Reflecting Emily... my life at Calvin College

an easy contentedness

As I sit here in my dining room tonight, I am content. My housemates and I have just returned from a grocery shopping excursion. We are never reminded that we are fairly poor people more acutely than when we are attempting to have enough money to buy decent groceries. We all feel the need to put healthy food into our bodies, but it is expensive! We try to save money in other ways so that we can afford fresh fruit and vegetables, lean meats, and whole wheat cereals, pastas, and breads. These sorts of things taste better and fill us up faster, even if they do hit the wallet a little hard in the check-out line. So it’s a sacrifice we make. We don’t want to fall into the very tempting trap of buying simply the cheapest things at the risk of compromising our health. Hopefully later this summer our garden will begin to supplement our vegetable requirements, but the garden isn’t flourishing quite as well as we had originally hoped.

Resettling

I’ve been back in my Grand Rapids “home” for almost two weeks now, and it has been something of an adjustment period. First of all, there was the jet lag which had to be dealt with. That was easy: the day after I got back I went to bed early and slept for twelve hours. Adjustment complete. Secondly, I had to get used to new housemates. The living situation I was in all last year seemed so easy and comfortable. We all knew each other well, having lived together for two years in the dorms prior to moving off-campus. It was not really any work to make everyone feel included and a part of our non-biological family, the houseloves. This summer, however, only two of us housemates are originals, me and Moriah. The other three people in our house are not houseloves. Thankfully we all have a decent amount of free time in which to hang out and build community, so the adjustment hasn’t been too difficult, but at first it felt a bit disorienting to wake up and find someone different using the bathroom or the kitchen and not know quite how to relate to them.

Tapping My Roots

After the class was over and the group left to return home, I had made arrangements to stay behind in Scotland for an extra week. One other girl, Jessica, was staying with me, and we were going to spend the time visiting my family, none of whom I had seen more recently than 2000 - eight years ago. We were received with warm Highland hospitality and such graciousness that we were made to feel as though we were the ones doing them a favor by staying with them! I hope to someday have developed an easy welcoming spirit similar to theirs. I also wouldn’t mind being timeless, as I found them to be. It seemed as though they hadn’t changed at all in the past eight years. My great-aunt Nanda was just as spunky and knowledgeable as I remembered, and having dinner with her the first night that the group was gone was a definite highlight.

Edinburgh - how DO you say that?

My dad’s side of the family is Scottish, so the final stop on our UK tour - Scotland - was something I was particularly looking forward to. It was an overcast and misty day when we took the ferry from Belfast over to Stranraer on the southwest coast of Scotland.

Most of us spent the ferry ride doing our final transcriptions from Ireland. We were in groups of four or five and each group had to turn in one transcription from each region. Everyone was charged with collecting two samples in every location, and then out of the eight or ten that our group had, we would choose one to transcribe as a group. I’m sure the people sitting near us were curious as to why there were five groups of girls listening to recordings of people saying “When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, it acts like a prism and forms a rainbow,” and then discussing whether that was really a schwa or if it was stressed enough to count as a caret. And was that “th” sound voiced or not? Did our speaker make a “w” in between “two” and “ends” or was it a glottal stop? These were the pressing issues of the day.

Ireland

I apologize for not continuing to update this blog while I finished my interim course. I’ll do my best to recreate my experiences now, complete with pictures (check back to the posts from London and Wales for photos and more details). We spent the whole day traveling to Derry, Northern Ireland on Wednesday, the 28th of May. Our first leg was a train from Llandudno to Holyhead, where we took the ferry across the Irish Sea to Dublin. We had initially planned to spend that night in Dublin, but finding adequate lodging proved impossible, so instead our group was met at the port by a coach and a driver named Seamus. Our bus was actually decorated with an 8-year-old’s rendition of a Dutch Windmill (I guess it won some contest, so it was displayed on the side of this minibus), but it was comforting for some of the Dutch-er girls in our group, and funny for all of us. Here we were in Ireland, and our bus - which was named Gus, by the way - had a painting of a windmill on it. Dutchness simply permeates our world.

Wales

By the time we left London, I was more than ready to go. It was exciting at first, but then it got overwhelming and just drained my energy. The city is so big, so busy, and so stressful! It was fun to see all the sights, but I was ready for something a little calmer by the end of the week. Our Friday day-trip to Oxford provided a bit of a rest, although it was cold and rainy so not as nice as we had hoped. I really enjoyed seeing the town though, and hearing about all the history of the place. We had a lot of free time to poke around and see what we wanted to.

London!

London is everything I had expected and more. I was lucky enough to sleep straight through our flight from Detroit to London Gatwick (thank you, Dramamine!), so when we got here I was not even tired. We took a couple of trains to get to our hotel, which is in Paddington, so not near the center of the city at all, but right on a very useful Underground line. Julia and I have also been putting our public transportation experience to use, getting accustomed to London’s bus and tube routes remarkably quickly. We can already look at the street where we are and say, “Oh, we just need to grab the 14 bus from here to take us where we want to go.” So that’s been an easy transition.

Starting Out

I honestly thought when I returned from Hungary a year and a half ago that I would not travel again until I was a well-established professional who could afford such luxuries. I am neither well-established nor able to afford more traveling, and yet, this evening at 5:15 I will be heading back across the Atlantic for a little more acculturation. Since I switched my major sort of at the last minute last spring, it is going to be difficult for me to get all the necessary classes in and still graduate on time (which is a goal I definitely hold). I need a speech pathology elective, and wouldn’t you know it, they don’t offer those during interim if you stay on campus! So this past January I took it easy academically and studied the great sport of gymnastics for a couple hours per week instead of taking an actual interim course. Now Calvin will still let me take three more interim credits, and the only speech pathology interim happens to be going to the UK and Ireland, leaving today. I’m starting my day off with some Lucky Charms cereal, getting me in the right spirit to go along.

Making History

Ok, so it wasn’t actually ME that was making history, but I felt like a part of history-in-the-making last night when I went to a rally for Barack Obama. I’ve never been to a big political rally before, and it was so exciting! Being from Iowa, the nation’s first caucus every election year, I’ve been to hear my fair share of politicians speak. The biggest name I’ve seen before is probably Al Gore, and this past Christmas break I was able to see both Bill Richardson and Mike Huckabee. Opposite ends of the political spectrum, I know, but at this point in my life I just want to be educated about where everyone stands and who they are. I’m not so much a straight ticket voter as I am someone who tries to figure out just who best aligns with my views on the issues.

The Big Race

I am not, nor have I ever been a runner. Somehow, almost all of my friends here at Calvin are. My housemates run, some more regularly than others, my boyfriend and his housemates run; it seems like everyone I’m friends with runs! One of the highlights of their running year is the Grand Rapids Riverbank Run the first weekend of each May. I went along my freshman year, but I wasn’t able to go last spring so I didn’t want to miss it this year. I love being the one there for my friends to hold their sweatshirts while they run and cheer them on when they finish.