#ukiuceap

Well Bobcats, 

Here ya go! My official last blog about being abroad.  I planned to visit Oxford for a while now, and since finals are officially over, I decided to take the advantage and plan a trip there. It was amazing.

A few buildings inspired many of the scenes in Harry Potter, and c’mon CS Lewis and other famous authors and poets went to Oxford! I met a lot of really nice students, and look out for free tours! It was 2 hours, and every minute was fascinating. 

I also gave a man 50 pents since he was struggling to pay for his order at a nearby cafe in Oxford, and it just so happens that he was a professor at Oxford...he gave my friend and I an exclusive tour of his college (Since there are 38 colleges in Oxford) and we were also given the chance to go inside a library!

Talk about good karma right?

Anyway, I want to end with the fact that Studying Abroad has been an amazing experience, and I’ve learned so much by being here...if anything my only regret is not having done studying abroad earlier in my college years. Now remember, if you do have any questions, comments, or concerns regarding UCM, or studying abroad in the UK, definitely ASK. I will from time to time check tumblr and twitter :)!

XOXO, Bobcats!

Hello Bobcats!

I honestly tried really hard to see what I could make for breakfast today...With finals and all, it was pretty hard to even have time to go to the grocery store.

So here’s what I made: 1 fried egg, 2 slices of ham, tomatoes, and some Heinz amazing beans, with mini pancakes with blueberries and bananas :)

And of course, I have to have my tea!

This all took about 15 minutes to make...it was so rewarding!  These were all bought from Sainsbury’s...something like how in America...we have Raley’s and whole foods, but the quality of their products are simply amazing~ 

Recently, I’ve been tweeting about fun facts about the United Kingdom...and this is where I got all of them <3 

Some of you enjoyed them a lot more than I did, so I thought that I would share them! And oh my goodness Bobcats! I’m graduating soon!!!! I never thought that I’d be here today....a Bobcat, studying abroad in the UK and traveling around Europe...I definitely DO NOT take this for granted at all. 

I hope that you all have been enjoying my posts, and definitely ASK questions if you have any, and if I can’t answer any I’m pretty sure any of my fellow student workers at the Students First Center would be HAPPY to help :)!

Check them out here : http://studentsfirst.ucmerced.edu/studentstaff

HEY BOBCATS! Just thought that there are never enough fun facts about the UK, so I want to share them as much as possible! Their really interesting, and I found some of them pretty odd! Check them out, or not, the choice is yours :)!

North East

1. According to British law, it’s still perfectly legal to kill any Scotsman who enters the city of York if he happens to be carrying a bow and arrow.

2. Tyneside’s Angel of the North statue is made from 200 tonnes of steel, has a wingspan of 54 metres, and is 20 metres tall – that’s the height of four double decker buses.

3. Star Carr near Scarborough in North Yorkshire is home to what is believed to be the remains of Britain’s oldest house. The structure would have been 3.5 metres wide, and dates from around 10,000 years ago, when Britain was still joined to the rest of Europe.  

North West

4. People from Liverpool are often called ‘Scousers’. The name is short for ‘Lobscouse’, which was a Scandinavian stew eaten by the sailors who visited the port. Local families adopted the dish, and the name stuck.

5. Manchester United have won the FA Cup more often than any other team. However, they’ve also lost more FA Cup Finals than any team except Everton!

6. You can view a very special type of colouring pencil in Keswick at the Cumberland Pencil Museum – at nearly eight metres, it’s the longest in the world.

South East

7. ‘Big Ben’ doesn’t refer to the famous clock at London’s Houses of Parliament, but to the bell inside. The building itself is called the Elizabeth Tower.

8. In St George’s churchyard in Gravesend you can see a life size statue of princess Pocahontas, the daughter of a Native American chieftan, who is buried in the grounds. She was visiting the area with her English husband, but sadly died of a fever in 1617 before she could return to America.

9. East Peckham in Kent has a unique claim to fame: it’s where the first-ever speeding ticket was issued, in January 1896. Walter Arnold was spotted doing 8mph in a 2mph zone, but was easily apprehended by a policeman riding a bicycle.

South West

10. In 1886, Sarah Ann Henley threw herself off Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge after a row with her boyfriend, falling 75 metres on to the mud bank below. She was saved by her billowing crinoline petticoats, which helped to slow her fall, and lived on into her eighties.

11. The last ‘witches’ to be hanged in Britain were three women from Bideford in Devon, in 1682. There was no evidence against them, but other villages accused them of sending the devil to their enemies’ houses, in the form of a magpie and a tabby cat.

12. Athelhampton House, a fifteenth-century manor in Dorset, is said to be one of the most haunted places in Britain. Its ‘ghosts’ include two men fighting a duel, a black-robed priest, a grey lady, a cat and a pet monkey.

Scotland

13. The one-and-a-half mile journey from Westray to Papa Westray in the Orkney islands is the shortest scheduled flight in the world. The trip takes less than two minutes.

14. Built in 1842, the Hamilton Mausoleum in South Lanarkshire has the longest-lasting echo of any man-made structure in the world – a whole 15 seconds.

15. In 1507 Stirling Castle was the scene of Scotland’s first recorded attempt at flight, when scientist John Damian launched himself from the battlements on feathered wings. Unfortunately, he crashed straight into a dunghill and broke his leg.

Wales

16. When it was built in 1286, Harlech Castle was on the coast. Today, it’s half a mile inland. That’s because the land the castle is built on is slowly rising, as it springs back into position after being weighed down during the Ice Age.

17. Bala Lake in Gwynedd is home to a rare fish called the gwyniad, which is found nowhere else on the planet. It’s thought its ancestors were trapped in the waters there at the end of the last Ice Age.

18. A cave in Aberystwyth was once home to the Crown jewels. They were moved there during World War II to protect them from German bombs, along with a copy of the Magna Carta and other valuable documents.

East

19. If you’re visiting Norfolk, watch out for jaspers (wasps), and try not to step on any dodmans (snails). The county has its own words for many things, including ants (pishamires), ladybirds (bishy barney bees) and money (kewter).  

20. The skies above Lavenham in Suffolk inspired the song, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. The words were written in 1806 by 23-year-old poet Jane Taylor, who lived in Shilling Street in the village.

21. The thousand-year-old Bowthorpe Oak in Manthorpe, Lincolnshire, is the largest living oak tree in Britain. It measures over 12 metres around the trunk, and 39 people can fit comfortably inside its hollow interior.

Northern Ireland

22. Ballygally Castle in County Antrim is said to be haunted by the ghost of Lady Isobel Shaw, who knocks on doors at night and then disappears. Legend has it that Lady Isobel was locked in her room by her husband and starved, until she leapt to her death from a window.

23. Northern Ireland has more young people than anywhere else in the UK. Children under 16 make up nearly a quarter of the population.

24. Northern Ireland’s Tayto crisps are made at a 500-year-old castle in County Armagh. The brand’s best-selling flavor is cheese and onion; it’s so popular that earlier this year, Tayto even brought out a cheese-and-onion-flavoured chocolate bar!

Midlands

25. In the 14th century babies in Herefordshire were baptised in cider, on the grounds that it was cleaner than water.

26. If you visit the graveyard of St Chad's Church in Shrewsbury, you might be excited to find the grave of Ebenezer Scrooge. Unfortunately, it’s not real. The gravestone is a prop left over from the 1984 movie 'A Christmas Carol', which was filmed in the local area.

27. Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK, but there are 30 other places called Birmingham around the world. There’s even a crater on the moon with the same name!

Current mood...

Finals has been pretty crazy for me...let’s also get one thing straight...the British do not mess around with their finals. 

I was also curious why everyone would make plans to go out starting from Monday nights - Tuesday nights and even on Thursday nights, and now I do. It’s to let off some steam. I tend to go night running, go out to take photos of some of the parts of Bristol I’ve never been to, and even cook meals that I know will be like an incentive to me.