Castles in the Sky

It used to be that if you had shitloads of money, you would build the most extravagant building possible and impress the hell out of everyone who comes. Tastefully, of course.

Today, if you have shitloads of money, you build a minimalistic house. I don't know which I appreciate better.

Anyways, what follows is pictures of castles in Germany and some of their nicer rooms. I don't have any of England because...it's kind of deficient in that aspect. Apparently when foreign emissaries visited England in the old days, they were all "WTF this is your house?! Lame." Understandable.

Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam. I've forgotten all the history behind these buildings...but this was for Frederick I or III.

Entrance hall to Schloss Sanssouci. The building was built in the rococo style, which basically reads as "GUILD AS MUCH OF THE CEILING IN GOLD AS POSSIBLE."

See what I mean?

He also liked collecting Italian art.

Orangerie, Berlin. Again, for Frederick...III? This is where he kept his plants, and he decided to build it in the style of an Italian villa. There's a greenhouse inside.

Coolest room ever! 

Neues Palais...and I've forgotten everything about this one. 

This entire room was made out of shells. It was really ridiculous. 

Pink marble room.

Steeple of Kaiserburg, Nuremberg. All my skies were bleached :(

You guys better recognize this. This castle, Neuschwanstein, was the inspiration behind the castle in "Sleeping Beauty." The king who build this bankrupted the nation in his endeavors, and it's still not finished. The castle was built as a tribute to Wagner, and consequently, the motif of the swan appears everywhere in the castle. 

Cool Museums II

View from the entrance.

View from the second floor. If you're serious about buying, you can drive the cars down that windy path onto the roads outside.

This isn't a museum per se, but it's part of the BMW complex. This is BMW Welt in Munich, where they display all their newest technologies and, well, cars. It's an amazing design, and there will definitely be more pictures coming sometime in the future of the outside and of actual cars. But I have hundreds of pictures to go through, so for now, just these are finished. Did I mention you can go in and sit in those cars? You can melt into the chairs. I want one!

Coming to a blog near you...

Cool Museums I

First view upon entering the British Museum.

From an architectural standpoint, I really like the design of the British Museum. But as a destination, it's wayyy too big. You get museum coma way too quickly, and then all the vases, statues, bronzes, etc all start looking the same. You could spend days wandering in here.

University Church of St. Mary the Virgin

This is the university church that stands right on High Street some way down Stanford House. I never noticed until I was looking through all my photos, but it has such different airs depending on the weather.

Kind of gloomy.

Beautiful~

Alright. If I'm lucky, I'll get into the Harry Potter themed formal hall, and it will be awesome. There is also supposed to be a Harry Potter tour of campus on Sunday in the spirit of Halloween, so I'm hoping to have a Harry Potter-themed post sometime next week. Coming up are also some long overdue posts on German palaces/castles and museums.

Also, someone just introduced me to this site: Bookshelf Porn. It is amazing. Where do they find these, and where can I get one?!

Corpus Christi College

I have been procrastinating on my papers the entire day, but I've just realized I've never posted pictures of the college I belong to, Corpus Christi.

Corpus Christi main courtyard.

The famous sundial, with the pelican on top.

Close-up of the sundial.

Corpus beer cellar! Quiz nights here every Thursday.

The dining hall. Harry Potter-eque?

Random Photo

I was just trying to take a picture of the door, and I thought these people got in the way, but as I kept cropping and cropping, I left the picture like this instead. Taken at Kaiserburg (literally, the king's fortress) in Nuremberg.

Best day EVER

Last Friday was a really good day for me. Somehow, there was an extra ticket to London for 11 pounds that included public transport for the entire day, and I managed to nab that ticket and go to London for a day. I'd been really tired from the trips to Bath and Brighton, so I just wanted to relax for a bit. I ended up going to Tate Britian and the Sir John Sloane Museum.

I was a little disappointed with Tate Britain--there was a lot of modern art, and I just missed the pre-Raphaelite exhibition, which is the one I was most interested in. There were a lot of sublime pieces, though, which were just as good. I love it when the painters pay so much attention to detail that the painting looks like a photograph. The Ashmolean at Oxford actually had a better collection of paintings, and they were all sketches of the beautiful Italian countryside, which made me want to go there (but hey, Rome in the last week yay!). I really should go to the Ashmolean and see their entire collection sometime--they have everything from Asian art to Roman statues.

Following that, I decided to go to Chinatown, because I was craving Chinese food. Come on, I haven't had anything good since coming here! This is the start of a happy day: I got some pretty good 四川擔擔麵 and 姜汁菠菜. Then, I walked to Covent Garden, which I didn't realize was such a huge shopping complex, with open-air markets, performers, and a giant plaza with the major brand name stores. On the way, I saw a froyo place called Snog, and I got froyo with real passionfruit (!!!!) and rasberries. Yum. <--this day is the main reason I went to badminton today, haha.

Isn't this the coolest froyo shop ever?

As for the Sir Sloane Museum, the only way to describe it is as a cabinet of curiosities. Every nook and cranny was filled with some Roman relic, or some nickel vase filled with glass, making it look as if it were overflowing with water. There were sarcophagi in the house, Asian vases, medieval shackles, paintings, etc. He built columns in the house to make it look Roman, and rooms with stained glass windows. Some rooms had at least 100 mirrors to capture the little light coming into the house, and the basement contained the memorial tablet for his wife...unless it also contained her grave somewhere. And that's creepy.

Creepy, of course, being the main event of the day, the play "A Woman in Black," which is a horror play about as lawyer being haunted by a woman in a deceased aunt's house as he goes through her papers looking for her will. I had my doubts about how well a theater could put on a scary production, but those were dispelled pretty quickly. I screamed at least three times during the movie, and at one point I jumped and grabbed onto Shannon, who was sitting in front of me, causing her to jump up and scream, too. Oops? I had difficulties sleeping that night; I kept thinking the woman would pop out and kill me. And it doesn't help that people had to remind me of the Grudge and the Ring at the same time. Ughhh, damn you horror movies!

All the way back in Germany...

...We went to this small town known as Rothenburg ob der Tauber. It's a really scenic town that still retains many medieval structures, such as its massive city wall, and as a result, there were SO many Asian tourists there. My mom and I of course being two of them. Anyways, since I had the time (read: I am slacking off on immunology), I thought I would post some old pictures on a lighter note.

Of course, since ever town had a Church, this is a mandatory photo. We were allowed to fully enter, though.

The best part about this town was its Kriminalmuseum. Its exactly as it sounds: there were exhibits on torture and the instruments used for them, along with displays about what were considered crimes in the day. I took a few pictures on the hilarious ones.

Stepping on someone's foot shows who's boss. There was another sign that said if a man let his wife beat him up and it was witnessed by others, he had to leave his house, because if he couldn't defend himself against his wife, then he wasn't man enough to deserve a house.

If women were arguing in public, they were put in these neck violins to learn behave before it would be taken off. It was sometimes used for married couples as well.

If you played bad music in public, you would be subjected to this instrument of shame, and you would have to hold it all day. The guy next to him is wearing a shame mask. For example, excessive gossipers wore this mask with a long tongue and huge ears.

 

This is for Kai: being too fashionable was a crime, too. Apparently the police had the right to rip the clothes off too...

If you were caught absolutely plastered in public, the next day you had to walk around in this.

Finally, Rothenburg ob der Tauber also had toy museums--Christmas is a really big deal in this town, so they're quite famous for some of their toys. The cutest?

Brighton & Hove

On Monday and Tuesday, I visited a friend of mine from Taiwan in Brighton, which is a seaside town in England that is second to London in the number of restaurants and clubs it has. Random, I know.

Anyways, the town reminded me of a mash of SF and Santa Cruz on the beach, and like SF, it has a lot of small streets with tiny shops.

Do you guys see it? Or is it just me?

The beaches were pebbled instead of sandy! "Trudging" describes walking along this beach exactly.

 One of Brighton's most famous attractions is its pier, which is a super, super tiny version of Santa Cruz beach boardwalk.

The entire pier lights up at night.

I really like this photo. Anyways, that's the extent of the theme park...if you can call it a park.

 Its other main attraction is the Royal Pavilion. It was built during the time period where Europeans were absolutely fascinated by the Far East, so the entire palace was built in the fashion of how Europeans perceived Asia. The outside has influences from India, while the inside is as Chinese as it could possibly be for people who had never been to China before. If Moulin Rouge put on a play about China, the set for that performance is probably what the inside of this palace looked like: rooms with pink, yellow, or blue walls, with painted glass lights in the shape of lotus. Dim lights and lanterns hung on the ceilings, with wood painted to look like bamboo. In the old days, they would burn incense throughout the day as well. The dining hall was an elaborate affair with paintings that looked like guilded leather, East Asian paintings, and a one ton chandelier that was held in the talons of a dragon adorned with glass lotus lamps on the side.

It was definitely one of the best homes I've ever visited, but it took a whopping 35 years to build.

Also, can I mention that Brighton had some of the best fish and chips I've ever had?

The Oxford Life

I have never gotten up so early in my life: today, I went to archery practice at 7 AM in the morning. Gah. Except I'll keep going because archery is so awesome. It's really peaceful; all you have to do is pull the bow and release the arrow. Except I still can't pull it back all the way on the 26 pound bow. Maybe I'll try the 20 pound bow next time.

Anyways, I had my first official meeting with my tutor last night. It went fairly well, and I think she thought I was doing well. Except she told me that since I wasn't a medical student, she would expect more out of my work than theirs, and effectively doubled my assignment wowowow kthanks. Next time I'll just tell people I'm premed so I can get away with shoddy work jk.

Thursday was definitely the worst day I could've chosen to have my tutorial, though. I probably can't go to photo club because of it, even though the teacher is really cool. He used to work on advertisements for Guinness, and he said that the rules were really exacting: the foam on top had to be exactly 4 cm deep, and for one of the Christmas assignments, he had to take a picture of a pint against a Christmas tree with silver baubles, and each of the spheres had to clearly reflect the pint. And this was in the era of no photoshop. Sigh. Such a cool class. And they're doing silhouettes next week! Boo.

On the other hand, I'll probably join badminton club. I like how since I'm only taking 12 units, I do so much more extracurricular stuff here than at Stanford.

Blehhh

I don't think I've even been so unprepared for work before! Writing the tutorial essay was a lot harder than I thought it'd be--there's so much information to synthesize and condense into ~2000 words. I finished reading about 11 papers, and it was so hard to sit down, organize all that info, and write something comprehensible.

Anyways, the beginning of this week was really busy. I had to catch up on all that reading and writing, and today, my alarm clock didn't ring. I missed my only class of the day--Victorian literature, ironically the class I would never voluntarily miss. And of course that has to be the class with only 6 people in it. To top it off, they were discussing A Woman in White, which is one of my favorite books.

Then, I didn't pass the swim test for the crew team, so I can't row. I'm kind of regretful about it, but there's no way I can go to the make-up test, since I'll be in Bath...yes, Kai, I will go to the Jane Austen center this time. I think?

Also, Oxford bops are the best. They played this song, hahaha. Guess which part everyone yelled out during it.

I should also add that I've started adding photos of food and York to facebook, because now there are people in them, haha.

Currently reading: Lady Audley's Secret.

Back from York!

This trip was kind of ridiculous. Let's start from the beginning.

Most of the sights in this trip were geared to people in the architecture class--while the professor led them on tours, the rest of us kind of just wandered around. Our first destination was Hardwick Hall, which is some massive house built in the 1590s? They had a huge garden outside, and we wandered around for a bit before entering. There was wormwood (absinthe?!) and menthol and a bunch of other herbs that I wish they had more information on. But maybe that's because I'm a bio major, and I don't really care about plants unless you tell me what they're used for, aside from eating. The focal point of the house was its medieval tapestries, but I'm not into that, so the house was pretty boring to me. Also, it was suuuuuuuper creepy. It was really dark inside, and there were hella weapons hung up on the wall, along with deer and moose skulls. It was like walking onto a set for some horror movie where the guests start dying from mysterious causes, one by one. Not cool.

Also, for some reason, each room smelled like some kind of food (maybe it's because we were really hungry by then, or because the kitchen was under the rooms?). The blue roomed smelled like bbq, and two other rooms smelled like chicken soup. The entrance smelled like LB broth derrrr.

Then we got back onto the bus to go to York Minster. That place is awesome, and I'll definitely be putting pictures of it up later. We also walked along the city walls, ate Cornish pasties (is it bad if I think this is one of the trip highlights?), went to a park and then returned to the hotel where I ate waaaaay too much for dinner. Also, side note, the English have more ways of cooking potatoes than I have ever thought of. Fried, boiled, broiled, etc. Maybe that's why Tolkien's hobbits were eating them on the way to Sauron. 

The second day was a lot better. First of all, everyone was excited that there was actual breakfast. I haven't had waffles in forever! So delish. We went to Castle Howard (Andrew: not another house...), which is where the film Brideshead Revisited was filmed. The Howard family is actually still living inside, which is pretty cool. Also, THERE WERE PEACOCKS THERE!!!! Andrew and I spent a whole hour trying to chase one down, and we got REALLY close before it one upped us and flew up into a tree. Cheater. That wasn't allowed. 

We wandered onto the polar bear path (which only had trees...no polar bears?) to the temple of the four winds, which apparently was built so that gentlemen could take their lovers somewhere to conduct their sordid affairs in the summer. From there, we hopped a fence, and found a pasture with a bunch of furry cows! I think the animals were the best part of the trip, haha. There was also an ornamental vegetable garden, but I didn't see any vegetables, and I couldn't see how it was ornamental either.

Later, we went to the ruins of Reivaulx Abbey, and we spent all our time climbing all over them..which apparently you weren't supposed to do. The stupid thing was, we were an hour earlier than our scheduled time of arrival, but instead of just getting back early, they decided to waste time at the top of a hill so that we could see the view from the top (and really, it wasn't that amazing).

Anyways, we got back to Oxford at ~9PM, and even though I was pretty tired, I decided to go to the bop (read: party). SUPER fun! They're basically a better version of the Stanford frat parties, with people actually dancing and good music. Yayyy. 

So the school year actually starts now...

I feel like I'm kind of screwed. I need to write a 3- and 4-page paper by next Wednesday...but to do so I need to finish reading A Woman in White, which is ~600 pages long, and I need to read 15 papers for immunology. And we're going to York for fun for Friday and Saturday, so that's two days gone.

I knew I was having too much fun. Dammit!

Fresher's Fair

Yesterday was the giant Fresher's Fair Oxford holds every Michaelmas (fall) term. It's basically a giant activities fair spanning three days, taking three floors of a large building, and it was far better than anything Stanford has. There were 12 huge rooms of tables, with everything from political to sports to musical to journalistic clubs. I probably signed up for too many things, but I'm hoping to meet a lot of people and try a lot of new things.

For starts, I signed up for Change Ringers, which is the society for bell-ringing. It's exactly what it sounds like--they do all the bell ringing on the various bell towers around campus, and we get to learn how to play the bells. I also signed up for archery and pistol and rifle shooting because those sound cool and don't require you getting up at ungodly hours in the morning, AS ROWING DOES. I know rowing is something everyone needs to try at Oxford, but just thinking about it makes my arms hurt, and I am miserable for a day if I get up that early, so, no go. I'm also in the Chinese Association because they accosted me in Chinese when I was passing their table, haha. They are really aggressive in recruiting here. If you so much as pause at their table, they immediately start talking to you, handing out flyers, etc. Even the Tae Kwon Do tried to recruit me. First of all, I don't look athletic at all. Secondly, it was really hard for me to say no without saying, "I don't want to join because I don't want to get punched in the face," which is what happened to Laura at the first practice. I think I half ran away, haha. My favorite table was that of the German club, where they had two clear plastic canisters, one with German flag inside. On top of that one, they had an octopus plushy, with a sign attached saying, "Paul the Octopus chooses the German Club!" Sweeeet.

If I'm really lucky, I'll also be designing for Exposition at Oxford. I thought the magazine looked so good I signed up straightaway. I didn't even know what it was about until I looked it up after. I'm also obviously in the photo club, which makes me really happy: they have classes every Thursday, and lots of field trips and competitions. So excited!!! The only drawback is that most Oxford clubs require membership fees, and if you don't pay, they charge you for classes, so we'll see how much it is.

Each college also has its own activities fair, though it's a much smaller one and it consists largely of sports. University teams are generally much more intense, but these collegiate teams are a lot more laid back. People just play when they want, so I actually signed up for badminton, and I'll be playing football later today with the soccer class, assuming people found a field and a ball. I can't believe I'm playing sports in England.

I'm also surprised at how few Stanford students seemingly want to meet Oxford students. Only Laura, Jane, and I have consistently been attending events--last night was so much fun! Corpus has quiz nights every Friday, where everyone gets into groups to compete for alcohol, and the topics range from "Pseudo-medicine" to "Guess the TV show from the theme song." I felt awful during geography because I couldn't remember that Ontario was a Great Lake (but hey, no Americans got all five, so I feel better). The quiz is interrupted intermittently with siren calls, at which point the moderators shout out questions, and the table that answers the loudest gets candy thrown at them. Not only was this event super fun, but it was a great way to meet people from your team. Some of the students were really good at coming up with team names, too. We were boring: there was a cup of sour starbursts on every table, so we named ourselves team Starburst. Others were "Quiz in your pants" and "Queuing Society," because Oxford LOVES lining up for things. There are lines at everything, haha.

Anyways, after that game (at which my team and I lost...sad :(. They actually have second to last prizes for consolation and effort. That's what we were aiming for, but we didn't get it ><), we had competitions in the same teams to see whose egg would survive being thrown from the roof of the college. Each team was given newspapers, cling-on (which is what they call saran wrap), straws, a balloon, a piece of cheese and turkey, and a mince pie to design something that would protect the egg.

We did miserably.

Some other team stole our cling-on, and we spent too much time arguing about how to protect our egg--we had two physicists in the group and we still lost!!! Bleh. Anyways, the night was concluded with us watching Dr. Strangelove with hot chocolate. Yes, there are weekly cinema nights. :)

And I realize I haven't post up pictures of Oxford, so I will get around to that eventually.

The City of Dreaming Spires

Field Trip Numero Uno

The good thing about a blog is that I have an incentive to upload/work on my photos.

Anyways, Saturday was our first field trip to London, and it was timed pretty awfully. The staff wanted to let us sleep in, so we left Oxford at 11, arriving at the Tower of London at 1:30 PM. However, since we needed to enter St. Paul's Cathedral by 3:30 PM, this gave us just 2 hours at the tower, which is simply not enough time to explore an entire complex of buildings, 13 towers, and all the different museums and exhibits inside.

We did manage to hit up the more major ones, though. We saw the tower here the twin boy kings were murdered (actually, no one really knows what happened to them, but they disappeared here and their skeletons were later discovered here, so...), as well as the royal treasury (biggest diamond in the world?!) and the armory. The prior began to have a really long line at the entrance right when we left. No photos were allowed, and they placed escalator belts along the exhibits to prevent people from "oohing" and "aahing" too long at any one item. That was pretty smart, except I felt it was moving a little too quickly--I barely got a glimpse of some of the diamonds, and it was like, "Wait, come back, I want to stare at you some more!"

Afterward, we went to St. Paul's Cathedral, which is a huge cathedral built in the classical style of columns and domes. But I hold a deep grudge against the place. One, their audio guides weren't working, so I know absolutely nothing about it other than the fact that it looks lovely inside. Two, I may know that it looks lovely inside, but I can't show anyone because photos weren't allowed. Seriously? I don't really understand why they wouldn't let people take photos. It's a great marketing scheme, it gets more people to go, and yet they don't allow it. Jerks.

I am really glad we got to watch Henry IV Part I at the Globe, though. I thought the play might be dry, but I actually understand many parts of it (though, at the intermission, a lot of people were asking about the overall plot, because it was a little unclear). The actors were superb, and it actually looked as if there was a lot if improv involved. During the sword fight, the prince dropped his sword on accident and start fighting with it while holding the blade edge, haha. Also, at the conclusion, all the minor and major characters came out to perform a line dance before bowing. It was legendary.

The Globe! To match the original, there is no roof. There are two ways to watch the play: standing in the yard, or siting in the gallery as we did. Only people sitting in the gallery have a roof, so if it starts pouring like it did last night, the people in the yard have to stand and bear it for the entirety of the play. No umbrellas are allowed to be open during that time.