Where to begin?

The view from my room (Stables 32), overlooking the court-
yard which three of the four residences give on to.

It's hard to believe that I've only been here two days--and at the same time, it's hard to believe that it's already been two days! After an easy trip to London from DC via Atlanta, I caught a train to Chichester and hired a taxi to get to West Dean. The first few days so far have been a lot of administrative things and getting my bearings, like becoming accustomed to the meals schedule and attempting to find time to get registered with the local doctor and obtain a library card and a mobile phone. I've also been, understandably, getting to know my fellow students and the staff at West Dean. The other students on my program are great and I've enjoyed learning about them and spending (quite a lot of) time with them.

The weather has been amazing. Blue skies and sun.

I'll skip a detailed overview of yesterday--a lot of orientation-type meetings and how-tos. Today, though, we started out in the library getting to know the librarian and learning a bit about the collections. The college library is housed in the old billiards room; the original library is now a gathering place for various functions. Unfortunately, no photos are allowed in the house, so you'll have to visit West Dean's website if you want to see anything! After that we took group photos (I have no idea when we'll see those) and had an IT information session, where we received access to the school networks and a West Dean email address.

So this is a view from the Trundle. It's hard to see in the
photo but spread out before us is the town of Chichester;
if you look really carefully you might be able to see the spire
of the cathedral.

Following lunch we took a sort of field trip with our tutor, David Dorning, to a nearby town called Yapton, about 14 miles away from West Dean. There we patronized a local tool shop which carries secondhand equipment of all types, and in particular a carpentry tool called a spoke shave that we adapt to use for working with leather. It was absolutely gorgeous weather today, was yesterday, and is supposed to be the rest of the week, so on the way back, David suggested we stop off at the Trundle.

The Trundle is the ruin of an Iron Age hill-fort and has amazing views of the whole Chichester area. From the top we could see all the way to Portsmouth and Southampton, and from there to the sea. It was breathtaking. The countryside looks almost completely unspoiled and about as natural as it can get.

Afterward we came back to the workshop and, after a brief orientation on the structure of the academic year, we received our first books to work on! It's quite exciting. Since all the work we do is commission work from various clients, we have quite a lot of paperwork that gets filled out for each item, detailing condition of the object and the proposed treatment--which must then be approved by the client before we begin work on it. Tomorrow we will evaluate our books and propose treatments with David's assistance. It looks to be a good time!