this week

Updating this blog on a regular basis has proven to be slightly more arduous than I thought it would be, and so (once again) I find myself overwhelmed will all of the details I want to tell you about this past week but without enough time to write the novel that they deserve. Last weekend I went on a free FIE trip to Stonehenge and Bath. I was suprisingly free of my typical motion sickness during the bus ride and so I could actually listen to our tour guide and enjoy the English countryside that whipped by out my window along the way. As most who make the journey would probably report, I was a little let down by Stonehenge. We were blocked from getting closer than 15 yards from the actual rocks, and so for the most part, seeing them wasn't much different than staring at the Stonehenge microsoft desktop picture. The chance to put them in the context of their landscape was appreciated though, and I genuinely enjoyed the fresh air and our tour guide's explanations. According to her, the public haven't been allowed to get close to Stonehenge for a few decades now, ever since viewers began to make a habit out of borrowing chisels and hammers from local blacksmiths and vandalizing the rocks. After Stonehenge the bus deposited us in Bath where I saw the baths and splurged on a 10 pound lunch of goat cheese tarts and caeser salad. Sara, Christie, and I didn't take the tour bus back to Kensington with FIE and instead waited in Bath for a friend of Sara's to pick us up. Lottie lives near Bristol, and we spent the night getting scolded for not being ladies (when we ordered pints instead of half pints at the pub) and eating delicious home-cooked food that her mom made. Later on we went to a guy nicknamed "Peaches" birthday party in Birnham near the sea. Once again we were the token Americans at a party, and all of the English kids (and the parents who were in attendance) wanted us to teach them drinking games. It was a great weekend, and now I'm buckling down (kind of) until Thursday morning when I depart for Istanbul!