highlights reel, part 1

Weeks and weeks ago, I composed a “hi, we’re here” e-mail to my sister, which was meant to be a quick update and turned into a 3,000+-word monster. Once finished, having spent some hours on the composition, I decided this was a recap worth sharing more widely, and let sister know that this private letter would most likely soon be appearing on the slob. And, since “soon” is a relative term, most especially among the family that my sister and I share, here is Part 1 of said highlights.

nb: The links below are to pictures or maps or webpages of the relevant locales, so don’t forget to click!

(Oh, and just in case anyone out there should take this greatly belated update for granted, I must tell you that this is a big step for me—I have a serious affliction when it comes to any sort of journaling, known in medical circles as chronologicus severus, which makes it very difficult for me to recount historical info in any order but chronological. It’s akin to a certain mindset when it comes to keeping a diary or journal—that dire situation best illustrated by the scenario in which you accidentally let your junior high diary get away from you for months and months, and then when you finally go to update so many dozens of REALLY BIG THINGS have happened that you’re too overwhelmed to go through them one by one just then, although you certainly intend to eventually, so in the meantime you simply sum up like so:

So, dear diary, just so you know, since we last talked I was courted and wooed by this wonderful, amazing boy named [names changed to protect the stupid], and we fell totally deeply madly in love, and he wrote poetry for me, and we were so very in love, and then he met some hussy on the Maple Grove model UN team and subsequently he crushed my heart into a bazillion pieces (just like, incidentally, my sister said he would) and I wept hundreds of bitter tears and then I got over him and now I’m ready to face the world and meet a new boy and that pretty much brings me up to date.

And after said “sum up,” you promise you’ll go back and fill in all the details, but you never do.)

And yet! Here I am filling in details! Granted, in this case the intervening months involve lots of picture taking and also some Morrissey, both powerfully compelling reasons to update, but whatever. Yay for me anyhow.

• Our last few days before leaving were pretty godawful. The party the night before departure, however, was very fun—lots of people came, including my parents, which led to the strange universe of friends-and-relatives-all-interacting-together,-with-alcohol. Unnerving at first, but ultimately enjoyable. But then it ended (very late) all melodramatic and weepy. Plus, courtesy of skipping dinner, being exhausted, and dehydrating myself by (almost simultaneously) crying and drinking deceptively large amounts of wine, I was treated with a size extra-mega-large hangover for the 12 hours of travel that lay ahead! Dumb, dumb, dumb. Just a note: by all means try to avoid ever throwing up in an airport bathroom if you can help it.
  
  
• I am not used to traveling with a lot of luggage. Having now done so—J and I each had two suitcases and two carry-ons—I can state with authority that it is HORRIBLE. Especially when you’re hungover and tired. In addition to being physically difficult, it also is a great way to reinforce a bunch of crappy ugly American stereotypes! That’s especially fun when the whole world hates us even more than usual! I cannot count the number of times I said sheepishly, “Honestly, I never travel with this much stuff. I usually just have a backpack.”
  
  
• When we checked into the hotel in London, we promptly went up to our room, fell down on the bed, and slept for about nine hours or so. What a fabulous use of our time in an exciting, culture-packed metropolis! But god did we ever need it. Even if we had somehow managed to drag ourselves through the streets to a sight, we probably would have ended up passing out in front of Buckingham Palace or something. And surely they have rules against that sort of thing.
  
  
• We did manage to get to the British Museum the next day, and it was, unsurprisingly, very cool. We’d made a rather large scheduling blunder on our last UK trip that resulted in our allotting one afternoon to the museum. This meant we pretty much dashed around from the Rosetta Stone to the Benin Bronzes and the other big stuff, all the while lamenting the fact that we didn’t have time to go into the many other fascinating-looking galleries.
  
  This time we did better, although of course you could probably live there for a year and not see everything. Anyhow, I think the highlight for me was the Enlightenment gallery, in the old King’s Library. Big tall windows, walls lined with books, beautiful sculpture, and lots of glass cases with cool things in them. And of course, the Elgin Marbles are highly impressive. (Oh no, wait! you’re not supposed to call them that! they’re officially “the Parthenon Marbles.” Ignore the looting British nobleman behind the curtain!)
  
  
• After our brief stay/long nap in London, we picked up our rental car to begin a circuit through Wales, up to Manchester, and back. Remember the luggage? When we showed up at the rental place, they took one look and said, “Errm, terribly sorry, but you’re going to need a bigger car.” SO EMBARRASSING.
  
  
• Road trips in Britain are fun because British snack food is so completely awesome. For example: bacon-flavored potato chips. Not nearly as gross as they sound! Even better, though, are all the biscuits and digestives. Mmmm, Hob Nobs.
  
  
• Wales is obscenely, ridiculously green and pastoral in places, and then you turn around and it’s really jagged and rugged and wild. I doubt I’d be thrilled about living there for any real length of time, however, since it’s mostly pretty small-town. We did go to Cardiff, which of course is a genuine big city, but unless we missed all the good stuff (which is totally possible, since we went there with no information about what to do and didn’t have much time anyhow), it seemed to offer very little. Still and all, the landscape is just crazy gorgeous, and I already want to go back and see it again.
  
  Enough beauty! Back to food!
  
  
• Brits share my love of condiments. J suggested (probably accurately) that this is an effort to make the bland food more exciting, but nevertheless I feel a kinship with their love of sauces. Ketchup, mustard, horseradish, mayonnaise, and of course let’s not forget the intriguingly ambiguously named “brown sauce!” After most meals, I left a small wasteland of flattened, squished-out plastic packets in my wake.
  
  
• British beer rocks. Most beer in the States has no point, in my opinion—it doesn’t taste that great, and you have to drink a TON of it to even get a little buzz, long before which I usually get a lot sleepy. But two pints of very tasty British ale or lager or bitter or whatever—that’s a whole different story. Also, it’s cheap.
  
  
• The woman who owns and runs the Top Farm House B&B in Knockin (in England, but just a hair across the Welsh border—in fact, we had to ask her which country we were in, at which she laughed and cheerfully said that we could be hung for such question) is fantastic. Her name is Pam Morrissey—no relation to Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey, though, because naturally I asked. However, she’s only a couple of degrees removed from Moz in another way, as she told us that one of her sons (“not the gay one!” she specified) is a great Morrissey fan and once got on stage during a gig AND got a hug. Oh my god. She also said that his intense Moz phase had overlapped with reading Thomas Hardy, a combination she considered dangerous to his mental health.
  
  
• Anyhow, Pam proved to be very cool, even well beyond the Morrissey connection—at breakfast she sat down at the table (the only other guest, a gentleman in the business of pullet supply, had gone already) and we talked for something like two hours. The conversation somehow turned to politics almost immediately, and she casually asked if we were Bush supporters. When we simultaneously and fervently responded that we were not (I think I said, “God, no!”), she sort of heaved a sigh of relief and we proceeded to talk about just about everything—and agree on it. Topics covered included racism, homophobia, the environment, and the dangers of fundamentalism in all religions. She said she’d had some pretty unlikable and bigoted American guests in the past, and was encouraged by us—“my nice liberal Americans,” she called us. She insisted on us signing her guestbook and hugged us both when we left. (Meaning, incidentally, that I have hugged someone who has hugged someone who has hugged Moz! Now we’re getting somewhere!)
  
  
• The Welsh language is nuts. From the Street Welsh Phrasebook we bought in Blaenau Ffestiniog (from David, who chatted with us a bit about topics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), here are just a couple examples of its quirks:
  

  —LL is pronounced as follows: a voiceless L, pronounced by blowing between tongue and palate. Pam told us that a close approximation was a swallowed C followed by a swallowed L.

  —W is a vowel, pronounced oo, either short as in “good” or long as in “cool.”

  —Y is also a vowel. Okay, sure, English kinda does that too. But in Welsh, it’s pronounced uh as in “under,” short i as in “bin,” or long ee as in “see.”

  —“I don’t speak Welsh” is said, “Dydw i ddim yn siarad Cymraeg.” Being able to say this sounds like being able to speak Welsh, as far as I’m concerned.

  Anyhow, Welsh is in danger of dying out, which is too bad. Something this interesting should be kept around.
  

• Llandudno, on the northern coast of Wales, is a bustling seaside resort town in the summer.
  
  May is not the summer.
  
  Off-season, it’s a bit depressing—full of empty arcades, many, many elderly people, and knots of somehow threatening-looking youths. J and I tried to figure out why young Welsh men struck us both as so intimidating—because they had in Cardiff, too—and the best we came up with was that they almost all had extremely short hair. Which to us apparently made them look thuggish, or something. I have no idea why.
  

Here concludes Part 1. Next up, the Moz concert! Which, in my oh-so-biased opinion, deserves its own entry.