much more colorful, wise, spent, scribbled upon. I love art.

Especially fun was the Whitechapel Gallery, featuring a huge exhibition by Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal. When you are done reading this, I beseech you to google him (“I beseech you to”… I have spent too much time with Caroline Swinford). He is wonderful and his paintings broke my heart in the most vivid, shapeless way. I also loved the Frith Street Gallery, an extracurricular destination to which I accompanied Katie on our day off. It is the gallery I picked for Peter’s wife Anna the painter, simply because I had heard of it, and you can imagine how her flighty adventures pooled in my mind as we lingered in the Marlene Dumas exhibition. She, also, is wonderful. I love paintings. All the time I thank my 15-year-old self, or whatever source from whom I stole the idea, for making Anna a painter. They are dark and wild and strange, at least in my imagination.

And then we packed ourselves into a train. JaQ and I decided we needed a Bad Romance dance party, and the half hour it took to acquire the song was a bit indicative of the success of the rest of the day. The train was four hours, as was the ferry ride, which whupped me thoroughly and left me groggy and disdainful toward food and people and being alive. And then we were in Dublin.

It would be good to inform you that this trip is not a fairytale and I am not inhabiting some Lizzie McGuire special or Amy Adams vehicle movie. I have been meaning to tell you this. Often we find ourselves completely out of rope, at the very end, and we grasp futilely for a handhold, for energy, for motivation to move and smile. We have been traveling for a long time, you understand.

We are beginning (beginning is a lie, but it serves to follow the story I’m angling now) to feel that now; we look at each other in our hallway-like room that sleeps ten, including two strange men, and wonder how we will choke down the next two weeks. But then I say, “SVK, can I give you a hug?” And Susan Vander Kooi hugs me back, and we stand there, warm, clutching, sighing, for a good thirty seconds, and perseverance seeps slowly back into us. JaQ and I belt Lady Gaga in the streets of Dublin, much to Caroline’s dismay, and push our longing for beds and family and puzzles out of our minds for fifteen more weary days. We pick up our sketchpads and squat in the street, draw another statue, laugh at our collective inability to draw hands. In our very blessed but real desperation we are beginning to cohere to each other.

So my family and I are drawing our way through Ireland.

Greg Quiring, Paris, James, Cheeky, and me

And penitently I resume.

There are so many things I want to tell you that I cannot fathom how to unravel the stranded stories, curl their wispy ribbons into spirals, and re-ravel them into stunning bows of coordinating colors and dangling decoration. So I am just going tell you lots of stories.

When we last met, I was in Bath, sleeping with my face pressed into the almost unobstructed wire coils that made up my mattress, pretending to be Catherine Morland and visiting Stonehenge. Afterwards, we went to London, crammed ourselves into very small rooms, and whipped through the city with the verve that is characteristic of Pam (and no one else). We were exhausted.

And yet, we splintered to disparate parents and countries a little regretfully, peeling away from our surrogate siblings reluctantly. When Susan left Car, jaQ (the proper stylizing, I’ve finally been taught) and me in the middle of the night for Spain, we hugged her slowly and said, “Be safe.” “We love you.” “Have a great time.” We found ourselves confronted with a family that had materialized in a lumpy and strange pattern before our eyes.

I, myself, completed perhaps the proudest task of my life, and got to Paris all on my own. I fought through the Gare du Nord crowd, hawking taxis and begging money, and saw my father grinning at me with his camera drawn, and he embraced me and said, “Hello, Suzanna!”

I was thoroughly startled.

When we arrived at our flat, I took a picture of the toilet that was mine to use, and nobody else’s, and it was not so bad to be called Suzanna and leave my friends. And so we had Paris; garlic, leather, cobblestone, cigarettes, 2006 Burgundy, diamonds, laughter, Poilane, French. My father is lovely, readers. He really is.

And on the way back, the second half of my proudest task, I almost fell down an escalator (the Brits would say elevator), almost got marooned in France, by border control, and I made the best travel friends I ever have.

I sat next to them on the train; the father next to me, and on the other side James, age seven, and his mother. I don’t know their names, so I named them, silently and on the spot, Brian and Joyce. They were blissfully and impressively English; they were from Somerset. I spent the first two hours talking pleasantly to Brian about accents, education, books, Canada, Spain (where they’d just visited), and cricket versus baseball. James, across the aisle, chipped in occasionally with great verbose and precocious speeches that made Brian and I snicker.

But then the train stalled and then stopped, we were still on the France side of the chunnel. We were informed of technical difficulties, and finally shipped back to a French station in who-knows-where, kicked off the train, and set afloat in a foreign land. The bilingual overhead announcements were both hostile and enigmatic. I wheeled away from my friends for the time being, searching for a direction in order to find our rumored new train, but wandering through the backwaters of a provincial French train station was daunting enough. With a complete and careless lack of subtlety, I went back to them. I wanted to be adopted.

Brian offered me a bit of Spanish candy, which was dull and then, suddenly in my mouth, completely enchanting. I didn’t realize until later that I had committed the most cliche of elementary school sins—I had taken candy from a stranger. This was hilarious to me and Brian both. We both knew he was not trying to drug me, or whatever it is that confectionary-dispensing strangers do.

In the station, James, the native, was beginning to be restless. I offered him the grand treasure of the iPad I now carry with me as a salve to my MacBook Pro wounds, and we sat on the floor, iPad in my lap, and drew on the drawing app. He told me all about Barcelona. In stunningly vivid and thorough detail.

When we finally found our new train, I was behind my friends, and found them already resorted into our row: James now sat beside me, with Brian and Joyce together on the other side. We spent the next two hours drawing and talking at great length about Barcelona, chickens, computers, and the Barcelona public transportation system. At great length, I did say, yes?

I awaited exasperation and it never came. This little boy utterly charmed me. At one point he told me about a Barcelona train station called “Franker” which is probably “Franca” or something, since it is Spain, but imagine a thick and chirpy Somerset accent on this pasty little boy. Franker has an English buffer. I don’t have the foggiest what that is. I said to James, “is an English buffer anything like an English muffin?” He took a bemused moment to consider, and then said, “No. An English buffer would stop a train and save everybody’s lives… But a muffin would be sooooo nice.”

I’m telling you, this kid is the coolest thing ever. We can’t stop saying it.

Then he told me how he lives on a farm with all sorts of animals, including six chickens. I said, “So, with six chickens, what did you name them?” James: “Well, I only named one… Cheeky.” That Cheeky is quite a character, let me tell you.

When I met my classmates in London, Jen laughed at this story, told in its entirety almost immediately, and said, “You’re in love with this kid!” I assented without any real protest. I think we are going to be penpals.

And yes, I did just glaze over five glorious days in Paris to tell a story about a catastrophic and much-delayed train trip, but come on. Cheeky? You can’t make this stuff up.

The rest of my ridiculously long-winded and strangely prioritized recapitulation of the following days will shortly, well, follow.

Your guide to youth hostel travels

It appears to me that I’ve done my utmost to tell you about the homes of the authors you may have read, or to tell you about the cities you’ve seen in movies. What I have neglected to mention to you are the details of an entirely other sector of this trip: the accommodations. It would not become me to inform you all about my daily adventures without also sharing the travel secrets I have learned. So, for the next time you find yourself holed up in a luxury youth hostel of the UK, here are Ana’s helpful hints.

First, when you arrive, harried and achey-armed from wrestling your suitcase through a crowded train station, there will be stairs. Please don’t inquire as to why all sorts of hostels in all sorts of cities must maintain the same impressive level of stairage. It’s simply a crucial axiom of the hostel way of life. There will be stairs, and there will be no lift. Consider it your privilege to drag your suitcase, foolishly loaded with trivial items like socks and shampoo, up several flights in order to find your room.

Your hallway will be slightly drab—it’s minimalistic, folks: European charm—and have a mysterious aroma, something like a mixture of cigarettes, orange air freshener, and very well-cooked meat. This might be marijuana, but if you’re as sheltered as your tour guide, you may never know. Suffice to say, the cigorangemeat smell welcomes you to your room, which is the size of a foursquare court and is designed to hold you as well as between two and seven hundred of your closest friends. But probably three. 

If you are staying at the YHA, or Youth Hostel Organization, you will spend a exerting and thoroughly diverting ten minutes struggling to fit your leaf green duvets onto the duvet fillers, which are made of material closely resembling matted cotton balls. If you are on the top bunk, you can hop over the safe and comfy high railing that makes your bed a direct model of a baby’s crib in order to make your bed with fitted sheet almost completely devoid of elastic, leaf green pillowcase, and leaf green cotton ball comforters. Top sheets are for communists and bloody Americans.

Other accouterment in your room include a sink. That is probably it.

If you desire all the comfortable and luxurious amenities of a hotel room, you must journey down the hall, through two or three swinging doors. Embedded in the hallway are approximately two toilets and two showers, all in separate rooms approximately the size of a conservative armoire. Lucy’s wardrobe is prime real estate in comparison.

The toilet, outfitted with individually sheeted toilet tissue, is generally harmless. You should only bring spider anti-venom and hygienic HAZMAT suits if you prefer more conservative travel habits. For showers, flip-flops that are plague, leprosy, and other-people’s-hair resistant are recommended. A friendly warning: at some point, you will lean over to pick up your soap, and your bare butt will touch the wet, slimy wall. For your own protection, panic attacks are not recommended.

When you are clean-(ish), happily squelch back in your soaked flip-flops to your room, where you will be greeted by the friendliness of three sets of bunk beds barred higher than a state penitentiary. Try not to be overwhelmed with the sense of homeyness that arrests your senses.

Other aspects of hostel life are similarly charming. The internet will cost around the same as your first car, and will work precisely 45.667% of the time. The front desk will be staffed with obviously English and English-speaking people named things like “Martin” and “Sophie,” and when you ask them simple questions like, “has a parcel arrived today?” they will stare at you as if you have asked them to derive the quadratic equation in Swahili.

The lobby will be filled with other residents: a few French, a few of a non-descript European variety with pasty complexions and indecipherable origins, but the great majority of them will be German. Vastly, vastly German. They will speak loudly, universally, and will generally ignore you, only to surprise you by occasionally examining you with a wide-eyed, unkempt zoologist’s curiosity.

I have no wish to make a statement about the German nation or its people at large. I am only speaking to the breed of German nineteen year olds visiting British youth hostels. It is a specific demographic, I am willing to concede. 

But, continuing on with my helpful tips to the youth hostel world: breakfast is an exciting minefield that must be carefully prepared for. Breakfast is almost always included in the price of board, and includes such items as hashbrown bricks and muesli sawdust. If you have never had the pleasure to encounter muesli, it is a granola facsimile which is sawdust. That is absolutely the best way to explain it. Also available at this scrumptious repast are vaguely pink yogurt with the consistency of hair conditioner and eggs that are not a bunch of eggs that were sneezed on, but a bunch of sneezes that were mildly egged-on. These items are heartily charming

In the end, there are only three major rules to live by when staying in the youth hostels of the United Kingdom. First: never expect anything of its staff. If you need a toothbrush, directions, mouth to mouth resuscitation, or last rites as you die of leprosy, you simply will have to find it somewhere else.

Second: if the fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, feel free to blame the Germans, room 36, or your professor’s thirteen year old son. He probably opened the shower door, as silly, foolish thirteen year olds are wont to do. Such naive foolishness it’s almost charming, isn’t it? But a bit of shower steam and the resulting fire alarm never hurt anyone, except your tender sensitive eardrums that are a gift from the good Lord. In any case, get out of bed but do not bother to alight from the building. There is no fire and the alarm will automatically switch off. However, it will not until you have resolved to get out of bed, put on your shoes, and flee the building. When you get to the doorway, it will switch off and you can resume normal activities.

And, finally: remember that you are enjoying one of the most beautiful, historical, literary, scenic countries in the world. You are young of body and fleet-footed of heart. You are state penitentiary-ed with some lovely people who laugh at your jokes and don’t judge you too harshly when you skip the emotional indignation of a shower. You are learning about some of the best and coolest books, people, and art in the world. In short, don’t complain too much. Appreciate the magnificence of such an experience. Also, you’re going to want to sleep under some mosquito netting.

Recurrently, Ana forgoes the spectacular in favour of the aggravatingly mundane

I am having an inordinate amount of fun with titles just now. 

So, I should pause to tell you that the last three days in Oxford have been splendid. On the first of those, Monday, we visited the Bodelian Library, which is a grand, kingly hierarchy of a library with ten million books and almost as many stiff, disapproving librarians that add to the austere grandeur of the place. It is wonderful in a way that only people like Pam, Caroline, and I find wonderful. But for us it is a hushed and dusty treasure.

Afterward we “made our pilgrimage,” as Pam would say, to the home of C.S Lewis. It is not as gloomy as Haworth or as gilded as Castle Howard—it is a real, working house, suburban and slung low to the ground. We were shown around the house and given a lecture by scholar Michael Ward, who also fed us Turkish delight and mountains of biscuits and tea. The house is not curtained off and museumed in any way, and several scholars let rooms and actually live there. I relished being able to narrate in my mind, “So there I was, face smeared with Turkish delight powdered sugar, roaming around C.S. Lewis’s house looking for the loo.” It was a strangely nice moment.

On the following day, we explored the second and third of three Oxford institutions that to me, with my Fresnan background, sound like Armenian names: (after the Bodelian) the Ashmolian and Sheldonian. The first is a museum and the second a venue for graduation and other events. We visited the sites as part of a walking tour with a literary tourism goddess, in Pam’s estimation, who pandered to my fascination for imaginary people and real places meeting. “People really want to see,” she said, “where Harry Potter did not walk,” (And here it is). I liked that idea, especially when it referred to Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited, which, if you recall, I saw like Bathsheeba on a rooftop and bought, am reading ravenously. We finished the day at the Eagle and Child, favorite hang-out of C.S Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

And yesterday was the day of all days for Jaq, our resident Austenian. Chawton is almost entirely devoted to the cult of Jane Austen, often intimated to be close to a religion, and in honor of that we worshipped copiously at the altar of Jane. (Personally I much more enjoyed a full-scale snapshot of Ciaran Hindes in Persuasion.)

Okay, perhaps a lie: I also enjoyed the tour of the Chawton Manor house, which is inhabited by a woman writers library, and plenty of ancient irrelevant paintings besides. The whole place is rotten with wood paneling, secret messages bottles, and the dining table where Jane certainly dined (at which we were allowed to sit quite casually), and served to quite seriously convince me (alright, I concede not so seriously) that I am determined to marry into an English manor family.

So there is a summary of the highlighted events of the past few days, bringing me to the “aggravatingly mundane” story that I really want to tell you.

So I really like these shoes called Vans. They are comfortable, stable, neutral, and really there are not enough good reasons in the world to justify the ridiculousness of this story. But, regardless, I asked my lovely mother to send me some new ones, since my old standards were, quite literally, falling apart. No joke: I got pebbles in my shoe from the bottom. That’s how bad the holes were.

So my lovely mother, along some of my dear friends, Nicole and Megan, from my dad’s office, conspired to send me these replacements. The package was due to arrive in Oxford soon after I did, whenceforth I would retrieve it at the front desk.

It never came.

I inquired at the post office; they sent me on a windy jaunt to the Royal Mail office. A thickly accented lady told me without much pathos that my package was being held at the Oxford Depot (deh-pot).

The Oxford Depot is a last resort, a huge warehouse situated on the fringed edges that are the vestiges of Oxfordian civilization. People who marry into manor families do not go to the Oxford Depot. (And blast, there goes my career ambitions already.)

But, after three absolutely delightful automated phone calls with a computer I call Karen (after Plankton’s computer wife from Spongebob, of course), it was to the Oxford Depot I determined to go. I phoned my parents, alerting them to the difficulty of the situation. Megan called that vast, cruel hierarchy of the Royal Mail and removed the problem of the large, Stamp-Act-like postage fee that remained on the parcel (believe me, I have learnt the word ‘parcel’ sufficiently) and I scheduled time to take a taxi to that far-off dastardly place, the Oxford Depot.

This morning, a very genteel Indian cab driver deciphered the location of this god-forsaken place without even an address—quite a feat—and we stumbled and lingered through morning traffic all the way out, almost to the Oxford airport. Finally, I saw the words Royal Mail and saw various parcels, and my blood began to sing with victory. Triumph was mine.

I addressed another very genteel man and showed him my tracking number. He informed me, very kindly, that due to the extremely ridiculous phone call mixup, my package was currently being delivered—to an address I had no intention of ever being again in a matter of hours. He could not do much about it.

But this fellow—who, if I knew his name, I would undoubtedly name my firstborn son after—made a call to his delivering buddy and requested an early delivery to the youth hostel.

And, after a long and harrowing ride back (I paid and bailed and sprinted the last four cold blocks back) I finally claimed my parcel. It had my shoes, as well as chocolate, cards from my mom and sister, and season three of Castle.

In other words, victory was pretty darn sweet.

Clutching my prizes in my trembling frozen fists at last, I boarded a train to Bath. After all of that in a matter of days, it is time once again for a new adventure.

And you will dwell in the house of the starch forever

There’s a line in an episode of Cougar Town, one of my favorite shows, that I definitely relate to. Protagonist Jules, played by Courtney Cox, is trying to convince her two best friends to splurge on a beach vacation for her birthday. “Come on!” she says, “we can make plans to go kayaking and hiking and biking and then—not do any of it!”

 

I don’t want to think about how many times I’ve done that same thing. Oy.

So it was pretty rewarding to actually do it—to drag and convince Janae and Caroline and then call up every cycle-for-hire place in Oxford to find some bicycles to rent and ride out on the “towpaths” out in the countryside.

But we did. It was a gorgeous day, and we wrote out of town and across little cycle paths one tire (tyre) wide, rubbed brown into the expanse of grass, marred again, by sheep poop. We rode along  the river Thames forever, seemingly, and then found our destination, a inn and restaurant with spectacular(ly British) Sunday dinner.

I ate roast beef with duck fat potatoes and Yorkshire pudding by the river Thames, and was very, incandescently happy. And, gloriously, the sun shone.

Also, can I share a quintessential English moment with you? Not red phone booths, tea, or smoking pipes. No, how about this: the thought process of an English chef. “Hmm, let’s see… We’ve got a big hunk of beef, we’ve got healthy vegetables, we’ve got huge, generous potatoes cooked in insanely delicious duck fat, we’ve got sauce, what else does this meal need?… hmmm. Oh, of course I know! More starch! Yorkshire pudding for everyone!”

I freaking love this country.

I won’t lie to you and say it was perfectly idyllic all the way through—my sit bones, as Janae calls them, are quite sore in a way that’s exasperating and quaint—but it was very self-satisfying to have a day off and to do something with it.

And don’t forget the bourbon and raisin pudding. Never forget that.

“Don’t tell me they nailed that into their bums”

(My favorite blog post name ever.)

I do not have the energy to great some great ruffly conceit about my adventures in Oxford thus far, but I want to remember them, so I will recount them to you know.

Well, okay, a short story first.

On the day before we traveled to Oxford, I went with Pam, Jaq, Car, Jen, and Susan to the town of Knutsford and its manor house Tatton Park. Two conclusions were made on this day: Elizabeth Gaskell grew up in a wonderful place, and I need to marry way, way up. I could get used to those pretentious, gilded, marbled, manor houses.

That evening, I trekked down to the Apple store again (just as fruitlessly) and then loosed myself upon the Arndale Center, peeking into shops. At one point, I browsed through a quite commonplace, bourgeois bookstore chain. I came upon the classics section, interested to see what Americans were included and which authors were highly prized. (To my satisfaction, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harper Lee, and J.D. Salinger featured heavily.)

Suddenly I came across a text I’d heard discussed, for movie-filming reasons at the castle our host family took us to in York: Brideshead Revisited. I had made an off-hand mental note to pick up the book, which sounded interesting, at some point. But now, with the artsily-photographed paperback novel in my hand, there is only one way to describe my feelings, one any book lover can understand: I lusted after it. My mouth went dry and I counted up my daily budget fervently, knowing it didn’t matter and I would buy it regardless.

Somehow that fiscal rebellion spurred me on, and I went in pursuit of a companion. I found One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I’m not even kidding. That’s the name of the book, and that’s the author’s name. I love the Russians. The book was recommended to me by my AP English teacher Molly Sargent, and it made an excellent final participant in my elicit book love.

I took them home down the crowded lit-up Deansgate drag, and every time I touched the crinkly plastic bag my heart beat harder. This doesn’t happen to me often, and I am not even the hardest-core bibliophile on this trip, but let me tell you: that is to love books.

I began Brideshead on the train to Oxford, and I’m currently in the motions of falling in love with a story. It’s glorious. You should read it right now. But here’s the cool thing: so far, at least half the action has gone down in Oxford, right in the colleges. And yesterday I walked right past the Ruskin school of Art, where narrator Charles Ryder spent substantial time. Tell me that isn’t cool.

In expository conclusion, today has been a bustling and excellent day in the city. We took a walking tour with a darling tour guide lady (“this is Jesus College; I love saying, ‘I’m just going to Jesus’ or ‘I have to phone Jesus’”). Today was Metriculation Day, which is sort of like the first day of school for “freshers,” so thousands of students were roaming the street in full student uniform, with loose sleeve flaps and graduation-style caps in hand.

Caroline and I spent much of the afternoon in a spectacularly Victorian Natural History and Anthropology Museum, which included huge dinosaurs, real shrunken heads, and shape-altering implements from other cultures. A British father explained to his five-year-old daughter, “So they would bind their feet so they would be small.”

“But doesn’t that hurt the babies?”

“Probably, but that was the fashion, so that’s what they did.”

“Well, it’s terrible fashion!”

“No, it’s just different. And look, they used to put that on their face.”

She was surprised, indignant, and charmingly English. “The only things I put on me are soap when I’m having a bath, or clothes!”

“I know, but that’s what they thought was beautiful. And look, do you know where that would go? On their bum. Isn’t that bonkers? They put it over their bum.”

And the little girl, very dry and incredulous, “Don’t tell me they nailed that into their bums.”

Okay, so Car and I may have been creeping. But it was probably the highlight of my day.

Afterward, we went to Evensong at Christ Church college, where huge chunks of Harry Potter was filmed (this probably means more to you than to me) and man, man, man, do I love a boychoir. I really do.

That is all I have to tell you. Peace, love, and big fat feet that aren’t terribly baby-hurting fashions. Don’t go nailing into your bums.