A timewastey kind of day

This one was actually published in Coffee Obsession, Woods Hole, MA. Ahhh...the wonder of free wireless.

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I feel that today will be a day of wasting time. I am currently in the Beetlebung café, Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard, waiting for a couple of hours to go by before I get on the ferry. The original plan was that I would get the 12 o’clock ferry, get the bus from Woods Hole and be in Worcester by about half five, at just the right time to get picked up on the way to section three of my east coast tour. However, it would appear that this is not going to be the case; I’ll have to wait a couple of hours in Worcester this evening even if I get the last bus, so I guess there’s no rush. Now, I know that certain people read my blog so I will not go deeply into my feelings about this latest change of plan. I’ll just have to go with the flow, use the time to catch up on some blogging and be grateful that anyone’s picking me up at all.

So, New Haven, Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Very, very different places. New Haven, for the Brits, has been the home of Yale University for a few hundred years and the home of Emma Llanso for the past few weeks. Emma didn’t have anything to do, bar getting a library card and unpacking her stuff, before her orientation* to Yale Law School on Wednesday, so I took the opportunity to steal a couple of nights free accommodation and sample the delights of 30c Dunkin’ Donuts. New Haven is a strange place. The Yale buildings are all extremely Oxbridgey**, with quads, gargoyles and fancy gates, but New Haven itself is a much bigger and generally much taller city. The juxtaposition of the two feels very strange to someone who’s been to Oxford so often; it feels like someone took Balliol and dumped it in the centre of Sheffield or Newcastle. Bizarre. But nice. Plus I got to spend time with Emma, who is possibly the only person I know who appreciates Doctor Who in the same way I do***.

Martha’s Vineyard is very different again, but possibly the most English place I’ve been to in this country. It is a lot, LOT like East Anglia; flat with a mixture of woods, reed marshes, ponds and beaches. Even the towns feel a lot like English seaside towns. It was even raining and/or grey for a good portion of the time. This, combined with being on my own for most of the day, contributed to the first real homesickness I’ve felt here. Please, family members, do not get uppity about this. I have been missing people all the time I’ve been here, but there’s always been so much going on and it’s been so much fun that it’s been easy to get distracted. This week, though, is probably the first time I’ve thought “I want to go home now” without any qualifiers. I guess that sounds a little selfish, still wanting to be here and leave people coping with Nana being ill and such, but it’s been true.

The Vineyard is a lovely place though. It’s been nice to get out of the town/city for a while and I’ve been able to get a fair amount of walking in in preparation for the hike up Mount Washington this weekend. Staying at the hostel has also been an eye-opening experience. I don’t know whether it’s just the Vineyard or whether all hostels are similar, but the people here have been very, very different from the sort of people I’ve been hanging around with all summer, and indeed the sort of people I’d normally choose to hang around with. Lot’s of people seem be vegetarian/vegan, in touch with their “souls”, practicing meditation/yoga/both, into “circles” (the gratitude circle, the deep thought circle) and/or Buddhist. Now, there’s nothing wrong with deep conversation, there’s nothing wrong with being aware of how you feel about things, but when people start saying things like “I started kite surfing because I felt that my soul was telling me to fly” I feel that perhaps my usual casual conversation topics (Physics, sci-fi, football, cups of tea etc) might not be appropriate. That isn’t to say that there weren’t some nice people there, on the contrary, everyone there was very friendly and I even managed to find people to go out for a few pints with. It’s just been a reminder that slightly geeky, usually science students are not the only people in the world, which I guess can only be a good thing.

*where she will be “oriented”. Sounds like she’ll be taken to South East Asia, but I guess it really means she’ll be orientated. Ah, the English language.
**I’m guessing this was the point really
***I could mention the fact that we had a bit of a mini-marathon, watching all of the second half of the Christopher Ecclestone series in one go, but I’d probably get mocked