Reinstalling the Chair Rail

For your viewing enjoyment, here is a little video giving you a taste of our genius here in England.

Locals and Crazy Seagulls

Internet aboard the Keanemutiny has been a bit shotty the past few days, so my apologies for the lack of reporting. The past few days have consisted of work, more work, and little bit of fun. Drawings on the English Garden House are progressing and we got to do some investigational demo work I'm happy.

Our group has befriended the local ferryman on the Mount Batten Ferry. We've gotten a decent taste of Plymouth local life as a result.

In other news, lunch yesterday was quite eventful. We regularly eat lunch at the Orangery on the Mount Edgcumbe estate. We were eating outside, enjoying the gorgeous day when an injured seagul crash landed on Helen's apple pie. Yes, you read that correctly. Helen lost out on an awesome piece of apple pie because a seagul dive bombed our table and smashed into her plate of apple pie. Helen seems to think the bird was aiming to swipe the pie, then push off the table with his foot for a quick exit. Unfortunately for the seagul, he had some fishing line stuck on his foot and he didn't quite get the glorious exit for which he had hoped. He ended up on the sprawled out on the ground next to our table with apple smeared on his beak.

Another theory is that he knew he was crashing and thought "oh no, I'm going down, better take this pie with me." Either way, it made for an exciting lunch.

Day 12 Aboard the S.S. Keanemutiny

Nothing too exciting aboard the Keanemutiny the past few days. On Saturday, we took a group trip to Cotehele, the original Tudor estate of the Edgcumbe family. Our car left the Mount Batten Centre parking lot on the way to Cotehele and after travelling a few blocks noticed a repugnant smell. Those of us in the back seat looked to our right and saw a smoke cloud wafting into the back window. I asked if it came from the motorcycle that had just passed, but Tiffani exclaimed, "it's coming from our car!" We quickly noticed that we had been driving with the parking brake on. The problem was remedied and we continued on our way.

Cotehele was a beautiful estate (my favorite to date) and was magnificently preserved. There must have been some stipulation in the family wills stating that the house had to remain in the Tudor period, because it somehow avoided modernization for nearly 600 years. Most fascinating was our tour guide in the kitchen who pointed out the pocket in the wall that at one time would have held a log for a primitive form of scaffolding when plastering and decorating the room. The guide also showed us a sealed-off service staircase that once lead to the servants' chamber. In Victorian times, it was deemed inappropriate for men and women servants to sleep in the same room, so a service dormitory was added to the house and the original winding staircase was plastered. He then lead us into the dormitory addition, a portion of the house reserved for those who bought a raffle ticket, but he let us in for free. In addition, the garden outside of the house was very colorful and great for picture-taking.

Today (Monday) we began work at Mount Edgcumbe. The English Garden House team (Helen, Nate, and I) took measurements of the rooms and will draw them in AutoCAD tonight.

British Dogs

This morning on our run Crystal, Helen, and I ran into Amber, a Shar Pei and her owner. A bit later, we saw Amber walking with Henry, a boxer. Henry's owner told us Amber was Henry's girlfriend. They make a cute couple.

For our class field trip, we drove out to Dartmoor, a national park in the middle of Devon. We rented cars to get out there and I attempted to master driving on the left side of the road. The result was fairly successful. Daniel, our professor, brought his two dogs out for the adventure. We stopped to hike out to an Iron Age stone formation. Needless to say, this field, like every other field in Britain, was covered in poop because of the sheep and wild pony population in the region. Despite the poop, the view was worth the hike. The foggy, misty weather was perfect for the setting and we took in some amazing vistas, particularly from the rock slab atop a hill.

Poop! part deux

So this England voyage is turning out to be pretty crappy....literally....explanation to come...

Today we went to visit Saltram, the mansion and grounds at which Sense and Sensibility was filmed. Really awesome house. In the afternoon we went to the University of Plymouth for a conference. While waiting for the ferry ride home, I feel something hit my hand. I looked down and asked, "IS THIS POOP?!?" Of course it was, not to mention there are speckles of poop on my shirt and bag as well. Everyone had a good chuckle until Nate and Taryn realized that they too had been shat upon. Nate said being pooped on by a bird is good luck, but Tiffani claimed there is no way that is ever lucky. Interestingly enough, the rest of the group walked away and left those pooped upon in quarantine by the benches.

After our fantastic dinner of chicken wrapped in bacon, Crystal, Kate, Nate, Christine and I went for a walk along my running route, the Southwest Coast Path. It was about a 3.5 mile hike out and back. We were able to take some fantastic pictures at sundown.

On a blog maintenance note, the English crew (aka the internet here) is not so great at uploading photos...hopefully this will be worked out soon.

Poop!

The S.S. Keanemutiny is now docked in Plymouth, the very port from which the Mayflower left all those years ago. To my surprise the locals do not wear buckles on their hats, nor have they offered to have a turkey dinner with me, a native American.

So here is a break down of the Penn group here in Plymouth: Taryn, the TA, and Christine, Kate, Tiffani, Yaritza, Helen, Libbie, Crystal, Nate, and me, the students.

After a ferry ride, a one and a half mile walk to a dock, and another ferry ride, we arrived at Mount Edgcumbe, our worksite for the summer. We took a very bumpy ride in a range rover driven by Ian, director of Mount Edgcumbe, around the estate. This property is a bohemoth on the cliffs along the sea...acres and acres of gardens, ruins, seats, and country houses. At one point, we exited the range rover in order to get a closer look at a stone ruin on the property. The field onto which we exited was occupied by approximately 8000 sheep and 12 times that number of turds. We all cleared the mounds on the way out to the ruin, but as I re-entered the car, Yaritza asked me what was on my shoe. I looked down and yelled "POOP!" Yaritza then looked at her own feet and yelled "shit! oh shit!" when she noticed her new kicks were atop a pile of brown. We quickly cleared the feces from our shoes via the grass and continued on our tour of the estate. The views are breathtaking and the property seems to go on forever. To end the day, we toured the main house (Mansion) of the estate. Sadly, only a shell of the early 18th century structure remains today because the building was bombed by the Germans during WWII. The interior is a sad 1960s attempt at reconstruction and decoration of an 18th century interior. It's as if the chief decorator on the project watched an "oldy time" movie and said, yup, that's how the house should look. Oh well, our group will be ensuring that the English and French garden houses are appropriately restored to their glory days of the 18th and 19th centuries.

London, continued....

Ahoy Mateys! resuming my London tale.... Saturday June 6 was my 25th birthday. We spent the day touring the sites on the Original Bus Tour. We started with Buckingham Palace. Outside of the palace was a bit of pomp and circumstance and by a bit, I mean approximately 700 grown men with black puffy hats marching down the street. I was a little concerned that the country paid this many people for the changing of the guards every day, but when I was told this was a full dress rehearsal for the Queen's Birthday celebration, I gave the frivolity the OK. The pigeons in the park around the palace are pretty brazen. They also sport mohawks and stare you down with their crazy orange eye.

We continued on our tour to take pictures of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. I then toured Westminster Abbey, which was well worth the £12 it cost. Later that night we went on a Jack the Ripper tour which started at the Tower of London. Our tour guide, Steve was very animated and left out no details. I attempted to post a video of him on this blog, but to no avail.

Resting on the Thames

The S.S. Keanemutiny settled on the River Thames for a few days to allow her captain to explore London. Ok, so maybe I'm not really aboard a ship, but that's the theme of this blog, so bear with me. Our flight landed a half an hour early at London's Heathrow airport at 8:30am on Friday, June 5. The Virgin Atlantic flight was uneventful, which is always good. The seats were a bit cramped, but the movie selection was kick-ass, so I was happy. We (Crystal, Kate, and I) took the tube from Heathrow to our supposed hotel on Regent Street, only to discover that there are 6 St. George's hotels in London and the one we lugged our bags to was not ours. boo. Tired and lazy, we decided to take a cab to the St. George's at which we actually had a reservation. This hotel was not as swanky as the last, but was in a prime location between Victoria and Pimlico. After receiving our one room key, we were told our room was on the third floor. Well, the man of foreign (not british) decent behind the hotel counter was sorely mistaken, because I counted six flights of stairs to our room....no elevator or "lift" as the Brits call it. Our room was small, but adequate.

At 2pm we were supposed to go to the Globe Theatre to see Romeo and Juliet, but we were way too jet lagged and opted for a nap instead.

Later that evening we bought tickets for "The Original Bus Tour" of London, not to be confused with those imitation bus tours. We briefly took in some sights, most notable of which was St. Paul's Cathedral, on the steps of which I had to sit and sing "Feed the Birds." If only I had tuppence. The picture above is of me and Kate at St. Paul's. There were tons of pigeons there...I'm not sure why they didn't make it into the shot. My hair looks ridiculously red because Crystal took this picture with the "pop art" setting on her newfangled camera. We quickly learned that setting should not be applied when shooting human beings, especially gingerkids. More to come on London.....

Anchors Aweigh

Ok, so task #1 is to figure out how to blog. I don't read many blogs and I don't really understand how they work, so this is going to be a learning experience. The point of this blog is to track my UK work experience. We'll see where it goes from there. June 7th through July 3rd I'll be working at Mount Edgcumbe, an 800 acre estate on the southern coast of England in Plymouth. I'm at home in Trenton right now. Time of departure is 8:50pm from Newark. Time of arrival is 9:05am at London's Heathrow airport.

All of my blog text will be justified, because I hate when people turn in reports unjustified. If it's nice and crisp on the left side of the paragraph, why not make it the same way on the right? Unjustified paragraph = laaaaaaazy. ok, now how do it insert a picture in this blog?