Just Pictures

Tracy's visit


Temple Newsome Garden


Petrifying Well

Knaresborough

York

Bolton Abbey

Scarborough

Plumpton Rocks

Bonfire Night

Lindy at the Light

Christmas Wrap-up

Sorry I’ve been so completely horrible at this blogging thing. Grad school keeps me pretty busy all the time. Since its Christmas though I thought it would be nice to catch everyone up on what I‘ve been doing for the last four months. The MA program I’m doing spans two departments, English and Political Science, International Studies. I take classes on using theatre with different groups of people and on development theory. It’s a lot of reading and writing but also lots of practical stuff. We’ve had a whole series of workshops run by various applied theatre practitioners from around the area. After New Years we’ll spend two weeks working with a theatre company for the mentally disabled and in the spring we pair up with different community organizations and run our own series of workshops in pairs. So far the course has been everything I’d hoped and more. It’s been a little bit of a challenge going back to school after more than ten years out—the first tiny paper I wrote took me FOREVER, but I think I’ve got the hang of it again now. In addition to my school work I’m also involved with a local theatre group called Urban Sprawl that deals with issues surrounding homelessness and is made up of a mixed group of volunteers and clients of various services. It’s been really fantastic to have that hands-on experience right away. Everyone in the group does a bit of everything so I’ve had opportunities to do tech stuff, lead exploratory workshops, and do some singing and playing the tambourine with the band.


There isn’t much lindy hop in Leeds compared with Seattle, but because of that I’ve had the chance to explore dancing from new angles. I’ve finally been learning how to lead—something I should have gotten around to long ago! I’ve also been started doing some teaching. I had never really had any interest in doing it before but it’s been a fun new experience. A couple weeks before Christmas I participated in an all day dance fundraiser for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. It was a really fun event! We did dance performances every half hour all afternoon in the middle of a shopping area and collected money from people to stopped to watch. It was a nice way to start the Christmas season and I did one whole routine as a lead :)


I spent Christmas here and actually got to do quite a lot of holiday stuff. For the two months leading up to Christmas there’s a very festive German Christmas market with all kinds of sausages and mulled wine and stuff. I ended up there pretty frequently, because it just seems to be on the way to everywhere. I got to go to several Christmas dinners, do some carol singing, and pull lots of Christmas crackers--paper party favors that you pull apart that have paper hats and jokes and presents inside. I watched the Queen’s annual Christmas speech. The biggest difference between Christmas here and at home seems to be that they don’t have nearly as much rich food--chocolate and cookies and pie and other special stuff. Here there’s mince pies, Christmas cake and Christmas pudding but they’re all just made out of raisins—so not really very exciting and you can really only eat so much raisin stuff.


I managed to explore a bit of Yorkshire while the weather was still fairly warm. There must be a million lovely places to visit right in this area—lots of natural beauty, quaint little villages, and ancient ruined abbeys and castles. I've spent a couple of very frustrating hours trying to add photos of places I've been etc but after managing to erase everything multiple times I'm just giving up. If I can figure out how to add a slide show they'll be there.