First Days at Work

Looking out to the Elizabethan garden from the staircase up to Nina's office

So far things are going well! I work for Nina in the Field Studies (aka Academic Travel) office Mon/Tues/Fri, so I've only been with her so far; tomorrow is Day 1 of helping Dr. Scott. Nina's office is among all the faculty offices which occupy the top floor of one side of the castle.

It's been great so far- a lot of it is very similar to things that I have done before purely for fun (looking up destination info)! It's mostly been researching: "this class is going to London and has free time in Kensington, make them a handout of attractions and restaurants they can visit with opening times, prices, and walking directions"; "find some good cafes near the hostel in Brussels where the law students will be staying"; "write a handout guide for the students about how to get around London using public transport" etc etc etc.

One of my bigger projects that I mentioned previously was working on the wishlist of field studies for the Travel Writing field school: today I finished that and made an Excel budget for it, which was fun and easier than I expected.

Nina's office is very small (I can't get in or out of my seat at my desk when the door is open) and I am encouraged (though do anyways by default) to sit in on all of Nina's meetings. It's been really fun listening to her planning sessions with various professors (including my former art history prof), and hearing all the questions that students ask her about planning their own travels or requesting special accommodations of any sort on preplanned field studies. Sometimes I can help answer- one student today was asking about planning an independent trip to Bath, and since I've done that (not alone, but independent from the castle; with 5 friends in 2011) and been there twice, I was able to give her some advice.

Here are some photos I've taken over the last few days:

Sunset and Bader Hall

Morning view from my window

in the castle courtyard

heading to the library

plants for sale on a cart outside the garden entrance

Elizabethan garden

Elizabethan garden

standing in the Shakespeare garden

visitor centre

(Mostly) Quiet Sunny Day

Another day of nice weather at the castle. Technically I had today off, although I spent a few hours getting started on projects Dr. Scott gave me. The first was getting acquainted with the East Sussex Records Office online catalogue and British Newspaper Archive and searching for castle records; the second was going to the visitor centre to make notes about changes to implement. I hadn't had much time to look around the visitor centre when Dr. Scott briefly took me there on Friday, so it was fun to have a closer look. I learned all sorts of interesting trivia- I'll write some of it in a later post :)

This evening was the first (of what will probably be many, if experience serves) fire alarm false alarm. The smoke detectors are very sensitive here and it's always been something like a hair straightener left plugged in or a kettle being used that apparently sets it off; knowing this, remembering how often it's happened in the past, and seeing as the students have arrived so recently, I knew it was a very safe bet that it was a false alarm and so made time to grab a coat, shoes, book, and my room key before heading out the door. Unfortunately, many of the students outside were missing at least one of these things (especially room keys!).

Orientations, Walking, and Cemeteries

Farm entrance on the road to the village

Today I did a few hours of research for Nina in the morning (still working on the Travel Writing field school field study wishlist from yesterday) and then helped her with the Field Studies orientations in the afternoon. This is orientation weekend for all 100 newly-arrived students: today was admin stuff (intros to field studies, the library, student services, the gardens, musicians in residence, plus lots of paperwork) and then tomorrow they're gone all day on a bus tour of the local area (Eastbourne, Birling Gap, etc). 

There wasn't much to actually do to help Nina; she did three separate sessions (one for the regular summer students, one for the law students, and one for the Global Health program students) and I just handed out info sheets and handled the safety waiver signature process. I also got to answer some questions, since Nina introduced me each time as her intern and a former castle student. 

At dinner I got to meet the two Queens research fellowship students: as I mentioned, one of them is working for Dr. Scott. They both arrived yesterday and will be here until early August like me; the last summer students leave on July 18, so it's nice to know I'll have some company in those quiet last few weeks! Like me, they both fall through the cracks a bit here, in that they're not students but not staff. They asked me to show them where a few places in the castle were (library, pub etc) so we did a quick castle tour after dinner, which was fun. 

Since I was free after dinner and it was nice out, I walked to the village in the evening (my second time today; I go in the mornings too). Here are a couple of photos:

There are a few public walking trails like the one in the above photo which branch off from the road. I don't know where they go, and I look forward to exploring them in the coming months. I'm hesitant to do so right now because they're very narrow and uneven, whereas the route to the village is a flat paved road. I'm allowed to walk on my sprained ankle and weight-bearing isn't a problem, but I have no ready access to non-emergency medical care here so I really want to be responsible and not risk re-injury. I still can't dance because I can't point my toes on that foot properly or bear much weight when my heel is off the ground; so, since walking is one of the few forms of exercise I can do (my usual summer running "learn to run 10K" routine, along with pretty much everything else, is still off-limits), I'm trying to do a lot of it (hence the 8 miles of village roundtrips today).

On my way back to the castle after my evening walk, I wandered into the All Saints Herstmonceux churchyard. It's a beautiful little area just 2 minutes from Bader Hall. The gravestones range from barely-readable 1800s ones to 2012 burials. I find it really interesting to read the inscriptions and learn a little bit about the people who have made up the local community.

Speaking of graveyards, Dr. Scott told me something really interesting yesterday: the next three years of summer archaeology field school at the castle (2014-2016) will be devoted to excavating at the Pevensey church. Pevensey is a nearby town (see my earlier posts about Pevensey Castle) and their church has run out of room in their graveyard; they need to expand, but they're situated on top of/adjacent to an Anglo-Saxon church, and this needs to be excavated before new burials can be interred at the site (so, they won't be excavating burials, just the Anglo-Saxon church next to the current cemetery to clear the way for its expansion). Anyways, it sounds like such a cool project!

Jumping In

Today was crammed with good things. I'll start from the beginning:

My room has three windows since it's in a corner at the end of a wing, and they all look out onto the fields behind Bader Hall. I loved this view when I was here in Fall 2011, and so the location of my current room is a nice bonus :)

Speaking of old rooms, the leftmost two windows on the bottom floor are Kelsey's room, and the two second-to-left windows are my former room.

I had some time before my meeting with Nina today, so I went for a walk to the village in the morning.

I was supposed to just be meeting Nina today, since Dr. Scott was going to be away, but his schedule changed and so I was able to meet with both of them. The three of us had lunch together to sort out some details: right now, the plan is that I'll be working for Nina M/T/F and Dr. Scott W/Th. However, it's very much not a 9-5 M-F kind of job (for example, tomorrow is a Saturday and I'm spending the afternoon helping Nina with Field Studies orientation presentations), and especially with Dr. Scott it'll be more flexible, where he'll often just give me projects and I'll work on them ~15 hours a week, but it can be whenever I want. 

Archaeology room under the side bridge (storage/processing area: trowels, tape, bags, buckets, cleaning area, etc)

After lunch, Dr. Scott took me to the Visitor Centre, Archives, and archaeology room to tell me more about some of the things I'll be doing. It was a lot to take in and nothing's set in stone; there is so much to do, and what I'll actually do and when will depend on several different factors. He has a full-time research assistant from Queens, Stephanie, who just arrived today, and is also supervising 2 Masters students from Waterloo university who are doing theses on aspects of the castle's history (they're arriving in a few weeks). 

Some of the projects I'll potentially be doing for Dr. Scott:

- cataloguing recent donations to the archives

- archival research with the East Sussex Records Office to update the visitor centre displays

- rewrite and reorganize existing display text in the visitor centre (right now there are headings like "Demolition", "Castle Reconstruction" etc but then the accompanying photos and text don't fit the heading at all)

- cataloguing backlog of archaeological finds from excavations this spring at Brickyard Field (18th century house site on the castle grounds)

- lending a hand on research trips to local archives and/or London with Dr. Scott and Stephanie or the grad students

- digging! The archaeology field school will be digging just at one site (Mota Piece, the medieval site from last year; they're not doing Beechtree Field, the ill-yielding Roman site we also dug), and for the excavation week in July my job will solely be to help with the excavation, both by digging myself and by assisting Dr. Scott and Sue (the archaeologist who supervised the program last year too) with plans, tools, and admin

- writing handouts for the archaeology students about sites they visit on field study trips

- processing finds from this year's archaeology field school (cleaning, cataloguing)

- assisting with the Canada Abroad conference at the castle July 30-31: helping plan the banquet menu, writing name tags, sending out flyers, and "chairing a session if you want to" (I have NO idea what that would entail and he moved right on, so I'll be inquiring a lot more about that sometime soon)

Elizabethan Garden

From my favourite bench in the rose garden (the garden will bloom in June apparently)

After talking with Dr. Scott, I went back to Nina's office to get a few hours of work in before dinner. For now I have my own desk and computer in her office, but in two weeks Nina's other (full-time) summer intern is arriving and I'll be sharing with her. My first task is researching field studies for the Travel Writing field school being held this June-July: the field school professor submitted a wishlist of day trips and end-of-term-trip stops, and I have to look up prices, times, attractions, accommodations etc and figure how much of it the field school can actually do. 

Another of my duties for both Nina and Dr. Scott will be accompanying a variety of field study and overnight trips. Details aren't confirmed so I'm not going to write about them just yet, but I am really excited- I wasn't expecting to get to go along on any trips, and the ones they're sending me on sound fantastic. 

I met some of the newly-arrived students at dinner (there's about 100 arriving today for this term, which runs until mid-June) and then read in the garden and walked around taking photos for a while. I've been lucky with the weather, it's beautiful outside!

Arrival

Central court at the Victoria & Albert Museum

I've arrived and all is well! After a nine-hour overnight flight, I arrived in London today at 11:45am (3:45am Vancouver time). There were some long tense moments at the UK Border Agency checkpoint when the officer was scrutinizing my letter from the castle very closely, and after asking me several questions said nothing for a couple of minutes while typing into his computer. But eventually I was cleared, and then it was an easy trip by tube into central London from the airport.

I left my suitcase at the baggage storage facility at the London Victoria tube/train station, picked up my ticket for my train to the castle, and phoned the castle's local taxi company to book a taxi to the castle from the train station in Polegate.

The afternoon was spent at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I'd been here twice before, but only briefly on each occasion: once with my history class, and once with mom last summer. This was still a major museum that I'd barely explored so it was top priority for today! The museum is "the world's greatest" museum of art and design, covering a wide variety of materials, countries, and time periods.

The Ardabil Carpet

In addition to generally seeing more of the museum's galleries, I specifically wanted to see the Ardabil Carpet. This is the oldest dated carpet in the world! The history seminar I was in this term (Colonialism and Material Culture) dealt a lot with material culture theory and museums, and this artifact was mentioned by our professor during a class discussion. It sounded so interesting that once I knew I would have some time in London, I had to go see it for myself.

Ardabil Carpet

MOA (the Museum of Anthropology at UBC) is the only other museum I can remember where
some of the cases have these same strips of light dots behind the case joinings.
It makes for a very distinctive effect! [These are used in the Multiversity (World Ethnography)
cases at MOA, and the Silver (material) cases at the V&A, pictured above].

Nowadays I like trying to be aware in museums of things like how displays are arranged and grouped both physically and thematically, whether interactive elements are included in exhibits and what form these take, the use of multimedia in the galleries, and how information is being presented to the visitor. I feel like I can engage more with museums than I could when I was, say, 18, due to a few different factors:

1) Often the subject matter of a museum or display is something that I've studied at UBC

2) My 2 study-abroad experiences in England at ages 19-20 tripled the number of museums I'd ever visited, exposing me to a much greater variety which allowed for interesting comparisons

3) I learned a lot during my internship at the Richmond Museum this winter! 

Speaking of the Richmond Museum, I couldn't resist taking a photo of the interactive component of the Silver gallery at the V&A, because it was called a "Discovery Area" just like at the Richmond Museum :)

Silver artifact for visitors to touch

Silver gallery 

In the Silver gallery

Stairs to the Silver gallery

More photos from the V&A:

I mentioned this in a post about the V&A last year, but I really like their
system of providing context/historical information in a gold chunk at the
left of a display, followed by a strip of individual artifact labels thematically united
by their connection to the information set out in gold. 

Islamic galleries; Ardabil Carpet in the background.

I stayed until the museum closed at 5:45, and then had plenty of time before my train to the castle at 7:45. So, instead of taking the tube back, I walked, setting out in the general direction of the train station and just reorienting myself as needed when I came across a "you are here" London map sign, which are very prevalent. It was a nice walk through Kensington, Chelsea, and a little bit of Westminster. Everything went fine with the train, taxi, and checking in at Bader Hall at the castle. Here's my new room:

It was pitch black when I got here so I can't see anything out the windows, but I know this building pretty well and can tell roughly where I am, and I think I'll have a nice view out my window to take pictures of! I'm at the very end of the hall in the non-student wing (that's why the room looks a bit different from my previous rooms). There's an ensuite washroom, which is nice, and there's also a kettle and TV which will be entirely wasted on me I think!

I've been up for 32 hours now so I'm going to bed, but best wishes from England and I'll be taking many more photos tomorrow in daylight.