Dear friends,
I finally have ONE picture to show you. Apparently you have to be an administrator to download things off of your USB memory stick. What?!? However, someone posted a picture to facebook yesterday.

This is me at the top of Llansteffan Castle. It was taken from the very bottom. I'm wearing my fine down coat, which does not let in any cold. It's lovely. However, I didn't really need it that day. I actually spent most of the time in Llansteffan just wearing my sweater, because it was really nice and sunny. Not exactly warm, but maybe around 50 degrees?

Llansteffan is right on the coast, and a very strange mix of emotions met me when I saw the ocean, the otherside of which holds all my friends and family. It was also fantastically strange to stand in the place where the literature I've studied was written, and the history I've studied was made. It was almost ghostly, to finally arrive in the place you've been connected to through your reading for so long. It's so different from visiting historical sites in America. There, you're connected to the history because you know it and because you're American. Here, it's completely different--even my heritage has nothing to do with this place. I'm not sure how to describe it other than to compare it to altar serving a funeral. This seems a strange comparison, but I remember always tearing up and crying a bit when I would be serving at a funeral as a child. I never knew the people who had died, and didn't know their families either, so it seemed like I was an unwanted interloper, connecting emotionally to something I had no real part of. When I listened to the eulogies, it was almost as though I was prying--hearing about the life of someone I would never even know, as told by people who loved him or her unconditionally. I have never thought of history or literature in that way before, but being here is overwhelming in that sense. I've come up against the incontrovertable magnitude of the fact that what I study is so huge in it's depth and span that it seems difficult for me to do so authentically. Erm. Perhaps one day, I'll be able to make that sensical.

Anyhow, I went to bed at 3 AM last night, after disinfecting every disinfectable surface in my room. I woke up around 3 PM to the sounds of Britney Spears (!) being blasted from the room next to mine. Lovely.

Tonight, I'm making dinner with some friends. It's a damn good thing, because I'm really tired of potatoes. This is all they eat here. Or at least, it's all they serve in the cafeteria.

Oh, last night, we went out for fish and chips (great, more potatoes). That was really fun/not so delicious. We went to the place that we were told was the best in town. This does NOT bode well.
Afterwards, we watched movies in the International Students Lounge, which is connected to my dorm. We started off trying to watch Monty Python's Life of Brian. You'd expect that the German and Austrian girls would have had trouble understanding, because we couldn't get the subtitles to work. However, NONE of us could understand a word of it, I think because we were so exhausted from our various hiking expeditions.

I HUNGER (finally).

Tomorrow, my classes start. I can't wait to know which one's I'll actually continue taking...

Love,
Gina