Scousetastic and other sorted adjectives...

Coming soon....

My famous George Harrison impression (famous if you were in NHS at Xavier).

and

Llandaff Cathedral.

I've Got the Golden Ticket

As a smart, cultured, and engaged young American student with the UK and the whole of Europe at your finger-tips what would you do with your first free weekend?

Punting on the Thames?
Strolling along the Seine in Paris?
Attending an opera in Vienna?

or...visiting the largest chocolate factory in the UK?!

Yeah, that's what we decided we wanted to do too....and let me tell you, Charlie was basically the luckiest kid in the world.


Last Saturday the Colgate kids hopped on a Megabus at about 8:45am headed for Birmingham, England just outside of which is Bourneville, the home of Cadbury World 'where chocolate comes to life.' The morning of our day trip was partially taken up by the 3 hr bus ride to Birmingham, but we arrived with plenty of time before our 2:50pm tour of the factory and decided to bop around Birmingham which boasts the largest outdoor marketplace in the UK. There were stalls galore filled with fresh produce, sweets, secondhand clothes, wigs, household necessities, anything you could ever possibly want could probably be found at the Bull Ring Market in Birmingham.

Then we made our way by train to the village of Bourneville which was created solely to house the Cadbury factory and its workers.






Cadbury was my kind of place...first thing that happens when you start the tour you ask? Why, yes, they do hand you two full size chocolate bars. Amen. Later on in the tour they hand you another full size chocolate bar and then as a reward for surviving the painfully creepy Cadbury world ride (basically like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland except that there are lots of little cocoa beans everywhere including ones in nests in trees which look like hanging skulls), they give you a cup full of melted chocolate. Then if you aren't yet in a sugar coma there is the Essence portion of the tour in which you get an even large cup filled with your choice of ingredients and more melted chocolate.

All in all, definitely worth the price of admission.

The Celtic Music Portion of the Evening

So, I have to confess that as much as I love rugby (its official, I had a lovely chat with a bio lecturer at pints on Thursday about rugby and am now clearly an aficionado), the real reason that I've now decided to move to the UK is these guys. Well really just amazing live Celtic, folk, blues, rock fusion bands in general.

As the rugby game was ending and all of the Welsh fans were filing out of the pub with their tales between their legs and tears dripping down their cheeks a Welsh band called Rusty Shackle was setting up and tuning their guitars...banjos, fiddles, basses, and mandolins. Talk about a multi-talented set of guys. The base player is just about the cutest person I have ever seen...sorry Jonny Wilkinson...and really, really talented. These guys just give off this amazing vibe of fun and imagination. I say imagination because they played some of the weirdest covers I have ever heard, like a celtic-folk version of Bloodhound Gang's the Bad Touch and something by Usher. They did however play the best cover of the Green, Green Grass of Home I have ever heard and in fact the only version of the song that I will listen to in the future.

Over all the night was just exactly what I love doing, bopping around to music though next time I vow not to have a giant schoolbag and I shall dance the night away.

I learned though that as much as I love being able to go clubbing I would much rather swing the night away in a pub with some Celtic-folk beats bumping in the background. Amen to that.

I discovered upon returning home from the pub that the band wasn't just some local boys playing for a few bucks, but actually the real deal. This is a still from the music video to their song "Cold Hearted Town"which is definitely worth a listen.

Besides who doesn't love a cowboy?
Click here for Cold Hearted Town

Rugby and Dragons.

From the second we made landfall in Wales the Colgate kids have heard the same thing from every person (Welsh person) we encountered: "WATCH THE WALES-ENGLAND RUGBY GAME." So we did...I have to admit that this night alone was probably sufficient to make me spend the rest of my life in the UK, seriously it was just about everything I love...

We watched the game at a pub downtown because everyone told us that we had to be in the city centre for the game which was the best advice anyone could have given us. The all claimed that there would be electricity in the air that night from all of the excitement which is a statement that I would typically brush off as an exaggeration, but in this case it was completely true. People were literally lining the streets decked out in bright red welsh garb, scarves, dragon head hats, face paints (like the lovely Christine and Brynne got), and rugby jerseys abounded. These nice young lads were strumming along in the streets a song about crushing the english or crying or something. Literally every where we tried to get into was packed with people crowding outside the pub doors just to get in for a pint and a television set...we eventually managed to scramble (literally scramble, think mosh pit but more rowdy brits than 24s) into a pub called Owain Glyndwr (a welsh hero, of course) where had a couple of pints poured and watched the game.

I was pleasantly surprised at how exciting rugby is and although hockey will always be my first love...I think rugby is now pulling a close second. I also loved the fact that brittish sports shows don't have 50 bajillion commercials so the games move a heck of a lot faster...I also have to admit that I loved watching people like James Hook (Wales) and Jonny Wilkinson (England) who Lauren and I deemed to be male models on the field.














Overall I was thoroughly content with my first Welsh rugby encounter, though sadly the English defeated the Welsh team 26-19.

Now I'm totally stoked for the rugby game that the study group is going to go see with our group funds! Heck I might even try playing the game myself...or maybe not.

Wales vs. England.

Coming soon...Rugby, Celtic music, and dragons. Doesn't that sound exciting?!

In the mean time do yourself a favour and check our Rusty Shackle...really awesome welsh band.
http://www.rustyshackle.com/music/

ME Sci Pints and Monet

I apologize to all of you out there who are interested in sophisticated things like history, art, culture, architecture because I will admit that the next few entries probably won't be anything to do with any of those things...

For the past week (week 2) I've just being doing the whole Cardiff thing and the more I find out about the UK and Cardiff especially the more wonderful it seems and the more I would love to live somewhere in the UK for some period of time (sorry mom).

OOH I LIED! I will talk about art...The Welsh National Museum is absolutely amazing!
If you ever have a chance to go to the UK and get to Wales the museum is a MUST.
First of all it is 100% FREE to the public, I literally just walked in and started browsing around because I had some time off between lectures and the museum is incredible. I started off in the Evolution of Wales Exhibit which has a giant woolly mammoth skeleton, beautiful ammonites, and some sick marine and land dinosaur skeletons. I was truly impressed by the scale of the exhibits...and then I went upstairs to the art galleries.
French impressionism was my goal and I just stood there staring at Monet's, Manet's, Cezzane's, Degas'...you name them...my favourite?
Look left...Claude Monet's San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk. Lovely.


The museum is not my default place to go when I have time to kill, awesome. Not that I have a whole lot of that now, classes have started and it's nose to the grindstone, well sort of.
Mostly classes are great, weird in that they only meet about once or twice a week but really interesting. I love my geology class and geo lecturer, he's awesome. It was my first class without any Colgaters in it and I was freaking out, but then I walked into the room and lecture started and it was about geology and I experienced an absolutely wonderful feeling of contentment, relaxing, and excitement all at once...I was in the right place. I don't want to get too sentimental but after taking paleo last semester I was seriously concerned that I had picked the wrong major, so it was a huge relief to know that I really do love geology.

I also looooove, love, love geology majors...and they're pretty much the same everywhere. One lovely lady named Milly (a senior master's student from England who did a semester in Miami) sort of took my under her wing and introduced me to another Earth Science student, Juliet, who is studying here for a semester from Miami. They were both wonderful and invited me to an awesome event they call 'pints.'
If I could have one seriously convincing arguement for the benefits of lowering the drinking age in the US it would be to have experiences like pints. Basically the ME Sci students (Masters of Earth Sciences) and a couple of lecturers go to a local pub every Thursday for a few pints and just to relax and get to know one another and enjoy geology love. It was such a chill experience, probably one of my favs so far here in Cardiff.

NB. Coasters are called 'beer mats' and the reigning table game during pints is to try and flip a stack of 'beer mats' from the edge of the table (hanging halfway off) up onto the top of your pint just by flicking it up with your fingers...I'm a champ nbd.