Getting settled in

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Looking back on the last few days… Have become good friends with Andy, Michael, and Britta, playing cards or ping pong and hanging out every night. Spent one afternoon sitting out under a tree with the sheep, just reading my Bible and really enjoyed that. Unfortunately that won’t be possible very often because of all the rain that is supposed to come this winter. Friday we had our first seminar, which was on Worship. It was ok, a little more interactive than normal lectures, but not anything profound. Friday night was family group night, and our host parents, Phil and Rachael, took us in a minibus to their small village of Warton. It supposedly has connections to the George Washington family. Later at their house we played games, and got to try some awesome English cheeses, which I really enjoyed.
Saturday was an adventure though, over 130 students travelled by coach up to the Lake District. We hiked about two hours from Gimble to Ambleside along lake and mountainside paths. The mountains were no Rockies, but still pretty dramatic. I was not expecting mountains in this part of the UK. I spent most of the Hike talking to Bernie, brushing up on my German, and poorly explaining some English to him. We talked about quite a few different subjects, exploring the depths of my understanding of German, and mostly relying on his English to discuss everything from grammar, to long and weird words, to German cars and beyond. One thing that stands out is the origin of the name Audi. The four rings in the Audi logo and from the four original companies that came together, but the name originates from the original owner whose last name was Hor (which is “hear” in English). Audi (like in Audible) is Latin for hear, and that’s how it got its name. My favorite part of the trip was a giant partially water filled cave in the side of the mountains. It was big enough for almost everyone to fit inside at once, and required skipping across stepping stones to reach the back. In the back of the cave there was a large, flat, and steeply angled wall. Naturally, we decided this presented a great challenge for us young idiots, and we proceeded to charge the wall at top speed and run up it as far as we could. That was the easy part, because it was so high and steep you couldn’t just jump off, you had to run without falling back down. There was a large rock at the top and the goal became to tag the rock and come back down without killing yourself, which we actually all succeeded in doing. I came very close to falling on the way down, but thankfully didn’t make a fool of myself. We took a video of Bernie running up and holding the rock for a few seconds before coming back down. The walk continued through fairy tale forests and stone walled sheep pens, always dominated by picturesque clear blue lakes on our left closed in all around by dramatic mountainsides. The size of so called “roads” in Europe never ceased to amaze me and other Americans as cars nearly ran over our feet while we were pushed to the side of a “road” I had assumed was merely a walking path. Eventually we crossed an old stone bridge and arrived at Ambleside. A quaint town of no obvious significance other than being old and near the lakes, Ambleside was pleasant, but unless you were shopping for overpriced souvenirs or fish and chips, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to do. Jeremiah (or Jeremy, I can’t remember exactly) wanted to by some hiking shoes in Ambleside so I went along as a translator. After finding a shoe store, and sending the attendant running up and down a flight of stairs a number of times to retrieve different shoes, he finally settled on a pair of light blue women’s hiking shoes, because the men’s shoes were not “bold” enough. The shoes were L60 which I think is about $90, kind of expensive, but not outrageous for a souvenir town. Jeremy was not completely sure of the conversions and later when Bernie showed him that he bought shoes for over 10,000 Korean crowns He was astonished and we rushed back to the store to return the shoes.
Later that night, back at the school, Dougie, our resident Scotsman, hosted a Scottish Cailey, or dance. Almost all the students participated, and we had a pretty good time learning the Virginia wheel (which didn’t seem very Scottish), and the Flying Scotsman, with a few NA dances like the Macarena and Cha-Cha slide mixed in.
It is now Sunday morning, right after a great sermon on brotherly love. I’m looking forward to possibly calling home today, and maybe uploading some stuff to facebook/the blog during a pretty relaxed afternoon.

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