28 Jul 2012: Christopher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

28 Jul 2012:

Christopher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

London, England, UK/Amsterdam, North Holland, the Netherlands

H: 21/22 L: 14/16 Weather: Scattered Clouds/Clear

I tried to sleep in as much as I could without missing the free continental breakfast my hostel offered, to help recover from my unwanted late night bus-hopping.  When I finally shuffled out of bed, I had been planning to do some laundry; I didn't have anything scheduled for the morning, and didn't really feel like doing anything about that, because I was terrified that somehow something bad would happen.  Instead, I decided to do laundry.  As I rummaged in my wallet, though, I came to the sobering realization that I had money for either my fares around the Underground that day or for laundry, but not both.  Well, it was a nice thought.

The plan was to meet with my cousins Chelsea and Garrett, as well as Garrett's girlfriend Suzy, at 1pm at Garrett's hotel.  He was staying at the Doubletree Westminster, which I had typed into Google Maps the night before.  I saw that it was by the Victoria station on the Victoria line, and headed in that direction, getting there with about a half an hour to spare.  Neither Garrett nor Chelsea were there, but that didn't faze me, as I was so early.  Instead, I settled down to watch Olympics coverage and read a book, though the hotel staff had unfortunately switched coverage to that of dressage.

And I waited.  Fifteen minutes.  A half an hour; it was now 1, the time we were supposed to meet.  Not there.  And I kept waiting, and kept waiting.  I checked to see if the hotel offered free wifi; no dice.  But, I figured, if they walked into or out of their hotel, I would see from the place were I was sitting.  Now it was 1:30, then 1:45, then, finally, at 2, I walked up to the front desk and asked if Garrett had checked in - maybe he had gotten a different flight from the one that he was expecting, and/or Chelsea's train had gotten in early or late and they had met up there or something.  Instead, the desk clerk said, "No one by that name has checked in at our hotel."

Alllllright then.  I ask, panicked, if there's a Starbucks nearby, so that I can use their Internet.  She directs me to the nearest station.  I walk over there, check my Facebook messages, and notice my blunder: I had Google Mapped "Doubletree Westminster", and it had directed me to a Doubletree by the Victoria station on the Victoria line.  Chelsea had told me to seek out a hotel by the Pimlico station on the Victoria line.  Argh.

So I make my way back to the Doubletree desk and freak out a bit (I'm practically in tears), and eventually the desk clerk realizes a little bit of what's happening and lets me use their phone to call over to the proper Doubletree.  They tell me that Garrett, Chelsea, and Suzy have already left, but they've left me a note, and that I should take a bus to their hotel.  Given my dismal record with buses, I find this advice somewhat terrifying, but I say okay and depart immediately.  At the bus stop, they tell me it'll be super easy; I just have to get on the bus and get off at Pimlico (er, I almost spelled that "Pimplico") station and it should be right there.  Okay.

It's not that easy.  I get on the bus, get off at Pimlico, and... no hotel.  I wander around for a bit.  No hotel.  I  sidle into a spa and ask the dude at the desk if he knows where the hotel is.  He has no idea.  I ask if there's a way for him to find out.  He takes out his smartphone and Googles "Doubletree Westminster".  The first search result is the hotel I just left.  The second is an unrelated Doubletree.  The third is the right one.  I try to tell this to the guy with the smartphone to get him to press it, but instead he clicks on the link to the wrong hotel and wastes time with that.

By the time I'm actually pointed in the right direction, march up the correct street, and enter the proper Doubletree, it's 14:50.  I stagger in and make my way to the desk.  The desk attendant there gets me the envelope with Garrett's letter.  In it, he says he's going to circle back and check at 14:30 whether I showed up.  I want to scream in frustration.  Instead I ask the clerk whether he did show up, and she says no.  So I settle in to wait.

I'm there for about an hour, and the group doesn't show up.  This is fine, and totally understandable, given how long they must have waited for me in the first place.  I have to head up to St. Pancras, but before I leave I ask whether there's a post office around; I have to mail a postcard I bought in York to my mom.  They are ridiculously nice to me.  Instead of directing me to the nearest post office (it's Saturday, they remind me; post offices are only open Saturday mornings, not afternoons), they take my postcard, no questions asked, and offer to mail it for me.  I ask how much I have to pay.  They seem surprised and say, "nothing".

Again, I'd like to underscore this: people in London were generally very, very nice to me.  My London experiences were not caused by anything but unfortunate coincidences and my own stupid judgment, not by Londoners or the people I was intending to see there!  I feel absurdly grateful to them (in fact, writing this post reminds me that I want to send management there a nice email about this incident), but I don't really have the time to express proper gratitude.  I try a hearty "thank you" or two and then practically sprint out towards the Underground.  I'm ready to be out of this town.

St. Pancras reminds me a bit of an airport terminal, particularly because they built a special wing just for the Eurostar, complete with security checkpoint and airline-like tickets.  I check in and make it through security no problem, then take my seat on the Eurostar train.  It's practically empty, but I suppose people would be more likely to be coming into London rather than leaving it on the first day of Olympic competitions.  As the Eurostar makes its way through the southern English countryside and plunges below the English Channel, I am tempted to see this as a clean break from London, a chance to start anew with the same vitality I had enjoyed until I made it to the city of my nightmares.

So, I made it to the Brussels-Midi train station, where I'm told to take a train to the Brussels-Nord station and connect from there up to Amsterdam.  When I make it to Brussels-Nord, they happily inform me that by "to" they meant "towards" Brussels-Nord, and I had to get off at Brussels-Central to make it to Amsterdam. I turn around and go south a single station, then am forced to wait an extra 40 minutes to catch the last train to Amsterdam, which gets in at about 01:00.  Well, so much for a clean start.

On board the train, the booming voice from the ceiling informs us all to keep an eye on our baggage, because, quote, "there are pickpockets on this train".  Well, great.  Now I'm stuck on a late night train feeling super paranoid.  At least, for a while.  Then I manage to reassure myself that it's something like the signs on Michigan State's library saying "thefts are occurring here".  I don't think the MSU Library is saying that, 100% of the time, there are acts of thievery occurring somewhere in the building; it's just trying to say that, in general, thefts are things that happen in libraries, and occur every once and a while.  Similarly, I think the voice from the sky was just trying to tell us to be watchful rather than somewhat passive-aggressively telling us that pickpockets are on board the train but doing nothing whatsoever about them.

Finally, I get to the Amsterdam train station, where Google Maps told me to buy a train ticket to get to my hostel.  I have to buy it for a whole stop, and almost walk over a group of smokers sitting in the back of the tiny commuter train with my suitcase.  Finally, I walk my way to my hostel, up through streets named after islands formerly in the Dutch East Indies, then turn onto Timorplein.  Yes, that Timor.  Now, finally, I can take this as the sign of new beginnings.

27 Jul 2012: At Least Nothing Was Stolen?

27 Jul 2012:

At Least Nothing Was Stolen?

London, England, UK

H: 24 L: 16 Weather: Intermittently Cloudy

I bound out of bed excitedly, ready for whatever adventures await me in London, before I realize, oh wait, my glasses are broken, I need to do something about that.  I ask at the front desk, and they tell me there's a place not too far away... but the clerk also says the word "expensive" about every other sentence when directing me there.  I ask for tape instead, and tape up my glasses to make the lens stay in the frame.  Well, great.  Now I look like I've been in a fistfight.

After eating breakfast, I head down to Westminster Abbey to meet up with Bailey and her friends once more.  It's absolutely gorgeous, and I take tons of pictures.  The most amazing thing about the place, of course, is all the famous people buried there.  Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the UK gets their remains put there, or at least a memorial somewhere in the building.  Visitors are given an audio tour narrated by Jeremy Irons.  It's a fun tour, and whisks us through there pretty fast, but to do so Mr. Irons has to skip over a lot of the famous people you pass by.

For example, in the writer's section, we're rightly pointed towards the memorial to William Shakespeare (not buried there, of course), but right there just to the left of Shakespeare is the memorial to Jane Austen, who isn't even mentioned.  Towards the exit, Mr. Irons mentions the tomb of the unknown soldier, but not WINSTON CHURCHILL who is buried RIGHT THERE and OH MY GOD WINSTON CHURCHILL and like fifty other Prime Ministers, and Darwin and William Herschel and I WAS IN HEAVEN OKAY ALL THESE PEOPLE.

We then head to Regents' College London to have lunch in the school cafeteria (they had pretty good fish-and-chips) before tooling around Regents' Park for a while.  Regents' Park was gorgeous, and Bailey and her friends were delightful as always.  It was fun to hear them reminisce about their time together in London.  Then, it was time for me to be off to the museums, to spend a bit of time before the big concert.  Said "big concert" was a staging of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—my absolute favorite song, ever—as a part of BBC's Proms series, an extended series of summer concerts that are quite famous in the classical music world.  The best part of Proms is that they sell tickets at the door for only £5 that are said to be easy to get; you may have to wait in line for a while, but they're supposed to be well-worth it.  Concerts are said to almost never sell out, unless you show up with like 15 minutes to spare.

I got to Prince Albert Hall, where Proms concerts are held, at 4pm.  The concert started at 6:30pm, though, and the lines didn't seem very bad, so I decide to come back in a half an hour, as there are some wonderful museums on Exhibition Road that are completely free.  This was a mistake.  The museum I was hoping to see was the Science Museum, and, me being me, I absolutely love science museums.  They're pretty much my favorite things in the whole world.  So of course I couldn't stay for just a half an hour.  I feel particularly guilty when I let it stretch to about 45 minutes because I discovered an exhibit they have where they have a bunch of rooms set up to show a performance of "The Planets", complete with surround sound and videos of the performers.  I was cutting down on my classical music time to listen to classical music!

Then, disaster struck.  I decided to give myself 5 more minutes (yeah right) and check out an exhibit I saw called "Who Am I?", just because the name sounded interesting.  BAD.  LIFE.  DECISIONS.  It turned out to be the best exhibit on psychology I have ever seen at any museum, hands down, full of wonderful interactive tools that actually taught kids about modern things that we think are cool in psychology: neuroscience and kin bias (without calling it that) and digit ratios and OH MY GOD IT WAS JUST THE BEST THING EVER and thinking about it on the way out of the museum I practically started tearing up because you have no idea how awesome it is to finally see your discipline respected enough that they put it in a museum, and not just any museum, but a science museum, like it's just another part of science, every bit as important and valid as geology or chemistry or physics, and they actually did it right, it wasn't just stupid Freud stupidity and Skinner boxes, but real, modern cognitive psychology that real people actually care about these days but no one knows about because we have done a bad job of advertising.

(Sorry, had to rant there a bit.  Back to regularly scheduled programming.)

Me as a young child, according to a random face technology thing they had.  I mean, obviously, my classes and facial hair were a very important part of my self-identity at that age.

I make my way back to Prince Albert Hall.  The lines had clearly gotten longer, and it takes me a bit of walking to find where they even enter the hall, let alone where I need to get in line for the end of them.  I'm looking for the Gallery seating line, but end up running into the Arena seating line; I decide, eh, good enough, and follow the line to what I think is it's back.  It turns out I accidentally wandered into the Gallery line, but, eh, that was what I meant to do in the first place, so yay.

In the Gallery line, I find myself next to Bai, Sherri, and Balazs, who are students from the University of London.  We end up chatting and getting to know each other.  Balazs served as kind of the go-between for Bai and Sherri, as he had been to several Proms already.  As we waited in line, we got issued little slips that had numbers on them denoting our place in line; I got #872.  We were a little confused about what that meant.  Were there really 872 people in our line, or 872 people in both lines, or did they just start numbering at some arbitrary number in the middle (say, 500), or what?

Eventually, after about an hour and a quarter, we started moving.  The line was long, but it was actually moving at a pretty steady clip, so that was comforting.  Eventually, it seemed like we were assured of getting tickets, as we were being led down a narrow corridor right outside Prince Albert Hall with about 10 minutes to spare before the concert.  We stopped for a bit.  People in better clothes than the Prommers were milling around us; apparently they had been shepherded over towards us to deal with problems with their tickets.

Balazs mentioned that one of his friends had been waiting in line once and was offered a ticket by someone who happened to be walking by.  I was impressed.  "That must be really rare.  No way that that would happen."  Within about a half a minute, one of the guys in suits milling around said that he had an extra ticket he couldn't do anything with, and he was willing to give it away, no strings attached.

I wish I was making up the timing, because I know it seems too perfect.  But it was that perfect.  So I looked around at the people around me, thinking they had heard him, and said, "Give me a moment," to the guy in the suit.  I asked them what they thought.  They didn't say anything very definite.  I kind of shrugged at the guy.  He moved on.

After all, I figured, we were about to head in - we were only about five minutes away in the line.  And I had gotten to know my little group, and liked them, so it would be nice to enjoy the concert with people I liked and knew already.  Plus, we had gone through the entire line together, so I felt a sense of obligation to them already; I shouldn't just split off from them for the promise of treasure, as that would be unfair.

Instead, we moved up in line.  When we were about 15 people away from the front—perhaps 3 meters away—a clamor came from the front of the line.  There was a guy with an official-looking name tag shaking his head.  You know what that means.  Sold out.  To say I was devastated would be a serious understatement; this had been the single event that I had been looking forward to most (not counting seeing people, of course; talking just in terms of activities), and now I couldn't experience it.

Looking back on this, it made me realize that I'm not a Ravenclaw, as much as I enjoy learning.  I'm a Hufflepuff.  And a Tully: "Family, Duty, Honor".  That's duty right before honor there.  So, sure, great that I was being loyal.  But this incident really made me think about a couple of things that I find really frustrating about myself.

First, of course, is my passivity.  As a good Minnesotan, I learned to not try to rock the boat too much and make unreasonable demands of others.  This is useful in many situations.  I tend to get good service from wait staff, airline employees, and others who are in positions where they're used to dealing with unreasonable, pushy individuals on a regular basis.  But it can also be bad, as it was in this case.  If I was less stupidly passive, I could've simply explicitly asked the people in my group for permission to take the ticket rather than somehow expecting them to grant it to me, especially because they obviously weren't paying attention to the unfolding situation.

More importantly, though, it really highlighted my risk-aversiveness.  A lot of the reason why I didn't take the ticket is my fear that somehow I wouldn't have a good time sitting with people I didn't already know in a situation that I hadn't planned for.  So I did absolutely everything I could to avoid this slightly negative situation, and it ended up ultimately leading to utter disaster.  I'm used to my risk-aversiveness depriving me of some mildly fun situations (a lot of the typical fond memories people have of college will never be mine... but, of course, many of the bad ones won't be, either!), and once and a while it leads me to mildly unpleasant things, like making someone feel slighted or the like.  But this made me think about how many of the really horrendous (well, horrendous for me, which is to say "kind of bad") situations I've found myself in have been the result of my risk-aversiveness.  The tally was pretty sobering.

In any case, we set off through Regents' Park towards the University of London, where the others were going to have dinner.  They apologized to me—repeatedly—for what they assured me was the awful quality of the food there.  What they should have been preemptively apologizing for, though, was the rudeness of the desk clerks there.  I had never really encountered a person in a similar job who was so outright rude.  For example, he told us that Balasz would have his University account charged to cover the meal, then once the meal pass was purchased completely changed his story and said he'd accept payment directly, then ridiculed us for being confused about the situation when he did a 180 on what he was talking about in the first place!  Grr.  We spent dinner discussing orthographies, of all things, and then I bid them adieu to hang out with Bailey to watch the opening ceremony.

Our plan had been to meet up briefly at her apartment, then go out and find a pub or a public viewing spot to watch the Olympics with Londoners.  But, as you might expect from my London adventures so far, it did not go according to plan.  I made it to her Tube stop just fine, but was immediately lost.  The problem with the Underground is that there are five hundred different exits for each stop, and the little hand-drawn map I had made for this one apparently matched a completely different stop.  Once I found my way to a different exit that had a local map by it, I had wasted important time.  Finally, though, I started walking in the right direction... but ended up getting lost again anyway, and when I finally found the street Bailey lived on I realized I hadn't written down her house number, so I walked up and down a few times before finding the right one from my fuzzy recollections of Street View.

Finally, I made it into the apartment, but by then the thing had started - no pub for you!  We settled down to watch the Opening Ceremony together.  It was pretty quiet in the apartment, and Bailey and her friend fell asleep a couple of times during the ceremony (which I don't blame them for; they had had to stay up late to work on essays and such all week!).  I suppose I enjoyed it, but it seemed kind of short in some ways.  I did appreciate the random appearance of JK Rowling, though, and the fact that NHS is so widely considered to be a national treasure that it was used in the opening ceremony of the Olympics.

When it was done, it was time for me to head back to my hostel.  I had to take the buses in London for the first time, and unfortunately my Oyster Card (used for all public transit in London) was almost out, so I had to pay quite a bit using coins.  I had a sort of weird route, where I had to transfer between two buses (the 20... something to the N28 or the N31) at a largely unmarked location, but I figured I could do it.

So I got off at the transfer point and waited, watching several N29 buses go by, waiting faithfully for an N28 bus.  Then I got on an N29 bus and headed away.  It took me a few stops before I realized, oh wait, I was on an N29 bus, not an N28 bus, and how on earth did I manage that, because I had seen several N29 buses pass me by, as they were meant to, and oh bother where am I and what am I going to do and augh.  So I doubled back and ended up getting off at the wrong stop because I got off at something-ham Road when I had to get off at something-ham Street, who even knows, and there were loud Frenchman all around me and what is even happening it's 2am and I'm really cranky right now and please just get me home.  And then I found an N31 bus and I flip out because I'm suddenly afraid I'm going in the wrong direction but finally, finally, finally, I'm actually going in the right direction, and I finally stumble into my hostel.

Even despite the awful sleep-aggravated confusion, though, there were some people who were really nice.  The bus drive on the wrong-way N29, for example, let me just pay with the single GBP I had on my Oyster Card even though that was way less than the actual fare and was very nice in redirecting me to the N28, and the lady on the wrong-stop I got off at who went off the bus at the same time made some nice small talk about the Opening Ceremony that I very much appreciated.  So there's that much, at least.

I really wanted to go to bed, but instead I looked up the "Doubletree Westminster", where my cousin Chelsea said she and her brother Garrett were going to be meeting up the next day, and tried to sketch out how to get there.  Mostly I was just exhausted.  So exhausted.  I only got to sleep at 3am.

26 Jul 2012: Brumming It Up

26 Jul 2012:

Brumming It Up

Derby, England, UK/London, England, UK

H: 25/27 L: 14/16 Weather: Partly Cloudy/Clear

Sleep in Derby felt really good - I was in a real, actual bed (have I mentioned that Chelsea is the best cousin ever?) and was able to sleep in quite a bit.  Unfortunately, though, as I set out for the day, I was running a bit late.  Despite this, I decided I had about 10 minutes to spare, and so I wandered into the town's Catholic church in the center of town.  Erp, bad idea.  You see, when I go into a place, I tend to want to enjoy it, and so I stayed a bit longer than I had.  The darn Catholics almost made me late for my train!

I ended up meandering through some random parks, only having a vague idea where I was headed, grabbing some tickets, and running to the platform just in time for when the train was supposed to show up, only to find... nothing.  No train, no passengers, nothing up on the place where they put the train's departure information.  Eerie.  While wandering around, I check the departures list, and my train isn't listed at all.  What on earth?  Over the station intercom, I hear a voice say something about my train, but I can't make it out clearly, in part because I have absolutely no top-down expectations of what it could be saying.

Luckily, the thing about "no passengers" is a lie, because I find a random British guy complaining to a dude wearing a reflective vest in the station.  He, I, and an Anglo-Chinese family all joined forces to try to figure out what was happening and what to do next.  The British guy updated me on the situation: there was vandalism in Bedford that meant all trains using the line we were trying to were severely delayed, if not cancelled.  Well, great.  We were apparently supposed to go up to Birmingham and then down to London from there.

Incidentally, this also causes me a bit of a struggle: I know that, in the US, Birmingham is pronounced /ˈbɜɹmɪŋhæm/ ("BER-ming-ham"), and I know that a local way to say the name of Birmingham, England is /brʌm/ ("BRUMM").  However, I know that, as an outsider, calling it "Brum" would be borderline offensive; it's not like knowing that Boiseans prefer the "s" of Boise to be pronounced as an "s" rather than a "z", but something I think that's available only to people actually from Birmingham.  I guess /ˈbɜɹmɪŋəm/ ("BER-ming-umm"), and it turns out that's completely right!  Hooray for vague familiarity with the silly things British people due to placenames.

So, we run over to the line that's going through Birmingham, and get on that train.  As we come to a stop in Birmingham's station—an ugly linear sort of place that reminds me much more strongly of an airport than a train station—the train (engineer?  driver?  operator?  big voice on the intercom?) human being cheerfully informs us that there's a 12:10 train headed to London that we could probably catch... except for the fact that it's on the opposite side of Birmingham's depressing station.  I dash across the place, only to have the "gate agents" stationed there that we need to take the 12:30 train instead.  I do, and find the train almost empty; the rush of people right at 12:30 fails to materialize, and the whole experience is kind of weirding me out a little bit.

We're headed to London's Euston station, and I realize that I have no idea where that is in London as I'm coming in about an hour late.  I start panicking, but luckily because it's London there are maps and guides everywhere steering me towards the Underground, and I discover that Euston is right next to St. Pancras, where I was originally hoping to go.  Whew.  I make it to a Tube station and check in at my hostel, then head to Westminster, where I was scheduled to meet with my linguistics BFF Bailey 45 minutes previously.  Thankfully, she ran late too, but Westminster Abbey closes ridiculously early, so we went to the Victoria and Albert gallery instead.  I spend my time wandering around, looking at Medieval paintings of the Virgin Mary and tapestries about boar hunting.  Right around the tapestry depicting boar hunting there's a computer with a modern recording of a piece that was apparently very popular in the 13th century, and listening to said piece was really weird because the thought that this was pop culture from 800 years ago is just bizarre.

After that, I met up with my friend Peter from the political forum I've been a member of since forever for dinner and drinks afterwards.  He takes us to somewhere south of the Thames, where we wander around looking for a restaurant.  Surprisingly, without really knowing what we were looking for, we found a place that served great food at relatively inexpensive prices, an unusual occurrence indeed in London.  I ended up having salmon and linguine pasta.  You can imagine how much I liked that.

Everything is delicious and happy, and Peter is, like everyone from the forum, wonderful to talk to, and it's about time for him to head back to Oxford.  We decide to stop for one last drink before he heads out, then we race up to Victoria station, where he's booked a ticket back.  Except we make it up there, running from place to place, and as we make it into the train station we see that his train has left him behind.  Argh.  It was, in fact, the last train from London to Oxford that evening.  I feel guilty, but, to his credit, Peter takes it in stride and catches a train over to Reading, where, I would later learn, he stayed with a friend overnight.

Finally, I'm able to head myself back to my hostel, and by then I see security guards closing the entrances to the Underground.  That's something I didn't realize: the Underground closes at something like 1:30-ish in the morning.  Late night closures are pretty common in the US, but in large cities closing times are sometimes later than that.  New York City, being a very special snowflake, keeps subways running all night long.  I run into the nearest open entrance I see, and try to see whether I can find an appropriate line still running.  lLckily, I'm able to grab the last Circle line trains of the night and then connect to a Metropolitan line train where there was a Jamaican band being fangirled at by a British woman who had never heard of the band before she stepped onto the Underground.

By the time I get into my hostel, it's about 2:15, and I'm absolutely exhausted, so I pretty much head right to head to sleep.  But disaster strikes.  When taking off my glasses, one of the tiny screws on the right side of my frames pops out and my lens drops to the floor.  It doesn't break, thank goodness, but suddenly I have glasses without a right lens.  I spend about 10 minutes frantically attempting to see if I can find the screw or a quick way to fix it or anything, then collapse exhausted into my bed.  I'll just have to figure it out in the morning, I suppose, or just walk around with a single lens in my glasses for the rest of my trip.  Unfortunately, as I would later realize, I had been the victim of a nasty case of foreshadowing...

25 Jul 2012: Four of Five Snorers Approve

25 Jul 2012:

Four of Five Snorers Approve

York, England, UK/Derby, England, UK

H: 19/24 L: 15/14 Weather: Overcast/Partly Cloudy

Getting to sleep in York was rough; I was in a room of 10 people, so, as you might imagine, it was kind of loud in there.  About five different people, I think, were snoring.  Then I realized: oh wait, I have earplugs!  And, miracle of miracles, four of the snorers were drowned out by the earplugs, while the fifth was reduced from a chainsaw to a gnat.  I joined my fellow sleepers quickly thereafter.

Unfortunately, though, the morning came earlier than it should have, because the hostel offered free breakfast... but only from 7 to 9.  That meant that Cindy-from-Canada and I had to be up and out that early to explore York some more.  While we were leaving the breakfast room, we happened to look at the TV, where the BBC was playing a show that involved detectives who sought the unknown heirs for people who are heirless and die.  Some poor woman had died and left £100,000 behind without any will, and her brothers were both childless, so they had to go out into the countryside and find who to give the money to.  British telly is weird.

Cindy-from-Canada and I decided to check out the York Minster.  Unfortunately for us, admission to the very-impressive-looking cathedral happened to be £14.  Alas.  Instead, we headed down to the York Castle Museum, which is not a museum about castles; instead, it was a museum about social history, complete with a mockup of a street from the Victorian Era.  The scope of it was broad enough, though, that it included an exhibit of the 1960s adjoining a recreation of a early-1800s prison.  I was vaguely disappointed by the 1960s exhibit, to be honest; as an American, from what I know of 1960s Britain it was composed 100% of the Beatles.

Additionally, my role as Village Idiot in games of Mafia was confirmed!

We also checked out Clifford's Tower, the only remnant of a Medieval castle in the city.  It was the site of nasty Anti-Semitic violence made in the Middle Ages, but now it's just a quaint little tower towards the side of York.  Small kids were cavorting around as one of the workers in the area dubbed them knights in a super adorable knighting ceremony.  The top of the tower afforded some nice views.

I walked her to the train station and we said our goodbyes, then it was time for me to get lunch.  I didn't need anything particularly complicated, but Europe in generally is severely lacking in what I'd call "medium-speech food" - things like Panera, Noodles and Company, and so on, where you can get decent food but can be in and out in ten minutes.  So I spent quite a bit of time wandering around trying to find somewhere that could give me some.  Finally, I was able to get a "breakfast panini" (egg, cheese, sausage, bacon, and tomato) and eat it with some raspberries from the farmers' market... yum.

As a final stop, I went to York's free art gallery, which wasn't anything special but was, importantly, free.  There are art galleries everywhere in Europe.  It's kind of ridiculous.  They had a "draw your own artwork" station for preteens, including a bouquet of flowers and a plastic trout as props.  I decided to inspire the teens by putting the trout in with the bouquet.

My next stop was Derby, where my cousin Chelsea lives.  It was just a train and a short taxi ride away, and suddenly I was in a real, honest-to-God apartment, that actually had spaces to live in and wasn't full of bunk beds or in a shifty dorm or anything.  Woah!  Chelsea was nice enough to cook me a delicious meal of chicken kebabs and corn-on-the-cob, which I absolutely demolished because CORN.  I was excited to hear that my cousin Garrett and his girlfriend Suzie were planning to be in town the following Saturday!  Heading to bed was easy, and I fell asleep right away.