17 February 2014: Happy Birthday, Cousin!

Ten years ago today, the older of my two little cousins, whom I shall not to refer to by name because she's a minor and I don't want to post information about her on a public blog for confidentiality reasons, was born. I can't help but feel a bit old as I think about the fact that the little infant that I held in the hospital while wearing an American Girl t-shirt has hit the double digits. She's just a really great kid. Smart, too, and funny. Before I left for England, she gave me a bracelet that she'd made and told me that she made a matching one for herself so that whenever we missed each other while I was away, we could look at our bracelets and think about one another. I'm not sure if she'll ever know how much that means to me or just how often I look at my bracelet.

In honor of my cousin turning 10, I thought that I'd post 10 things that I've learned about England since I've been here. Not only because she's an extremely smart kid who loves learning fun facts, but because I should probably talk about my study abroad experience in my study abroad blog ;)

1. Yellow mustard is called American hotdog mustard.
2. The Olympics aren't as big of a thing in England. America goes a lot more nuts than the majority of the world does about the Games.
3. If you think a boy/girl is attractive, you say that they are "fit."
4. There was a period in the early and mid-2000s where English people didn't listen to American music and Americans didn't listen to English music. As a result, hanging out and listening to "throwback" tunes of our childhoods can be very frustrating...especially when Smash Mouth never "crossed the ocean." (Not that you'd know Smash Mouth, either, cousin. Well, no. You're a smart kid. You've probably at LEAST heard "All Star.")
5. British television shows are a lot better than American television shows. And American television shows are a LOT better than American shows that are based off of British shows.
6. Cadbury chocolate melts more quickly than Hershey's chocolate. It tastes sweeter, too.
7. "Awesome" is a word that only Americans use. Whenever I ask my English friends to put on an American accent, the word 'awesome' will usually come up.
8. "You okay?" or "You alright?" is kind of the same thing as "What's up?" or "How are you doing?"
9. It's really hard to find stick deodorant in England. Everything here is either roll-on or spray can. And the only stick stuff that I found is over three pounds for a little stick of it, so I'm getting used to this spray can stuff.
10. No matter how different somebody's upbringing and culture was from your own, you can still make friends wherever you go.

So happy birthday, my dear cousin :) I love you so much, and I can't wait to see you and your little sister (who I also love so terribly much that I can't stand it) when I get home.

12 February 2014: Food for Thought

First of all, as I mentioned in the last post, I made a video about England's Nutella sometime during my second week here. I hesitated on putting it up, seeing as how I'm a bit awkward on film, but maybe some of you will get a bit of a laugh over it.

While we're on the topic of food, several days ago, one of my friends from back home asked me what they called American cheese over here. I took some photographs to show him, and he complimented the English on being brutally honest. I don't really care how unappetizing it sounds on the packaging, though. Stick some of that onto a chicken patty sandwich with a squirt of mayo and I'm a happy little Ellen!

Today while I was at the grocery store with my friends, I noticed that there weren't any pudding cups. There were yogurt cups, (or "yoghurt," as they would spell it here), and there are delicious mousse cups (which are MUCH better...I'd take a frothy lemon mousse over tapioca pudding any day!), but no pudding cups. When I got home, I asked one of my friends if there were pudding cups anywhere here. He had to google what that was and said that if it's the same thing as yogurt, then there are. I told him that it's different than yogurt and had a really hard time explaining what pudding is in America. I then asked him if pudding was really just that cake stuff, and he said it is, but no one really eats it except for on Christmas. I then learned that pudding can be used as an all-encompassing term for dessert. Like, you can have a Popsicle for pudding. But pudding is still pudding. And pudding is also not pudding. And Yorkshire pudding is fried dough, which is COMPLETELY different than pudding. Whatever pudding is.

I never thought that I would be this confused about pudding. 

10 February 2014: The Kinder Surprise Egg

 Since my Monday lecture/seminar kind of took it out of me today and I'm really in the mood for something sweet, I've decided that today is the day that I eat my very first Kinder Surprise egg. I honestly could not be more excited right now and am literally trembling with anticipation.

Let me explain.

A Kinder Surprise egg is a delicious chocolate egg with a toy inside. From what the Internet has told me, it's literally the greatest sweet in the world. However, since the American FDA does not permit food with inedible objects inside of it to be owned or consumed in America, these delicious little treats are illegal in my home country. The people of the Internet like to rub it into the Americans' faces that we cannot have Kinder eggs (to which we usually reply with a picture of an eagle saying something along the lines of, "I'M SORRY, I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY FREEDOM!!!" but the moment that Kinder eggs are brought out, we know that we've lost the argument). 

America takes this Kinder egg thing really seriously

Too bad I'm in England right now!!!

So as you all might imagine, this is a really big deal for me.

I'm going to try something a bit new today. Instead of doing this blog post as a reflection, I'm going to do a bit of "live blogging." I'm going to type down what's going on as it happens. There's going to be pictures taken, but they'll be inserted after the actual writing. I know that I could just do this in video form, but as you'll all see when I upload my "Nutella" video, I'm much better at writing things down than speaking things out.

So without further to do...

Right now, I'm looking at my egg. It looks so pretty in its wrapping. I have no clue how to get it undone.

I've ripped back some of the foil. I feel a bit sad that my perfect egg is about to be eaten, but then I remind myself that I can get another one the next time I go to the store.

I can smell the chocolate so well! It appears that there's a white stripe in the center.

I squeezed the egg gently and it divided into two halves! It's white on the inside!!!!!!

IT TASTES SO GOOD! OH MY GOSH THIS IS LITERALLY THE YUMMIEST THING EVER. LIKE PERFECT COMBINATION. WHY DON'T WE HAVE KINDER CHOCOLATE AT HOME? WE GET SOME CADBURY STUFF. BUT THIS MAKES CADBURY SEEM LIKE CHILD'S PLAY. OH MY GOSH!

I'M EATING THIS SO SLOWLY BECAUSE IT'S MY NEW FAVORITE THING EVER. MOVE OVER, FREDDO FROG.

THE CAPS LOCK IS NECESSARY BECAUSE IT'S SO IMPORTANT!!!

Okay, now that half of my shell has been eaten, it's time to figure out what's in my surprise!!!

First of all, I'm trying to figure out how anybody could accidentally eat this thing. It's inside of a capsule thing and, like...no one can swallow that.

I'm too dumb to open the darn thing.

Aha! You just have to squeeze it! And inside is...a thing?

Just trying to build it following the instructions...

Aha! I've got a little...ball thing...

Apparently it's a magic ball. And the kids on the instructions seem to be having the best time ever playing with it, so I'm assuming that it's going to be a hoot.

Ignore the empty bag of crisps...

It's telling me to go to 2.magic.com, so that's what I'll do...

Aaaand once again, I'm not allowed to have full access to my Kindery fun because of my location. I thought that Kinder eggs were okay here!

But that's okay, because I still have another half an egg left!!!!!

In conclusion: The Kinder Surprise Egg was everything I could have hoped for and more. 10/10 would recommend, will buy again. Now it's time to play with my nifty toy!!!!

5 February 2014 part 2 - A Journey to Morrison's

This evening, right after I'd finished eating a sausage roll from the fake grocery store across the parking lot, my friends knocked on my door and told me that they were going to the real grocery store, Morrison's, and wanted to know if I wanted to come along. I was more than excited to go with them. I mean, I've been surviving off of Nisa just fine, but the thought of having a bit of variety in my diet was way too tempting to pass up.

When we got to the store, we walked inside to get our carts. They were all chained together. My friends each got out a pound coin, put it into a cart, and unlocked it from the others. I raised my eyebrows. It cost a coin to use the carts?! However, after seeing the utter confusion on my face, my friends explained to me that I'd get my pound coin back at the end and this was their way of preventing grocery cart...I mean "trolley"....theft. I was still pretty confused, but put in my pound coin to get a cart.

The store was a bit surreal, I'm not going to lie. Sure, the produce section was all very familiar to me, but mostly everything else was different. The brands and logos were mostly things that I wasn't used to. I mean, like, with the exception of the sweets, they were all things that I'd seen at home...just in different packaging.

When we turned into the sweets isle, I glanced to my right and dramatically gasped. Not just a little intake of breath. My hands both flew to cover my mouth. My friends saw this and laughed a bit, knowing that this was one of the biggest moments of my life. Before me was a rack of Kinder surprise eggs. I quickly put one into my cart. I haven't eaten it yet, though. That's going to get its own blog post.

As I wandered through the store, I felt like a real adult. I was doing price comparisons, prioritizing things, planning out meals, and even chose to get the grown-up turkey instead of the turkey stuff that had a dinosaur in the middle of it. It's weird how much this experience is making me grow up.

Although to be fair, those dino things are quite rad. Maybe if I'm feeling adventurous someday, I'll get some.

At the end of the shopping trip, I was waiting in line, minding my own business, when I walked into some plastic barrier thing. An alarm sounded throughout the entire store. I looked down and saw that the barrier was labeled as being alarmed. For a solid 10 seconds, everybody in Morrisons was looking toward me. I just kind of chewed on my tongue and tried to look sheepish. Leave it to me to do something completely socially awkward in the middle of the grocery store.

When we left the store, we hooked our ca--trolleys back into the hooks. Once it got hooked in, the pound flew back out. I suppose that it makes sense, but at the same time, anyone with a pound can steal a trolley...

Oh well. Whatever. I'm just glad that I have a variety of foods to choose from now! However...as lame as this sounds...I'm not really hungry right now, so I might just have a Mama noodle cup a little bit later.

5 February 2014: Still Getting Culture Shocked

Now that I've been in England for over a month, I'm starting to falsely feel like I have this place all figured out. It only takes me ten minutes to figure out how much my loose change is worth rather than fifteen, I've started craving such delicacies as beans-wrapped-in-pastry-dough, and I only have to ask for slang translations a few times on a typical night with my friends. I know that a Malteasers Teasesrs bar is superior to any other kind of chocolate, Walkers Cheese & Onion crisps are better than any crisp flavor that we've got in the States, and that if you want to order lo mein at the Chinese restaurant, you have to ask for chow mein. Really, whenever I'm feeling a bit caught up in everything, I'm forgetting that I'm an American at all.

However, like I said, this sense of security is false. Even now, I'm still experiencing culture shock in a way that I didn't think was possible.

For example, the other day in my American Lit seminar, we were discussing the poetry of Frank O'Hara. In one of his poems, the poem's narrator states that he doesn't have an American body. My tutor asked the class what we thought that he meant when he wrote that line and asked what an 'American body' is. I mentioned how there IS no such thing as an American body, because everybody's 25% German, 30% Dutch, has Greek skin, Spanish eyes, etch. As I was saying this, one girl in the class looked at me and said, "Do people in America actually do that?" A bit confused, I go, "Yeah. I'm 25 Italian, 25 Bohemian, and 50 Slovak." She looked at me and goes, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." I looked down a bit and went, "Yeah, it all IS kind of stupid," and everybody chuckled.

I'm not posting that story to whine that "Awwwh the other kids were being mean to me!" Actually, no one was. I just never realized that in the rest of the world, people don't have that mixing-pot mentality that Americans have. Taking a step back, I'm just now realizing that people rarely identify as American. I mean, in England, I tell people that I'm American, but whenever Americans meet each other, we still ask each other what we are. And if there's a common country of ancestry, we ask what part of that country, what city, what street, which house...it's odd to take a step back and realize just how much Americans WANT to have an identity that's different than their neighbor's.

Last night, when we were coming back from the club (for Mimi's 20th! Shameless shout-out Happy birthday!!), we took something called the clubbers bus to get back to campus. The clubbers bus is essentially the ski club bus in the middle of the night when everybody has been having a bit too much fun and there's no chaperones to tell us not to try and pile fifteen people onto the back of one seat. Last night, when we boarded the bus, my friends all turned to go up the staircase to the second level. I started internally freaking out because I was actually in the second story of a double decker bus! Of course, this was no big deal to my English friends, but once the bus started to move, I looked at them and said, "Okay, random dorky side note, but this is my first time on the second story of one of these and this is a really huge moment in my life." They didn't know that America only had single deckers and completely indulged my excitedness.


Perhaps that's not a good example of "culture shock," seeing as how I knew that I'd end up on the second story of a bus at some point before returning to the States, but it IS a good example about how I'm not as "culturally assimilated" as I think myself to be. However, upon reflection, maybe I DON'T want to become THAT assimilated to York. I don't want there to be a moment when I'm over here when riding on the second story of a bus isn't that big of a deal. I want everything to be as cool and exiting as it was when I first got to this city on January 4th.

Also, let's take a moment to look at this picture of me getting into Kuda. Smiling at the camera. What a nerd.

And I'm glad to know that my Facebook friends are just as excited that I climbed some stairs on a bus as I was. Maybe we're ALL a bunch of huge nerds... ;)

31 January 2014: Mail Time (and an impromptou display of emotions)

Today, while I was sitting in the library writing some more of my paper on John Donne, I checked my e-mail to see if there were any important messages to distract me from the current task at hand. There was one in my inbox that told me that I had received mail that I had to pick up at the reception desk of Halifax. Now, receiving mail is always fun, but when you're in college, it's the best thing ever. And when you're at a university in another country, the only way to react is by internally doing this:

So I briskly walked back to Halifax (after stopping at the store to pick up a sausage roll and some tooth paste) to go to the reception desk to claim what was mine. After signing a paper, the man at the desk handed me not one, but TWO pieces of mail!
Since I'm a grown adult woman, here's an accurate representation of my reaction:

((Sorry for the Gene Wilders thing at the end. It was either that or a Doctor Who one. The Internet is strange))

I put my food into the fridge, went upstairs, sat down on my bed, and just looked at my box for a moment.

I covered up the addresses for security reasons, but I was just so happy to see a piece of mail that was delivered to me! And with my house in the return address spot, no less!!

It was wrapped in a chicken parm box. Truth be told, I wish that there was some way for them to have shipped the chicken as well ;)

 Then, after I realized that I was acting like those people in "The Music Man" when the train came with their mail, I opened up my box. The first thing that I saw was an envelope with my mom's handwriting on it. "Miss Ellen," it read. I fought back a couple of tears.

When I opened up the card, I saw the following image. For some reason, I started choking up even more.

And when I opened it, I started to cry. Not in a bad way, mind you. For some reason, this was just the most emotional thing in the world. It's been exactly a month since I've seen my parents last, and even longer than that since I've last seen either of their handwriting.

I can't help but think back on the time when I was in the first grade and I referred to my parents as "mommy and daddy" and one of my also first-grade classmates looked at me and said, "You still call them 'Mommy and Daddy?' It's 'Mom and Dad.'" Shut up, classmate. No it's not.

In an attempt to save myself from being the world's biggest basket case, I decided to put the card to the side and see what they mailed me. Inside, I found the one thing that ever student in university who has to cook for him or herself loves the most: FOOD! There was a bag of chicken noodle soup that makes 8 servings, a bag of cheesy potato soup that makes 8 servings a couple of bags of instant mashed potatoes, and even some Lipton beefy onion soup so that when I'm feeling fancy (and rich!) enough to buy beef, I can make some skillet stew. (If any of my York friends are reading this and ever want some soup, let me know. I don't have enough tupperware to save eight things of soup, so I'll be rather generous with my parents' gift.)

Just look at all that food!!! Do you know how many meals that is?! I have big plans for those mashed potatoes and the frozen chicken I've got in there for tonight!!!

Only problem is that the recipe isn't in metric. Looks like I'll have to use some google converters when I get around to making this recipe!!!

I'll also probably have to get a bigger pot. And a sense of what a "cup" is in metric.

I know that you guys are probably raising your eyebrows right now and wondering why I think that this is such a momentous occasion. I mean, I'm in this great and wonderful historic city, meeting all of these new people and doing all of these cool thins, and I'm choosing to write about getting soup in the mail. I guess that it's just to show how appreciative I am of the fact that I've got so many people out there who love me. I am overwhelmed by the fact that my parents took the time to pick out food for me and write out a card just to show me that they're still here for me. (Shoot, I'm tearing up again!) And it's not just them. My friends at home make a point to Skype with me and keep me up to date on what's going on at Wooster and BW. My camp just told me that they'll let me work again this summer even though I'm going to miss part of June and my enthusiasm was only rivaled by the enthusiasm that my camp friends showed. People are always giving me advice about things that I should do in England and telling me stories about when they came over here.

My new friends that I've made over here have also really got my back. They understand the fact that I'm a bit of an introvert and just accept me for who I am. It feels so good to have been just accepted into this tight-knit house like I was always a part of it. There was a time in my life when I was growing up when I firmly believed that I was undeserving of people being nice to me. But now that I've got so many people in Cleveland, Wooster, Berea, Akron, Spain, England, Ireland, and everywhere else that are there for me...

29 January 2014: Betty's Tea Room

Today, two members of the Butler staff invited the three people at York from the Butler program to go to lunch with them at Betty's Tea Room. Betty's is a rather famous tearoom in England. People from all over the country come to York just to eat at Betty's. So when we found out that we were going to be taken there (and not have to pay for it...not the cheapest place in England), we were more than excited.

Of COURSE I didn't get the word "Betty's" in there...

Display in the window. Just look at those macaroons!

Along with the tea room, there's a sweet little shoppe where you can purchase different tea things.

Will and I decided to meet up in the parking lot outside of my house so that we could take the bus down together. Instead of going the usual way to the bus stop that I generally take, he took me through this muddy back path. I had no idea that that area was even back there! There was a great big field with a couple of horses, some little pubs, a few cute restaurants...I was shocked. How had I been living here for nearly a month and not known that this existed?! Perhaps I should leave my room and explore a bit more...

On the bus, we met up with Valerie, who had just gotten out of class. It felt really nice to reconnect with the two of them. We all talked about our classes, some of the difficulties we've been having, our houses, cooking...it was just really refreshing to communicate with people who are going through the exact same things that I am. It almost made me feel more confident. They even convinced me to buy a student rail pass!


 Even though I'd only met with them both over a few days back at the beginning of the month, I felt like I was meeting with relatives. There wasn't a moment of awkwardness whatsoever. It was absolutely lovely.

For lunch, I ordered a dish that's made out of shredded potatoes, cheese, and British Bacon. (I say "British bacon" because it's kind of like American bacon and Canadian bacon had a baby. Quite tasty though!) Although it was quite filling, it was absolutely delicious! To drink, I got a soda called Elderflower Bubbly. I'd never heard of it before and it sounded rather European, so I had to try it. It was nice for sipping, but I don't think that I'd ever sit down with a whole bottle of it.

My mouth is watering just lookint at it!

It's just so fancy! 

While we ate our lunches, we all chatted about York, upcoming Butler events, current events in the world, the weather, fashion, our home schools...just everything. I'm not sure how, but I even worked camp into there. You know what they say about camp counselors...meet one of us for 15 minutes and you'll know what we do with our summers.

After we'd eaten and I swore that I'd never be able to eat ever again, the waitress brought out the dessert cart. On it were the most delicious looking desserts I'd ever seen. When she described what each of them were, our eyes all popped. I ended up ordering some cake looking like thing with meringue and almond and hazelnut and yum and alskdjfalwejksf. We also each ordered some tea. I didn't understand most of the words on the tea menu, so I got a pepperment one.

Both were beyond fabulous.

It was so nice! It didn't even need sugar! But then again, I've always preferred my tea without milk and sugar. But still.

Oh yeah. There was a delicious sweet on top. And like a puddle of berries. And then she put some sweet cream on my plate as well.

 Now, I'm sitting in my room trying to write two papers, both due on Monday. *sigh* Oh well. I guess that you have to "study" when you "study abroad." ;)