There and Back Again

Dear Internet,

Another week has flown by. Thank your lucky stars if you’ve had good weather. Ever since last week, it’s been snowing here in England. For this California girl, that’s not good news!

Trying to appreciate the snow

This week in England has been all over the place. I say England and not London because most of my time this week was spent in a bus going up north to Manchester, Ambleside, and Liverpool. Manchester had a really amazing gallery. While some of the art was Victorian, they had an awesome paper art gallery. In it, people had created things like melted motorcycles, trees, and teeny cut out houses all out of paper. It was pretty incredible. My favorite was called "The Tree of Knowledge". It was a real tree branch, stripped of all its real leaves and replaced with artificial leaves. These artificial leaves were cutouts of encyclopedias, novels, and poems cut out in the form of leaves and then glued onto the tree branch. To someone who can't draw stick figures, it was amazing.  

Paper art at Manchester Art Gallery

The Lakeside District blew me away. We went to John Ruskin's house, who was a famous artist and art critic back in his day. While his house was modest in size, his property was incredible. It had snowed the night before so we didn't get to see the garden in its full glory, but it was gorgeous nonetheless. He built paths all around his house, he had multiple gardens (which bloom like crazy in the spring apparently), and a dock built out onto the lake right next to his house. I snapped a zillion pictures... We also drove down to Liverpool and went to the Beatles Experience. Jealous? While we were on the road, we stopped by Castlerigg, a smaller and similar version of Stonehenge. That's where this next picture was taken.

John Ruskin's backyard

On Sunday we got a little worried back in London because the snow had delayed or cancelled a lot of the trains. To get to church, we have to take the tube for a half hour and then a train for another half hour. We were concerned our train would be down, or that it would be down on the way home. The last thing we wanted was to be stuck in a cold, relatively unknown and definitely far away town! We were lucky however to be able to have it working both ways. 

These last few days have been spent doing homework and trying to avoid the cold weather. Monday and Tuesday I spent a few hours in the National Gallery doing some homework for my classes, which is a fantastic place to study if you're looking for one. Today was our first free day! After a much needed sleep-in, a few of us went to a really cool museum and Camden Town. The museum we went to used to belong to Sir John Soane, an architect who designed Downing Street. He collected a LOT of things. The most interesting thing he had that we could see was an Egyptian sarcophagus! He had redesigned a lot of his house so that it could hold more items. It got confusing in there! Camden Town was one big shopping cluster. Stalls packed next to each other, haggling, it's a shopping addicts heaven! We had to abort that mission early because we weren't prepared for the snow that came later today. 

I hope you all stay warm this week wherever you are! Sending you all hugs and kisses.

Love,

Courtney