Continuing my increasingly sporadic series documenting our trip to the United States, I wanted to post about abbreviations and road signs.
All of us encounter and use abbreviations in our daily lives, but I sensed that this is more the case in the USA, and I had to do a bit of learning as regards what stands for what.
Many of these abbreviations can be encountered on the road or have something to do with transport: SUV, RV and "Ped xing", for example.
I worked out pretty quickly what a SUV was - or so I thought - my own explanation for this was "suburban vehicle". Right from our arrival, I had to get used to the different (larger) dimensions of the average road vehicle there: not just the majestic big trucks, which from a European perspective look a bit old-fashioned with their chrome chimney-like appendages and their vintage appearance compared to their "flat-nosed" European counterparts, but also the average vehicle that ordinary people use to get around. If you've seen the TFTTF video here, you'll might have inferred (OK, it's not made explicit) my surprise at the size of the Jeep we had as a hire car. And yet that was nothing compared to the size of the pickup that was parked in our hosts' garage.
Anyway, SUV - I later learned - stands for Sports Utility Vehicle. The term makes me think of one of those wee little golf buggies, but I guess that's my problem.
The next type of vehicle I had to guess (behind the abbreviation) was the RV. Here I had no clue. Ah OK, roughly equivalent to a motor-caravan or camper van, though the RVs you see in the States are so much bigger than anything I've seen here that there's hardly any comparison (and "camper van" definitely begins to sound like a claustrophobic old VW bus in this context). RV stands for "recreational vehicle", but here again, the expansion of the abbreviation alone wouldn't have brought me much further. In a vacuum, I'd interpret "recreational vehicle" as a mountain bike, a go-kart or perhaps as some kind of illegal drug.
On the TV you're also confronted with abbreviations that to my knowledge aren't that common in Britain at least: various pharmaceutical spots advertizing drugs that can help you combat a problem known as "E.D.". OK, this you can work out if you pay attention to the subtleties of what's said: they're clearly talking about erectile dysfunction, i.e. we're talking Viagra and co. In this context, what surprised me wasn't so much the abbreviation as the frequency of advertisements for prescription medications (and, as I'll say in a moment, the type of medications being advertized). To my knowledge, this is something that is not allowed either in Britain or in Germany.
I was pretty flabbergasted by the frequency of ads relating to pretty personal issues of this sort on prime time TV, not just ED but "feminine itching" and the like. I did find myself wondering why it was OK to talk about this kind of really personal, intimate and - let's face it - sexual stuff in mainstream media in a country where extreme lengths have been taken to avoid "Nipplegate"-type exposures. After asking an American colleague about this, I was given to understand that anything that is advertized on a medical basis is OK (and let's not forget that these pharmaceuticals companies are giving the TV networks a heck of a lot of money to advertize their stuff), but anything that can be argued as purely titillating "advertisement" is not OK. These categories of things are clearly dealt with rather differently in ("Continental") Europe.
Another category of abbreviation I found worth commenting on is road signs. I grew to love the "Ped xing" signs, which look so odd at first glance and which must look baffling to anyone not quite competent in English. And another sort of sign made me able to amuse our hosts: when we were about to depart to Canyonlands, Dave kept telling us that we shoudl beware of the bears and such like. On returning, I was able to tell him that despite numerous indications such as "Bear left" and "Bear right" on the road, we hadn't actually managed to see any such bears :)
Lastly, from a British point of view, I found the signs indicating "no pedestrians allowed on pavement" very odd for a while. I mean, pretty much every British person knows that "pavement" is "sidewalk" in American English. So this was doubly confusing. Finally I realized that "pavement" in American English means as much as "road surface", so basically the sign was saying - quite sensibly in the context - that pedestrians shoudn't be walking on the road in that area (this was a narrow, winding road with bad visibility, going through a canyon).
Anyone awaiting a writeup of our weekend in Canyonlands will have to be a bit patient, since I'm still wading through photos and want to get through the selection and editing before posting a few of them in my writeup. However, in the meantime you can see a bit of a video about our trip to and arrival in the USA (and as of Monday / Tuesday next week, some brief clips from Canyonlands) over here, and a whole bunch of photos I've already put up on Flickr here.
In the meantime, I've collected a few miscellaneous images relating to things that have by now struck me as (stereo)typically American, or at least characteristic of this region, some of which have confused me, others baffled, some impressed and others shocked.
Here's a first instalment on food and drink. All images are unedited, straight out of the camera (I will no doubt tinker with some of them at a later date).
1. It's hard to go thirsty in this country
This ubiquitousness and the quantity had previously puzzled me - why so much? I'd put it down to the old "there's more of everything in the USA" idea, but now I have learned some more valid reasons why, through painful experience. All weekend in Utah Jon was urging us to drink, drink, drink, otherwise we'd get dehydrated. At first we thought he was being over-cautious, but we soon sensed that the atmosphere was indeed extremely dry and that we needed to be drinking constantly.
Still, it was a bit of a pain, though (especially having to get up several times in the night while camping...), so I was only too pleased to shed the habit the moment we got in the car to drive back. The result: over twenty-four hours of feeling dreadful. Apparently this was altitude sickness, which I now know is caused not just by lack of oxygen, but significantly by the drying effect of breathing at higher altitudes (meaning also lower humidity), coupled in this case with greater heat. And since much of Colorado is at a relatively high elevation and humidity is significantly lower than back home, I'm definitely seeing the drinks machines, water fountains and the rest with new eyes now...
2. Fast food is indeed (almost) everywhere
I was trying to take some photos of this old gold mine at Idaho Springs in the Rockies, but what seemed just as dominant in the frame was the branch of Subway in the foreground. It seems that you need to flee to a national park if you want to avoid seeing the various familiar logos of McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell and the rest. I am quite amazed at the number of chains that seem to thrive here, only a few of which are present in other countries. Any time you stop for fuel at a service station along your route, the facility will have not just one but sometimes four or five of these outlets.
I'm not a food snob - I do occasionally go to these places back home. It's just the frequency and monotony within variety that has surprised me. It's scarily easy to end up eating fast food, just because it's conveniently there whenever you start to feel hungry.
However, it's good to see that the "supersize me" idea seems to have been outlawed, and that some of the chains seem to deliver better quality food than the usual suspects.
3. Quantity and variety of foodstuffs
(Mind you, it was handy to buy a gallon plastic bottle of tequila and two gallon bottles of margarita mix for the barbecue party last weekend, each bottle with its own in-built handle, which reminded me of a motor-oil or fabric-softener container back home. You might have spotted these on the video showing us getting drinks out of the car.)
I said before the trip that I expected to be bowled over by the quantity and variety on offer in American supermarkets. And they haven't disappointed me. The range of ready-prepared ("lazy") food available (everything from grated cheese to TV dinners to dried pasta or rice dishes, plus zillions of varieties of instant mashed potato) is mind-boggling (even more so than in Britain, at which point I will point out that the Brits and to a greater extent the Americans have less free time than the Germans, so this can partly be explained in that way, though it surely cultivates further laziness if you're not careful).
At the other end of the scale, the range of fresh fruit and veg is a real feast for the eyes - I was particularly impressed by the polished appearance of the apples (not that I think it makes them taste any better). Mind you, this can make it all the more frustrating when you can't find what you want: we searched King Soopers in vain yesterday for zucchini - there was none to be had in the whole store, and we looked in the organic section, the baby vegetables section, the ready prepared section, the frozen section and everywhere else we could think of as well as the obvious. Every other imaginable variety of fruit and veg was fully stocked.
Coming back to variety, I also did a double-take at the range available in terms of my childhood nemesis, baked beans. I'm glad to say, though, that having sampled the home-made variety made by someone who came to the barbecue party, I am willing to reconsider this as a partially viable foodstuff in the future.
OK, I'll sign off for now but will update again in a day or two on the subject of abbreviations and using the road. For now I'll go back to looking at and editing the Utah photos.
Well, it's now been a week since we arrived, and the time is flying by.
We've done some touristy things like visiting Estes Park (which reminded us a lot of Titisee in the Black Forest - tons of souvenir shops selling pretty similar stuff on the whole, though we did come across some interesting bits and pieces), going to Boulder (where we went to the Pearl Street pedestrian mall) and driving through the Rockies a bit. Friends had recommended that we drive up to a place called Gold Hill, a remote settlement in the mountains, and this we duly did. The only trouble was that it was very foggy up there, which obviously brought significant disadvantages in terms of sightseeing but which also added an interesting eerieness to a place that seemed to have some trappings of a ghost town in any case. We didn't stay long, but long enough for me to capture this shot of an old truck (which, because of the fog, has needed some work and might not look natural enough for everyone's taste).
There are loads more places we want to visit, so we'll need to plan the next week carefully to fit them in, since after that we'll be busy with the photography workshop.
Other than sightseeing we've doen a fair bit of exploring shopping malls here and there and have had some rich pickings in terms of sports shoes, camera equipment, books and numerous miscellaneous items. Oh, and I've been to Walmart to buy an extra bag to carry them all home in...
The shopping malls are a fascinating experience - lots of variety, bargains to be had, and weird and wonderful food outlets advertising themselves with slogans like "A taste of the old world"... It's rather nice to be greeted in a friendly manner when you go into a shop, though the first time someone said "Hi, how are you today?" I looked around to see who they might be addressing. It gets a bit much for our German-accustomed ways when someone comes over and introduces themselves by name and all that, but I still find it's a nice touch.
Our hosts, Dave and Chris, had a barbecue party at the weekend and invited a load of Christoph's ex-colleagues from HP. It was a great evening - we made a Swabian potato salad to go with the brats, someone else brought home-made baked beans (which were great), and a further guest brought a whole bunch of great wines from the Napa Valley, which was particularly good as we'd aimed to sample some good American wines while we were here. As regards people reacting to my bring British, one person said "I love your accent" as soon as I'd said as much as "Good to meet you", and someone else said "Meet my wife, she's Irish too" (though I'm pretty sure this was a simple case of crossed wires, the speaker being of Scottish extraction himself and thus not likely to confuse the two). Anyway, everyone we met was absolutely lovely and really interesting to talk to. You can see some pictures from the evening over on Christoph's Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nubui
We're now just getting ready to go off to Utah for the weekend - Moab and Canyon Lands seem to be on the agenda. We're going with Christoph's friend Jon Miller, who is a film maker and does a podcast about his Everest expeditions. Looking forward to it - will report in detail next week.
So, we arrived here yesterday late afternoon after a predictably long but very smooth journey. We've got a hire car, a Jeep (when in Rome...), which I thought was amazingly big when we first got it, but by now I have realized it is actually a modest size in comparison to many.
Most of the area where we are is very flat, with just a few small undulations that reminded me a bit of sand dunes back home (all on a larger scale, mind you). Yes, the landscape is to me a cross between a many times magnified version of Ynyslas (duney place near Aberystwyth) and the moon. However, we can see the Rockies off to the west of here (we're in the romantically named Loveland, not far from Fort Collins).
Most of the journey from DIA to here was spent with me busy trying to spot differences, looking out for evidence of or contrary to my preconceptions, trying to work out whether I found anything majorly surprising yet. After the third or fourth time of saying "Oooh, look at that truck" I had just about worked out that American trucks are very different from the flat-fronted variety familiar from Germany / the UK and that all the chrome "accessories" like weird chimney type things, fender details and vintage-type radiators at the front are pretty much standard. And that there are a lot more white cars here than at home (perhaps to reflect heat better??).
At one point we started counting American flags, though after we got to about five I think my attention waned and other things were more interesting - the many trailer parks and trailer retail outlets, wooden houses that look as though they might collapse like a house of cards, and drive-in or drive-through this, that and the other. The concept of a drive-through bank was new to me, though I think I may now have over-acclimatized myself to the the concept, as today we have seen things that I was inclined to interpret as a drive-through church and a drive-through crematorium respectively. Hmm - maybe jet-lag is warping my thoughts somewhat.
We slept remarkably well last night. It must have been four or five a.m. German time when we went to bed, so we were obviously very tired, having been up close to 24 hours. But we slept through till 6.30 local time, so the initial acclimatization I would say has worked well. Only I'm noticing today that I have no feelign whatsoever for what time it is...
Back to the flimsy-looking houses mentioned earlier. One thing that really caught my eye was a construction site we passed earlier where the shell of some fairly elaborate building had already been constructed. Out of chipboard! My jaw really did drop at that, I must say.
A couple more miscellaneous surprises: drinks vending machines that take banknotes, the highly polished looking apples in the supermarket, the variety of different sorts of baked beans available, and depot-like "antiques" stores (the scare quotes are deliberate), one of which was called "Itchy's Flea Market".
Anyway, I think that's enough to report for one day. It's early afternoon here now, so time to think about how to spend the rest of the day.
Well, I'm working on ticking off items on my pre-departure to-do list and starting to think about my preconceptions about the USA (can't say I have any specific preconceptions about Colorado - must start reading the guidebook I bought yesterday).
I have promised American friends and colleagues that I will take a good look at my prior expectations and see what elements seem to be either debunked or confirmed once I'm there, plus obviously there'll be a million and one new impressions that I won't have been prepared for. As someone who teaches cultural studies of a country (Britain) relatively unfamiliar to my (German) students, I'm used to having to deal openly with the kinds of stereotypes people have, and I'll be trying to do this consciously here.
A few miscellaneous preconceptions / stereotypes that have crossed my mind today:
1. American towns and cities have such looooong streets and look like a circuit board from above. The place where we're staying is house number 3007 on its particular street! Actually, from an aerial photo it looks not unlike a British suburban area: lots of rows of little boxes, each with its patch of green round about. Except, of course, that the streets are straighter and seem to run west-east or north-south only. Oh, and the lawns do seem to run down to the pavement (errr... sidewalk) like they do in movies set in such areas (Brits would have a hedge, fence or wall to preserve privacy).
2. The inevitable food issue is at the back of my mind. Trying not to think of ubiquitous junk food outlets, which I'm hoping will turn out to be an unfair stereotype - I am looking forward to eating some good non-junk food, though. And since we're not staying in a hotel, home cooking is going to be an option at least some of the time. Must look out for fat-free low-cal low-carb snacks while I'm there...
3. Sticking with food, I'm expecting sensory overload the first time I go into an American supermarket. "Spoiled for choice" could become "panicked by impossibly enormous choice".
4. How will people react to me as a person from the UK, and should I out myself as being Welsh? A few possible reactions (warning: I am about to mercilessly milk all the stereotypes!):
"Oh, could you just say that again - don't you just luuuuuuuuurve that elegant / eccentric / aristocratic accent!"
"Get real - stop talking in that fake accent! Think you're something special, huh?"
"You're from the United Kingdom... isn't that in the Middle East?"
(British MP Kim Howells once famously told the House of Commons that this was a common misconception among Americans. The nomenclature surrounding Britain / Great Britain / the UK / the British Isles / England etc. is, admittedly, something of a headache)
"Wales? What state is that in?"
(Allegedly this is what GWB said on meeting Charlotte Church)
(Charlotte Church has been hailed by the tabloids as being Wales' answer to Victoria Beckham)
"You're Welsh? Really? So am I! My Grandpa's grandpa was from Swaaaan-sea ...gee, we're probably related!"
"Are you related to Richard Burton / Tom Jones / Anthony Hopkins / Lady Di?"
"To the west of England - aaah, I get it - we Americans call it Ireland!"
...Knowing what a great sense of irony my American friends have, I trust no one will be offended by these shameless exaggerations. I'm actually looking forward to collecting impressions of how individuals REALLY react to me on the basis of where I'm from, if they do at all. We shall see...
Sorry to have been silent for so long - the semester certainly kept me busy, and I'm afraid I didn't quite keep up with it. Anyway, I'm updating now as I'm facing my virgin trip to the USA this week: flying on Thursday Stuttgart-Frankfurt, then Frankfurt-Denver. It is my HOPE that I'll be able to update this blog while I'm out there, to keep friends and family informed of what I'm up to. So please watch this space, even though there hasn't been much to watch in the last few months :)
A couple of weeks ago I had my family (parents and brother) visiting. Here are a few photos I took in Chris' home town of Horb (we spent a night with his parents and had a lovely time, though Chris had a photo workshop at the time and couldn't join us). There are a few more photos to be seen on my Flickr stream: http:/www.flickr.com/photos/rebecca_bexxi
...and I'm a bit nervous, as ever at the beginning of a semester. Despite work-intensive and fair attempts to distribute students among courses of the same type, I almost ALWAYS have people clamouring to get into my courses, and it's a real energy-sponge in the first week. Most people would say I should be grateful that I'm popular, but it is a real drag having to turn people down.
Anyway, tomorrow I have my two "foundation courses" - one in speaking and one in writing. The students are all registered as studying English, have had 8-9 years of English at school and have passed the entrance exam, so they should be OK. Plus these are my two smaller courses - 20 and 21 students respectively.
Then on Tuesday it's "Contemporary Britain" - two parallel courses on British Studies, 70 students in all. The aim is to prepare them for being grammar-school teachers of English. The challenge is to try to get them to shed their prejudices about Britain. Most of them haven't been to Britain except perhaps for a couple of days, so this is hard work. Most of them think British food is awful, England = Britain, everyone in the UK thinks the Royal Family is great, five-o'clock-teatime is still an institution, Monty Python is the best thing since sliced bread (British bread being white, spongy and always ready sliced, as they believe), that haggis is an affront to humanity, that we eat ham and eggs for breakfast, and that the Brits hate Europe. So basically a life's work for me to try to persuade them otherwise. Well, let's see what I can achieve in a semester.
Wednesday will be the killer day - I'll see my two Monday groups again, plus in the afternoon my finalists' translation course. Lots of nervous people. A tough day.
And then on Thursday, just one course - Translation Advanced, which I love. Just hope there won't be any awkward customers in the group...
In the meantime I have upgraded to PS Elements 5.0 (from 2.0 - big learning curve involved!) and can't seem to change it from German to English. So have to cope with the added stress of that, but hopefully I will get used to it soon.
OK, will update again next week. Bt of a dull update this time, I'm afraid, but I felt I needed to say what was happening.
OOOOOOOOOOOK, I'm going to try to update my report on the workshop without rambling too much. Let's see...
Day 2 (Sunday): On which we did a walking tour of Tübingen, had two tricky assignments, and Boris had to be taken to hospital.
It was a dull grey day (dry, mind you), and some clown suggested "shadows / shade" as the assignment to be done during our tour of Tübingen. To my horror, the majority voted in favour of this theme, and I got worried.
We made good time walking into town - probably because there were NO shadows that might have tempted anyone to hang around, and we stopped for a while so people could take pictures on the main bridge over the Neckar, which offers the ultimate picture-postcard views of Tübingen.
Then we walked up the steep street to the church. For those who don't know Tübingen, it has winding, uneven cobbled streets, so you have to take care underfoot. Boris got distracted by a shadow and twisted his ankle misjudging a step. Ouch! Actually he was a real trooper and carried on, but by the evening he couldn't walk and Chris had to take him to the hospital. Fortunately nothing broken, "just" a nasty sprain, so that put everyone's mind at rest. And the doctor said that he MUST use his foot normally and try not to hobble around too much in the next few days.
The castle buildings offered, at last, some good shadows, so we spent a fair amount of time there. And on the way down again, lo and behold, the sun came out and I finally felt the assignment was doable. This is my best shot on that theme, an old-fashioned shutter / blind on the window of a house. I really liked the lines, the subtle contrasts and the kind of double shadow you can see on the blind.
After that we grabbed kebabs en masse back by the bridge and headed back to the studio for the afternoon session.
We had an introduction to studio lighting and were able to try out various motifs and techniques. One of the Michaels felt a bit uncertain at first as to how to attach a remote flash, and I snapped this shot of him looking perturbed.
Day 3 (Monday): On which we learned about portrait photography
We did various things on Monday, including an interesting introduction to Lightroom presented by Boris, but the portrait sessions (in the studio and then "field work" in groups outside) were definitely the highlight. Lots of us were inexperienced in this genre, and it was fantastic to have time to try some things out.
After some practice and some explanation in the studio, we were instructed to go out in twos and threes and spend an hour taking portraits of each other. I teamed up with Eva and one of the Michaels, and we started off in front of the orange wall of the car park, which seemed a nice background at first, though the sun was a bit problematic as it was coming in rather strongly from the side. Not tremendously flattering when you have to squint and your laughter lines turn into deep crevasses! Eva chose a tree to be photographed under; the only problem was the shadows the branches cast on her face, plus the sun was still very strong.
Having got fed up of doing battle with the sun, I asked Michael to pose behind a woodpile in the shade. Here I was able to get much better results and was amazed at the repertoire of grimaces Michael has at his disposal - you didn't have to ask him to relax or vary his expression at all - it just happened...
After that we found a bench where we could try out some more unusual perspectives, i.e. one person lying on the bench and getting photographed from all angles. There'll probably be some rather weird shots of me turning up on Flickr in due course; I opted for an unusual but more flattering pose for Michael.
Day 4 (Tuesday): On which we looked at layers in Photoshop and had an intriguing final assignment
I'd really been looking forward to the Photoshop session as it is only recently that I've started to understand how to use layers. And it certainly didn't disappoint me - I made copious notes.
In the afternoon we were given an interesting final assignment - to return to the motive we'd shot for our very first submission on day 1, and to apply our new-found wisdom, techniques and ideas to an improved shot of the same motive. I wanted to keep the three-colour hyacinth motive but found that getting in closer and going for a diagonal angle brought a lot more vibrance to the scene.
So, anyone who's reading this and who hasn't had a look at the Flickr photos yet, PLEASE stop by and leave a comment or two - we're all ravenous for feedback to help us improve further, now that we've seen how much we can learn from focused work.
I fear I was a bit over-enthusiastic in appearing to promise daily updates - I'm now at least three days behind. Well, I will aim to get this blog updated in the next couple of days, and in the meantime I suggest you look at the pictures in the Flickr "HS-Bilderflut" group, filtering them with the tag "hsworkshop01" (without quotation marks in both cases). I'm off to bed for now, as I'm knackered and a wee bit peopled out after the workshop.
So, yesterday was the first day of the HappyShooting workshop - rather grey and rainy, though we were inside most of the time, discussing composition techniques. We did, however, have two assignments for which we had to go outside, and the weather was friendly enough not to rain at those points.
The workshop was due to start at 10, and by the time Chris, Boris and I arrived half an hour before then, there was already a little group of participants waiting for us. Including the two "moderators", there are sixteen of us, including three women, and a good age range, from teens through to - I guess - 50ish. And as was the case on the TFTTF workshop, everyone's really nice, and I'm the only non-IT person here (but I can live with that and can always discreetly switch off if the talk gets too geeky).
Our first task was to go out for 15 minutes, take pictures of anything we wanted to, and then to submit one for discussion by the group. Although this was a very non-restrictive assignment, it probably gave everyone a chance to take a picture of the sort or in the style that they favour, so this was a good way to get to know a bit about people's tastes, styles and photographic eye.
I didn't venture far beyond the front door of the building, where I found a flower bed, which was ideal given my penchant for flower photos. I spent ages crouching on the damp ground trying to get a shot of three different colours of hyacinth, and this was in fact the picture I submitted in the end.
I was pleased with how bright the lighting looked, given the dull weather, and it looked pretty good even in the non-edited form we had to submit. I've since tweaked the contrast / saturation just a tad, and cropped away a bit more on the left, as the crop I had in the original shot (shot from the wrist, so little control over composition) looked a bit accidental. The top of the pink flower is a bit cramped, but obviously I can't change that now :)
Another picture I took during this initial assignment was the one of rose leaves shown below. Having had to choose a picture based on what my display on the camera showed, I wasn't confident that it was sharp enough to show. But having now worked on it a bit in Photoshop, a colour burn layer (first time I've used this) and a vignette, I actually like it a LOT better than the one I submitted - I think it's the best picture of water droplets on leaves that I've taken.
Lunchtime was spent hairing around Tübingen trying to find someone who would repair bent pins caused by someone putting their CF card in the wrong way. No luck - the camera will have to be sent back to the manufacturers for that to be done; none of the camera handlers wanted to take the risk in trying to bend the pins back. Oh well. LUCKILY the camera belonged to someone whose partner had (redundantly, he thought), brought two cameras.
Later on we agreed on the assignment "colourful - but no rule of thirds". This was amusing, because the rule of thirds is REALLY hard to avoid, and in most cases it could be argued that we'd actually broken the rules. This was my entry...
... but of course anyone of a pedantic bent will find enough lines that intersect with the borders of the picture at the third point. Oh well. I certainly wasn't the worst offender, though. I did take some better pictures in the course of the assignment but rejected them as too "thirdy". However, you can view these on my Flickr site, as I certainly didn't chuck 'em away.
In the evening most of us went for a Thai / Chinese meal at the restaurant below the Metropol Hotel. Really yummy, and very welcome after all that work.
And now the second day is almost over, but I haven't had a chance to edit any of the pictures yet so will leave that update for another day.
Recent Comments
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Vanilah said:
Objection! I swear even before I took your class, I never once thought England = Britain! I admit that I... read more
on Semester starts tomorrow -
Count Rushmore said:
[this is good]"Wales? What state is that in?" ...Sóóó recognizable!I cannot tell you how many times I've been asked whether Belgium was... read more
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Josh said:
I didn't realize that we as American's were more abbreviation heavy than the rest of the English speaking world. read more
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jasonconga said:
hey girl, glad you made it safely, not drink some good american beer and report back! read more
on First full day in the States
on What to expect?