Denmark is a prison

Shakespeare shenanigans abound!
The theater class directed Shakespeare scenes, and everyone had to participate. These ten-minute scenes, each from a different Shakespeare play, were set up all around the conference center and performed Thursday night. We had to improvise costumes (mostly borrow each other's clothes) and sets. I must say that I was very impressed by what everyone came up with. As for me, I played Baptista from The Taming of the Shrew, and we did a weird alternate universe rendition in a retirement home.

We look like the cast from Scrubs. 

Somehow it worked! And it was pretty funny. Others performed in The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, As You Like It, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Everyone did a spectacular job staging and costuming despite our limited resources.

Nerdy Macbeth (and his sock puppet companion) discourses with the high school witches. 

Amid our research and papers, we desperately needed something fun to do. Watching everyone perform Shakespeare definitely brightened our week! Tomorrow the Dickensians will go see the new Great Expectations movie. It works for my research as well, so allons-y! 

Keep Calm and Do Your Research

The lack of updates is intentional. After our free weekend we came straight back to Norwich (well, 40 minutes outside of Norwich by bus) to work on research and to wrap up the semester. Aside from a day trip to Cambridge on Thursday, nothing exciting has happened. We spend most of our time doing homework, and if we're not doing homework then we are goofing around. Challenging Chris to a game of ping-pong, Sean to a game of tennis in the freezing English weather, watching movies in our classroom... that just about sums up my life here.
On Thursday (Thanksgiving) we have the day off to cook for the entire conference center. The whole group will be cooking. I'm on roast vegetables duty. Shenanigans are planned for Thursday night, but I'm not sure what sorcery Chris and Cheri have devised for our amusement.
Staying inside all day makes us antsy, and because the sun now sets at 4pm we have less daylight hours to goof around outside. So unless you want updates on my research on Dickensian doubling concerning minor characters, with a touch of feminist critique concerning Estella and Biddy in Great Expectations, then you will have to wait until I return to London in December for meatier updates.

Cardiff!

For my second free weekend I went back to Wales, although this time to Cardiff. While Conwy was fun, there is a lot more to do in Cardiff because it's a bigger city. The four of us who traveled to Wales decided to have an easy, relaxed weekend because we'll be thrown into more papers and reading and research by Tuesday.

After an easy train ride into Cardiff we walked around town for a bit, had dinner and went back to work on homework. On Saturday Stephanie and I figured out how to walk from our B and B to Cardiff Bay, where there is more shopping and (more importantly) the Doctor Who Exhibition.

I don't think we found it. Nope. 

Trying to explain Doctor Who to an outsider is difficult, but I'll give it a shot: the show, which has been running for ages, is about a time-traveling alien (a Time Lord) called The Doctor, who picks up Companions and has inter-galactic adventures in his spaceship called the TARDIS (the blue police box). The exhibition took us through a walk-through show highly reminiscent of Universal Studios set tours, where you stop in a room and follow a storyline.

 In the first room we were told the story: the Doctor (Eleven, Matt Smith) has been captured by his enemies. After walking through a literal "crack in time" (a crack in the wall opened) we learn that the TARDIS has called us (the "Shoppers") to help the Doctor, thus becoming his temporary Companions. The Doctor instructed us to hop abroad the TARDIS and to steer the ship. In that room we walked onto the set of Eleven's TARDIS' control room, which shook violently as the ship crashed and careened through space.Then we became prisoners on a Dalek ship (the Daleks being an enemy alien race), and after escaping we came upon a dark room filled with strobe lights and weeping angels. Of course we end up saving the Doctor, and afterwards went to the exhibition. There we got to see props and costumes and other fun things from the set. 

'

Like this fine weeping angel. Don't blink. 

Then we walked around Cardiff Bay and admired the view. On Sunday Lauren and I took a bike tour of Cardiff, which was fun. Overall a fun weekend, though I still have lots of homework to do! Tomorrow we meet the group again after a six hour train journey. Fun times.

The Primordial Soup

Celebrating All Hallow's Eve in Northern Ireland was quite an experience. In the midst of Dickens research, Pre-Raphelite poetry, and a sea of Bleak House reading, we took aside time to run a muddy obstacle course as a group.
It is supposed to be a race, but because the actual event was a few weeks ago we had the luxury of doing the course as a team-building exercise. In the early afternoon we trickled out into the common area in exercise clothes, the air so cold that our breath misted. Some came out bedecked in colorful warpaint and trash bags. Didi, one of our hosts, took us through the course.
We jogged through the muddy cow and horse fields, waded through the freezing creeks, and tackled the various obstacles placed in front of us. They were a bit precarious, though we were so full of adrenaline that that didn't deter us.
There is something about mud that breaks down all inhibitions. Once we approached the first mud pit the group broke out into open war. In light of the metaphorical political mud-slinging season, we experienced literal mud-slinging. Projectiles flew through the air in graceful arcs towards the people struggling to climb over the obstacles. People tackled each other and slipped into the mud. At one point Blake attempted to bring Chris down. At no other point in my life can I say I've seen someone with a Ph.D, covered in mud, come dangerously close to throwing a student over his shoulder like a sack of flour. As we waited for people to wade through the muddy pools we hugged one another, slapped each other on the shoulders, or patted each other with mud-filled hands, all in the effort to douse each other in horse crap.

Nothing quite says, "I HAVE A PH.D or I AM A MATURE YOUNG ADULT" than Irish mud. 

It was so cold that my arms were bright red and my hands felt numb, so cold that we didn't notice the cuts and bruises and nettles. I almost lost a shoe in one of the mud pits, and I did half of the run with rocks in my shoes. One of the more difficult obstacles was the hanging net, rather like a ship's rigging. We had to climb over the net, which was at least 12 feet high, over a wooden beam, and back down to the other side. Although I was hesitant about attempting to climb in front of the entire group, I practically pole-vaulted over the obstacle. I felt like a freaking Olympian.
The last obstacle, after over a mile or so of muddy fields, was an army crawl through some pretty disgusting mud. As we all went through we made Dickens jokes. We called the army crawl “the primordial soup,” in honor of our current reading of Bleak House. The other obstacles were dubbed “the forest of difficulty.” Overall, we had tons of fun even though it was freezing, and that night we had had a huge bonfire underneath a full moon, which rose steadily over the Mourne Mountains.

Chris and Gabby attempt to roast potatoes at the bonfire.