Lake District- Day 2

On top of the unknown mountain
view from near the summit
waterfall trail
My duck friend.
Ferry ride.

So we woke up early this morning-- 8:30 or something along those lines.

Dani and I had planned to take the ferry down to Bowness to go see the Beatrix Potter museum. As our luck would have it, it was raining that day. Of course! It was like Ireland all over again. But we didn't let a little rain get us down and we set out on the ferry headed for Bowness around 10am. The rain decided to take a break and fortunately it did not rain on us on the way down to Bowness. Once we got there we just sort of wandered around looking for little rabbits to lead us to the museum. We didn't see rabbits but we saw a heard of swans hanging out on the dock of Bowness. They looked pretty fierce and I tried to restrain Dani from petting them. She has a soft spot for animals-- it's pretty serious actually. Eventually I managed to pry her away from the swans and we set off for the museum with Mary Katherine and my roommate Erin. We found it and shelled out the money to take the self tour. 

Let me begin this paragraph by saying that this museum was made for children, but I enjoyed it as much as I might have if I was 4 years old again. The Beatrix Potter books have a special place in my heart; and my heart truly did skip a beat when I saw Jemima Puddleduck. In the museum they had various scenes from different books. It was a trip down memory lane and as cheesy as it sounds it really was magical. It seems as if nowdays you can only let your imagine wander such extremes when you are a child. Anything else is deemed as immature and improper. Children have it off so easy and they don't even realize it. They can believe anything they want to believe and their lives have not yet been tainted by corruption and vileness. The still believe that good will always triumph and that everything is worth hoping for. Oh how I wish I could be a kid again. 

Eventually we tore ourselves away from the museum and wandered around Bowness in the rain for a little while. When we were sufficiently wet and cold we got back on the ferry and headed back to Ambleside. Upon arrival we ate our lunch and then headed out again. Some friends of ours had discovered a waterfall hike earlier that day and they pointed us in the direction of it. We wandered through ambleside until we found a sign labeled "Waterfall"-- so we followed it. The waterfall hike was pleasant and ran parallel to a pretty substantial stream with several waterfalls. At some point on the hike we found another trail that would lead us to the top of a mountain. I of course jumped with excitement at the chance to summit a mountain, however, my counterparts were not as enthusiastic was I was. Nevertheless the humored me and we started trekking. 

Now during this "little" trek of ours I discovered that it doesn't pay to stay away from the Rocky mountains for as long as I have. So I can safely say that this mountain definitely kicked my derriere. It was a beautiful hike though. We could see all the villages nestled at the base of the mountains surrounding the lake. As we climbed higher and higher I could feel the mountain breeze and feel my lungs contract as the air got thinner. Some people would freak out about that and pull out their inhalers, but not me. It was wonderful. I find it very safe to say that at some point in my life I MUST live near the mountains. I have been spoiled my whole life by spending almost every summer hiking around the mountains in some part of the United States. Now that I've gotten older and gone to school and gotten a serious summer job I can no longer do that. There is nothing I miss more during the summer than being forced to get up early and go summit  a couple fourteeners. These mountains were nowhere near 14,000 feet, but it was good enough for me.

When we finally summited this mountain, that I still don't know the name of, we were out of breath and slightly chilly because we had stripped off so many layers of our clothes. From the peak we could see all of Lake Windermere below us and the villages along the lake shore. It was wonderful. Around the rest of us we could see mountains upon mountains upon mountains. I had an Ireland moment all over again and I told myself that I would return. Perhaps not in the fashion that Beatrix Potter had, but that I would take time in my life to wander through these hills and learn about their story. This really is the wild English countryside and I love it. I feel like this is part of England that few people see and this is what makes England so beautiful.

We descended from the peak and picked up some of our fellows that had bailed earlier and together we found a restaurant in Ambleside to quench our insatiable appetite. Dinner was served and we went home with full bellies and an unshakable sense of accomplishment. 

Little did we know what tomorrow would bring. 

Lake District- Day 1

So this is the trip I have been waiting all semester for. This is the trip that every single student has said "you have to go on". The Lake District is an area in the North of England that is known for its... well it's lakes... and it's mountains. For those of you that have read Peter Rabbit you will be intrigued to find that Beatrix Potter visited the Lake District as a child and eventually moved there to write many of her world-famous children's books. 

This was the one trip I was taking that was organized by the school so I had high expectations for it. We left on Thursday around 6pm with a 5 hour coach ride ahead of us. Fun, I know. For some strange reason the drivers here cannot drive for more than 4 hours without a 45 minute break... so about 2 hours into the trip we had to stop for them. I have no idea where we stopped, but it was at some swank lorry stop. We finally arrived at some god forsaken hour. Everything was dark and the shunted us off the coaches and into the hostel. It felt similar to all those times when we arrived at campsites late and night and had to try and pitch the tents in the dark. I am thinking of that particular time where mum was supposed to make Pasta with tomato and basil but... she forgot the whole pasta part of the dish and so we ate it on bread. Oh the good old days. Well here in the Lake District we dropped off our bags and then went on onto the tiny pier and when say tiny I mean the thing was about 4 feet wide and maybe 30 feet long. It's basically there for the hostel guests to walk out on. So you've probably gathered that our hostel was on the shore of the Lake. Lake Windermere in fact. 

We got bored on the pier after a while so we decided to walk to the little town of Ambleside. Ambleside is the closest town to our hostel and it was about a 15 minute walk into the town. It was so late that everything was pretty much closed except for a few pubs, so the group of us just walked around exploring. There really wasn't anything to see in Ambleside so we walked back to our hostel and called it a night. 

g'night moon.

Cambridge

So on March 7th I went to Cambridge for a day trip sponsored by the school.

Originally I hadn't planned on going because I was supposed to go to Venice but that trip fell through for some reason that I can no longer recall. Anyway, so I decided on Tuesday to go on this trip because I missed the trip to Oxford and I had been told by my most hard core Uncle that visiting the Unis (Universities) is a right good time. So I woke up at an abnormally early hour and got on the coach to go the famed Cambridge University.

Before we went to Cambridge we stopped at the American Cemetery. The American Cemetery is a cemetery dedicated to the men and women who fought for America and died while abroad. We stopped there for about 30 minutes or so. It was wonderful in a weird, somber sort of way. The sky was cloudless and the grass was the perfect shade of green. Then... there was row after row after row of white marble crosses and stars of David. When you first walked through the gates into the cemetery there was a long looking pool to your right and running along the right side of the entire pool was a wall with every single name etched in it's surface. Along the top in much larger letters was a tribute to the men and women who had died to preserve freedom. Other people walked along the wall in silence stopping every so often to look at a name or too. I think cemeteries are strange places. They cast this spell over us. They are scary at night. They command our attention like few other things do. In some respects they are beautiful, in some respects they are morbid. And sometimes you just wonder how much of a party it must be with all these people hanging out. I don't wish to be irreverent, but boys will be boys and soldiers definitely will be soldiers. Cemeteries cast this spell of remorse and melancholy upon those that walk through and while I think that the sacrifice that many of these people made is not one they should have made; I don't think they died in vain and I don't believe they would want us to go tip-toeing around. Granted this is not the place to throw your fourth of July bash, but it's also not a place to loose your soul at for 30 minutes. 

There is nothing glorious or romantic about death. As Tom Stoppard once said one moment you are alive the next you are not. It's just an absence of being "Now you see me, now you...". We don't see them. I was walking past a thousand faceless people. People I didn't even know. People I couldn't share anything with or learn from. 

These men and women are brave. Far braver than I shall ever be, but their memorial inspires us to be more than what we are today. They inspire us to make a change, hopefully for the better. There is very little good left in this world, but the good that there is left is something that is worth fighting and sacrificing for. 

So after we left the cemetery we continued on to Cambridge.  They dropped us off on the edge of Cambridge's campus... which is enormous. People wandered off to do their own thing and my friend Elise and I headed for the Kings College Chapel. The grounds of the campus were beautiful. There were little snow drops and crocuses blooming beside all the footpaths and people were lazily drifting down the canal that runs through the campus. Even though it was a Saturday students were wandering around. The intellectualism that was permeating from the school was almost too much for me.

We walked into the the Kings College Cathedral and were stunned. It is one of the most beautiful churches I have ever been in. The fan ceiling is probably one of the high lights. It has stunning gothic architecture. The stained glass was also quite incredible. We walked around and sat and reflected for awhile before heading outside to explore the rest of the campus. 

I had come to Cambridge with only two goals: to see the Kings College Chapel and to see the Great Courtyard where the race in Chariots of Fire took place. Now obviously Kings College Chapel is part of Kings College and it was open to the public, but today Trinity College which houses the Great Courtyard was closed to the public. Since when have rules ever stopped a Sullivan. After walking around the campus some more and looking at the outsides of the colleges we decided to simply just break the rules and walk onto the St. John's College campus. We're students anyway so we blended in... sort of. We walked around St. John's for awhile before we headed towards Trinity. The gate door was obviously closed but I just walked up and pulled it open. Other people were doing it anyway so I wasn't the only one breaking the rules.

The courtyard was not what I had imagined at all. It was much bigger than I had anticipated and very open. The sun was shinning and the courtyard glowed in the early afternoon sunlight. We walked around the quad a bit and then left. After that we perched ourselves outside the Kings College entrance and ate our scrumptious  packed lunch. After eating our lunch we headed to the Fitz-William art museum in Cambridge. It had a good selection of world art and ceramics and such. After walking through there we headed back to Cambridge's main market area. On the edge of the market there was a church. The church was of no particular significance but pinned to the fence surrounding the entire church, were flyers for events at Cambridge. These events varied from public lectures, to parties, to theatre performances, to concerts and recitals. It was incredible to see that there was so much going on there. By the looks of it there were atleast 7 or 8 different plays being performed by various groups in the Cambridge community. 

By the time we left Cambridge at 4pm I was thoroughly sold on coming back. If theatre doesn't work out I plan to do whatever it takes to get accepted and study at Cambridge. I don't really care what college I'm in or what I'm studying as long as I get to be part of what goes on here. Cambridge didn't feel like a nerd school to me. Nor did it seem like a haven for a bunch of toffee-nosed rich kids and snobby-elitist-Ivy League Americans. Cambridge is a place of learning, and that learning transcends what is taught in the classrooms. That's one thing I have discovered while I have been abroad-- learning is not something that is limited to notes and ideas. Trust me I've taken plenty of notes this semester, but the knowledge that I have really retained has had little to do with what date the Easter Rising occurred on, or why Charles I was beheaded. What I have come away with from this experience is a greater appreciation for what I have. A much greater appreciation for what my mother spend all those years doing, and an increasing desire to learn more and try to connect with more people.