Chester Fieldtrip

So yes, by this point (January 22nd) classes still haven't started yet. Just a fun fact for the day ;)

So off to England for the day....

          Today we visited many places, including Bodelwyddan Church, St. Winefride's Well at Holywell, and Chester (a wonderful shopping city by the way. A couple of the girls and I are going back for a "shopping date" soon).  We started out the day at Bodelwyddan church, which is also called the Wedding Cake church and the Marble Church. You can tell why from the pictures.

There was marble everywhere inside this church, and it came from many places throughout the United Kingdom. Some came from Belgium, France, Italy, Ireland, and more. It was very beautiful inside the church, and it had some fascinating stained glass windows as well.

 

 Outside of the church was a Normandy graveyard that housed soldiers from WWII that died of a flue epidemic during the war. Their military base used to be at this site. It was quite an experience. There were so many graves...made you feel grateful in a way...

Normandy graves

            We then visited St. Winefride's Well, in a town called Holywell of course. (They are quite punny here in the UK). As legend has it, a prince fancied St. Winefride but she continuously refused him. So, he cut off her head and it rolled down the hill and water came out of the ground where it laid. This became the well. Magically (of course), someone passing by put her head back on and she was cured. The buildings associated with the well were then build around the well itself, during the 12th and 14th century. It was freezing when we were there, but Tecwyn told us that people come from miles around to bathe in the well, because according to legend, it has healing properties. There's a part of the building where people come and are "healed" so they leave their crutches here and walk out good as new. There were probably 40 pairs of crutches just sitting in this room. Kind of cool to see :)

The Well (those are changing tents to the right)

      


             After this we went to Chester. It was a really cool city. I was fascinated by the buildings, they look so perfect. We visited the Chester Cathedral , which was very grand and quite a sight to see. It was very big, and we had  an audio tour of the building, so we got to hear about all the history and fun stories associated with different parts of the cathedral. One part that I really enjoyed was this small picture that was painted on a cobweb.

 Actually it was painted on a caterpillar web, but it's called the "Cobweb Picture".  I thought that was just so cool. The picture really doesn't do it justice. I think it said something like 40+ hours of work went into this small picture, no bigger than a wallet size photo. Also there's no way to correct mistakes. The artist nerd in me loved this picture :) The cathedral also housed the biggest organ I have ever seen, and there was someone playing it while we were there. Wow it was beautiful. There were 4,864 pipes that comprised the organ and it had 4 keyboards as well. I could have sat in there and listened to that forever...

          We had some free time here as well, so Grant, Hannah, Meghan, and I went shopping for a while (before the Cathedral, technically). We only had a couple hours (which clearly isn't enough time to get some serious shopping done.. ;)...) but there were so many stores and so many sales! Definitely coming back here on a Saturday :) Really excited for that. We stopped by a cafe and got some hot chocolate. They really know how to do hot chocolate and coffee here. I saw a sign in the cafe about how their coffee is from Costa Rica, and I felt all cultured because I was just there, and had the legit Costa Rican coffee :) and then I thought about how much warmer it was there..haha

This was in the courtyard that was surrounded by the Cathedral.
I really liked it :)

          We then got a guided tour of the city (30 minutes or so). Our guide was really funny, very into his job if you know what I mean. He was so animated and funny. He also spit quite a lot while he talked, and oddly enough he talked VERY close to people... so that became a running joke of the day. Even Tecwyn noticed, and made a witty comment about it once the tour was done. Tecwyn is awesome. :) We all love him. We had a little more free time after this tour and we just walked around and took in the city. We found this foot place that used live fish.. I didn't understand fully, but we looked in the window and people had their feet in a tank with 50+ little fish, just nibbling away (cleaning? I'm assuming) at the people's feet. We all thought that was a little odd.. but funny none the less. I absolutely loved this field trip and seriously can't wait to come back and shop :)

  

Just had to get one with the phone booth :)

Registering for Classes...

       So, on the 18th (yes I know... I'm slightly behind) we registered for classes. They have a very inefficient way of doing it here... All the students got a piece of paper, and you have to trek all around town to get signatures from the professors individually. I seriously mean all around town too....because here it's not one college/university; every college has it's own building, so there's the school of law, the school of music, etc. etc. and they are seriously spread out throughout the entire town. So.. needless to say the day was frustrating, because you would get to the building, but the person you needed wouldn't be there, so you would have to come back in 3 hours.. or something like that. All of us students got angry with this system very quickly, and we only had 3 days to get all the signatures and turn in the paper. You can imagine how frustrating it was as half the people we needed were never available :( But once we got all that done it was nice. So my schedule for the semester looks like this: Monday-Brain and Mind from 9-11, then History and Culture of Wales from 6:30 - 8:30. Tuesday-Outdoor Pursuits all day :) (I'm super excited.. to say the very least, b/c all that stuff is right up my alley). Wednesday-Brain and Mind from 4-6pm. Thursday-Minimalism (music class) form 12-1pm. Friday-NOTHING :) (that will be the one and only time that ever happens in my college career). This is quite different from my normal class schedule, as I am used to three or four 3 hour labs a week, combined with 4 or 5 classes....

      So, needless to say this semester is a breather for me, which was much needed :) O yes, the Brain and Mind class is only 6 weeks long, so after 4 more weeks I won't have class on Wednesdays or Fridays :) We've had 2 weeks of classes by now (today is Feb 3rd), and all my classes are very different. Brain and Mind has 400 people in it (biggest class I've ever been in), the professor is French and quite a character. We were talking about the neuron on Wednesday, and the myelin sheaths and Nodes of Ranvier on the cells...and long story short he called part of the cell "unprotected sex" and "protected sex", depending on whether or not they were covered with the myelin sheaths or not.... So that class is never boring. Minimalism, on the other hand, has about 13 people in it, and they are just rows of chairs in a room-no desks even. The professor is English (I think) and he's also quite funny. You can definitely tell he's into music :) My History class is with Tecwyn, who is just the sweetest old man. He brings biscuits (cookies) to class ever week :) so I always enjoy his class. I'm SO EXCITED for Outdoor Pursuits :) We had our first class on Tuesday, where we did Low and High ropes courses. I've done them before but they were still very fun :) We have an amazing group as well so that will make things very exciting throughout the semester.

      Fun fact: the main building here, called the Main Arts building, (I kid you not) looks like Hogwarts from Harry Potter. I will take pictures and put them up here sometime. It's quite funny because a lot of us "Americans" have class there, so we always refer to it as "Hogwarts" amongst ourselves. :)

      I'm getting into somewhat of a "schedule" over here, though not quite there yet. I bought a crockpot, and made some stew :) which turned out surprisingly well :) I also have my wonderful travel  tea cup, which I take to Brain and Mind every week :)

    Some fun things I've noticed so far: The water here gets hot.. like scalding hot-took me a while to get used to. Traffic lights go from green --> yellow --> red, then back to yellow --> green. It always makes me think of a race for some reason :)  Cookies here are called biscuits, and English muffins are just called muffins. (Some of us were joking today about if they called them American Muffins here). Cell phones are called mobIles (emphasis on the "i"), bathrooms are toilets, trashcans are bins, and movies are films. There are many more, but those are a few of the differences I've noticed thus far.