16 Weeks in Scotland

Sunday, October 22, 2006

What's Going on Here?!?!

I'd like to blame Dennis for the recent slack-off in blog posting, since he hasn't downloaded our Islay pictures from the camera yet, but I really can't put it all on him. So, I'll give you a text-only update and leave you longing for photos.

Things are going well with classes; we're right at mid-term, which means we've been giving out grades on papers and tests, and the students are getting their rude awakenings (only rude for some) that this is indeed an academic program where you have to EARN your college credits, not just a convenient launching pad for four months of international travel. Most of them are quite responsible and mature about it, but you have a few who seem really put out that you would dare evaluate them here the same way you would have evaluated them at home. I think all the same patterns occur on our home campuses, but we don't have to LIVE and EAT with the students at home. This place gets to be a kind of petrie dish, both on the biological level (I've had the only cold I'm going to allow myself) and the emotional/social level. It's really good to get away, and you really do have to leave the house to get away.

So, leave we do -- last weekend (Oct. 12-15), we went to the Isle of Islay, which some of you know quite well is the home to eight whiskey distilleries (and all of them are in Dennis' favorite category of whiskey). The island was . . . fascinatingly dull . . . interestingly boring. I think it's like most islands: stark in beauty, quirky in personality, somewhat isolated, but very, very friendly. We toured two distilleries and saw the malting floors of another. I'll save most of the Islay story for another blog, with pictures.

This weekend, we stayed here and went into Edinburgh Saturday to see a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art and a movie ("The Departed") at the Filmhouse. Very nice to be in Edinburgh; I think we need to spend more of our weekends here because I think I'll regret not seeing all the things that were so close by.

The students threw a Halloween party Friday night (since we'll all be on Fall Break during Halloween), and the faculty all dressed up as Henry, the house chef; the students got such a laugh from it that they voted us "Best Costume" and gave us a £5 gift voucher to a local restaurant (which will just about buy a pot of tea and a scone).

Tonight, the house is having a Caledonian Dinner, a sort of early Burns night, with whiskey and haggis and readings from Burns. Dennis and I are even going to sing a little; we don't know any Scottish songs, so we'll sing "Wagoner's Lad," which is, after all, an Anglo-American folk song.

We leave Wednesday afternoon for our long break; first, three nights in London, where we're going to see the new production of Tennessee Williams' "Summer and Smoke," and then six days in Paris, where we're going to walk around with our mouths open, going "Golllllll-eeeeeeee!! Look at that tower; ain't it a Eye-ful?" I think we'll live on various kinds of breads, cheeses, pastries, and wine. Then, we come back under the Channel for another night in London before heading back to Dalkeith. I'm looking forward to the break, although I'm sure I'll a) spend too much money, b) eat too much, c) buy too many gifts, and d) make an ass of myself trying to speak/understand French. The students who've already traveled to Paris have assured me that if I just say, "Pardon, je ne parle pas francais" and pretend to be Canadian, I'll be fine. Sounds good, eh?

We're reading Jekyll and Hyde this week in the lit class, and I'm excited to be doing a book with Edinburgh origins, finally. We may have to do a field trip to Deacon Brodie's pub . . . .

Hope you all are well and happy. We'll have more to say and show soon!

Gin

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

I Wandered Soggy, As a Cloud (w/apologies to WW)

Report from the Lake District:

So, I’m sitting here doing what Wordsworth says poetry is all about: “recollecting emotion in tranquillity.” After this trip, I can see what he means. There is little tranquillity in this vastness. The world is all excitement and wind and clouds and color and rain and timeless meandering stone fences. This place is vast. The word sublime is not inappropriate. What began as a literary trip to see the Wordsworth’s home and haunts turned into a physical journey through his inspiration. This is the best of England’s walking tours. Not only can one walk the very same routes that set the tone and inspiration for Wordsworth’s Michael and Daffodils, not to mention the autobiographical tales in The Prelude, while vaunting the crags and wandering the countryside, you can actually feel what Wordsworth wove into words. If child is father to man, this natural fireworks display of grass, rocks, and cloud splattered sky is father to the poet. It’s like going to the biggest cathedral in the world, with the finest stained glass landscapes and lapis skies – and even more brilliant when the rain would let up for a while. But then the rain is just another tile in the mosaic. We fought the rain all the while we were in the Lake District, but in the end we were rewarded with the grand finale: a great rainbow. Poetic justice at its best.

I know I’m often accused of hyperbole, but this place has a lot of deep juju for me. Wordsworth and the professor who introduced him to me are pretty much responsible for who I am and where I am and who I’m with in my life these days, and it’s just an awesome privilege to actually walk the hallowed ground of the poets who changed the way we see the world. They are the ones that fed me through the lean times. Ah Mecca . . .

Dennis



Here’s a little travelogue:

We arrived in Grasmere on Wednesday evening and promptly got lost looking for our guest house; in my imagination of the town, it was tiny and clustered in one spot, so we had our first lesson in Lake District geography: the towns are long and winding, with several main roads, and dozens of similarly-named hotels and guest houses.

Anyway, when we found it, we were delighted; it's the family home of Dennis and Christine Batey, and they converted two of their upper rooms to en-suite guest rooms. Their daughter, Helena, was staying in one and we had the other (which meant lots of privacy and personal attention). The full English breakfast with home-made bread was YUMMY and very welcome when we set out in the pouring rain each morning.

Thursday morning, we suited up as best we could and headed into town; first stop was to buy rain gear (gaiters and waterproof rain pants). We walked out to Dove Cottage, the Wordsworth home from 1808-1817, by way of the graveyard behind St. Oswald's church, where we paid homage to William and sister Dorothy. The cottage was an interesting peek into early-19th-C life, and we saw the actual washbasin that Wordsworth washed his face in each morning ("Hmm . . . splash, splash . . . let's see . . .splash . . . 'I wandered lonely as a lamb?' No . . . splash, splash").

After a tour through the Wordsworth Museum, we started a four-mile walk around Rydal Water. After slogging through rain for two hours, we made the halfway point and decided to catch a bus back to Grasmere (after a nice hot bowl of lentil soup). It was an incredibly beautiful walk, and we vowed to buy waterproof shoes so that we could not be cowed by mere weather again!! Here (and above) is some of what we saw that day:







We ended Thursday by taking a short walk around the town of Ambleside and having some Thai food, which was very good. Friday started out gloomy and gray but dry, so we suited up again to tackle the 1000-foot ascent up the fells to Easedale Tarn, a lake nestled between two fell-tops. Not long into our walk, the rain began, and by the time we got to the tarn, we were bent over, clutching our hoods, leaning into the driving wind and rain (but we got there, dammit!). Here's the tarn, in one furtive photo Dennis took while dodging raindrops, cowering behind a boulder.

No bus to take us back down, and the usual stones crossing the Sour Milk Gill were under rapidly-running whitewater, so we turned around and went back the way we came. As we descended, we got a brief hour of sun and clearing, so we were able to take a few more photos:































Saturday is the day we left, so, of course, it was bright and clear. Our train didn't leave Windermere until 5:30, so we did have time for another walk -- this time, the other side of the Rydal Water walk that we hadn't been able to finish on Thursday. We were rewarded with amazing views and a tramp inside a really cool cave.




All in all, we loved our weekend in the Rain District -- oops, that's Lake District -- and hope to return (with waterproof boots). We decided that Grasmere is indeed the best place to stay (Mary is right; Rick Steves is wrong), Keswick is boring and touristy, pub food has improved mightily from its past reputation, and walking 20 miles is quite good justification for eating apple pie and Victoria Cake (from Baldry's in Grasmere -- another excellent recommendation from Mary).

We also decided that we love the fact that you can get good home-made soup almost anywhere in the UK (not that industrial canned shit most American restaurants serve), that children shouldn't be named Findlay, that Wordsworth must have had great butt muscles (from climbing all those hills), and that you can never pack too many plastic bags. :)

Gin















Saturday, October 07, 2006

Sweet of the Week

I don't have a picture, so use your imagination: something called Victoria Cake, which is two layers of absolutely butter-laden vanilla sponge cake with a layer of jam and cream in between. Somehow, it all seemed soaked in butter. This was an amazing creation, purchased and consumed at Baldry's Cafe in Grasmere (after having walked 15 miles over three days in torrential downpours).

More on the Lake District in the next blog.

Virginia

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Foundations upon Foundations

The City of York -- beautiful, historic, crowded, stimulating! Here's an essay that Dennis wrote about our trip for the house newsletter, The Dalkeith Digest:

Foundations on Foundations

We just got back from York, one of the oldest settlements in Britain. WOW! What a walk through history. This Town is so old it has six different names. The Celtic Eborakon (based on the name: “the place of the yew trees”) was changed to Ebocorum when the Romans arrived in 71 A.D. Later, when the Romans went broke and left, the Saxons named it Eoforwīc, (place of the wild boars) which stuck until the Vikings came around and changed it to Jorvik (horse bay) And then this new group of people called the English came on the scene and renamed it Yorrik after which it was simplified into York after the Norman conquest. Each of these names reflects the people who were in charge at the time. Same place – different place. It’s the people who make and tell the stories that change history. Time marches on while we try to capture it in a name.


























Standing in the archeological diggings beneath the huge cathedral of York Minster, the timelessness of history and the human need to define this timelessness with names struck me cold. In 1967 the present cathedral, built in the thirteenth century (1220 to 1350), needed substantial foundation repairs. During the excavation process, two previous foundations were discovered – one from the Norman era (around 1050): Jorvick and Yorrick; and an even deeper foundation and buried ruins from the Roman occupation from around the third century A.D.: Ebocorum. Although there has been a place of worship in the exact same area since the early 600’s, the excavators discovered that each of these churches was built upon the even earlier foundations of the Roman headquarters when Ebocorum was Rome’s northernmost outpost. Although scholars knew that the Romans had built large stone structures over the four hundred years or so that they occupied England, these new discoveries not only proved that the cathedral was built upon the physical remains of a previous neo-Christian culture (Constantine was proclaimed emperor in Ebocorum), but that the new Gothic Catholic cum Anglican Church of England was built on the physical remains of the Norman Roman Catholic church.





















Foundations upon foundations upon foundations. From a political military outpost, to the reflection of the greater glory of God, to the joining of the political and the spiritual to reflect Henry the VIII’s concept of the greater glory of God, the great edifice of York Minster represented at various times the deep cultural values of those who maintained it. But, it wasn’t until the spiritual, historical, and nationalistic values of the present compelled authorities to repair this magnificent symbol of England that its even greater significance was discovered.









We learn what we allow history to teach us. In a reflective moment, I realized that York Minster’s story has deep metaphorical implications. When the strength of the cathedral’s great foundations came into question, both engineers and scholars dug into its past to discover not only the present problem, but the deeper long forgotten foundations of York Minster’s greatness as well. When we, ourselves, question the strength of our own foundations, we might do well to dig deeply into our depths to discover the forgotten connections that have quietly stood the test of time to help support the newer more visible values that might tumble in around us without the introspection and historical awareness of our deeper strengths, of who we are and what we might need to fix in order to continue on.



Like the man said: “If we don’t study history, we will be doomed to repeat it.” And what is introspection if not a study in our own personal history? Fortress or church, Roman Catholic or Anglican faith, York Minster cathedral remains a point of greatness because of its strong foundations and our willingness to repair them with an eye to the future. When we know and understand our own secret foundations we’ll be able to maintain our own basic strengths as we move forward into history.

--Dennis







The various images are of the inside of the church -- the medieval stained glass (all original), the ornate tombs, and the painted ceilings (can you imagine how colorful these places were when all the paint was fresh and bright?).