Great Times, Great Places and Great Works

Life is great here in London still!
Since last I wrote I have been filling my time by acculturating myself, studying, working, traveling and having an all-around enjoyable time.
I went to three more museums in London. The weekend before last I went to the Natural History Museum and the Imperial War Museum (which isn’t a bunch of old school imperialistic and euro-centric mess like it sounds like it might be). In fact, it is quite an incredible museum that covers Britain and the Common Wealth’s involvement in WWI, WWII and subsequent wars. It has amazing artifacts from all these wars as well as some great ‘experience exhibits’, like the trench experience and the blitz experience. The former lets you walk through a scale model of a WWI trench while the later puts you in a simulated underground bunker in London that is being bombed by Nazi planes.
I also went with my class to the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain last week. It was a huge collection of his life’s work. Very interesting but also very dark and almost overwhelming at times. His work makes one feel bleak but also enlightened. My professor walked past me in the exhibit and whispered, “it reminds me of The Heart of Darkness, ‘the horror, the horror’”.
Then this last weekend I traveled to Ireland! It was an amazing time. I found it really hard to not be jolly and smiling in that wonderful nation. As I found in Holland, everyone is so nice and knows the meaning of a good time.
I went with two of my friends from London and the three of us crammed a whole proper holiday’s worth of sightseeing, fun and relaxation into one weekend. We got into Dublin Friday night and went straight to the Temple Bar area, which is the main night life section of Dublin. We went around to several Pubs and clubs utterly crammed with tourists and true Dubliners alike.
The next morning we started sightseeing. We went to the historic Trinity College, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Dublin Castle, the National Library and the literary museum they have housed in it, and of course the legendary Guinness Store House. We spent at least an hour learning about Guinness and how it is made and then got to have a pint of fresh Guinness in their gravity bar, which is the tallest point in Dublin. After that we went to the Jameson Distillery for a whiskey sampling and sampled Jameson’s most select reserves that are only available at their distillery. One of the Whiskeys had been aged for 40 years in a Spanish oak barrel.
Somehow throughout the course of the day I was able to find time to enjoy a traditional Irish stew of lamb, potatoes, barely and rosemary for lunch and smoked salmon from dinner.
That night we went on a Dublin pub crawl. We were guided by a very Irish and very nice and interesting Trinity student to some of the most historic and unique pubs in the city.
The next day we woke up at 7:30 to go to Bray, a seaside community that is surrounded by breathtaking mountains on one side and a breathtaking landscape of cliffs leading down to the sea on the other. It’s a very surreal place. We got off the train we took there and walked down a black rock beach to a mountain that lies adjacent to the town. We climbed (literally as we had to climb up some rock faces) to the top of the mountain where we then climbed once more to a jetty of pure white and rugged rock mass where a giant cross stood stoically positioned way above the little town and the great sea. We then walked to the next peak and descended from there to a seaside path that took us back to Bray.
While my work at the Citizenship Foundation might not be quite as awe-inspiring as the top of Bray Head (as the mountain is called), it has been quite rewarding these last few weeks. All the hard work that the Giving Nation team and I have put in to making the Giving Nation award ceremony a very memorable experience for the students being honored really paid off. The ceremony went very well and the students really enjoyed the activities we planned for them, including the riddles about various historically and culturally interesting places in London that I wrote for them. And I most say that my video for the awards ceremony that I have been working on for almost a month now came together quite nicely, if I do say so myself, and I think everyone enjoyed it.
Now that the Giving Nation awards are done with it is full steam ahead on the research project I have also been working on for the Citizenship Foundation. It is on the British news media’s portrayal of young people and how that portrayal affects young people’s self-image and inclinations toward political and social engagement in their community and country.