Pudding and Pie

Hey all!

So tomorrow I’m off to warm and sunny (fingers crossed) Spain for the start of my 9 day tour of the continent (that’s what Brits call the rest of Europe) then I’m back to Jeans for a day then shooting down to London (I’m such a jet setter these days) to meet the real Queen Mum…Annette Burns! For the past 10 days I’ve been at Jeans (my grandma’s pen friend since they were 12…grandma’s hitting the big 7-0 this year so you do the math on that one) and we have been having a blast, or at least I have! In her generosity Jean has given me a great glimpse of what the real England is like to a real Englander. Here are some highlights of the week for your reading enjoyment!

Last Friday we went to Lincoln where her daughter and family live and also where the Lincoln Cathedral is. We got to Lincoln and I came to realize that said Cathedral is at the top of a very, very large hill and we happened to be at the bottom. Apparently there is a bus that shuttles poor people like us up the hill but it was nowhere to be found so we started the trek. Once we made it up the hill we headed into the Cathedral only to be turned away when we replied that “no, we were not there for the service”. Shut down! But they did tell us that we could go around to the back and see that part so we did and it was worth it. Lincoln Cathedral can hold 2 Westminster Abbey’s inside of it and we stumbled across a very nice and knowledgeable man that gave us all kinds of info. Like do you know the difference between a minster and a cathedral, well you are going to in a second! A cathedral holds a cathedra (clever naming, huh?!) which is where the archbishop sits and a minster can be a cathedral but a minster is also a teaching church so clergy are educated in a minster. Interesting, right? And also the lectern thing that they put the bible on always faces east because that is where Christ will rise from (he will rise with the sun) and the bible rests on an eagle because that is the only bird that can look directly into the sun. The lectern that they have there is from the 1600’s. We learned all kinds of other cool things that I’m sure you will have the joys of hearing when I recount my travel stories to you in person J. All in all a great day that ended with a Chinese buffet and a chocolate fountain, score!

Saturday Jean and I headed to a food festival with Jean’s niece, Jane (ha I just realized that if you switch the letters around you can spell Jean from Jane, I wonder if that is a coincidence…) where we watched a man cut an apple in the shape of a swan, I was tricked into eating pork scratching (crunch pigs skin), I had a taste testing of port, and we saw the worst cooking demonstration known to man. Apparently the guy that knew what he was doing had an accident so he couldn’t be there so his boss was filling in and doing commentary while the students cooked. He didn’t know how to work the stove and the demonstration went downhill from there…but the quail egg I tried was quite tasty! That night Jean arranged for me to go out on the town with her grandson, Ciaran, who is around my age and in the RAF (royal air force) and one of his friends from the RAF. The night was a lot of fun and consisted of the three of us bar hopping, them making fun of my “American English”, me trying to figure out why so many roundabouts are in this country, and a lot of laughs on everyone’s part.

Monday we headed to Skegness, a seaside town on the east side of England right on the North Sea. The weather was fantastic even though rain was predicted and we enjoyed a day of walking along the beach and people watching. Then came the best part, seaside donuts. Now I don’t really like donuts that much but these were the best donuts that I have ever had. I got to watch them being made and then rolled in sugar. Needless to say they disappeared quite quickly and I will be running some extra miles in the near future after all of the good food that I have been treated to with Jean. The food that they feed us at school is not a true impression of good English food (thank goodness, I would have been a little worried if it had been).

Tuesday was full of laughs as I accompanied Jane (we went with her on Saturday) to her classroom of 11 year olds (year 5 in school over here) and helped out for the afternoon. She had apparently told them about her friend from America that was coming to visit because they all looked at me with wide eyes when I walked into the room.  I was then peppered with questions of whether I knew this person or that person (needless to say I did not know little Johnny’s stepmom, even though she is from America as well), questions of what my favorite color is, what it’s like to live in America (I said not too different from living here and the little boy that asked me said “except you can’t drive manual cars though, right? And you did it on the wrong side”, cheeky little boy!), and told that I could be an actress (my life is now complete!). That afternoon they were painting African shields to go along with their study of Africa and the next afternoon they would be performing African dances. While we had a few mishaps including 3 spilled containers of paint (it wasn’t me!) the afternoon was a lot of fun and I’m excited to enter the field of education in a few years. Actually that’s a lie, I’m half terrified as well but if my students enjoy  my class half as much as Jane’s enjoy hers I’ll be okay.

Wednesday and Thursday were filled with me brushing up on my English history. Wednesday we headed to Chatsworth Manor where the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire live. You can tour their home (parts of it at least) and the grounds. BEAUTIFUL! After that we dashed to the next town over, Bakewell, to pick up a famous Bakewell pudding because I was told that I have to try one. (yummy!) We found a bakery still open and then to my surprise we stopped in a butchers and got a steak and kidney pie (my stomach still quivers a bit at the thought) for tea (dinner). Back at home Jean prepared a dinner of steak and kidney pie, mashed potatoes, and green beans. I was crazy nervous about said pie because it’s not kidney beans that the steak is cooked with, it’s real, live (well it used to be alive) kidney meat. You can tell the kidney meat from the steak because it is oddly smooth looking and supposedly adds a lot of flavor to the dish. It was actually quite tasty when you forgot what you were eating and a plateful of mashed potatoes always puts me in a happy place! Thursday we headed to York and had a lovely day exploring the town, doing a bit of shopping, and trying not to get lost on the highway on the way home! We went in the York Viking museum where we were bombarded with a truckload of little French teenagers running around speaking in French. I got nervous that I was hallucinating and was still in Paris for a second. York is an awesome city and we saw the York Minster which is 4 times the size of Westminster Abbey and has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and has 128 stained glass windows with some dating back to the 1200’s. My home country wasn’t even an idea in 1200, heck, they didn’t even know it existed and they were over here making awesome stained glass! It’s crazy to think about.

Today I have to pack, shoot. I have made myself pretty comfortable in my room at Jean’s so it could be another repeat of my struggles to pack back in January. I’m doing really well and having a splendid time (in case you couldn’t tell) and can’t wait for what the next few weeks will bring and can’t believe that this time next month I’ll be thinking about heading home. If you need to get in contact with me in the next 2 weeks try e-mailing (I’ll try to check it when I can but that doesn’t always happen) or call me on my cell phone (not my American one, mind you!) if it’s important. Thanks for all the thoughts and prayers. Continue to pray for safe travels in my attempt to see the world!

Love from Lincoln (and all over the Midlands of England),

Stacey

Je t'aime Paris! (I love Paris)

*Disclaimer* I wrote this yesterday (Thursday) so it is a day off...sorry :)

Bonjour!

That’s about the extent of my French even though I just got back from 3 of the most amazing days of my life that so happened to take place in Paris! Looking back it feels surreal. Like when people say “oh have you been to Paris?”, I’ll reply “no but I want to go…oh wait, just kidding, I have been!”. It was one of those crazy once in a lifetime trips and was a great start to my Easter holiday. I did learn something about myself though…my fallback French phrase is “bonjour”. So when I would leave a store, enter a store, want to say thank you, it somehow always managed to come out as “bonjour” which caused several laughs from Konstantina and several red cheeks form me!

                

 My adventure started off early (and by early I mean 4:30 so that’s pretty dang early!) and I did not get a very good night sleep the night before because I had no sheets. Since I was leaving so early the next morning I had to put all of my things in storage the night before which left me with a pillow and a mattress in my 68 degree room…brrrrr! We got to the airport okay, went through security no problem and then I just had to wait for my flight. When I finally boarded the plane I was met by my very unpleasant row mates (the lady kept just staring at me and glaring, I’m still not sure why!) but I slept most of the way so it was alright. When we got to the airport I thought I had a plan all worked out for how I was to get from the Charles de Gaulle airport to downtown Paris where my hostel was located. This plan was foiled when I discovered that the train going to and from the airport was being worked on and was not running that weekend. Shoot! At this point I was tired and just wanted to plop down and shed a few tears with a big bar of chocolate in hand. Since I wanted to make a good first impression on France I refrained and after an hour of walking in delirious circles I figured out I would have to take the airport tram to a bus to a train that would get me where I needed to be! After that little bump in the road it was pretty smooth sailing for the day. It was a lovely 75 degrees and sunny in Paris so who couldn’t be happy with that?! I got all checked into the hostel I was meeting Konstantina at and then headed out to see the sights before I met up with her. Now for those of you that haven’t been to Europe, the streets are NOT in a grid pattern like ours, or any kind of pattern for that matter! So this resulted in my just kind of wandering with a doe eyed expression until I ran into a rather large building that I was at first annoyed with because it was blocking my path to the river Seine. I figured once I got to the river I could get pretty much anywhere with the help of my handy dandy map (shout out to Norman for the map…it saved my life a number of times!). Then as I kept walking to the end of this seemingly never ending building I realized it was the Louvre (the famous art museum) which was basically where I had been heading the whole time! I just walked around a bit, sat in the gardens outside the museum, got kicked of grass I wasn’t supposed to be sitting on by a man yelling in French and had a lovely afternoon! Rewind a bit though, I forgot my struggle to find food. It is a good thing that I do not live in a forest because I would surely die of starvation because it took me an hour and a half to find food. I think I was delirious from hunger because there are food areas all around that area but somehow I missed them all! I finally found a tuna baguette and a coke…best thing EVER! Later that afternoon Konstantina and I met up and decided to find more food. We decided crepes would be our best bet and found a street vendor making them (it’s not that hard because they are everywhere!) and settled on nutella filled crepes. Nutella is a chocolate hazelnut spread that I have become addicted to over here (our apartment will be stocked with it next year, Kaitlin!) so I was most pleased with this dinner!

                On the first Sunday of the month most of the national museums in Paris are free to the public so I decided I would go to the Louvre on Sunday so I wouldn’t have to pay. Konstantina had already been there on a previous trip to the city so she visited another museum and we decided to meet up later. I got up pretty early, (wanted to beat the crowd…and I figured I would get a bit lost walking and I had developed a gimp walk from the massive amount of blisters I had gotten the previous day so I factored this all into my travel time!) got breakfast at the hostel (granola cereal with chocolate bits! and of course a croissant) and headed out. Good thing I checked the weather before I left England and knew it was supposed to rain so I was all ready with my raincoat (yes, I did represent AOII in Paris with my rain jacket!) and umbrella. I found the Louvre and headed to the back of a seemingly never ending line only to see a man holding a sign that I couldn’t read (I think there was a part in English but he was too far away) that said 1:30…my heart sunk because it was 9am and I thought the sign was Disney world style and was telling me when I would be getting into the museum. Fortunately I think it was just a line estimation because I was inside in around 40 minutes. The Louvre itself is an old palace before the monarch of France decided the Louvre was too small (small must be a relative term because it is HUGE) and moved to Versailles which is a few miles outside the of the city. The Louvre is home to the Mona Lisa (small but her eyes really do follow you everywhere!), Napoleon III’s apartments (just think gold and red velvet and French elegance) and a ton of other pieces of art. The sad thing was that most of the descriptions were in French (guess that makes sense, but still annoying when you can’t read French). So I didn’t always know what I was looking at.

                Next Konstantina and I met up and decided to head up the Champs Elyesses towards the Arc de Triumph. The Champs is filled with shopping and has everything from H&M to Cartier to Louis Vuitton and probably 4 Starbucks (fun fact: Starbucks was pretty much a failure in Melbourne, Australia according to Konstantina, and there are only a couple in the whole city!). We made it to the Arc with no trouble except for the lingering rain of the morning, snapped so pictures and then decided to head to the Sacre Coure, a big church in Paris that is supposed to be beautiful. Now of course this was basically at the other end of the city but it was near(ish) our hostel so we figured we would have to head that way anyways. This little adventure took much longer than expected and I think we went the longest way possible! It took us so long that we decided to stop in a bakery for a little snack/a chance to rest our feet. Great idea on our part because we found this cute little place that had éclairs and macaroons and was pretty cheap and so good! We actually got to sit and watch them make some bread too which was neat. After the bakery we got lost and a police officer must have noticed us standing in one spot but twisting our map and spinning in a circle because he asked us if we needed some help! He pointed us in the right direction and we were off for a pretty easy walk, so we thought. We were wrong. The church is at the top of a 130m (don’t ask me to convert that because I don’t know how! I’m finally getting the temperature conversion down and it’s been almost 3 months!) hill and after 2 days of walking our feet were NOT happy about this!! But the church was totally worth it, in my opinion. They don’t let you take pictures inside which I find of find charming but it had one of the most beautiful painted ceilings that I have ever seen. After spending some time at the church we decided to head back down the hill and find some dinner and then headed back to the hostel. Now this was supposed to be my last night staying in a hostel because I had the genius plan to stay in the airport the next night to save money and since I had an early flight the next morning. Well as this was getting closer and closer I was starting to get a bit nervous about getting to the airport at night because the train ride basically goes through the Paris suburbs and let’s just say they aren’t Geneva, Illinois. I e-mailed mom (love the Plug-Inn hostel for having free internet/computers for you to use!) and she e-mailed me back saying she had just heard from my Grandma and Grandpa that they would generously pay for another night in a hostel for me to keep me off the streets. Wow, God works in cool ways! My hostel was not available for the next night so I booked another one and slept soundly that night!

                Now Monday would be my last full day in Paris. I did some shopping in the morning in our neighborhood which at night was SKETCHY because it was in the Red Light District of Paris and right near the Moulin Rouge, needless to say there was no walking alone at night. During the day the neighborhood was home to the artsy crowd which led to a lot of cool little shops. I saw people lined up to get their baguettes and saw the crepe makers firing up their crepe making things. Then I got on the subway (I’m such a grown up! I even had to do a station transfer!) and met Konstantina for the free tour we were taking. Now I have had these New Europe tours recommended to me by several people and it lived up to its standards. Our tour guide was a bit quirky (but really so I am so I can’t judge) but really loved her city and told us all kind of cool things. I basically decided that my goal for my future history classes is to make them like a walking tour through history because it was SO interesting. After the tour Konstantina and I had plans to go to the Eiffel Tower and luckily the tour ended right near it. Now with both of us traveling on a budget we decided that it was not worth paying three times the price to take an elevator up when we could walk up the 1,600 stairs (it’s not that many, right?!) for less. So we took off our jackets, stretched out our legs (not really, but maybe we should have) and were off! We got to the second landing of the tower to realize that you can’t walk up any further and you have to pay to take a lift up to the very top. We decided that it really wasn’t worth it so after taking in the breath taking views of the city we started the trek down. Once we got down we decided to walk down the park and get some pictures with the tower in the background (tourist alert!). Then we wandered into a supermarket and I nearly bought a baguette (all that bread for only .85 euro!) just to look like I belonged! Then I realized that my awful French would not help my disguise so I opted against the baguette L At this point it was almost time for Konstantina and I to part ways and we realized that we had not taken any pictures together (people probably would not believe that we were traveling together except for the fact that we had all the same pictures in the same places where we would say “I’ll take one of you, you take one of me!”). I headed to my hostel where I was in a room with 2 girls (I think there was a boy but he came in after I was asleep and I left early the next morning) who were from LA and Australia. It was an interesting experience as we had different views on things but they were both still very nice. The next day I was off to the airport (apparently I brought the wrong ticket and the machine wouldn’t let me through when I tried to exit so I just followed a stranger very closely on his ticket…oops!) where I proceeded to totally pass out on the plane and only wake up when we landed in England!

Now I am staying with my grandma’s pen pal, Jean and having a lovely time! Today we went to Sherwood Forest, home of Robin Hood and then had a lovely snack of scones and clotted cream! I feel like a true Brit now! I’ll have more to post later but I’m sure you are getting sick of reading at this point!

Thanks for all the prayers for me during my travels. I’m having a fantastic month thus far and can’t wait for what else is to come! I’ll be home in just over a month (CRAZY!) and can’t wait to see you all! 3 weeks from yesterday and my mommy will be here…yay!!!! Thanks for following and I have tons of pictures for you guys and will post them as soon as I can!

Love from the Louvre,

Stacey

Fun Fact: There is 1 dog to every 5 people in Paris!