“a week of adventuring”, or “a somewhat non-uninteresting blog entry”
note: i will include links to pictures throughout the extremely long narrative. you will recognize these links because they will be within brackets–square brackets, like “[" and "]“. there may be no other designation that these are links, so keep an eye peeled. pictures are at 35% size and are in .jpg format
another note–”the crew”, “the guys”, “us”, or other similarly first-or-third-person plural designators usually refer to: dan urban, joey carucci, and myself. dan you all should know already–he is my suitemate, was my roommate last year, really likes weezer, and can make cool crap with metal using lathes and stuff. joey carucci has long black hair, is the most inquisitive/challenging person i’ve met, and is without a doubt the most italian-looking of the three of us. lastly, i, of course, am simply me.
we left thursday night for the airport with 2 small bags apiece–carry-on, naturally. true adventurers travel light. we got there, surprisingly, on time, and our flight went without a hitch. i started reading dave egger’s a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. more on that later. after landing in new york, we deplaned, went through another security checkpoint every five feet (where they decided different things concerning the permissibility of vaguely weapon-shaped objects in our possession, like keys or cellular phones), helped a spanish-speaking woman find her way to her gate, discussed scientific theories which postulate unobservable entities or philosophically suspect notions like multiple universes, and boarded our 777 to london.
again the flight went smoothly and we got to london about 8:30pm local time, where we raced to customs ahead of the other passengers, went through, and met my parents, who were waiting for us. we had realized some weeks earlier that they and my sister would be in england around the same time as us, and thought it would be cool to hang out with them for the few days our stays overlapped. as it turned out, this was a tremendous blessing, because of their helping us with transportation and housing.
they drove us from london northwest-ish to horsleys green, a little hamlet next to a little town called stokenchurch, which is adjacent to the perhaps-better-known city of high wycombe. horsleys green is the location of the wycliffe uk headquarters, and because of my parents’ affiliation with wycliffe, we were able to stay at the wycliffe campus there, in dorm-style housing, for as modest a fee as can be found.
dan, joey, and i shared a room, which we put to immediate use because of jet lag. the next morning we woke up earlier than desired (jet lag again), but breakfast was served at the bright hour of 7:30am, so we met my parents and sister at the dining hall for a veritable feast of assorted grain cereals and the liquidy, goopy, yogurt which seems to be the popular thing there. afterwards, the 6 of us piled into the rental van my parents had scored at an incredible bargain, and took off for bath, england–a 2-hour drive.
on the way to bath, we took a short detour and stopped at stonehenge, an incredible site in the middle of nowhere, with only the grazing sheep and tourists to keep it company. of course, the lack of nearby civilization did not stop someone from charging visitors an exorbitant fee to get within a chain-link fence boundary. being true adventurers, we spurned this commercialism and viewed the literally monolithic structures from outside the gate. [stonehenge through the chain-link fence] [some intrepid travelers (from left to right) a. looking cute, b. gazing at stonehenge in the distance, and c. fiddling with something]
as if having just stopped for a bathroom break, we left stonehenge after the requisite moment of awe and continued to bath. some time later, a most horrific thing happened. i was in the back seat, listening to the new further seems forever cd with my beautifully expensive noise-cancelling headphones, when all of us in the car noticed a huge bird step into the road. now, this bird has an extraordinarily long neck. it’s not a chicken or a turkey or a goose or a swan or anything else i normally see–to me it looked like a pheasant on steroids and with some giraffe ancestors. anyway, the bird is apparently also very stupid because it begins to cross the road, which, being in england, is being driven upon very very quickly, by us, who are, incidentally, in a van with a very low front bumper. the next moments were full of honking and cursing and swerving not quite into oncoming traffic, all to no avail: with a great thud the bird was hewn down like wheat to a very dull but very fast and violent scythe. and yet this is not the whole of it: hardly daring, i turned around and attempted to survey the damage. what met my eyes made me involuntarily scream with horror, agony, and excitement: the bird had exploded into a million feathers, as if a bomb had been planted inside it! they drifted around in crazy patterns, as their wearer had done in life, a tribute to the end of a meaningless existence. but enough of picture-perfect roadkill.
we got to bath, found parking, and bought some lunch. then my family split while we guys toured the ancient roman bathhouse which is bath’s namesake. [joey and dan looking at the baths with the handy electronic tour guides] it was cool, but my third time seeing it, so a little boring. by now it was late afternoon, but for 6 world travelers the day was yet beginning! we trucked back to the van, where i was tempted to paint one bird on the driver’s side door, in hopes that we would continue to score more hits.
from bath we made our way to a little town called castle combe, which is the most quaint town i’ve ever seen in my life. we ate dinner there. here are some pictures. [ side street in castle combe] [the 4 kids in the town centre] [a lot of the doors had these cool locks and handles] [another view of part of the town]
that was day 1, and it ended as i fell asleep in the back of the van on the way back to horsleys green, tired from who knows what, full from good solid fare at the castle combe pub, and still savoring the two pints of thick local beer that somehow found their way down my throat without much in the way of resistance.
day 2 began early again, as we repeated the same morning routine as day 1, with the addition of bacon. also, the three guys took a walk into the wood adjacent to the wycliffe centre, which is one of the things i always make sure to do when i stay there. the morning was crisp and surprisingly clear (as were all our days in england, to our great fortune). [part of the wood, with some lens flare action] i saw a peacock, too. shortly thereafter, the guys and my family drove north to warwick, so that the three studly guys could see warwick castle while ‘the fam’ went antique shopping or something. all i really need to say about warwick castle is that it is an old castle made into a tourist stop, and it is quite amazing. we paid our entry fee and walked around the place for a few hours, which is when i took these pictures. [the big tower at one corner of the castle] [shot of the surrounding countryside from another tower, through an arrow slit]
i believe it was at warwick during a time of sitting around that dan and joey and i decided that pretty english girls (they should be called ‘lasses’, not girls, of course) are really hot, owing to the accent. on the other hand, we concluded that there were less beautiful english girls on average than american girls. usa represent! still, if you took identical twins with a good amount of future hotness and separated them at birth, bringing one to the states and one to england, and if they grew up to look exactly the same, the brit would be about one and a half times as hot.
anyway, after warwick we rejoined my family and drove to the cotswolds, an area of england consisting of hills (downs), trees, and picturesque countryside (much like other areas of england, in fact). we stopped at stratford-upon-avon to pay lipservice to shakespeare in the form of looking at the house of his one-time wife, anne hathaway. [anne hathaway's house, a tourist attraction] [i wanted to take a picture of myself in front of that house] from there we drove to bourton-on-the-water, where we had high tea at a cool place we’d visited before, and where a few of our party payed to see a model of bourton-on-the-water, but a few more sensible (ahem) of the party went to a pub and each had a pint of guinness.
we drove (all this driving! now you see the benefit of hanging out with my family, as opposed to finding how to get to all these places via public transit) back to horsleys green for dinner. in preparation for the massive amount of grading i would have to do that night, i had another 2 pints of guinness with my meal. ah.
did i mention grading? yes, i did. in fact, i had 88 bluebooks to grade–the results of the final exam for phil 78, the class i TAed winter quarter. as the exam was on the day i left, and as the grades for my students were due while i was going to be away, i was forced to carry the exams with me overseas to grade. and grade i did, for hours and hours that night–examining 88 long essay questions is no joke. i finished sometime around 2:30am and e-mailed the grades to my prof, finally completing all duties related to winter quarter 2003.
and so we slide into day 3, where my parents and sister leave and the guys strike off on our own! we had breakfast and said our goodbyes to my family, then check ourselves out of the wycliffe centre. a bus stop was a short ways from there so we walked to it with our bags and caught a 10:30 bus to oxford. on this bus i finished dave egger’s book. i’m still not quite sure what i think of it. at points i was hilariously engaged and enthralled with his style, and at other points the self-awareness grew too heightened even for such an introspect as myself. moreover, the book was about his life and so sometimes i caught myself not caring when things got a little slow or boring. to his credit, these moments were few. perhaps the thing which brought the book closest to my heart was that most of the events took place in the bay area. his prose, his ruminations about berkeley culture, and his pinpointing of the spirit of the age, even a decade ago, gelled remarkably well with thoughts and feelings i’ve had about this weird place. it was just fun to recognize half of the places he talked about, and even be acquainted well with a few.
once in oxford, we toted our luggage to the backpacker’s hostel we were to stay at that night. the hostel was a funky sort of place (in fact, owned by a company called “funky hostels”) where we stayed in a co-ed room with many bunkbeds and too many not-hot girls hanging around in their bras. anyway, we dropped our bags off and started our day of walking around oxford. i suppose we did just about everything worth doing. we stopped in for a while at my favorite store there: frederick tranter’s pipe shop. i gave in to various impulses and added two beautiful pipes to my collection: a peterson standard system 303, and a reading briar (a long-stemmed pipe), as well as a six-seater rack and some exclusive tobacco. [my 3 pipes (the one in the middle is from frederick tranter's a few years ago) and rack]
we also took a tour of christ church college [looking up from a small courtyard in the college], which they used various parts of for filming the harry potter movies. [me standing on the main hogwarts staircase] since dan also bought a new pipe at tranter’s, we sat for a while in front of the college and smoked and read. as it was getting on in hours, we made our way north to the eagle and child pub, the selfsame establishment wherein c.s. lewis, j.r.r. tolkien, and other members of the inklings met regularly to discuss whatever they discussed. there we met a friend of dan’s who was studying at oxford and had dinner (i believe i had 2 pints of guinness–no, one of bass and one of guinness). in fact, we sat in the very small room where lewis and tolkien sat, ate, drank and smoked their pipes. thus, to round out the roll-call of habits we had to break out our pipes and smoke a bowl (of tobacco) for our patron saints.
later that night we went to the stanford house on high street, where we randomly caught up with a few friends who were there at oxford for their last night before leaving for spring break and coming back to stanford. i hadn’t expected anyone to be there at all, so it was fun to see some kids from my freshman dorm. it was also fun to use their computer cluster. anyway, it was time for bed and we left. the night at the funky hostel went without incident or worse, nudity, so let that be enough for day 3.
day 4 was packed full of stuff, so let’s look at the highlights: first we took a long bus from oxford to london, then bought tube passes for the day at the earl’s court underground. our first trip was to trafalgar square, where we met kyle van houtan, a former cornerstone intern. he was in england for a bio-something conference at cambridge, or something. with him in tow we tubed to paddington, got lost, then found our hotel so we could drop off our suitcases. then we took the underground downtown to the westminster/parliament/big ben sort of area. [the guys in front of westminster abbey] we took our picture in front of westminster abbey, and i noticed that in most of my pictures of buildings the sun was in just the wrong place. oh well.
anyway, lunching commenced shortly thereafter at a pub named “finnegan’s wake”, an utterly cool monniker which should be someone’s band name. after lunch we breezed by some more important city monuments, then back to trafalgar square to meet kyle’s traveling companion who did not show. we used the opportunity to go into the national gallery and spent 15-20 minutes looking at the most gorgeous monets, picassos, van goghs, seurats, and whatever other mind-numbingly beautiful originals they had there. if i worked in london i would definitely take my lunch break at that place, in order to let my eyes feast on the fruit of that train of geniuses whose blood must have something a little more than human in it.
then, it being kyle’s time to take his train to cambridge, we went back to the hotel, got out his luggage, and bid him adieu. then we steeled ourselves for the walking that lied ahead, and went to work dissecting the town with our feet. using the tube only when convenient, we must have walked between five and ten miles that afternoon, seeing just about everything left to see in the city. [sign near the tower of london that i found humorous] [one third of a gigantic piece of art in the tate museum of modern art. it was the most aweing thing i saw the whole day. i was astounded. go there and see it.] [the sunset off a bridge near the same musem]
we ended our day at harrod’s knightsbridge, where dan and joey bought gifts for family and i bought a decent bottle of port for the suite. then an all-too-expensive dinner at a fabulous underground night-club/pizza place nearby, with beautiful portuguese waitresses. this was the only day i did not drink at least 2 pints of good beer, mostly because the three of us shared a bottle of a french cabernet at dinner, thus eliminating the feasibility of such consumption. after dinner we zombied back through the tube and collapsed in our beds at the hotel, which, frustratingly, was out of hot water for the evening, prohibiting showers for the second night in a row. my anger, however, melted into dreamless sleep quickly enough.
at glorious last! we have reached day 5–the last full day in england. after waking up and feeling old angers flame up afresh at the realization that lukewarm was the best the shower could do, we walked and tubed from paddington to king’s cross station. there we bought train tickets to cambridge and our train left shortly (there is a platform 9 3/4, by the way). our day in cambridge was probably my favorite of them all–we toured king’s college and cathedral (more awe, of course), had lunch at a smart little place nearby, and even went punting on the cam. this was probably the most physically strenuous hour of the trip, as we switched, between the three of us, poling our little boat down, then up, stream. dan was by far the best at punting and using the long pole as a rudder, and i caught on reasonably well. joey, on the other hand, couldn’t punt or steer to save his life, so we gave him a paddle, which his massive pectoral muscles put to good use. scenery along the river was gorgeous. [me at the prow of our boat, emma, with the mathematical bridge in the background] [dan punting and joey fiddling, again] [some nice scenery along the cam] [joey and i in the boat]
later that day we stumbled upon a college with signs for the conference our friend kyle was supposed to be speaking at, so we wandered inside and, lo and behold, kyle had just finished his presentation and was taking q&a! when he came back to sit down we grabbed him and went outside to talk for a while. it was, obviously, cool that we had seen him again, and we made plans to meet for a drink after dinner at the eagle, the oldest pub in cambridge (and maybe england?). we putzed around cambridge some more, hung out in the cambridge university press bookstore (this is a big deal), then went to our last dinner in england. we sat outside in the beautiful, crisply cold evening, praising god that we’d had 100% beautiful days and no rain the entire trip (this is unheard of).
kyle met up with us as planned, and we talked, then went back to st. catharine’s college, where he was staying, to play pool and foosball until it came time to take our train back to london. it might be interesting that this day was the day of most alcohol consumption for me on the trip, as i had a glass of wine with lunch, 2 pints of beer with dinner (old speckled hen and guinness), and some blue-raspberry-tasting smirnoff ice ripoff while playing pool, which i should have been ashamed to drink but wasn’t.
eventually we said our goodbyes to kyle, fairly ran the 25 minutes back to the train station, and caught our train. we stumbled exhausted into our london hotel room around midnight. the next morning we rose a bit late, ate breakfast, packed, and called a coach to take us to the airport. as when dealing with all taxi-or-coach drivers anywhere, i gave it a less than even chance that we would make it to our destination alive, but thankfully our luck held out. mine continued to hold out, and i was upgraded to business class for the flight to chicago (joey and dan, unfortunately, had to stay in coach). it’s hard to overstate how really important this kind of upgrade is on a long international flight.
well, the flight went smoothly, as did our connection in chicago, and sooner or later we found ourselves breathing san francisco air again, at about 9:30pm on thursday night, when exactly a week before we had been sitting in the same terminal waiting for our plane to depart. being more attuned to public transportation after the trip wherein we used it frequently, we took a bus home from SFO (only $1.25 a person!), though it took about an hour and a half.
as with all international trips, it will take some time for all that has happened to settle in my mind, so i can discover whether or not i’ve come back changed in any significant way. what i know for sure is that spending a week with dan and joey was great, and i got to know each of them much better.
and with that, the week of adventuring was officially concluded. spring break 2003 part II, or “two days of sleep and relaxation”, will follow soon.