what did i do yesterday?

Not much, for my last Saturday in London.
I thought I was going to be really productive, so I got up early and went to Portobello Market with Amy and Nathan. We walked around for probably four hours, and still didn't see everything we could have. When I went to the market the first time, I only saw the antique part, but there is a section for food, like fresh veggies and meat, and a section for vintage clothes (I'm kind of glad I didn't know about it sooner, since I probably would have spent way too much money there), and a section for junk that you might find at a really bad garage sale. I'm glad we went early, because by the time we walked back we could hardly get through the hundreds and hundreds of foreigners who come to the market every week. It was a madhouse. But a lot of fun.
At the market we bought some fresh spinach and cheese, and brought it back and made omelettes. They were fantastic, especially since we had been eating a lot (a lot) of pub food in the past few weeks.
Then we sat around for a few hours. It's nice to just relax sometimes, since we've been running around doing stuff for three months straight.
Then we tried to find a jazz club to go to. There are a lot in London, so we headed out with two good choices. Both ended up really crowded, and there was either a 10pound cover charge or an enormous line outside. We ended up just going to another pub. It was still a good night, though.
Cheers!

more adventures with a day pass

For the past two days I've bought day travelcards that work on the Underground and on the busses. They cost 6.80 pounds, but they're a better idea than using the pay-as-you-go pass I have for normal days, especially if you go a lot of places. So today I tried to get my money's worth.
Kyle, Nathan and I started out at Victoria station, where we bought discount tickets for "Wicked" tonight. With a student ID card the day of, they were 25pounds instead of 50. I thought it was a good deal, and it ended up being really worth it; Wicked was amaaaaazing. I absolutely loved it.
Anyway, after we got tickets I went by myself to Camden, a shopping district known for weird stuff. There are a lot of vintage shops and places to buy really weird goth clothes. Strangely, it was all still retardedly expensive. So that was kind of a letdown. I tried to take a bus there but ended up getting on the wrong one, so I ended up taking a subway. Good thing I got that pass! By the time I got there it was pouring down rain, and most of the market is outside, so I didn't have the greatest time.
So I decided to go to Kensington High Street, which used to be the very best place to go shopping in London. Now that title belongs to Oxford Street, but Kensington is still a really nice place to go. Somehow while I was in the subway trying to get to Kensington it got warm and sunny, so shopping at the two places was even more opposite. I bought a shirt for a pound. Awesome.
Then we went to see Wicked, which was amaaaaazing. It's playing in Chicago and New York, too; I would recommend it to anyone. It was fantastic.
Good thing I bought that card!
Cheers!

i spent more time undergound than above ground today

That's not really something to be proud of.
Yeah, so I went to Tate Modern today with art class. That was cool, since I think my prof works there and knows a ton about the paintings there. I just went to Tate Modern last week with the Peters family, but it's a big museum so I still saw a lot of new stuff.
After that I had some lunch at a pub on the South Bank, one of my favorite parts of London, because of all the street performers and interesting things to look at. It's also got a great view of London from the banks of the Thames. It's worth a day to just go and walk around for a while. I had a delicious club sandwich, which here is not lunch meat but chicken, tomato, lettuce, mayo and egg. Yum. It was a beautiful day, so it was a nice walk to the pub and then back to the subway station.
Then I went underground. I first went to Victoria station, where I wanted to buy tickets for the musical "Wicked" tonight. I got to the ticket office, where they said they had four tickets left. Perfect. I needed three, and there was a big student discount. I told him this, and he told me to show him the three student ID cards. Crap. Everyone had to be there to get the discount?! So I was mad about that.
Then I went to Waterloo station, where I needed to book a train from the Netherlands to France. I found the ticket office and everything just fine, but when I told them I needed to go to France the guy told me I had to go to a different station. Fine. So I went to the other station, waited in line for twenty minutes, and the guy told me the same thing. A different station. This time it was not fine. By this time I had been trying to get these tickets for about an hour, so I got pretty mad. I never did get a real explanation why I cannot reserve train tickets in England, but apparently I just have to reserve them at the train station the day of our trip. That's upsetting. Whatever. Whatever.
I was fed up, and getting back on another train did not help my mood. I decided to make a pit stop at Coven Garden.
That was a really good idea, because it was probably about 60º F outside, with blue skies and a little wind. Coven Gardens is a really cool place, with street performers, shops and tons of things to look at. There are a bunch of little specialty shops, like one called Octopus that sold cute little handmade-looking things with cute drawings of animals on them. I also saw an opera singer and a street magician. Where else can you see things like that right next to each other? It's a really great place; probably one of my favorites in London. So I had a good time walking around there for a while till I calmed down enough to get back on the underground. By that time it had gotten dark, and all the businesspeople were going home from work. So I spent the last half-hour of my day staring at black-trenchcoated backs and trying unsuccessfully to read a novel over someone's shoulder.
Oh what a day.
Cheers!

parliamentary, my dear watson

ooh dear what a title.
Today we took a tour of Parliament. We did not get to go into the chamber where the House of Commons was meeting, but we did get to see where the House of Lords met and the throne where the Queen sits when she opens Parliament each year. It was interesting to get to hear about how the British government works; even though we've talked about it in class, it was good to get the "real" story from someone who works in the building. We also saw where French president Nicholas Sarkozy was going to address both houses later today (well, earlier now). So that was cool.
Then we went on the London Eye, the World's Largest Ferris Wheel. Our group took up two entire cars, which says something for the size of our group... and the size of the cars. They were enclosed in glass, so at the top we had a 360º view of the entire city of London. It was cool to be able to point out places we'd been to and to find Hyde Park, near where we live. The whole ride took about half an hour. That was one time around the wheel, which gives you some idea of how big it was. I took tons of pictures, so hopefully I'll be able to get a few of them up here eventually.
That's all I did today. I'm pretty exhausted from the last week of touring and homework non-stop, so I'm going to bed early tonight.
Cheers!

adventures in homework land

For the first time all semester, they are requiring us to do actual work. So that's why I haven't posted much.
Yesterday was homework, all day. I really don't want to complain, but I did not sign up for the London Centre to sit in my room and write papers. Especially during the last week. The last week! It's really depressing... everyone leaves in a week and one day... and I go home in two weeks. Time has flown by.
Anyway. Today we're going to sit in to a session of Parliament. I think it should be really interesting... I've seen some sessions of Parliament on C-SPAN, and sometimes they can get really loud and rowdy. So I'm pretty excited. Then after that we're going on the London Eye! The largest ferris wheel in the world (I think). So that should be awesome.
Cheers!

i'm procrastinating

It's midnight here, and I'm only halfway done with a paper that's due tomorrow for British Life and Culture. I figured I should take a break and update you about my life, though. That's how much I care about this blog. Or... maybe I'm just a terrible procrastinator.
I just got back from "Happy Now?" a play at the National Theatre about two couples with marriage problems. It was really good, although kind of depressing. It made me rethink my ideas about having kids one day... maybe I don't want that. I was kind of depressed because I saw some of myself in the main character, whose life in the end turns into something she never wanted. Now I don't know what to think. It was a good play, though.
Yesterday was Easter, the first one I've had without my family. I had Kyle's family to hang out with, but it's not the same. We went to a church in Kensington where the founder of the Alpha course is a minister. It was a non-denominational contemporary service, where there weren't any chairs, just cushions on the floor, and the band played Christian rock. It was a lot like the Celebration service at FUMC in Columbus, and the complete opposite of the church we went to for Good Friday services. I liked the contrast, although I was kind of disappointed that we didn't go to a normal service for Easter Sunday.
Cheers!

well

I'm going to write this right now, since I don't think anything exciting is going to happen today.
It rained and was cold and awful outside, so I spent most of today inside trying to plan our trip for when school is over. It's hard! Since most countries have different, independent rail services it's hard to figure out what time trains are and everything. I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to get from Amsterdam to central France, and then decided maybe we'll just skip Champagne and go directly to Nice or Marseille, and now I don't know what I'm doing. We're going to go to a train station Tuesday and see if we can sort it out with some help. I did get a high-speed train booked from London to Amsterdam, and a hostel in Amsterdam, so at least we'll get there, even if we have no idea what to do after that. Spring break worked out ok, and then we just decided when we wanted to leave and then went to the train station. So I'm not too worried, but it would be nice to be able to know exactly what we're doing over the break. Right now our plan is to go from Amsterdam to Reims to Nice/Marseille to Barcelona to Seville. We're thinking about cutting out Reims since it is a lot. It kind of depends on the trains.
So that's all I did today. We're meeting Kyle's family for dinner soon...
Cheers!

hoo boy

Yesterday felt like it went by really quickly. First Kyle and I went to church with his family, since it was Good Friday, at Westminster Cathedral (not Westminster Abbey. ha) That was interesting, since it was a Catholic service. I had never been to a Catholic service before, and so all the standing and kneeling and sitting was kind of confusing. They sang the entire passion of the Christ story, with different people singing different parts. We stood for the whole thing, which I can understand since if we had been sitting most of the congregation would have been asleep. There were so many people there! We got to the church about an hour early, and I'm glad we did, because by 2:30 the seats were completely full and people were standing on the sides and in the back. I'm glad I went, it was definitely an experience.
By the time the service was over it was 4:30, so Kyle and I went back to the flats and the family did some more sightseeing. Then we met again for dinner at a pizza place in Notting Hill, which was nice. It's a really posh, upper-class neighborhood, so the room where we ate was filled with kids called "Lilly" and "Juliana" talking really loudly about "oh moi GASH, reeeally?" The food was good though.

museums, and st. paul

We walked around today. A lot.
First I went to the V&A museum with art history, which was really cool. They had a copy of the sculpture "David" (the real one is in Florence), and a really cool photography exhibit. We didn't have much time to look around, though, because Kyle and I met his family at St. Paul's immediately afterwards. We met them on the balcony of the dome. That was neat – it's one of the largest unsupported domes in the world, I think, and it's covered with paintings and mosaics to make it even more impressive. The inside is a lot lighter, too, because it's made out of light stone instead of the usual dark stone. We didn't get much time to look around, though, because it closed at 4:30 and it took a long time to get to the very top.
After that we walked to the Tate Modern museum. I hadn't really been before, but I really enjoyed the gallery. It had a lot of really modern art, like a whole exhibit of minimalists, where a single fluorescent light set at an angle was a commentary on the human existence or something like that. I appreciate modern art like that as a whole, but some of the pieces were sort of weird. I felt very pretentious standing in front of a solid black canvas. It was a good museum, though, and I'm glad we're coming back next week with class. Our prof Giovanni works there as a guide, I think, so he'll know a lot about many of the pieces there. I think it'll be good.

on the line

Yesterday we took a boat to Greenwich, which I thought was a long way away but actually you can still see London from the dock. It's the place where time is measured from, and where the Prime Meridian is located. There's also a maritime museum there with a lot of ships and stuff. It was a pretty cool trip, they just let us do whatever we wanted to once we got to the maritime museum. So that was fun. I stood directly on the Prime Meridian, which actually goes through London (I think) so I might have walked over it a few times and not known it.
After we got back from Greenwich (I mean as soon as we got off the boat), we met Kyle's family for dinner at a pub close to their hotel, and then went almost immediately to see "Chicago" in Coven Gardens with Kyle, his sister and her friend and Mrs. Peters.
I really enjoyed "Chicago" after seeing the movie in theatres a few years ago. I thought the actors were great, and the dancing was really cool. It was a lot of fun. It was kind of awkward watching it with Mrs. Peters, since a lot of it is kind of sexual. Anyway, I liked it. I thought it was interesting that there was one song in the musical that I don't remember from the movie: one about how no one has any class anymore. It seemed more British than the rest of the musical. I might just not remember it though.
That's about it, I guess. Today we're going to some museum for art class. Can't wait.
Cheers!

a tourist again!

The first of my final projects was due today – I had to give a presentation about satire for my British Literature class. I did it with a partner, so it went fairly well. I don't think the prof was expecting much; she's always talking about how unfair it is that we have to have grades and assignments. I'm not too worried about it.
When I got home from class, I left almost immediately to meet Kyle and his family at Westminster Pier, where we took a tour/cruise down the Thames. It was a nice change of perspective since we had taken a walking tour of the same area in the beginning of the semester.
After that, we went to Harrod's. I hadn't been there before, and I don't think I need to go back ever. It was a nice store, with separate rooms for the really exclusive designers, but everything was way out of my price range (of course) and I felt like the people who worked there and the people who actually shop there were judging me by the clothes I was wearing. I bought some fudge though, just so I could say I've bought something at Harrod's. It was 1.58 pounds or something – the cheapest thing I could find.
Then we went out to eat at an Italian restaurant. The Peters have been really nice about paying for things for me... I keep trying to pay them back but they won't let me.
After dinner Kyle, his sister and his sister's friend and I went bowling at a place about a five minute walk from our flats. It was exactly like American bowling. I think I bowled a 74. I'm a little rusty (or something).
Tomorrow we're taking a boat to Greenwich, the origin of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian. They say you can stand exactly on the Prime Meridian and be in two hemispheres at once. Neat!
Cheers!

we will rock you

Today for our weekly cultural excursion we went to see "We Will Rock You," a musical set in 2308 when the only music is created just to make money. It has a lot of Queen songs, as you might expect. And it was reaally cheesy, like it was from the 80s, as you might also expect. But I thought it was ok. Not great, but ok.
Other than that today has been a work day. I got a lot of homework done, and am about to get some more done in a few minutes. This week and next week will be really busy, since the semester is winding down and everything is due soon. I can't believe we have less than a month left! This semester has flown by. They said we would be ready to leave by the time we were supposed to, but I think the opposite is true – I wanted to leave earlier in the semester, and now I'm ready to stay here. Hmm.
Cheers!

paris, je t'aime... a good movie, now also a true statement

I loved every minute of Paris. From the minute I stepped off the train Thursday afternoon until the whistle blew on the platform this morning, I was more and more in love with Paris.
I went with Kyle, his parents, his sister and his sister's mom, so there were seven of us total. That made it kind of hard to coordinate things, but everything turned out ok. I wrote a lot of things down in my notebook so I can copy them here, but for right now I'll make a list of things we saw; I have a bunch of homework that just materialized out of thin air that is due this week, so you will have to wait a little bit to hear all about my trip.

• Eiffel Tower, third floor
• l'Arc de Triomphe
  
• Louvre, and the Mona Lisa
• the outside of the Musée d'Orsay
• Moulin Rouge
• Notre Dame
• Champs-Élysées
• Seine River (we took a dinner cruise)
  

Bath

We went to Bath with class today. It was kind of cool – they're the oldest Roman ruins in England, from around 300 A.D. The exhibition was weird though. It was really crowded, and they had built around the original stone structures. I didn't really like how it was set up. It was a two-and-a-half hour bus ride over there, and I'm not really sure it was worth it. But Bath was cool anyway.
Tomorrow Kyle and I leave for Paris with his family. We'll be there until Sunday, and I don't know if there will be internet where we're staying (in a $100/night hotel), so, until Sunday...
Cheers!

wilde night

Today was fun... we went to see "The Importance of Being Ernest," a play by Oscar Wilde (sorry about the pun). It was funny, about British upper classes and how ridiculous they can be. I really enjoyed it.
Afterwards we went to a bar called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which is where people like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis hung out. A sign said it was rebuilt in 1667, and it definitely looked like it – the creaking wood floors and dark atmosphere made it seem really old. It was neat; I felt more cultured being there.
Tomorrow we're going to Bath, to look at the Roman ruins. I think it'll be cool.
Cheers!

rain day

While many people in other parts of the world are getting tons and tons of snow and getting to stay home from school, we here in the United Kingdom just had a huge rainstorm. To look at the satellite pictures, you'd almost be surprised that the island is still here. They were telling people to stay out of the Underground because of possible power outages. Scary! There were something like 80 mph winds.
So today we didn't have school.
Yes.
We didn't have school. Because of rain.
So I didn't do anything today.
Cheers!

meh

Well I really didn't do much today. I went shopping on Oxford Street... I've written a lot about that already so I don't need to go into much detail. Just know that there were tons of people there, a lot of gawking tourists trying to take pictures of each other through the throngs of people. By this time I feel like I'm no longer a tourist, so shopping was kind of annoying. Didn't buy anything, although I was tempted to... the prices were just too much to justify looking cute. I got back to the flat about 4 p.m. and have been hanging out ever since. Did some homework. Watched some TV. That's about it.
Supposedly there's going to be a huge storm tonight, with winds up to 80 miles per hour. No ice, no snow, no hail, just wind. Still, there have been rumors that class will be canceled, and they're telling people not to use the underground because of potential power outages. I'm kind of excited.
I'll keep you posted.
Cheers!

photos from oxford

Christ Church

a marker in Christ Church

Amanda and Nathan in the Great Hall at Hogwarts, I mean Christ Church

we walked everywhere / we discovered places

As promised, I'm writing more about Oxford. See, I do what I say I'll do sometimes!
The trip was a lot of fun. We left from London Paddington, the station closest to our flats, and were able to get a group ticket for half price since there were four of us. So it started out a good day!
We hadn't done much planning for when we got to Oxford, so when we got off the train we weren't sure where to go or what to do. So we found the High Street, like Main Street in most English towns, and walked around for a while. Well Oxford is not a very big town, so we walked from one end to the other in about twenty minutes. Finally we went into a sort of science museum, where we found a map and some directions to the Turf Tavern. We went there for lunch, and found out that's the place a lot of big names frequented when they attended Oxford University. After lunch we walked around the Oxford campus, which was beautiful and looked like castles. The college is really old, and you can tell from the buildings that it's full of tradition.
We also went to Christ Church, WHERE THEY FILMED HARRY POTTER. Ok, so I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, as much as I hate to admit it. Christ Church's great hall is The Great Hall in Harry Potter, so I was pretty excited to actually see it in person. By excited I mean I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe. For at least ten minutes. Walking in was sort of overwhelming. Now it is sort of embarrassing.
Anyway, I really liked Oxford. The town has a really nice, young, laid-back atmosphere that I haven't found in any other town. There was definitely a majority of students there, of course, since there are a few colleges there, including Oxford University, one of the most prestigious schools in England.

Today I really didn't do much. We tried to go to the National Gallery, but there were so many people there it was hard to concentrate on the paintings. I did see Da Vinci's "Madonna on the Rocks" and some works by Raphael, so at least I got something out of our 20-minute tube ride.
That's about it.
Cheers!

i promise, i'll write more.

I went to Oxford today with Nathan, Amanda and Kyle.
More tomorrow.

Cheers!

my feet hurt

Today the only thing I did was walk. We walked around the Tate Britain. We walked around a brewery. We walked around the neighborhood. It was rough, and now I'm tired.
I really enjoyed the Tate Britain. They had such a huge range of works, and a "massive" Turner collection that I really liked. It's great that most of the museums are free, because I plan to go back to the Tate since we really didn't spend much time there. It's a great collection.
Immediately after we finished at the Tate we went to Fuller's brewery for a tour. That was really interesting – it's a local beer so they took us completely through the factory and showed us all the stages of beer-making. I got to taste the beer before they had added any yeast, which was just grains and water. It was weird. And warm. After the tour they let us sample all the Fuller's varieties, so we ended up getting about a pint and a half for free, sort of... we had to pay for the tour since Ball State wouldn't endorse anything that had to do with drinking. I really don't like beer very much, but I liked seeing how it was made and how different kinds of grain made the beer taste and look different.
Tomorrow I'm going with a couple people (Amanda, Kyle and a guy named Nathan) to Oxford, England, to see the college and stuff. It's just a day trip, since I think we're still kind of recovering from the shock of how expensive spring break was. I think it will be fun - a lot of people have already been and have said it's a good place to visit.

crazy mouse

a ride at the Brighton pier

PINBALL WIZARD (in case you didn't figure out the first sentence of this post

Today we went from Soho down to Brighton, we must have seen it all. (Get it, get it?) Anyway. It's a little seaside town that's pretty much built on the tourist industry, since I'm sure it's beautiful during the summer. It was nice today, but with the temperature in the low 50s and pretty strong winds in some places, I can think of other places I would rather have been today (my bed). The director of the program basically just gave us a train ticket and told us to do whatever we wanted once we got there, after we saw the palace, which was called something else but I don't remember it right now. Price George IX (I think), Queen Victoria's father, built it as a "pleasure palace" for in the summers before Brighton became such a big tourist attraction, so it's lavishly decorated and really spectacular. A few of the rooms are done in a Chinese style, with bamboo painted on the walls and Chinese pottery and other artifacts everywhere. It was impressive now; it must have mind-blowing to guests in the 1800s.
I'm pretty tired now, partly because we must have walked all around Brighton, which is not a small place, and partly because we chose to go there and return during rush hour on the Tube. I had heard of this phenomenon before from Popo, who said he had to let a few trains go by before he could get on one. I did not believe it, or just could not have imagined the magnitude of this event. I still can't quite believe how many people were on that train this morning around 8:30. We did have to wait, because there was no way to wedge into the door of the train. Since we had a deadline, I steeled myself and pushed into the train, between tall businessmen in suits with briefcases. The doors closed, and I was drowning in a sea of black trenchcoats and ties. I had to remind myself to breathe as I stared through the mass of people at the square of window that reminded me there was an exit. I'm not usually claustrophobic, but then again I usually can move parts of my body without bumping into other people. This morning I almost didn't have to hold onto anything like I usually do because I was held up by the other people in the train. Not to be repetitive, but there were a lot of people in that train.
We came back from Brighton at 6 p.m.
Rush hour.
Great.

Cheers!

random photo of the day

An actual road sign in Liverpool

feeling comfortable, and, i need your help

I always do that – I write a really short blog promising to write more the next day, and then don't post at all the next day.
I'm sorry.
But it makes the next post even better, doesn't it?
Yeeeah.
That works in my favor, since I really don't have much to write about. We got out of class early today since we didn't watch a movie like we usually do, so I watched a movie myself, called Green Street Hooligans, about a football "firm," which really meant those crazy football (which here means soccer) fans who get in terrible fights with other team's fans. It was an okay movie, but it was set in London, and I recognized some of the places in the movie.
That made me think. I've been here almost two months, and I'm finally starting to feel like a Londoner, rather than a tourist. I no longer walk on the right side of the sidewalk, I look the right way when I cross the street, I pay in pounds, and today I found a euro in my pocket. It's a weird feeling to be comfortable in a place that so recently seemed so foreign to me. I remember quite clearly being completely confused by the money here – why do they have a coin for two pounds but not for 25 cents? Now it seems almost natural to have – and use – much more change. And I don't even notice the accents any more. Rather, I notice my own American accent much more.

Tonight I'm supposed to go see some play by some guy who won a Nobel prize. I know that sounds crass, but honestly I don't know who the playwright is, or what the play is even called. My British Lit teacher is supposed to have arranged it, but as of now, 4:50 p.m., I haven't heard anything. Plays usually start around 7:30, so I'm sort of doubting that we're actually going. It's kind of disappointing... but tomorrow we're going to see Les Misérables so I'm not really complaining.
For our final in British Life and Culture, we have to write a "Letter to America" that's worth 50 percent of our grade. I think I'm going to use a lot of stuff from my blogs, so if you can think of any posts you think would be worth a lot of points, let me know! It's supposed to be cultural observations about England, so... Help me out! Leave some comments!

satus quo

I only have three minutes left on my internet for this week, so this post is going to be short. I did some exploring of the neighborhood today, and worked on a Web site for Kyle. That's about it. I'll write more tomorrow.
Cheers!