Carrot cake, Germany, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Anglo-Saxon church...this is the basis of this post. I have to write it down now so I don't forget what I have to talk about.

First, the carrot cake. I made carrot cake yesterday for my flatmates. The cake turned out great. The icing....not so much. Nan if you're reading this please tell me what I did wrong. I followed the recipe but the icing was sooooo runny! As you can see in the picture, the icing has fallen off of the cake and pooled in the pan. So yeah, not exactly as planned. It tastes good still but I'm not sure how to explain what happened cuz Nan's icing is always so high off the cake. We're just kind of eating the cake now and drizzling the icing on top, which works pretty well too. Also, you'll notice that the cake's a little wonky-looking. That's because nobody had cakepans and by the time I realized this the store was closed. So, I used 2 different sizes of square/rectangular pans and then had to cut a chunk off the the rectangular cake so it would fit on top of the square cake. Oh well. It's done and no one's complaining. The presentation isn't the greatest but it tastes fine.


So, the big news for the week is that I've booked some trips!! Me, Elle, Tom and Erin (who are all from Mac) are going to Germany/Amsterdam at the beginning of December. I've been browsing the internet for cheap flights cuz if you wanna find good deals you have to check quite often as the prices are always changing. So, I found tickets to and from Dusseldorf, Germany for 7p each! (That's about 15 cents!) Now we still had to add flight taxes, which because of gas prices are pretty expensive right now, so it was about an extra 30 quid (slang for the British Pound) each for the return ticket in taxes, but still that's pretty good...65 bucks approx to get to Germany and back? I'm not complaining! Why Germany? Well, my Dad's cousin, Sylvie, who we visited the weekend before Mom and Dad left here, called me last weekend to see how I was doing and mentioned that almost every city in Germany has these amazing Christmas Markets during the Advent period that have been going on for hundreds of years. So I figured it would be nice to go...
So we're flying out of London on the evening of Dec.1 and flying back the morning of Dec.5. So we get 3 solid days there. We're planning on renting a car when we get there cuz Cologne, another German city, is close by and Amsterdam is only just over 2 hours away by car. So we'll probably drive up to Amsterdam on the 3rd and stay over night there. I'm so excited though...it'll be good!

Okay next...Edinburgh...and York I guess I can talk about too. The Student's Union puts on these "Give it a go" trips that you can buy tickets for, and basically they just load up a couple buses and take some students to different places. So, I signed up for the trip to York, which is a really old English city about an hour away from here(we're learning about York in our Anglo-Saxon class...it was around at least in the 700s). Mom and Dad went there and said it was really beautiful so I'm looking forward to seeing lots of cute tudor houses and there's a really old cathedral there too. So that's next saturday, the 22nd. Then I signed up for the trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, which we go to the last weekend in November (the weekend before my Germany trip...haha). We leave on the Friday afternoon and come back sometime on the Sunday.

And speaking of old Anglo-Saxon things, my class went to see the All Saints' Church at Ledsham on Wednesday (about 10 miles out of Leeds). It was built sometime in the 7th or 8th century. I felt like a total tourist when we went though cuz I was taking so many pictures and other people were talking to the prof about archaeological or historical aspects of the church. I just thought it looked nice. I took some video of the inside of the church that you can watch here...it's a bit shaky and dark cuz there wasn't much light inside. Our prof was explaining to us about how in later centuries the church was altered and fixed up and stuff, so when you look at the pictures you will see that there is dark stone the makes up most of the church, and then there's a lighter coloured stone at the top of the steeple...all the dark stone is from the anglo-saxon period...the other stuff is newer. I took a picture of this hanging they had of the Lord's Prayer...and I thought it was kind of funny cuz they spelt trespasses as "trefpaffes". Where we say "And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us", it says on the hanging, "And forgive us our trefpaffes as we forgive them that trefpafs againft us". It just sounds really dim-witted kind of if you try to read it out loud. It reminds me of how that pirate with the wooden eye from Pirates of the Caribbean would've talked. lol...and then I took a picture of this door on the outside that was really cool-looking. Careful though, it's a blurry picture and it hurts your eyes to focus. It kind of reminds me of a mini version of the door at the Mines of Moria in Fellowship of the Ring....and yes, once again, everything I say relates to a movie. We had a block party in our flat on Friday night and I was supplying the music from my laptop...and I never realized how much music I downloaded or bought because it was part of a soundtrack for a movie or television show...

Ooh while I'm on the topic of things I've never realized...I was walking in the city-centre on Friday (cuz I still have fridays off til the first one in November) and they have this open-air art exhibition in Millenium Square called "Earth from the Air" which is a series of photographs taken from the air all over the world. At one end of the exhibition they had a huge floor map of the world that you could walk on and stuff if you took your shoes off...and it was there to point out where all these different pictures had be taken for the exhibit. And I mean, I KNOW Canada's big. But when I saw it on this big map I realized how big it really was. Maybe it's because I'm now staying in quite a small country...I'm not sure, but ya, it's pretty big (this is where everyone goes, "Yeah, well, duh!")

I uploaded some new pictures of my flatmates and I from when we went to a place called The Wardrobe last Monday night. It had a jam night so there were just random people going on stage and playing jazz music together. It was nice, but I'm afraid I can't listen to jazz music for too long before it all starts to sound the same and starts to bore me.
Here's pictures of Sophie, Katherine and Rich, Rich, Me, and Katherine, Rich and I. Haha...still no pics of Matt! I'll get one someday. We don't know where that kid is half the time. He's always off visiting someone upstairs or downstairs or in another block or something...