bienvenue! and creepy old statues.

 

 

Yesterday was our last day in England. We performed in South Port, near Liverpool on Tuesday night (I danced the theater arts routine for Allie who had to leave for Miss Utah! So fun! So scary!), after having toured the Beatles Museum that morning. Wednesday I flew in France. I'll post more photos and things about all this later. 

But first, let me explain the above photos. There's this tomb of some guy high up in the Anglican church in the York Minster. The angel babies are supposed to be crying over his death. But we decided that it was really an ode to a pedophile with him lying in this somewhat provocative pose and children turning away crying. 

Funny thing is, that's the exact pose the boys in the cha cha started out in in our show Saturday night (we get bored doing the same show night after night after night, so sometimes we..uh...change...things slightly).

Anyway. Today we shall explore Paris, the city of light! Woo!!!

last show, best show

Wow, I can't believe that tomorrow tour's over. We had a show in York on Saturday night, and Becky and I had the opportunity to stay with this adorable Scottish couple (they're with me in the picture). It was such a fun weekend! They taught us some Scottish phrases including:

head banger: someone who's stupid and annoying and doesn't know it

hen: term of endearment for a female

jimmy: generic name for a guy. If you were trying to get a stranger's attention on the street, you could yell, "Hey Jimmy!"

so...I have no idea how to spell this one so I'll just do it like it sounds...geysa wee swally: give me a drink!

The other photos are from downtown York-the minster or cathedral (which is beautiful! I just love cathedrals here), and down a snickleway or alley (there are hundreds of them in York). On Sunday night the bishop of one of the two York wards took us on a "mystery tour" of the city and showed us Clifford's Tower where a bunch of Jews were massacred (and the rocks bleed because of their iron content), snickleways where people were murdered, the devil statue across from one of the pubs, half destroyed abbeys, and other creepy things. It was sweet. Just as we came out of one of the snickleways, there was a group of maybe 20 year old guys drinking and smoking outside a pub. They saw our BYU jackets and said, "BYU? You're from Utah?" We couldn't believe they'd heard of the university. We told them we were a ballroom dance team which prompted the request that we dance for them. So Chelsie and Brent started doing some lindy. They thought it was really cool and as we were leaving they held up their glasses and drank to BYU. How ironic.

Today and last night we've been in Liverpool. Liverpudlians have a crazy thick, sing-song English accent, so we had a lot of fun trying to decipher what everyone was saying to us. Alissa and I stayed with a family who'd be terrified by a demon in the house they lived in up the street from their current house. "It used to chase the missionaries down the street, but don't worry, it can't get us here!" Um...yeah...

Tonight's the last show! We have the first decent stage to dance on since Blackpool, and we're all on a high with the thought of being free to do whatever we want with our days again. I'll be in Paris with my mom, brother, and sister by this time tomorrow! Woo!!!

And thus episode two of this summer of Europe shall commence. :)

more on the land of kilts

Seriously, sometimes I want to kill blogger, because it is so annoying to work with. The above photos are from Dunnottar castle (pronounced dun-NOT-ter, not DUN-uh-tar), which, as you can see in the last photo, we stormed two days ago. It was awesome!

England has about a million varieties of really, really good chocolate. One of them is called a Yorkie, and according to Alex there was a rugby (I think?) player with the last name Yorkie who really liked chocolate, but everyone on the team made fun of him, because they thought it was girlie. So Nestle came up with the Yorkie bar, a masculine chocolate bar with the tag line "It's not for girls!" The above photo is me, Chelsie, and Shannon snacking on one before our show a couple nights ago.

Oh Nestle, we beg to differ.

a day in which i storm a castle and eat sheep innards

Greetings from Scotland!

I love, love, love, love, love this country. Why? Because during the short time we've been here I've had:

salad dressing (England does not believe in salad dressing, plain salad tastes like yuck)

beautiful weather (no rain!)

castle seeing!

paper towels (England is too "green" and therefore only ever has hand driers or nothing at all in bathrooms)

Yesterday I ate haggis.

Let me repeat that. I ate haggis.

Haggis is a mix of sheep organs boiled in a sheep's stomach. Mmmmm. It was actually pretty good! Kind of spicy, kind of meatloaf-like. I couldn't get the mental image out of my head though of what it was exactly I was eating...and it looked super nasty. 

But now I feel all Scottish and cultured!!

And let me tell you how freaking sick and tired I am of slow upload speeds. They make sharing photos with all of you uber painful. So no photos for now, but let me tell ya, I've got some good ones.

Oh! And tonight's the world cup game US v. England! We had to move our show to an earlier time, because no one wanted to come during the game, haha. Football is HUGE. And I really hope that America wins. And so do the Scottish, because they hate England. Funny.

Cheers!

The official London post

Pretty much London is incredible. Here’s a list of what I did all in the space of 14 hours: (a bunch of these all we did was look at the outside and take photos, designated by LATOATP)

1.       1, Tower of London

2.       2. Westminster Abbey (LATOATP)

3.       3. Buckingham Palace (LATOATP)

4.       4. Trafalgar Square

5.       5. The Tower Bridge (LATOATP)

6.       6. Veeraswamy Indian restaurant

7.       7. The National Gallery

8.       8. Picadilly Circus

9.       9. British Museum

10.   10. Big Ben

11.   11. Parliament (LATOATP)

12.   12. “Les Mis” at the Queens Theatre

Cue photo evidence:

Saturday, Tuesday, Wednesday nights were all filled with performances in London, Sheffield, and dang it I can't even remember right now respectively. It’s been a lot of fun to stay with members of the church out here. They have so much commitment and dedication to the gospel; it’s really inspiring. On Tuesday night I stayed in a house that was built in 1541 (!!!) The people living there now bought it and renovated it (they’re very wealthy). It was gorgeous. While we’re on the subject of old things…yesterday we got to stop and see the Roman ruins of Hadrian’s Wall, the wall/fort/barracks/etc built around 200 AD by decree of Emperor Hadrian. It was raining and freezing cold, but it was still pretty mind blowing to walk around structures that were so OLD. I just can’t get over how steeped in history this place is! So different from the US where anything from the 1800s is old. That’s new in England!

the old, old, old house we stayed in

Roman ruins! There were all these sheep pastures nearby; it was like Settler's of Cataan live version.

Dramatic posing.

blackpool competition, day three

Amateur standard went...not that awesome this morning, but we made it back to the next round anyway! This means that I'll be doing this to my hair again tomorrow:

which is highly painful for some reason by the way. The crown of my head seems unable to handle hair pins. I will also be nail gluing an earring to my right ear lobe (realized after I got here that the whole clip on piece was gone, leaving just a hunk of rhinestones). Ouch.

I think it's sort of funny because my appearance has been altering between really, really done up for competition and then really, really disastrous after I'm done and showered. This is due to a fried straightener because plugs in England look like this:

so in order to use appliances you have to have a) a converter to even get the plug in and b) a transformer to change voltages, because the voltage in the walls here is 220 V (or maybe 240, can't remember) whereas in the US it's 110 or 120 or something lower like that. Anyway, I put the transformer on the wrong setting the very first day we got here, and it hasn't turned on since. I've been going all natural on the hair, which is to say terribly frizzy. Alas. Twas a necessary sacrifice to the gods of European travel.

Next on today's agenda:

watch standard team win the formation event
watch professional latin
party on
!!!!!!!!!!

blackpool competition, day two

Today I danced, shopped, and hand washed clothing.

Here is a photo of all of my purchases so far:

note the stamps (postcards to be sent soon to a few of you!) and the delicious Fingers cookies (sort of like a Twix bar only minus the carmel and way more addicting as they're covered in Cadbury chocolate)

Washing clothes in the tiny English sink was quite the adventure. I've been wearing my Nike Blackpool warm ups since we left Salt Lake so they smell like sweat and fake tan (sick). My practice clothing has not fared any better. I finally decided to get down to it and wash them. Sinks in England have two taps, one is scalding, the other is freezing. Even though I washed my clothes in freezing water (so the dye wouldn't come out), they turned the water deep brownish/black. Yum. That's what's been on my body the past four days. Fingers crossed they dry adequately tonight, because I've got to wear them in support of the standard team tomorrow as they face off the Chinese in the standard formation team championships!!! Woo!!! Go BYU!!!

Dear future husband,

Two more qualifications for you: I can wash clothing in a sink, and I'm really good at spending money on stamps (5 pounds spent today). 

Here's a photo to prove the sink part:

Not knowing when to use the flash when taking a photo is one of my disqualifications.

Yours truly,

Your future wife

On a...neutral? note, we did not make another round in amateur latin. I don't feel too bad though, because no one else from the team did either. Tomorrow we dance amateur standard and secretly I'm hoping we don't make it past the first round...two days of full standard hair and makeup is not so fun and very time consuming.

We've got rehearsal at 6:40 tomorrow morning, so I think it's about time I headed off to bed! Cheers!

blackpool competition, day one

So blogger/slow internet is really, really annoying for uploading pictures in posts. I've taken over 100 photos in the past 2 days, but within this post you will find maybe 8? which is still a lot...but not fully representative of the exciting adventures I've been having!

Yesterday we went to Preston, England and visited a few church history sites including the River Ribble, where the first people were baptized in England, the obelisk where Heber C. Kimball and his companions first preached the gospel in England, the house where I can't remember who...probably Heber C. Kimball and a bunch of other people were staying and they cast out some demons (it's the house in my header picture), and the oak tree President Hinckley had planted to commemorate missionaries in England. We got to have sacrament meeting in the park right next to the river, which was really cool. We also went to the Preston temple, which was very pretty.

This photo is to prove to Aaron that brightly colored doors are adorable. So many of the houses in Preston (and pretty much everywhere else actually) have them and I love them! So cute!

the River Ribble...more proof that England is absolutely beautiful

obelisk! aka location of preaching (it's also right in the middle of a carnival, which was interesting for us to parade through in our matching clothing-long black skirts and nasty plastic brown jackets with leopard lining, Alex said we looked like Jehovah's witnesses, we get the weirdest looks everywhere we go)

Afterward we went to this uber picturesque little village called Downham, which is exactly what you'd expect an English village to be. I couldn't stop myself from taking a million pictures of sheep...or posing in front of rustic stone walls, wooden doors, wheelbarrows, etc...

my future home

posers.

sheep! this place was better than a petting zoo

beautiful stained glass window in the little church (a warm up for France, yeah?)

me in front of said church

Today was my first day of dancing at Blackpool. We competed in Amateur Latin...which was scary...and kind of fun...

and....

we made it back to the next round!

So tomorrow I'll be dancing again! And that is all I expect to dance, haha. I never expected to make even one round, so this is quite exciting.

me and Mike after dancing, love the makeup

Once the dancing was over we went shopping. Love, love, love Primark, Next, and New Look. The shopping is great here! I got a pencil skirt at Primark for 7 pounds. BAM. And I also bought a couple of Cadbury chocolate bars. And a couple postcards. (Side note: I was so excellent at picking out the correct amount of coins to give the salespeople. I am so pro at paying in pounds/pence.)

Today is probably pretty representative of what the rest of the week will be like. The next round of amateur latin is tomorrow, then the standard formation and amateur standard are on Wednesday, and latin formation is on Friday.

I look forward to more shopping (I've got to get myself a British world cup shirt), more dancing, and more wandering around Blackpool. :)

Cheers!

jolly good!

(So this post is sort of a combination of three posts I've been writing since we got to the SLC airport yesterday morning at 7:00 AM)

Greetings from Blackpool, England!

Our flights went smoothly from SLC to JFK to Manchester and

then taking a "coach" (that's a bus for all of you Yanks) to Blackpool.

I learned that I do not like rye bread, airplane dinners are pretty good (or I was too tired and hungry to care), I can handle jet lag pretty well thanks to a semester of chem 391 (no sleep for weeks), free wifi is too much to expect from most of the world (except for the SLC airport and the bed and breakfast we're staying at), Delta's biscoff cookies are so delicious, fish and chips is tolerable (I ate fish!! This is momentous!), and what Pugeot and Renault symbols look like on cars.

stormy English countryside...our first view of the country!

confusing pence pieces at the fish and chips shop, huzzah for English currency!

eating fish and chips! yum!

And now...I just got back to the hotel from watching the team match competition.

Oh. My. Gosh.

Dream come true. The top couples in standard and latin in USA, Europe, Great Britain, and Asia going head to head, dancing. We watched Eugene and Maria, Riccardo and Yulia, Michael and Joanna, Franco and Oxana, Victor and Anastasia, and Arunas and Katusha. Wow, wow, wow. Another cool thing we got to see was Eugene and Maria announcing their retirement (they're retiring! I can't believe it! They were the ones who choreographed our latin medley and have been working on it with us).

the beautiful Spanish Hall where we got to rehearse today (standard team's in the photo)

watching the team match competition!

team match! so many incredible dancers!

Tomorrow we're off to Preston to see some church history sites. It should be really cool.

Until then...hope your Sundays are great!