Arundel Castle

In Maine, there is a little town called Arundel, which is pronounced uh-RUN-deul. There is also a little town in England called Arundel, but I get laughed at if I pronounce it the same way. Here, it's AHR-run-deul. La di da. It's not too far from Brighton, and I hadn't seen any castles in these parts yet, so Ed and I went in April to czech it out.

Here's me at the ol' train station, waiting for our second train, since AHR-run-deul is inconveniently located with respect to Brighton and the rail lines.

Establishing shot of castle. Ain't it purdy? It's wicked old, from 1067, but it's been restored since then.

Next to this part were a bunch of tents with kind of a Medieval Times/Renaissance Faire thing going, but we didn't go over to see any of their smithery or hear any of their stories.

 Acceptable.

Once up in the castle keep or somewhere, we could get a nice little view of the areas we didn't pay to get into. It's kind of like an amusement park. If you want to do only the crappy little kid rides, then you pay the base price. Then for better rides, you go to the Silver Package; for better rides and a restaurant coupon, the Gold Package; and for better rides, a restaurant coupon, and access to the bathroom, the Platinum Package. Except naturally, in a castle, it's whether or not you want to see the keep, certain bedrooms and living areas, dungeon, and so on (but of course you have to piss down a hole in the side of the castle). We opted for the Silver Package. Yea.

Here's me, like enjoying myself.

 I'm pointing to where the arrow goes.

Since Ed is escairt of heights, I went around the top of the keep alone, and took these shots:

I don't know what this building is. It's nice.

 Ed waiting for me:

 

Next we walked around the grounds and found the little chapel. I was reminded of the Queen of Hearts' garden before the roses got painted red.

I'm recalling that we weren't allowed to take pictures inside the chapel, and inside the castle, too, for that matter. Instead, we took note of all the Jebuses inside the chapel, and how small the people buried there were, based on their grave statues (get it, GRAVE statues for dead people?) Then we left and continued walking the grounds.

 Outside the chapel was a little path that was very obviously supposed to be walked on, but as I was met by a locked gate at the end, I found it was meant for employees and such to walk on, not visitors. I took this picture anyway. Neener neener.

There are a bunch of gardens on the castle grounds, which our package allowed us to see. They were cute. This little stonezebo had nice patio furniture inside, clearly meant to tantalize lowly plebes like us, since the inside was roped off.

We're having FUN, DAMMIT.

Dude, this thing was like the weirdest fountain ever. It has that background of rocks and/or shells or something, and a rock base, with a geyser fountain, which could be fine, except that it has that awful rotating crown on the top. What were they thinking?

There were more gardens than this, but apparently we stopped taking photos. You know what gardens look like, though. I think I remember seeing they were growing organic produce in some sections of the place, which is neato. They also had a couple of those Precious Moments fountains with spouting cherubs, heh.

We didn't get there until like three in the afternoon, which only left us a couple hours to wander around. We went to the gift shop and I kind of wanted to buy something, but nothing I could afford and easily transport back to the States struck me. Ed got a pencil so we could do a crossword on the train back. Then we got some ice cream at a corner store. It was on one of those double-headed cones, and that was fun.

This is a picture of a field. I think we took a picture of it because there were some bunnies in it. Either that or Ed was trying to take my picture and completely missed. You can see my shoulder.

But it was getting towards supper time, so I couldn't stay to watch the bunnies.

My Campus

So if you've been waiting for pictures of where I live and such, finally, here they are. NYEH!

This is my little bedroom. We're not allowed to put anything on the walls, but we get a big bulletin board. It's kind of boring living with blank walls, but oh well.

 I make up for it with a totally suite Star Trek duvet (here it's a duvet cover. The duvet is the bedspread, nerrr).

 

All the rooms here are en-suite, and the bathroom is semi-Korean style, which I think is funny. They do provide a shower curtain here, but the way it's set up makes the shower area too tiny to comfortably shower in, so I just sweep it aside. It's been years since I've lived in a place with a tub, or even a separate area for the shower. I'm still having to wipe down my toilet with a rag after a shower and wear flip flops to go into the bathroom hours after I've showered.

This is the view outside my window. It's a parking lot for the gym next door, but at least there's a little bit of greenery between me and the cars. It's also not as loud as you'd expect, though there are some squealing tires (tyres) now and then.

This is my communal living room and kitchen. I have two flatmates, so we get a little sitting area, dining area, and kitchen in the same big room. This is where I do most of my reading, since the light is good, and I can prop my knees up against the coffee table and not having to look down so much.

 Our kitchen is apparently the cleanest ever, especially for a college dorm. There's a cleaning service that comes in once a week, and I think I've actually seen the dude walk in, look around, and walk out without doing anything. I'm a little pissed about that, actually. The chick that preceded him, even if the place looked spotless, would at least spend 15 minutes disinfecting handles and switches and surfaces, even if they looked okay. 

Because there are only three of us, all we get is a mini-fridge and mini-freezer. At the beginning of the year, one of the other girls hardly even ate anything at home, so there was plenty of room in there, but now she eats in as much as the rest of us, and has dinner parties like once a week, so it's pretty packed in there. This is boring.

Speaking of boring, here's the outside of my dorm complex. There are three buildings--this one is the one across from me, where reception is.

Here's my building. It looks the same.

 Around the dorm are these big round sculptures that may have been some sort of student project. They remind me of those really ugly sculptures that Delia Dietz from Beetlejuice made.

Here's the other dorm complex, across the little service road. These buildings are slightly more interesting, and they also don't have limiters on their windows over there, so they can open them all the way. I'm jealous. We can only open our windows a couple inches.

Here's the school sports center (centre) that I can see from my window. I take a couple X-biking classes there each week, which is like a spinning class, which I didn't know what that was, either, until someone compared them. I used to imagine people in a spinning class turning around and around with their arms out, going, "WEEEEE!!!" for an hour. I bet that's good exercise.

Here's a view of the distance, past the campus. Somewhere over there is the little train station. You can sort of see the rugby pitch before the tree line.

Here's the library entrance. I work in the computer lab (poolroom) inside the library. I'm there RIGHT NOW.

The side of the library is SO BORING.

There is a soccer (football) stadium being built right next to the campus. I think that's strange. Apparently the school sold some land to the city, or whoever is responsible for the stadium, and the grey building near the center of this picture, and another one to the left of the frame, are no longer in use because of this, and will be torn down, the space to be used for the stadium. I'm thinking parking lot (car park). I bet there are mixed feelings about having a stadium right next to a place of study.

 

This is the Checkland Building. It's under two years old. It's probably one of the most retarded buildings I've ever been in. The architects wanted it to look really cool, so they made the whole front from glass and these weird beams in front, and made a "five-finger" design, where sections A-E reach from the front to the back of the building, with outdoor acoustic wind tunnels in between them. The insides are all samey and labyrinthine, as well. So during the first few months of school here, my teachers and some of the staff members would be always complaining about getting lost, because not only is the design just a bunch of the same hall, the designers somehow thought it would be a good idea to number the floors 1-5, despite the fact that two of the floors are underground. So the ground floor is level 3, nerrrr. Its only saving grace is that the signage is decent, so if you're a person like me, who read signs instead of getting around by instinct, you never get lost. The outdoor spaces between sections were pretty annoying when I had class, though, since any noise would be amplified tons, and there's always noise out there.

Here's my dorm from the road.

Off to the side of the above picture is another set of sports pitches, with picturesque verdant hills in the background.

Outside my building is a little patch of grass and three trees, where there are some more of the Beetlejuice sculptures, and where a family of bunnies grazes every day. There's a mummy, daddy, and Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail. There might be a Peter, too, but I don't think I've ever seen any more than three of them out at a time, so I'm not sure if I have the count right.

As I was taking all these pictures, one of the little babies (they're actually called kittens, or kits, as I learned recently) was out amunchin'. They're precious.

British Stuff

 Someone left a tv out on the sidewalk (pavement) recently, with a funny note.

Ed made me a traditional kid's breakfast called boiled egg and soldiers. Apparently you boil an egg, so the white hardens, but the yolk is still pretty runny. Then you butter some toast and cut it into short strips (soldiers) to dip into the egg. Ed boiled my eggs, then I got to tap tap the tops open with my knife, and after using up all the yolk, scrape the remaining whites out with a spoon. It's good.

 

The first attempt wasn't perfick, since the yolk was a bit too hard, so a couple weeks later we tried again, and it was much better. 

 

On Easter, Ed got me a large dark chocolate egg, which was very nice. He wanted me to eat the whole thing that day, but no. Later he brought me a Cadbury set of two creme eggs and another hollow chocolate egg about half the size as the first one. Normally I'd be disappointed at hollow eggs, but dark chocolate can't be beat, and Cadbury milk chocolate is about infinitely better than any crappy American chocolate. I've only just finished the milk chocolate egg, and am still working on the dark chocolate one. Almost done.

 

It would be nice to include my recent trips to Arundel Castle and the British Museum in this post, but since I have a paper due in a few days, I don't have time to deal with that. You'll have to wait until the end of the month, probably. By then I'll have had other adventures to talk about, too.

Brighton Science Festival

 When I first got here, I heard about the Brighton Science Festival from some of the orientation events I attended, so I signed up to get emails about it, and eagerly anticipated attending. It was in February and March. Here's the cover of the brochure:

I went with Ed to several events. The first one we went to was free, and was about Circadian rhythms. We learned some stuff about the little clocks inside the brains of humans and other animals, how important natural light is for our health, and how certain conditions like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease can affect one's natural rhythms. This could have been a much better event if it had been thought out better. This was one of the talks that took place in a pub, which doesn't seem like the best place for something like this. Even though everyone there at that time was either there to hear the talk, or had come anyway and was listening attentively, you can't help there being disturbances--people ordering drinks, employees serving food and drink at the tables, chairs scraping... This would have been acceptable if someone had thought about it for about half a second and realized that the lecturer would need to have a mic on him. I could hear most of what he said, but it was a struggle, and every time he said something funny, he lowered his voice, and I didn't hear any of the little jokes he inserted into his lecture. Also, many people, including us, had to stand, and I'm short with medical conditions, so that's never a good situation for me. But anyway, it was an interesting subject, so I didn't regret going.

The next event we went to was called Soldering is Easy, and we got to learn how to solder (they pronounce the "l" here, and don't understand me easily when I say "sodder") and make these things called Zombie Apocalypse Badges. Ed took some pictures of me with his phone camera as I was soldering, but they're very fuzzy, sorry.

Here's what the badge looks like. It's pretty cool. The little bit on the upper left there, a) reminds me of Hal 9000, and b) is meant to bend over the little square that says IR1, but something went wrong with the making of the components, so the piece couldn't be put in the right way. Oh, well.

Here's a little movie of the badge when it's turned on. During the workshop, after we made our badges and registered them in a little database, we could turn them on, and bring them close to other badges. Each badge would pick up the signal of the other badge, and record the contact in the database. Then we could go look back and see all the connections we made. There was a little moving graphic with all the badge owners' names, and lines connecting the names of those whose badges had interacted. According the the BSF website, sometimes a badge would transmit a zombie virus, but I never saw any evidence of that. Unfortunately, the badges never got any use beyond learning how to make them and walking around with them at the workshop to get more contacts. It was fun, though.

Speaking of zombies, we also went to a Zombie Science talk, done by this comedian Doctor Austin, working with scientists from the University of Glasgow. This was set up like a university lecture, with some "course notes" provided in a little pamphlet. Doctor Austin gave a humorous lecture on the real science of zombies, discussing how real zombies might come about, how zombieism might be cured, and so on, with participation from the audience. The kids really liked this one. He shure tawked funny.

Another one we went to was on symmetry--symmetry in nature, molecular symmetry, symmetry in the universe (although that was just more about space and stars and stuff than symmetry), etc. Each type of symmetry had its own lecturer, and I think three out of four were quite good. The molecular symmetry was the one that wasn't the best, as I recall, maybe because it wasn't explained very well.

The last event was like a big blowout for the festival, with a whole day of talks. We went to four, I think--they were on the crazy shit scientists do to succeed (like take their own experimental drugs, screw over their partners, etc.), bubbles, music and territory, and numbers. The bubbles one was the best--there were a lot of crazy demos and really interesting things to see. The rest were also quite good, except for the music and territory one. We were both interested to see that one, especially Ed, since he makes and is very into music, but the speaker was poor. He didn't organize or explain his ideas very well, so the whole thing seemed incoherent. Too bad. The rest of the day was suite, though.

Science rulz.