Author Archives: Neil Alexander Donovan

Cheerio for Now!

So, I left London, and now I’m back in Pittsburgh. The entire trip to London was extremely fun, and I’m glad I went. It was a great time, I had some great times with the people I went with, I saw a lot of cool things, and I went to a lot of cool places I had never seen before. I really enjoyed it, and I hope if you’ve ever thought about going to London, then reading my blogs has informed your opinion at some level, allowing you to further consider the prospect of going and seeing some really cool things. Because, make no mistake, going to London for a month is a huge commitment that requires time and effort, and knowing that if the most important thing you can do before you go. Sure, there’ll be fun things to do once you get there, but it’s very important that you have a plan.

But before I let this blog go for now, I have to get a wall of text off my chest and tell you about the ordeal I went through to get back to Pittsburgh, because it could happen to anyone. And man, was it an ordeal.

From Russell Square, me and eight of the people I stayed with got on the Tube to the Airport, in a repeat of the way we came to London. That wasn’t the ordeal, though, because we just rode the train straight there and got our boarding passes and everything in order. Security was a big deal, because it was really confusing which way we should go, because the lines are a jagged mishmash of ropes telling you where to go, when actually you should be over there, not there.

But security wasn’t an ordeal, because the security guard waved us over to where we should be, and that was sorted out. We waited for a while for our plane to decide what gate it was going to go to, but that wasn’t an ordeal because there’s a ton of shops and restaurants in the airport as well as a children’s playplace and a foosball table (the latter of which I played with Hunter whiel we were waiting.) So far, everything was going according to plan. We got to our plane’s terminal, boarded, and flew all the way back to Philadelphia. I watched three separate movies on the flight, so that wasn’t an ordeal at all, in fact, the flight was quite smooth.

In Philadelphia, the nine of us who had flown over split up, and went to our separate flights and/or buses and/or cars. The true ordeal was, in fact, getting onto my flight to Pittsburgh, taking a nap, waking up from the nap to find out we hadn’t even taken off yet due to mechanical failure, getting off the plane to get onto a new plane at another gate, and getting to that gate only to find that the plane wasn’t going to land yet because of the weather, but that it was also going to another gate, and going to that gate and learning that the plane would not be taking off today because it had gotten too late in the evening. So…I stayed a night in Philadelphia.

It was weird even having to bug the US Airways employees to get me a hotel room that I could sleep in, because you’d think they’d have some available. However, a bunch of flights had gotten canceled because of weather that day, so they had already promised rooms to a lot of people, and only by asking more hotels if they could bring in more people would they be able to accomodate any of us.

So, I got to stay in a really nice hotel in Philly, and it was great, for the one night it lasted. But I was tired anyways and it was about 2 in the morning by the time I got into the room, so I didn’t get to enjoy it that much.

The other ordeal I had was the fact that I wasn’t guaranteed a seat on a flight to Pittsburgh the next day, because of the aforementioned other people who had also stayed the night. My best bet was to catch a flight from Philly to Cleveland, and have my parents pick me up there, but I just wanted to get home already. So, I got a seat on a flight to Cleveland, but I asked to be put on the standby list for flights to Pittsburgh. Now, I don’t know if you know what standby means, but they put you on a list and if there’s any unclaimed seats on a plane, they fill them up with people on the standby list. Since the first flight to Pittsburgh in the morning was canceled, I was told it might be a long shot to get home. But, what ended up happening was I stayed for one flight at 11:30, and my name wasn’t called on the list, so I went to the next gate where a flight to Pittsburgh was going to leave, and then they called my name, and so I made the flight to Pittsburgh by getting the second to last seat on the plane, and in first class no less!

And so ends my written experience traveling on Study Abroad. I had fun, and I hope you did as well!



Location: London, United Kingdom

Back to the Bard

For my penultimate blog, I’d like to mention the other big trip that we went on, which was a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, otherwise known as Shakespeare’s birthplace. The way we went this time was by train, which was much better than riding a bus all day long. It also helped that Stratford-upon-Avon was generally closer than Bath, which allowed time for us to go see a performance of Henry IV Part 1 at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s theater that they have there.


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But before that, we had time to wander around Stratford, time I and a few other people filled by going to Shakespeare’s house, now a sort of museum.


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The way in which the house is organized is as you might expect; several roped-off areas in rooms where things have been recreated to look as if it might have during Shakespeare’s time. There’s also a few people who explain a bit about why there’s gloves everywhere and about how they were made (as Shakespeare’s father was a glovemaker).



There’s a display of a window pane that was in Shakespeare’s house where several people have carved their names on, some famous people among them.


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In addition, there were a few performers outside who would recite Shakespeare from memory upon request, which was very fun to watch.

But as for the performance itself, it was pretty good, to be honest. There were a few aspects about the performance I didn’t agree with, but on a technical level they pulled it off really well.


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I would recommend going there, maybe if you’re not the biggest theater nut in the world, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who can’t get behind any of Shakespeare’s stuff on some level.  



Location: London, United Kingdom

Running a Bath

After Stonehenge, our bus took us to the end of the line in Bath. Bath, if you didn’t know, sits on this gorgeous hill with an extremely nice view of the valley it sits upon. It’s no wonder the Romans chose to make it their summer getaway, besides the natural hot springs which enabled them to make the titular Bathhouse.


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The Bathhouse itself lies in the middle of town, not a far walk from where the bus dropped us off. It’s impossible to miss where it is, since the old abbey, an exceptionally tall building, stands right next to it.


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It’s really amazing, though, inside the Bathhouse. Besides the green oozy water, it’s really awesome looking at the statues and the architecture, and inside they also have a museum full of relics of the ancient romans, and a full miniature replica of how the bathhouse looked back in Roman times.


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The bath, while it WAS a bath, isn’t a bath anymore. People can’t go swim around in it anymore, mostly because the water has gotten rather funky, and also perhaps because it wasn’t really well maintained for a period of time. I seem to remember a sign that said that in restoring the bathhouse, they had to drain the pool back down because the water level had risen so high from what it had been in the Roman days.


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On our tour bus, our guide offered to show us around Bath on a walking tour, and was highly knowledgable about the entire area. If you do happen to go on a tour bus, I’d highly recommend going on it. Turns out quite a few famous people lived there, like Jane Austen, and some not as famous people, like Nicholas Cage.



Nevertheless, Bath is a really remarkable place. I would highly recommend going there as well, if you have the time.


Location: London, United Kingdom

The Long Haul to The Henge

Among the myriad of group trips and dinners we went on, the biggest one was probably the trip we took to Bath, hitting up Stonehenge on the way there, a trip which took pretty much the entire day.


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It’s a really long drive away from London, but we took a bus all the way there. It’s really worth going, but I can’t say if it’s worth you driving all the way there and back, because I didn’t drive myself. A bunch of us fell asleep on the trip, so really, you should really find a convenient way to go that doesn’t involve you driving yourself in my opinion. Especially if you’re not used to driving on the left side of the road.



I had been to Stonehenge before, but they renovated the site a lot, for instance there was a lot more room to stand on the northern side, which was basically a little grassy area rather than a cramped ditch.

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But as for Stonehenge itself, it’s in an area of England that’s very far away from everything, as such, besides the nearby highway and some towns a mile away, it’s really peaceful, quiet, and very windy. It’s surrounded by farm and grassland nearly everywhere, with trees nowhere to be seen.


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Stonehenge is really impressive, though. These really are amazing to see, knowing that a hundred or so people somehow managed to bring all these stones that weigh as much as an elephant each to this point, but whatever purpose it served besides a calendar is a mystery.    


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Oh yeah, the sun shines through it on the solstice, and if you go on any of those days, you’re likely to see some Druids standing there having a religious ceremony. As the audio guide says, when people discovered how old Stonehenge was, people immediately thought the oldest-living group in Britain, the Druids, had something to do with it. Later they discovered it couldn’t have been built by the Druids, as it was even older than their society, but by that time the Druids had already jumped to the conclusion with everyone else, and now they use Stonehenge as a religious site.  


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You can’t go up to the stones, though, unfortunately. The audio guide explained that there’s space under the site, and the ground would shift and change if millions of people came and walked into Stonehenge every year.

But still, I couldn’t recommend going any more. Getting out of the cramped city and seeing forests and grassy fields for a change was a very good feeling, and it feels very peaceful up at Stonehenge.

Next, we continue onto Bath!



Location: London, United Kingdom

Totus Mundus…

So, I wanted to talk about two things in this post, and I thought I’d start with the boring part first, save the interesting part for last.

First off, the classes themselves. While I’ve mostly talked about and posted pictures of the interesting places I’ve seen, the main thing you do when you Study Abroad is study, so I’d be remiss to mention it at least a bit.

Our classes were a bit different from the normal Study Abroad classes, the ones where you’re there at another university, studying under professors from that university and receiving grades from that university. On our short trip, we just had a professor and a grad student from our own Penn State teach us their own respective courses in facilities that are leased to other U.S. colleges. It was basically like high school classes, too, since all of us students and professors saw each other every day, with the exception of weekends. Also, there were the field trips, which made it feel even more like high school.

 Some of them tied into our course theme; “Literary London” would not have been complete without experiencing something “literary” within London.

Which is why, for our courses, we were given the assignment to go and see a few Shakespeare plays. Specifically, one at the reconstructed Globe Theater.

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The one going on at the time was Titus Andronicus, which, as you may not know, was probably Shakespeare’s bloodiest plays. Featuring things such as death, depression, rape, murder, onstage dismemberment, and copious amounts of blood.

It’s such a shame Shakespeare never wrote for TV, because audiences today eat that sort of thing up on HBO and AMC all the time.


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I didn’t get any pictures of the actual performance (for obvious reasons), but what I can tell you is that, if you do happen to see Titus, and you’re a fan of blood, you’ll want to stand as close to the front as possible. It’s the best view by far. Actually, any play they perform at the Globe you’ll want to stand as close as possible, but especially this one, IF you’re a fan of blood.

Oh, I forgot to mention that if you get tickets, the cheaper ones have you stand in a crowd in front of the stage. For hours. And god is every minute worth it. Actors flit in and out of the stage and wheel things in and the crowd standing in front of them all the time, and so much is going on. Just don’t get standing tickets if you don’t think you’ll make it that long (there is an intermission, though. You can sit as much as you like.)


Location: London, United Kingdom

In Another Castle

Hampton Court Palace was a blast, but I as soon as I heard we were heading to Windsor Castle, I was excited. I had heard so many things about Windsor Castle; not only was it a castle built to withstand a siege, unlike the open living space of Hampton Court Palace, it has been a home to British Monarchs since the 12th century.


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I didn’t get any pictures of the interior, because you aren’t allowed to take any, which should be even more incentive for you to visit, because the interior of the castle is absolutely gorgeous. It did give me pause, to contemplate that I’d probably never make as much money in my entire lifetime compared to the cost to decorate even just one of those rooms. There were some walls that were literally coated with guns and swords. The whole interior was absolutely littered with them. Most of them were real, but a few I noticed were decorative, like, there’d be a sword with a gem encrusted handle, which look like it might break off from the blade if it was used in an actual fight.


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There’s also a beautiful chapel in the castle as well. The audio guide even invites you to sit down at one point because, really, you can’t take it in just by walking briskly through it. There’s a remarkable amount of detail everywhere within. I mean, it wouldn’t but “just” a simple chapel since supposedly the Queen would use it during her stay, so it’s worth going to.


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The thing about the chapel, and some other parts of the castle, were the seemingly thousands of plaques with the coat of arms of knights within. Mostly on the ceiling, some of them even have numbers written near them to tell you you can enter in your audio guide and be told about those particular knights. But there are thousands of them, some of which have been covered up because of dishonorable acts they committed after the plaques were hung up. It was really very interesting, but we just didn’t have the time to listen to all of them.

Again, another royal home I highly recommend going to visit.


Location: London, United Kingdom

A Day At Court

You may not know a bit about things you can see outside of the city of London proper, but are easily accessible by rail. Now, our group was very…directionless. Not a lot of us had a plan to go and see things, so we really just followed people who actually had had plans for that day. One of the results of that kind of attitude was our group trip to Hampton Court Palace.

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It was probably the most historically authentic place any of us had ever been – you got to go through the halls where Henry VIII had lived, and they were set up like they might have looked back then – there were big fire pits and tables in the main hall set up for dinner, with little factoids written on the tablecloth about how the king always got first dibs on the food, etc.

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There were big pillows you could lie on, and a metric ton of paintings within. But besides the inside, there were a ton of things on the outside as well.

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The lawn of Hampton Court is huge – it’s bigger than 3 football fields. If you go, and decide to walk around the gardens, the lawns, the fountains, the hedge maze, then you might want to bring your best pair of walking shoes. By the end we were so exhausted of walking everywhere that we were so tired. And we still hadn’t seen everything! To see everything there would’ve taken up an entire day, whereas we just came after class was finished in the early afternoon.

 It’s another tourist site I would highly recommend, and even if you’re not a fan of walking, there is a horse and carriage you can pay for and you can ride around the massive lawn instead of walking across it.


Location: London, United Kingdom

Eye Spy

Hey guys!

Last time I talked a bit about the Underground. This time I thought I’d mention a bit about the places I’ve gotten to using the Underground.

You might’ve noticed some of the pictures I took weren’t taken on the ground. That’s because that day I went with my fellow students to the London Eye.

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 It was worth every pence, really. The view of the city in every direction is astonishing.

There wasn’t a single thing anyone disliked, except the optional “London Eye: The 4D Experience”, a ten-minute film which annoyed a lot of people on our trip, because it was “pointless, and you had to wear 3D classes.”


IMG_1985.JPGThere was also the confusing queue. Here we wait in line for tickets, meanwhile the sign points in another direction, which confused us quite a bit.

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It was a 30-minute ride, during which there were views of nearly everything, except perhaps, as one child observed (whose parents and he joined us in the carriage), the Tower of London.


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You could see Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben of course, the Shard (the tallest building in London), London Bridge, and plenty of other possible destinations.


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I would highly recommend going while you’re there. If anything, you can have a few moments for taking very nice pictures, something we all took advantage of.





Location: London, United Kingdom

Getting Tubed

    

If you go to London, take heart: this is the very best of soccer hooliganism. My friend Alonso tells me soccer (or football, depending where you’re from) chants are awesome. Having never been to a proper British football game (the World Cup’s in Brazil, unfortunately, and the Premier League wrapped up as soon as I got here), I can’t confirm, but what I heard of these guys only confirms those suspicions.

These guys did it for quite a while, actually, and I only just remembered my camera was in my backpack 44 seconds before our subway train came. And yes, they got on the train and continued, but I was too busy holding on to the railings for dear life or else I would’ve filmed more.

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The rides on the Underground really remind me of roller coasters – no other form of rail transportation has you rollicking around, making so much noise as the wheels pass over the rails, as roller coasters. I really feel like I’m going on an adventure every single time I get on one, because roller coasters used to fill me with anxiety- Now I love the noise they make. I’ve even ridden on actual trains in London, which don’t feel nearly as unstable.

But besides the actual ride, the Underground is so damn useful for getting around London. Our program came with the stipulation that we would ge Oyster passes for riding around on the Underground, which basically allow you to never pay for a physical ticket. With all the traveling we’ve done around London, having to wait in line at an e-ticket machine or a ticket window would’ve been absolutely dreadful. Plus, the trains themselves are really punctual and on time – I’ve covered a distance of 15 miles within Greater London within an hour – it would’ve taken half a day on foot.


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Try and get by walking everywhere down there.

Even yesterday, when we were riding a bus to a bus station to get on a different bus, Emily remarked that taking the Underground would’ve been so much easier, as there’s a station right outside the bus station. Nearly everyone was in either loud or silent agreement. So, to sum up, all public forms of city transportation pale in comparison to the clockwork precision and loud ricketing of the London Underground. Oh yeah. Here’s me by the way. Welcome. Let’s find out more about London together.

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Location: London, United Kingdom

Hey, I’m Neil, and I’m In Da UK!

Hello, greetings, welcome to my part of the web. 

I’ve been in London on the Literary London program for a week and a half so far, and it’s been really nice here so far. The weather has been a little less so, but that’s London for you. I’ve been walking around a lot, doing things with my fellow Study Abroad members, and I’ve got to say, if you ever consider going, bring an umbrella everywhere  you go. Don’t make the same mistakes I made. One day it was pouring rain and we had to run and take cover every several feet while we were walking towards the Millennium Bridge to cross the Thames. Forgot to bring my umbrella, and it definitely would’ve come in handy…

But besides the weather, my stay in London really has been pleasant so far. The people are friendly, the food so far has been good, my professors from Penn State aren’t boring, and so far, the homework hasn’t kept me from enjoying walking around everywhere. 

Since I’ve been in the U.K. for a week or so now, I thought it might be best if I give you a quick recap of my journey so far.

So, I live around Pittsburgh, and I left Pittsburgh International to go to Philly, where the plane to London was. 

The flight was really nice, and mostly uneventful. The whole process of flying was helped by the fact that I had prior experience flying before, so, to anyone else considering going to study abroad, knowing what to do and when to do it is a huge help in air travel, both to yourself and your fellow flyers. Taking your shoes off before a TSA agent has to tell you to, putting your laptop in it’s own separate box to be scanned, knowing your spot in the seat order so when they call your section to board you can do so – all of those sorts of things speed up the process and ensure a great experience. I know more than a few people who are absolutely scared by the process of flying, so trust me when I say that it’s a whole lot less scary than yo might think.

Anyways, after the flight, we were led to our rooms, which are very nice and comfy. Me and the other PSU students room just like up at State College, except for the fact that it feels more communal, more like supplemental housing than regular dorms. Also we get a living room and kitchenette, so, I guess it’d be more like living off-campus than any other choice that living in State College offers.


Continuing on, our rooms were only two blocks away from the British Museum, and there’s a whole lot to see there. I’ve lost count of the times somebody in our group would make some remark about “look at all this stuff they stole!”. There’s the pieces missing from the Parthenon, there’s the Rosetta Stone, numbers of statues Egyptian, Roman, and Greek; there’s also smaller displays on cultures from the Middle East and North America. And that’s not even mentioning the stuff they have from the Vikings. There’s tons of archaeological and cultural artifacts from around the world, and it’s really awesome being so close because you’ll never see everything in one go.

Thanks for bearing with me as I’ve adjusted to using this incredible website. Besides some of the day trips, walking around London, classes I’ve taken, and some photos, that’s most of what I’ve done so far. But I’ll be sure to include those and more in the coming chapters. See you back later!


Location: London, United Kingdom