Monday, April 30, 2012

Pants, Pincurls, and Travel

A quick photo update of my travels this semester: I've managed to make it to Bath, Stonehenge, Isle of Man (for archery club!), and Belgium! A combination of planning ahead (so as to minimize paper-writing conflict, though there is always some), student rates, and overly optimistic organization forecasts are mostly responsible for this.

Of course, for the vintage side of this blog, these won't offer much, except for my comment (below) on the experience of trying to maintain pincurls whilst hostel hopping - my travel clothing is pretty unexciting. On my trip to Belgium, I actually got pants for the first time since high school!! It was freezing cold there, windy, and it hailed multiple times - tights simply were not doing it for me, so I somewhat reluctantly gave in and got some cheap pants on sale at H&M. To my surprise, I actually really enjoyed/am enjoying them! It was liberating to be able to move about without constant shivering, not to mention not having to worry about big gusts of wind revealing my underwear (knickers if I want to make myself chuckle) to the world. I've worn them a few times since getting back two weeks ago - the weather here has been atrocious, raining constantly and really high winds, and on late-night trips to coffee shops for studying or mid-day runs to the grocery, since I ride a bicycle it is so much easier! I've been getting really tired of the one-hand-keeping-skirt-out-of-gears-the-other-one-steering move.

One more thing about pants: this whole "pants" vs "trousers" thing is really throwing me off here. As my fellow New World-ers know, trousers are fancy-style-pants in American English, whereas here trousers simply means pants. And pants are knickers, underwear, "panties" (uuuurghhh what a horrendous word, but I've included it for the sake of clarity) over in Brit-land. Completely forgetting this, I was talking to a guy I had just met the other day (actually the night before leaving for Belgium), and it came up in conversation that I didn't own any pants and hadn't worn them in ages. He got this really weird look on his face, and I thought maybe he just really hated skirts, but then he was like "Oh, I had to translate that - you mean trousers." Oops. It was a bit awkward but it did give me a laugh, the idea of unintentionally telling strangers that I don't own any underwear.

Anyway, on to the pictures:

My wonderful friend Victoria in Bath.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Euphonic Earworms: Undecided

I love this song, and it has so many wonderful covers, that I'm undecided as to which I like most! (See what I did there...)

Chick Webb's Orchestra and Ella Fitzgerald. Okay, this may just be my favorite.

The Dandridge Sisters. A very interesting cover, I love their harmonies!

Django Reinhardt, vocals by Beryl Davis. I just discovered this version from a friend and it's been playing on my iPod a lot lately!

- Emily

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

McCall's Magazine 1934

More thirties magic from McCall's Magazine to make me wish I had (read: could afford) a personal seamstress. Taken from my university's archives as usual, but this time I only had my iphone, so that would account for the fuzziness.