Free Days

Alright, it's time for another photo blog! I imagine that they are more fun to read than a solid block of text anyway (at least that's what I learned in my multimedia presentation class last semester, haha).

So! On Wednesday I went to a couple lectures and then found myself done in the middle of the day. I texted Meg, the girl I knew from high school, and we decided to meet halfway between our two respective houses at Camden. I live in Belsize Park and she lives in Kentish Town, so this seemed like a pretty decent idea. We knew there was an open air market dealie at Camden so we wandered down to the wharf to have a look.

Oooh, a bridge into the flea market!

Once there, we spent a couple hours idly wandering through the stalls. They are selling a lot of weird stuff there. And maybe hitting the ganja just a wee bit, based on some of the items being sold. Also, I think there may have been an overstock of giant horse / farrier ironworks at some point, because they are scattered all over the market. It was kind of awesome. I should have taken a picture! Seriously, maybe fifty or sixty random double-life-sized sculptures of horses getting their hooves checked. haha.

After a while we got bored and Meg knew of a Pound store near her house, so we walked up to Kentish Town. This is a church that we passed:

This picture is out of order and I'm too lazy to fix it, but this is a small horse head over a shop. I don't know what Camden's obsession with horses is, but I approve.

The next day I went to another lecture that got done at noon! So I went to the British Museum!!! I spent about three hours looking at the Greco-Roman exhibits on the ground floor and then was getting kind of tired so I decided to leave the other floors for a rainy day (but I will definitely be coming back)!

I hopped on a random bus towards Hampstead Heath, that being roughly the direction towards my house, and ultimately decided to see what the Heath was all about. I stayed on the bus until it dropped me in a really nice neighborhood. After a few tries, I found the street that dead-ended in the park. Now, I could see on the map that Hampstead Heath was a really, really big park, but I wanted to walk around anyway. The problem was that I didn't have a map OF the park except for a rough approximately on my little map of London that noted when the terrain moved from "pasture" to "dense forest." After two hours of pulling myself up steep hills, walking across vast distances, slopping through mud, and trying to judge direction using the setting sun, I emerged on a street with a bus stop -- conveniently, the bus that runs right past Swiss Cottage, hooray! So I will probably not make the mistake of misjudging the Heath's size again, and next time I go I will have a map with me, haha.

This is a lake I found.

Here are some swans. I call this phase of my photography the "When People Were Still On Trails and I did not Feel Lost" phase.

Now we're entering the "Wow, this is actually a pretty legitimate park" phase.

And this is the "Wow, a man made fence must mean that people still exist in London" phase.

Some trees. I bet this will look super cool in the autumn!

Oh hey, there's London. It seems really far away.

But it's closer if you use the zoom setting! I was trying to find a landmark called the BT Tower which is very close to my campus, but I couldn't distinguish it with my camera. : (

Anyway, I had a good afternoon and got a couple miles of walking under my belt, so I am pretty happy with my experience. I helped an old lady find the correct bus (this is the third time people have asked me for help with bus routes, which is scary because I really don't know what I'm doing).

Today I went to a lecture that was meant for the Archivists but I figured it couldn't hurt to attend. It was boring. Then I went to a meet and greet afterwards and ate very spicy Indian snacks and hung out with a guy from Slovenia who is also doing Digital Humanities. The clubs and societies were out in full force in front of the quad building so I signed up for some stuff like Dodgeball Club, Salsa Club, and Hiking Club, haha. I also got a copy of the student paper, and it is really good. Like, really good. It makes the Daily Nebraskan look like a joke (which, let's be honest, it kind of is). When I checked my goody bag of free junk later, I found that I ended up with an Oyster card holder from the London Symphony Orchestra (a little plastic wallet that holds your metro pass, in other words), a lighter, some chewing gum, and some gumming paper for folding my own tobacco? That's random, I want to know which booth passed that out, haha.

I went to a book store by campus and snooped about, then decided to hop on a random bus and see what happened. Pretty soon I could tell I was not heading in the right direction at all, so I changed at King's Cross and waited for a bus that said it was heading to Swiss Cottage, although my stop was at the very end of the route. Three hours later I disembarked near my house. Haha. Fortunately it was a double decker bus so I sat in the top at the front and pretended I was driving in a video game. I saw a lot of neat stuff though! What a cheap tour of London! We had passed a mega grocery store on the way that I walked to after I got off the bus. I am pretty excited to have discovered this monster super store so close, because before I had been taking a bus to Camden Town which is horrifically busy.

We had another building meeting about internet and I am starting to get frustrated. The majority of people want to just get something simple that costs around £40 a month but gets the job done. I am in this majority. The tech guys that we put in charge of getting internet want to run fiber optics into the building, etc, etc, find massive routers and tie them together.....but none of them are willing to call the places that need to be called in order to arrange anything. SOooooo tomorrow I'm calling a company to ask which rooms have phone lines wired and then armed with this information I am going to get six or seven people on my floor to go in on a plan. People on the ground floor have already organized together in this manner, and I'd rather have internet sooner than later so yeah. I feel bad because the fewer people that sign on the more the fiber optics thing is going to cost for them, but they are taking too long and accomplishing nothing. Haha.



Tomorrow I actually have quite a bit of stuff to do at school. Lots of report writing lecture sessions and senate house tours, etc. I'm not really sure what that means, but I will show up with a writing utensil just in case!

Later!

The Weekend and the First Day of Orientation

Hello! I haven't updated for a couple days because I have been busy scurrying around London, my dorm, and campus meeting people and accomplishing big things. On Friday I cut a bunch of optional lectures in order to go get a phone and on the way I found an avocado! I took a picture so that dad can identify what type it is, but I am pretty impressed by its overall size. It took some doing but I found corn "crisps," so I will probably try to eat it tonight!

This is a poster for the new CD that Coldplay is releasing. Brad is raging because he couldn't get tickets to their concert. : (

On Saturday I met Meg, a girl I knew from high school who is studying in London this year as well, and we wandered around by Parliament doing touristy things. Look, Westminister!

...and Parliament!

We had crossed the river to get a better look at Parliament and then figured it was time to get some lunch. I had sorrel juice and an intense mutton wrap from a Caribbean food stand, which was pretty good. Very interesting flavors! We went to the Tate Museum of Modern Art after that (Meg is doing her MA in Art History), and finally wound up in the neighborhood of the Globe Theater. They wouldn't let us in to look around but we saw the outside! It's okay because the real one burned down anyhow.

We found St. Paul's Cathedral next. Some guys at the Jazz and BBQ thing from the night before had invited me to go with them on a pub crawl of Fleet Street and we were supposed to meet at St. Paul's, so Meg and I decided to try a daytime tour of Fleet Street. I really don't understand what is supposed to be so interesting about it. I mean, it is an old street but it seemed to be more banks and tourist stores than interesting pubs.

We did find a Twinings on Fleet Street, however, so we had to stop. I should explain that I discovered what Twinings was on Thursday when I was meeting with a professor. He offered me tea, I asked him if he had any decaf, and he was shocked that I didn't realize the majority of tea from Twinings is naturally uncaffeinated. He was more disturbed when I had never heard of Twinings to begin with. So when I saw the store we had to go in. Tea bags were 10p each and I ended up with about twelve different varieties to try. How quickly I fall to the dark side. Meg bought a nice wooden box they were selling that came with sixty bags of tea or something, so I think she will be set for the next couple months!

On Sunday I went to church with Serene, her boyfriend, and Daniel, a cop from Hong Kong. He is studying Crime Science here for a year before he returns to his old job in Hong Kong. We went to a Unitarian Church that I had passed when I was looking for a cell phone up in Hamstead. The church was gorgeous -- centuries old, remodeled on the inside but very austerely so the halls retained all of their cool older feel. The service was just kind of okay. I mean, I didn't mind it but it was nothing special. I should have taken pictures of the church but I was too busy talking to random members who approached me. During the handshake portion they asked me what my major was and when I said "Digital Humanities" I cringed because then I am forced to launch into an explanation. I was relieved when two people actually knew what that was, one of whom worked at Penn State and Grinnell WITH digital humanities! Nice!

I wandered around Belsize Park later in the afternoon, being just a bit bored, and finally got close enough to one of these monsters to take a picture. I don't really know what they are (mosquitoes? Lacewing flies?), but they are very large and scary looking. I tried to get a sense of scale included in the picture but I still failed to communicate the immensity of the bug.

Monday was my first day of Freshers' Week. I stood in line for a long time (wait, sorry, I mean I stood in a queue) to check in with Information Studies. I met a couple people who are studying Publishing and who were all from the UK. The were nice enough to include me in their conversations but I had a hard time following what they were talking about because of my geographical ignorance of northern England, haha. They were joking about universities in Leightonhampshireworcster, etc, etc. But they seemed nice. I also talked to a girl named Anna Maria from Greece while I was queuing. We all went to a couple boring orientation / introduction type things at the department level before they broke us into our majors. Digital Humanities had an hour or two in between things so Anna Maria and I went with a few other people to sit at a café and wait. It was interesting to see the broad fields that people are pursuing within DH. I seem to be mostly visualization / text analysis / database management while Anna Maria is almost entirely digitization and e-publishing (she worked on the Perseus project, which I think I included in my very first blog post! WHOA!). A guy named Mannin, from India, is interested in distribution and manipulation of digital video and sound. There is an Italian girl who seems to have wandered into digital humanities somehow who is still a bit confused about it, but she was previously Librarian Studies as an undergrad and seems to want to continue that work with a digital media twist.

In the afternoon we met our professors and were assigned to mentor groups. I was assigned to the head of the whole information studies department, yikes, but she seemed pretty nice. We also found out that DH people are cranky unless they get cake / biscuits and tea every meeting, so we got a break in the middle of this orientation when a cart was wheeled in with all the fixings. The DH people were sad that it wasn't wine, but they figured 3 in the afternoon was a bit early for that and settled for tea.

After the orientation, Anna Maria, a girl from Ireland named Shawna, and I went to a pub to celebrate our first day at uni. I ordered chips, which was pretty exciting. We were in a pub that reminded me a lot of the set of Cheers. It had free wi-fi and was pretty quiet, so I'm thinking that maybe pubs would make good homework places the way that coffeehouses do in the US.

The whole way home it rained buckets on me, but I had remembered my umbrella so all was well. I had made food on Sunday to eat during the rest of the week, but I'm discovering that if I just snoop around kitchens enough during dinner hour I may never need to buy food again. On Sunday I was forced into a three course meal by the Chinese girls on my floor (on the condition that I learned to eat with chop sticks, which I actually did under their expert guidance). That was an accident, I just wandered in to heat something up leftovers in the microwave, which they found appalling and assumed I was starving or something. Then last night while I was doing laundry, I popped my head into the ground floor kitchen to say "hi" and saw that a guy, Sanjeev, was doing some cooking. I was curious to see what it was so I watched while he made an Indian stew of a sorts. Cooked potatoes, chickpeas, water, tamarind paste, and then a bunch of curry-smelling type powders went into the pot and after a while I was offered a bowl of some of the most biting potato stew I've ever had. He served it with rice, which was nice because it took care of some of the spiciness, but I was still had a runny nose by the time I finished. It was really good so I asked him about the spices. He was quite certain that you can't get them in the US. "Not even at an Indian grocery store?" I asked dubiously, having seen many packets similar to the one he was using on the shelves of the store on 17th street. He was adamant that you can't get these spices in the US so if I wanted to I would have to look them up on the internet and try to find similar herbs to use, but it would never be the same. Haha okay.

The moral of the story is that two nights I've had food ready to eat and two nights I've experienced cuisine of the world instead! So maybe I'll pop into the Romania / Czech student kitchen tonight and see what they've got going. And then I'm going to need to brainstorm up some "American" food to show everybody. I'm thinking cranberries, gravy, and pumpkin pie as being my best bets for impressing people, but I really have no idea. I think every Chinese person in this building may be a gourmet chef, and Sanjeev seems like he's playing it by ear but succeeding as well!

Maia and I are joking that we need to hold a house Olympic event while the real Olympics are happening because we have so many countries represented:

China - approximately 60 million

US - 5

India - 3

Czech Republic - 2

Mexico - 2

South Africa - 1

Ecuador / Canada / France - 1 (multiple citizenship)

Romania - 1

Spain - 1

Trinidad and Tobago - 1

Hong Kong - 1

We are thinking the events would be racing around the block, a football shootout, etc. I hope it happens because that would be a lot of fun!

I have to go soon to look at my department's "Option Fair" to decide my final schedule. I am pleased to see that the one class I very much wanted fits in the timetable with my required courses. Adios!

Big Day

Whew, what a day! Last night right before I went to bed the girl who lives next to me, Ling, knocked on my door and wanted to practice English. So okay, why not, we talked for a while, then it was sleep time! Glorious sleep! It turns out that you sleep GREAT when you have a duvet and can actual combat the 50 degree temperatures that the dorm room is reaching in the absence of a heater. haha. I had to wake up early because Brad wanted me to try to get Coldplay tickets to their concert in December, but when I got up I found out he had gotten the dates wrong and they were already sold out! : ( I was pretty upset and I don't even really like Coldplay, so I'm a little worried about what Brad might be doing to himself right now, haha. I did find out today which dorm residence the members of Coldplay lived in while they were at UCL (it's Ramsay), so maybe that's some consolation to him. Also, that means they were quite "posh," or in other words, loaded. Ramsay is a NICE hall two minutes away from campus in a high rise building, haha.

Anyway, after waking up early for nothing, I went to enrolment. After standing in line for around an hour, I finally got "enroled" and then stood in another line to get an ID card. It was fun though, because I started playing "guess the nationality." Everyone was carrying their passports / visas to show to enrolment authorities, so I tried to take a guess at their country based on their looks before I glanced at their visas. It turns out that Americans are all incredibly tall compared to their Indian and Chinese compatriots, but otherwise I was not super successful with the game.

Having finally obtained my ID badge, whooo, I decided to go fill out a form to get on the National Health Services radar. On the way to the hospital though, I saw a stand with Paella. Yum! So I stopped to have lunch when I saw directly next to them a stand with "Joe's Authentic Mexican Burritos." That was kind of too good to pass up, but Joe was not my favorite guy, really. He was a blue-eyed blonde man with a thick accent, so I asked him what made the burritos "authentic" and he responded a bit angrily that HE was Mexican and so was his mother and that's why these recipes were the real deal. Whoops, sorry for profiling, sir. They were very good burritos.

The line for NHS was too long for my taste, so I toodled off to get a phone! I had asked online about the best places to get cheap phones without a service commitment, and Car Phone Warehouse was suggested. Perfect! There's one only a few blocks away from my house (maybe fifteen, twenty minutes walking?), so I set off down the street. About a block from my house I walked by a bus stop and saw that it ran to the same village (Hamstead) where I was going so on a whim I decided to get on and see what happened. It dropped me literally right next to the store I was looking for! Yay. I got a cheap little phone that claims it has some internet abilities and I bought a £10 sim card so I can make calls and texts until I get my real account set up. I wanted to look around the neighborhood a bit more because it is a really, really cool part of town. Maybe my favorite part so far. I looked it up later on wikipedia and all sorts of famous people have lived in Hampstead, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Ozzie Osborne, Sting, Agatha Christie, George Orwell, HG Wells, and a ton of other incredibly well known people (take a look at the list)! I found out during my internet searches that Hampstead Village encompasses Belsize Park (the neighborhood I live in) so actually I'm living not only with Gwyneth Paltrow, but also alongside all of the other famous people in Hampstead. Not too bad! haha.

I went back to campus to finish NHS and I decided to pop in to the bank showcase to see what was going on there. The same people from Santander's remembered me from two days previous when I visited them for maybe two minutes to grab a pamphlet, which rather impressed me considering how many people have crowded around their booth eight hours a day for five days now. I ended up opening an account with them because it was very simple to do, requires no down payment, and allows one free international check deposit a month. So Monday I will have a bank account and by the following Monday I should have a debit card!

I also went to the Financial office and reduced my loan by $10,000 because I will be spending far less on housing than I initially budgeted based on the school's recommendation.

Back in the dorms I accidentally walked into the room of a new fellow who moved in. You see, his room had been unoccupied and open for several days and I wanted to compare something in his corner room to my regular skinny room, but there was a guy and his luggage sitting there. Whoops. So I invited him to come to a little jazz / bbq thing going on at a café on campus with me and Maia. haha. Good cover! He is from California and we may end up setting up internet somehow because the guy who is letting me borrow his internet for the moment may take it away any day now, haha, and Dave, the new guy, did not know that we could get internet here at all! At the jazz thing we met a bunch of other people from Slovakia, Germany, and a bunch of people from the US! It got cold pretty fast and we weren't prepared for that, so Dave and I and Ling walked back to Clifford Pugh by around nine or so while the others went on a pub crawl. Ling's fiancée came into town tonight to visit, so she invited me to eat a late dinner with them. They made rice noodles and spiced them with a lot of red pepper, and it was pretty good! We talked about American TV shows and my limited knowledge of famous Chinese people. Yao Ming, Michelle Yeoh, Jackie Chan, and Bruce Li were pretty much it for me, and they did not know who Yo-Yo Ma is! Sacre bleu.

So my big day is coming to a close and on Monday I start orientation for the Information Science department. I think we are supposed to get a tour of the Science Library and facilities and hear a lecture or some such thing. I'm not really sure. I need to check the email again. This whole week is pseudo-lectures and inductions and HTML / etc optional sessions and then the following week will be actual classes. Very interesting.

Tomorrow I am meeting an old acquaintance from high school, Meg, at Trafalgar Square for lunch and then to do "touristy things" for the afternoon. That should be fun! I haven't seen her in maybe six years? It has been a while, so I am looking forward to catching up and looking around at the southern part of London for a change. So far I've pretty much stayed north of the river!

Oh, I almost forgot! About two blocks from my house, right next to the Swiss Cottage metro station, there is an open air market going on. Today my eye was caught by a french (I can only assume) booth selling fruit. They had these things they were calling 'avocat' fruits and I finally decided that the one or two pound monsters must indeed be avocados of a variety I am unfamiliar with. I was going to buy one of them when I saw a sign that said 'grenadier.' I took a closer look and was unable to identify them, so I had to ask the booth keeper. Ahh pomegranates! So I bought two for a £1 or something pretty reasonable. I don't know how to eat them or how to tell if they are ripe, but I will probably try to figure that out tomorrow! I will also post pictures of the Fuerte or whatever kind of avocado I ran across, haha.

A Big Day for Shopping

Well! Today I was supposed to be on campus registering for National Health Insurance, bank accounts, and all of that jazz, but when I arrived on campus the line was so long that I decided I had better things to do. I met a girl from Trinidad named Luckeisha at a little café on campus before we tried to enrol. She had facebooked me earlier because we will be in the same house (she moves in Saturday) and wanted to see what it was like so she could shop for dishes, etc. She is extremely nervous about the winter because she is already bundled up and it maybe 60 - 65 degrees F here, but she thinks it is quite chilly. She was sad when I advised her that the jacket she had on was merely a fall jacket and that she will need another one come wintertime, and she was quite interested to hear about snow and long johns and hot water bottles and things of that type.

Anyway, we got to campus and the line was so long that the man helping the "queue" form told us to try again in a half hour. In a half hour the line was even longer, so we just left figuring that we could try again tomorrow, Saturday, or Sunday.

I was sitting in my room eating lunch when Maia came by and asked if I wanted to go to Ikea with her (pronounced "Ikearrr," haha). So we took the tube out from Swiss Cottage to a town called Wembley. It was a short, above ground ride which was quite pleasant, and then we headed to an Ikea maybe ten minutes away? This part of London was not nearly as nice as the part we live in, but the Ikea itself was enormous. Picture a SuperWal-Mart on steroids. Massive. So we did quite a bit of shopping and filled up sacks full of things like 50 pence plates. I was getting so carried away with shopping for cheap things that I even bought myself a little 60 pence succulent plant! I bought a duvet there that cost around £20, but I don't feel too bad about it because it is rated for winter weather and I have not seen any duvets that were less expensive anywhere. Between the two of us our total was £42, which is crazy considering that twenty eight items (minus the duvet) cost us around £20. So now I have two glass plates, bowls, glasses, a bunch of silverware, some towels and dishrags, a frying pan, a plant and a pot, and I think I might be set for the moment!

There was a Tesco Extra across the street that was equally massive, so lugging all of our Ikea junk we took a stroll down the aisles and I bought some cheap butter, salt, seasonings, noodles, oil, etc. So far I have been living on mostly bread and sliced sandwich meat. I bought a bunch of potatoes the very first day but when I was cooking them realized I didn't have any milk, butter, or salt, so they were a little less delicious than I expected, haha. Tonight I shall have basil fried potatoes, and I am pretty excited about that. Maybe if I'm feeling crazy I'll throw some sliced roast beef in there, mmm. ha.

My internal clock is still really struggling, but I forced myself to get up very early this morning in the hopes that tonight I will be able to go to sleep before 1 or 2 am. Urgh.

My sim card from giffgaff came in the mail, so I am going to head to an O2 store to see if I can't find a cheap phone to use! Then I will just wait until I have a bank account here before I set up my giffgaff account. I don't really know how the exchange rate thing works with debit and credit cards, but we're going to find out because I used my credit card today! haha. Still, I figured it would be better to pay bills locally if I can.

The cleaning staff has been hard at work on the kitchens today and I am very excited! I showed Luckeisha the kitchens and she was surprised that I had characterized them as "insanely scary" and "horrifying" when they seemed to be just fine. I should have taken pictures.

Okay, well I'm going to head back to campus to see if the registration lines are looking better! I will probably update again tonight because I don't have anything going on as far as I know, and the person I'm getting internet from at the moment is going to be returning his router tomorrow or the next day to change services, etc. Oh nooo!

New Friends and Important Lessons

I am pretty much entirely settled into my room now, minus the duvet, and I am happy to announce that the kitchens and bathrooms should be cleaned soon! I believe the past residents must have been terrible, terrible pigs, and their crap is all over the kitchen (unwashed, uneaten, etc). One of the kitchens was cleaned by the students who just moved in because they banded together and scrubbed as a team. The fourth floor kitchen was cleaned by the house staff and I am hoping that they are working their way down the building.

I cleaned up my shower yesterday because I couldn't deal with the copious amounts of hair. I filled a trash can with hair, I kid you not. I'm hoping the culprit has since moved out!

I have met a couple people in my building!

• Serene is an English Lit MA from Singapore and I met her and her boyfriend while I was checking in. We found the grocery store together and have eaten a few meals together. She is a really great person and she said that she is not really big on drinking alcohol or partying, so I am glad that I will have someone to spend my Friday nights with when I don't feel like going out!
• Maia (I've forgotten her major) is from the Czech Republic. She studied at UCL in the past for three years but has since lived in Sweden and Germany. She seems to have very strong opinions about the best places to go shopping in London, and I'm hoping she will let me tag along so that I can find some good clothes stores!
• Cherry is an Architecture postgrad from China. She moved in on my floor two months ago to take an English language crash course, and she doesn't know how to cook at all so she has been avoiding the kitchens too. Her actual name is Chun Li, which I thought was awesome (Street Fighter II: The Legend of Chun Li!), but I had to explain to her why she should have kept her Chinese name, haha. She is very, very friendly, and when Maia and I dropped by to ask her about the internet situation she made us sit down, eat ice cream bars, and promise to teach her how to cook!
• I have met one other person from my floor, a reclusive student from China (or so Cherry informed me) who knocked on my door to breathlessly ask if I had internet and then rushed away before I could introduce myself. I have also seen her dart back and forth to the bathroom a few times.

I am hoping that the internet void will soon be filled. Maia already found internet because she took the place of someone who moved out on the first floor (we call it the second floor in the states), so she is paying £10 a month to share with three other people. Cherry is using internet from the sole administrator in the building on the fourth floor (US = fifth floor) and while she is on the second floor with me she says the service is fine so I am hoping that he will let me use the internet too! Serene found a router in the hallway of her floor but neither of the rooms it might belong to have answered her knocks, so she isn't sure what she will be doing yet either! At the moment I have been using campus internet, and Cherry told me about a library a block and a half away from the house that will let me use their wireless if I show them a university ID!

I have also been working on taking every alternate type of transportation that I can back and forth to my house. Normally, I take the Swiss Cottage underground station which is about two blocks from my house to Baker Street and then transfer to the line that takes me directly to campus. Baker Street is a really neat station. I have a suspicion that it used to be above ground or something, because all of the walls have windows and there are intricate designs carved into the stone. It was opened in 1863 and is very cool looking. I will take a picture next time I am there! This route takes me maybe fifteen minutes, I should think, but costs a bit more at peak times a day!

Because it costs more before 9:30 and after 4:30, I have been experimenting with buses. I have figured out that I can take the 168 to Camden Town and then transfer to the 31 which takes me to a huge station about three blocks from campus. Taking the bus at rush hour may not be worth it though. I went to the grocery store in Camden Town at around 4:00 yesterday afternoon and by the time I got on the bus there was hardly any room for me let alone myself, a backpack, and two grocery sacks! The buses take about thirty minutes I should think.

If I am up for a walk, I have figured out a direct line from Belsize Park to a stop by campus, but this requires a ten minute walk to Belsize from my house, five minutes on the tube, and then another five minute walk once I arrive. Perhaps I will use this route in warmer weather.

Meanwhile, I learned an important lesson about drinking water. When I first got in I was very thirsty, and it is my habit to turn the hot water tap on for drinking water because in my old house it took long enough for the water to get hot that if I used it for drinking, brushing my teeth, etc, then it would be warm by the time I wanted to wash my face. Well, here only cold water taps are potable, and I believe I am beginning to feel the effects of drinking from the wrong faucet on Monday. It could be that I've just been eating unusual food, but things are not super happy in Jessica-land at the moment, and I am hoping that I will be able to stand in line to get my user ID today! I also meet with one of my professors to talk about classes before I enrol tomorrow. That's right, one "l" in "enrol." I am going to be a terrible UK speller!

I haven't looked into getting a phone yet, though I do have two sim cards and another one on the way via post! O2 and another company are trying desperately to get my business by sending me sim cards, but I will have to look into prices and things before I am willing to commit.

Well, I should get going! I'm hoping to be up earlier tomorrow, but right now my problem is that I cannot fall asleep at night until one or two and then I cannot wake up in the morning. Yesterday I slept four hours past my alarm! Whoops.

Photo Update!

Photo tour time! Long story short, I finally managed to get on-campus wireless internet, whooo! So now I can post some pictures! I don't have any pictures of my new friends yet, but here are some photos of campus and my dorm room! Captions above, photos below:

This is the "main quad" of UCL.

They call this "The Cruciform" because it is an "X" shaped building.

This isn't from campus, but it is next to my house! Haha whoops.

I'm in the main UCL building looking out a window at its Hogwarts-style exterior.

A tiny winding corridor typical of campus.

Neat.

An on-campus Church of England cathedral!

I found dad the chemistry building, but I can't go in yet until I have a student ID. : P

My dorm room! View towards the door / sink / etc. The plate, mug, fork, spoon, and knife that I found dumpster diving are sitting on the fridge waiting to be washed. Haha. I also found ten hangers, a working lamp, and a power cord. Dumpster diving is totally worth it.

The long view of my room! I'm thinking about rearranging things to put the desk nearer to the power outlets, but so far I've just unpacked and organized my stuff a little. I'm pretty happy that I didn't ask for the linen packet. I still need a duvet, but I should come out spending less than I would have on a plain white linen set from the university (unless duvets cost upwards of £25...?).

'Skers! Also, the lamp that I found in the trash!

This is the view out of my window! I requested the backyard and though I don't get a lot of sunlight, so far I like the backyard view quite a bit!

Well, that's about it for the photo tour so far! Tomorrow I attend the "Wellcome" ceremony stuff and meet with a professor to talk about what I'm registering for, so I'm sure to have some more news at that point. And hopefully a UCL ID card so I can actually go into buildings!

First Impressions!

Well! I had quite a trip out here! My first flight was delayed an hour and a half so I almost didn't make my international flight! Then Engine 1 failed somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, so that was exciting but we couldn't really turn around at that point, haha.

Customs took about an hour and then I got on the metro bound for central London. Let me tell you, rush hour on the underground with three bags is not the most fun I've ever had, but eventually I got to my stop and wandered around dragging bags over the cobblestones for the next twenty minutes in a swarm of people. Check-in did not take long, though the housing office staff seemed quite harried. The girl behind me in line also lives in Clifford Pugh, so we got a cab together and arrived without further incident at the house! My new friend, Selene, and her boyfriend are from Singapore. They both seem super nice, and we grabbed lunch together and went grocery shopping! We were adventurous and rather than settle for one of the tiny and expensive markets near our house, we took a bus into Camden and found a Super Tesco!

Food here isn't all that expensive, actually. I was braced for much worse. Ground beef was £2.50, so that translates out to a pretty similar value of ground beef here, for example. They really like pork here. That's pretty much all I can find in the stores so I will be learning to cook more of that, I guess! I also bought a baguette for 97 pence because I figured it was too European looking not to buy.

Speaking of cooking, everything is really great about my house except.....the kitchens. The people who lived here before us were moving out today and they left every single kitchen in the house in the most apalling shape. I would take a picture but it might scar the camera. I'm talking stuff slopped on the CEILING and cabinet doors hanging off their hinges. I really don't understand what they could have been doing. All of us new folks are not sure if the cleaning lady is going to take care of it or if we are going to get stuck with their mess, so we're just avoiding the kitchen for now. I have a fridge in my room and I pilfered a very basic set of utensils and a plate from the pile of stuff people were throwing out, so I have sandwich making abilities while I wait for the kitchen situation to be remedied. haha. I also bought some pillows, a fitted sheet, a duvet sheet (but not the duvet itself...yet), and a towel, so I think I am probably set up for a few days at least!

It's around six in the evening here right now and I am sitting in a computer lab at the residence hall where I checked in this morning. When I asked to use a computer I watched them punch the code in the door, so now I have access to the computer lab as long as they continue to let me in the building, haha. I tried getting into the UCL library but they require a student ID. One weird culture shock about UCL compared to UNL is the security. There are cameras everywhere and checkpoints, and basically to enter most of the buildings you need an ID. I poked around on campus for a while this afternoon and decided to wait until I get a card. There aren't very many sidewalks through campus, so it looks like you have to either enter from the outside of that city block or weave through buildings that are currently inaccessible to me.

I took pictures of my room and of campus that I will put up as soon as I can use the campus wireless! Hopefully it won't take too long!

It's only 6:00 pm and I'm starting to feel a little tired. I took a nap this afternoon against everybody's advice but I don't think I would have made it around campus otherwise!

Bye!

London Bound!

Hello!

I'm writing this from the Omaha airport, which is nice enough to provide free wireless! Who knew?
Anyway, this might be the last time you guys hear from me for a while unless I can find internet access right off the bat. I will be leaving Chicago a little after 4 pm and then I arrive in London at 5:30 am! Then I will need to take the tube to campus (45 minutes, I have estimated), check in at my residence administration building, and get back on the tube to head to my actual dorm building!
Once I get there, I will flop my things down and try to find something to eat in the area. I made a list of stores and directions to get to them so that after lunch I can try to find some bed sheets, pillows, and cookware. Then after that grand adventure, assuming I am successful, I may head back to campus to see if my student ID will get me logged into any of the computer labs! I want to be able to tell people that I made it!

Last night was awesome. Lexi, Brad, and I went to Andy and Megan's wedding and it was really great. It certainly helped keep my mind off of leaving. I was very nervous this morning but right now I feel perfectly fine, so I hope that my buoyant spirits remain for the rest of the trip!

The next message will be from another continent! Goodbye!!

Why UCL, and what are digital humanities?

Hello friends!

As you may have heard, I am going to be getting an MA next year in the United Kingdom! Whoo! Under pressure from my parents and non-facebook acquaintances I have been cajoled into keeping a blog of my time abroad, so here it is! Unfortunately, I am not abroad just yet, but I will be leaving this Sunday, the 18th. I'm writing now so that I can feel less useless while waiting, and because I have had a lot of questions about exactly what it is I'm doing next year!

What are 'digital humanities?'
That's a good question, and there is no easy answer. Over the past decade or so, scholars have been taking advantage of the tools that computers and digital technology provide for humanists. This includes making texts accessible to millions via the internet, scanning documents for archival purposes, publishing journal articles online with links to their supporting evidence, and using algorithms to analyze data (such as word frequency, etc).

Recently, this field has expanded dramatically to include visualizations of data sets, attaching geographical information to items (GIS), studying human-computer interface

viability, and much much more. If you are interested, I will provide some links at the bottom to great examples of websites exemplifying the types of digital humanities projects that I am interested in.

Why UCL?
Well, University College London is one of the finest universities in the world at the moment (U.S. News & World Report ranked UCL 4th best world university in 2010, QS World University Rankings put it at 4th in 2010 and 7th in 2011), so that looks nice on the 'ole resume, but I picked UCL primarily for other reasons.
While I was at UNL I was sucked into the world of "digital history," and my professors urged me to look for graduate programs along the same lines. It may not come as a surprise that there are an underwhelming number of digital humanities and digital history programs out there in the world, though there are many schools such as UNL that are incorporating digital media center research into their programs. UCL is starting up their DH Master's degree this fall, so I'm going to be a guinea pig of a sorts. Their degree is very tech heavy, compared to the amount of humanities courses offered in other DH programmes such as King's College London, and that is one of the reasons I chose UCL; I may feel like I'm dying in the middle of a programming class, but I hope to have some marketable skills when I graduate!
Other perks include: being in London, having one central campus, and knowing there is a famous dead guy on display.

So where are you living?
I am living in a UCL residence hall about three miles away from campus. The hall is a non-traditional dorm and is supposedly around 40 post-graduate student rooms in an old converted house / apartment thing. There's a kitchen and bathroom on each floor and a laundry room on ground level. And because it's such a small hall, there is no adult supervision! So...party?

My dorm is in the Belsize Park neighborhood, where I will be living alongside such stars as Chris Martin, Tim Burton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, and Sean Bean (according to wikipedia). I'm pretty excited to move in, and I will be sure to post pictures of my dorm and the area as soon as I figure out how to get internet!

I have to get my own internet set up if I want it at the dorms, so there is a good chance that I may not check in with the US of A for a few days unless I can find an internet cafe or wifi zone.

In the meantime, I only have six days left in the country, so if I haven't said goodbye to you yet then we need to get in touch! : )


Examples of digital humanities projects:

Perseus Digital Library - An unbelievable collection of Greco-Roman texts

Valley of the Shadow - In depth look at two opposing counties during the US Civil War (several books have been published using this resource)

Beyond Mannahatta - Determining topography / flora / fauna in pre-European Manhattan

ngram - The powerful tool of Google Books. Seriously, try it. It's amazing.