The Isle of Wight

Good morning, gentle readers, I have returned. It has been 2 weeks since my departure from Amsterdam back to jolly old England and I finally have something of note to say. Brief recap of the past two weeks first though? Brief indeed. After I returned to school I realized exactly how much work I had to do and it made me anxious/nervous/slightly stressed. Nothing is due until the middle of May or later but after being away from WashU for so long and completely losing my work ethic, I was afraid it would be extremely difficult to bounce back into the 'hard work' mindset. It has been. But I have done a fair amount of work...I have first drafts of two of my essays complete and I've made good headway on a third one. Umm what else? Its been wonderful to be back with my friends here, I missed them so much. And Matt, who went back to the states after we left Venice, is here visiting for a couple weeks before his internship starts and thats fabulous as well. We're planning on going up to London on Wednesday which should be a lot of fun. I haven't been up to London in a long while and I need to get in at least a couple more trips before I leave England. There is so much that I want to see. So yeah, that's really the main gist of the past couple of weeks. Not a lot interesting has happened, but it's been nice to be sort of relaxed.

Yesterday, though, we had our first Sussex-planned day trip of the summer term. It was off to the Isle of Wight and I must say it was a bit disappointing and definitely my least favorite of the day trips that we've had. Mostly because I feel like we didn't do anything. We spent a lot of time driving on the bus/ferry, seeing a lot of the island but after the first hour segment of seeing the pretty Isle of Wight countryside pass by, you kind of get bored. Anyway. I'll start from the beginning. We left school at about 8AM and made it to Portsmouth in time to get on the 9:30 ferry to the Isle. The ferry was a very nice ferry and we actually had a good little time playing around up on the sundeck (which was a little cold because of the wind...but it really was a gorgeous day). I think my favorite part of the sundeck time was there was this little British toddler who was holding a little puppy on a leash. And we kept looking at him because he was adorable and he looked back at us too. Jon had his camera in his lap and this little boy continued to look and smile at us, specifically at Jon. His parents came over and started talking to us and the mother said, oh well he sees you have a camera in your hand so he's posing because he thinks you're going to take a picture of him. So Jon, of course, took a picture. And then (the best part) the father said to his son "you're just a little camera-tart, aren't you?". It was hilarious. And I'm going to start to call people camera-tarts. Be prepared. The ferry took about 45 minutes and once we drove off of it, we drove probably about another half hour to get to Shanklin, a little town on the southeast coast of the island. It was really cute and all, and it was really nice to see a beach with sand on it, but there really wasn't anything to do and we only have 2 hours there so there wasn't a lot of time to do anything, if there was. Jon, Matt, Caitlin and I wandered down to the beach and frolicked on the sand and stopped to get lunch (mmmm fish and chips on the beach. Amazing) but that was it before we had to walk back up from the beach to get on the bus. And then we drove another hour along the coast to the southwest side where we had a very long hike up these cliffs. It was pretty. It had some great views. We saw the Needle Rocks which are apparently famous. But it was a very long walk. After a while the scenery wasn't anything new. At about 4 we got to Alum Bay which had like a little amusement park thing going on, but we didn't have any time to do anything like that so we all basically got candy at this cool candy store before we had to get back on the bus. We left Alum Bay at 4:30 and got back to Sussex at 7:30.

It was a nice island, and probably would be really crowded and popular in the summer when it's really warm, but I felt like we didn't do anything which kind of annoyed me. I was also tired and my chest got sunburned which was no fun, which didn't help the annoyance but I guess I felt it was almost a waste of a day. There was probably other stuff we could have done, and just spent an entire day in one spot. I would have liked to have a bit longer in Shanklin so we could have explored the old village and the Chine (this large ravine) but we simply didn't have time. And then Queen Victoria had this huge summer residence in East Cowes and it would have been really cool to see that. So yeah. Pretty island, pretty day, nice to have some fresh air, but generally a disappointment. Oh well, you can't win them all.