Somusing

Even though we are all speaking English, there are many times when we have trouble understanding people here in England. I knew this would happen, but it's still amazing and fun. The UK has many, many different accents and dialects (Wikipedia has a long comparison of American and British English , if you're interested), and some are harder to understand than others. Liverpool's accent, called Scouse (Liverpudlians are known as Scousers), is one that's known to be hard to understand -- they talk fast and squish words together and leave words out and have slang terms unique to Liverpool, and when I've overheard Liverpudlians speaking to each other, it sounds like a completely foreign language. When we arrived at church on our first Sunday in Liverpool, I was surprised when people started asking me if I was okay. "Are you okay?" they said. And "Are you all right?" I thought I must look pretty tired or something, but it quickly became apparent t...

When we were in Berlin, we visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe a couple of times, and it really made an impression on me. The memorial takes up a large city block, and as you approach it, there's not much to see. It just looks like a bunch of concrete rectangles of the same width and depth but of different heights, not very tall or imposing. Some of the blocks on the edge are even flush with the pavement. But as you come up alongside it and look down the rows, you see that the ground slopes down and the blocks get very tall. You can walk around inside the memorial, and it feels pretty weird. Oppressive, dark, cold, disorienting. Some people think the blocks are like graves, but I thought they were more a representation of the laws and orders and dangers that slowly engulfed the Jews until they were buried so deeply in the oppression that they could disappear in huge numbers without much comment from anyone. Those orders might have seemed like...

Last week on Wednesday, we moved for the fifth time since we began our adventure. We've purchased a few new suitcases and gotten rid of some small bags, so our packing is looking better every time. I'm letting go of the packing-for-carry-on-only mentality that I used to adhere to for trips. It turns out that if you're packing for a year, it's better to have one big suitcase (one that rolls well) and one backpack for each person. Duh. But it took me a while to figure that out. There will probably be more revisions in the future. Everybody's squinting in the photo below because it was so bright and sunny that day! Every sunny day in England feels like a miracle. We took the train from Liverpool to York. Just outside the York railway station, where we waited for our bus to Pocklington, we were just across the street from the York city walls . More on the walls later, but it's sure fun to walk out of a railway station and come face to face with 800-yea...

We took the train (well, three trains) to Conwy, Wales , on Friday, which was Jon's birthday. I've just looked through my photos from the day, and they really don't compare to being there, but I'll put some up, anyway. Conwy Castle was built by Edward I of England between 1283 and 1289 when he was trying to conquer the Welsh. (A cousin sent me a list of my royal English and Irish ancestors, and Edward I was my 22nd great-grandfather! Although all those medieval kings were kind of crazy and bloodthirsty, so maybe it's not that exciting.) He built a lot of castles along the coast of Wales during that time. At Conwy, there's the castle as well as walls around what was the town of Conwy at the time (now Conwy's a bit bigger than it was and extends beyond the walls). You can walk along the tops of most of the walls around the town. Buildings and houses are built right up against the walls in many places and some people have the wall in their back yard. He...

Here are some other photos of our recent Liverpool excursions. Erin waiting with me at the Queen Square bus stop: The Liverpool ward building and stake center of the LDS Church: The former railway bike trail we walk on to go to church, and on this day we moved for the weekend to a different apartment because ours had been booked before we came along: Phin eating a dry Weetabix and hunk of cheese for lunch with Zed napping behind him: The LightNight Liverpool festival, with lots of public events. We attended the re-opening of the public library which has lots of open space, interesting architecture, and a public rooftop desk with a nice city view. We also went to late openings of museums and the town hall, etc.: Mira and I saw dancing Chinese dragons on the street in front of the Hard Wok Cafe (really) accompanied by a crazy loud firecracker display, and around the corner some concrete guitar cases with labels naming famous Liverpool guitarists such as Paul Mc...