A Brief Update

Hello! It has been a while since I have written because I have been quite busy!
Highlights of my recent life include:

• Seeing another dorm building and realizing we aren't so badly off after all!
• Meeting a Canadian, making a Red Green joke, and finding out he's her god-uncle!
  
• Being elected as one of two course representatives (and getting the responsibility that goes with the position...awww)
• Meeting a bunch of DH folks from the Netherlands and trying to explain to them what "mushy peas" are and why the english insist on eating them in pubs
• Going to the Science Museum for a special night "adult" event -- meaning I could play with all the fun toys without having to wait for kids to get boogers on them first
  
• Carrying a couch for 1.5 or 2 miles back to the residence hall! ooof. A lady wanted to give it away for free but we had no transportation method besides our own backs.
• Joined the gym uneventfully and am enjoying picking a random machine each time I go! They have super weird stuff that I am not familiar with at all! Like a machine that wiggles so when you do pushups / situps on it, you work your muscles more than you normally would since they are also fighting against the shifting platform. Phew.

Today I had the great pleasure of meeting David and Christine, distant cousins many times removed that my Grandma M has kept in touch with all these years. They live in Canada but they are on a theatre tour at the moment (they were planning on seeing two shows today)! They took me to lunch at this very, very upscale place. It was a very beautiful room with mosaic tiled ceilings and marbled walls, the whole bit. A several course meal, wine, and very quick waiters, plus one of the best steaks I've ever had lay in store for me, not to mention the excellent conversation! It was a very enjoyable lunch, and I hope to keep in contact with them in the future, as we got on very well considering we were complete strangers! Haha. I told them if they are ever in Nebraska that they will have to stop by and we'll treat them, but I don't know how soon that may happen... oh Nebraska.

They asked a waiter to take a picture of us in the restaurant, so as soon as they send me a copy I will post it here!

Brad had me all excited earlier, because he messaged me asking if he could come to London for Halloween weekend! His mom really wanted him to have a nice holiday even though he is in a country that doesn't celebrate Halloween, so she was going to send him to hang out with me and the gang here in the dorms. Unfortunately, tickets are too expensive at the moment (it being last minute and all), so he won't be able to make it here. I am thinking about booking tickets to visit him in Malaga within the next few weeks though!

Speaking of booking tickets, Maia, Serene, and I figured out what we're doing for Reading Week! Maia decided to go back to visit her family in Prague and invited the whole residence hall to visit her. It would appear that I am the only one taking her up on her offer, but I will spend three days in Prague before taking a train to Munich to meet Serene. We thought long and hard about whether we should go to Berlin or Munich, and in the end Munich won out because it was a) less expensive, b) had a better known concentration camp near it, c) is close to Austria if we feel like daytrippin' to Salzburg, and d) looks like it may have a lot more 'Bavarian' charm than the more industrial looking Berlin. Not that I don't want to go to Berlin, but it may need to wait for a different week! I am a little concerned because I had to book a train ticket from Prague to Munich on a site that was only in German. So while I'm fairly confident that Praha to Munchën is correct, I am worried that I won't be able to get from the Nürnberg train station to the bus stop in twenty minutes. The changeover is all on the same company's trip, so I hope that they have a shuttle or something, or make it quite obvious as to where I am supposed to go, but that is a little stressful for me. I'm going to make Maia look over my tickets and things before I get on the train to make sure that I'm not going to the wrong place!

I am pretty excited about the opportunity to have a local show me around Prague! Plus, she has a car...whooo!

Serene and I were originally going to go to Munich or Berlin with another girl in the dorms, Luckeisha. Unfortunately, we hadn't considered that because she is from Trinidad she needs a travel visa to enter European countries. The visa is quite expensive, she has to have insurance up to €20 K in the country she is visiting, and she has to have booked all of her flights and hotels in advance BEFORE she applies for the visa. So she will not be joining us this time, which is quite sad. I had always taken it for granted that I could waltz into whatever countries I wanted without much of a thought for entrance visas and things, but now I have looked it up and I am surprised by the results! I can go to most western European countries without a visa, but eastern European, Russia, Turkey, etc are all going to be problems if I want to go there. So I guess I'll go to Tunisia instead! haha just kidding. Maybe.

Once again, I am amazed by how inexpensive travelling in Europe is. I think my tickets to Prague are the most expensive things of the whole trip, and they were only £45 or something. The train / bus ticket to Munich is € 29, and the hostel is € 12 a night. Not bad! Plus, armed with my previous hostel experience, I was able to confirm that indeed, there are bed sheets provided, lockers, and showers. :) The hostel also offers tours of Dachau and the concentration camp itself, which Serene and I may take them up on if we can't figure out the bus routes ourselves. I was impressed by how much I was able to figure out from the German website with only a minimal amount of dictionary searching, so hopefully we will be able to function in Munich!

I blew my cover accidentally to the spanish speakers in the house. A bunch of us were cooking one day when a guy asked (in Spanish) if there were any knives he could use. I passed him one and no one thought anything of it until about ten seconds later when someone realized, "Wait. How did you know what he wanted?" So I can't eavesdrop anymore! Not that I was doing a great job of it anyway, because between the Ecuadorian and Barcelona accents, plus the ridiculously rapid Mexican pace, I wasn't getting a whole lot besides the gist anyway!

It rained today, making this the second time it has rained during the day while I have been here! It would appear that London gets a bad rep for no reason, although I've been told that I just need to wait for summer to roll around to get a better idea of London's weather.

I have to pick a project for my Digital Resources in the Humanities class and I am so torn! The assignment is to analyze interaction with an analog object versus interaction with its digital counterpart. For example, how is seeing a sculpture in an art gallery different than seeing a 360 degree view of the same sculpture online? What are the pros and cons of each? Would the sculpture reach as wide of an audience if it were not digitized? Etc. I have a couple ideas that push the boundaries of the assignment and I'm not sure she will let me do them, but meanwhile I can't even decide which one I want to do!!

1. "Live" WWII twitter feed : The idea is that WWII headlines, events, and photographs are being "tweeted" as if today was the same day in 1939. So today I got messages about reports of brutality in Poland, the US decided it would sell weapons to belligerent nations, and I listened to King Leopold give a radio address. Is this enough of a digital counterpart to the history that I can never actually experience for my teacher's taste? Hard to say. Probably hard to analyze as well, but quite interesting!
2. GIS data from a buried Roman cemetery : She said where possible, we should visit the site or object's analog version so that we could compare it against the digital version. I would argue the power of DH is that the digital version can give you an experience you would not necessarily be able to have in a physical sense. So I can GO to Prescot St. in London, but I will not be able to experience the Roman cemetery that was recently excavated unless it is through GIS maps and visualizations that I can download and explore on my computer! Eh? Maybe.
3. The London Bridge in 1540, a virtual tour : The BBC hosts a history site for children that includes a virtual tour of what the London Bridge might have looked like in the 16th century. This third option is a bit of a cop out compared to the others, to be honest, but it also pushes the envelope of the assignment. I can easily go stand on the London Bridge now, but this digital version helps me to visualize what it might have looked like 500 years ago. And the fact that it is aimed a younger audience would play an important role in my paper's analysis...

What do you guys think? I have to decide within the next couple days so I can write up a proposal and find some supporting research material for my overarching points!

Right now though, I think I'm going to go to bed because I have class in the morning and I am still battling my cold, though I think I have almost won at this point!

Bye!

Steve Reich!

Okay, so I forgot before I made the previous blog post that I never talked about the LSO concert! Pep, me, Serene, Maia, and a girl named Mariana went to see the London Symphony last Saturday. Student tickets were £6, so Pep and I picked the most expensive tickets we could find, plugged in the code, and were really surprised / happy that it let us have the discount!

We decided to grab dinner somewhere around the concert hall, which seemed like a mistake when we arrived because it really wasn't a pedestrian friendly area and there was not a whole lot around. So begrudgingly we decided to go into one of the ritzy looking, chic restaurants built into the huge venue. The food was really inexpensive, and very, very nice! Hooray! I split a meal and a dessert with someone so my entire total for the night (including the ticket) wound up to be around £11! When we walked in to the concert hall, we were surprised by how far up our tickets were. We were supposed to be in row E, but as we got closer to the front, we realized that because the pieces had two orchestras involved, there was a stage extension up and we were actually in the FRONT row. WHOAAAA so we could breathe on everybody's shoes, basically. It was a really interesting perspective, because I could clearly make out when the violins (who were sitting closest to us) were out of tune, slightly ahead of the beat or behind, etc. I am not trying to diss the LSO, I'm just saying that it was comforting to know that pros don't always have as much rehearsal time, still have personal playing issues, etc. haha.

Steve Reich, the composer himself, performed a piece called Clapping Music. We were only about ten or fifteen feet away from him, which was super cool. The concert itself was great, and then when he came out for bows we (illegally) took pictures, haha. Here are some of the best ones!

This is what we looked at while we ate dinner!


Here he is!

I should probably mention that the conductor is quite famous also (see: Kristjan Järvi), but I was more interesting in getting such a close up view of a person that many would consider to be one of the most influential composers of our age. By 'our' age, of course, I mean people who were alive in the sixties.

Anyway, I really have to go to bed now! It is one in the morning, and I have my last databases class tomorrow! Afterwards all of us DH people are going to go find some lunch to celebrate! This means that I will miss the tour of Roman excavations underneath the Museum of London, but I feel the team-building is more important in this early stage. Plus I assume the excavations are going to be there a while longer, haha.

I also have to get mentally prepped because the Floorball Club is going to a tournament in a few weeks and they are holding try-outs tomorrow. I am terrible at floorball and I'm extremely out of shape, but I am very good at putting my body in between the wiffle ball and the goal, so I might have a shot. Speaking of out of shape, remember when I had heart failure two springs ago? Well, I had to fill out a health form for the gym and that bit about the 'previous heart problems or issues' made them quite nervous, so now I have to go in on Sunday to run on a treadmill while they monitor my heart rate before they will give me my membership card. If they learn anything it's going to be that I can't run a mile without wanting to vomit, haha. Maybe I'll only have to run one kilometer though....hmmm.

Hampstead Heath Take 2!

Last night, I went to bed with a plan to accomplish great things in my free day. But when I awoke this morning I found that finally the heat had been turned on in my room. I couldn't get out of bed, I was so happy.

I finally got moving because my friend Serene had made me promise to go to pilates class with her at a rec center about two blocks from our house. Even though I wasn't a member I can still pay on the spot for group classes. When we arrived, however, the class was full! I had a few minutes to mull around on my own and long story short, I ended up joining the gym (yayyy student rates)! I figure if I'm PAYING a little less than £1 a day for a gym, I am probably going to actually go. Now I have pool privileges, exercise / weight machine rights, and group activities are all open to me. Plus, I can leave a child in daycare for up to two hours! Perfect! Serene and I have a whole list of activities that we are going to try, including Spin Class and Funky Buns, Tums, and Guns or something like that. I'm scared of that class, haha.

Anyway, while I was at the Leisure Center, I popped over to the Swiss Cottage Library and got signed up for alllll of Camden's library services. I have a keychain and everything. Rad!

It was so nice outside I decided it was a perfect day to make a second foray into Hampstead Heath. I rode my favorite bus up through Hampstead and jumped off just around the same place that I exited the park last time. I took a photo with my camera so that I wouldn't get as lost as I had (see exhibit 1, a third of the park represented in digital form on my camera).

This is the church by the bus stop where I was waited. I can hear the bells tolling from my house, yay.

The Spaniards. They are over there.
"Keat's House" was supposed to be somewhere nearby too, but I didn't find it.

This is the chubbiest wild bunny I've ever seen. He didn't give a flip about anything. He stood his ground a very long time when I was walking towards him. Anyway, the next few photos are just pictures of the park that I snapped as I was strolling along on my three mile adventure (I brought a pedometer, haha).

This is one of my favorites.

Parliament Hill! The place I had been trying to find the first time I walked around in the park! Here is London Proper. You can see where my university is (roughly) because the tallest tower on the far right is only a few blocks away from UCL.

I preferred the view of the other side of the hill, facing away from London. If I am not mistaken, this would be Islington, or the very edge of Camden.

I decided that rather than walk towards London, I'd use my remaining daylight to check out the eastern entrances to the park. I popped out in a very nice neighborhood and got really excited about taking pictures of plants.

Macro settings!

I looked it up later and this would appear to be a neighborhood loosely defined as either Kentish Town or Tufnell Park. I would err on the side of the latter, as Kentish Town is a bit like Camden Town as far as I can tell, with maybe a higher immigrant population. This neighborhood was very posh. Lots of super fancy front yards and English garden type frontages, but also a lot of gates, and very few cars parked on the side of the road. On the other hand, there also weren't a lot of people walking dogs, pushing strollers, or talking by their gates like there are in my neighborhood.

It was getting cold so I took the first bus I recognized back to Belsize and started walking from there. Belsize Station was recently featured in a Coldplay music video, so Brad is incredibly jealous that I not infrequently go to and from school using the station, haha. Anyhow, here I am walking back! There are a lot of streets called "mews" that have a very particular look about them. Here is a typical one, though my favorites are the mews that kind of hook back into a private courtyard. The doors on those usually look as if they were once stableyards.

This poor little snapdragon has been blooming up against the side of my residence hall for several weeks now, so I wanted to give it some props by taking its picture.

Other than joining a gym and finishing my databases class, I haven't been up to too much. Oh wait, did I ever talk about the Steve Reich concert? Oh dear! I need to do that pronto! I was thinking I already had but I guess that will be my next entry, haha. Otherwise, I cemented my reading week plans and I just need to order tickets. Maia is going back to Prague to hang out with her family for a few days and invited me to tag along. I will fly out on Monday, stay until Wednesday morning, and then catch a 20 euro train to Berlin! I'm meeting Serene in Berlin where we will hang out until Saturday! Then Sunday I am going to have to do a whole lot of reading, haha. So I'm pretty excited about that! All the flights seem to be pretty inexpensive, for the most part. I was originally planning on visiting Brad on the Thursday - Monday of reading week before heading to Prague, but tickets from Malaga to Praha are more than about £30, so I am too cheap. I will visit Brad another time, haha.

Myself and one other person are going to be representing the Digital Humanities course at the department level soon, which is kind of fun. It will be a nice resume builder, and I'll probably learn some stuff about administrative workings in academia.

On Sunday we had a small birthday party for Pep. Serene and I tried to make a lemon meringue pie, but a combination of not having corn starch and having a horrible oven meant that our quick 20 minute pie turned into an hour long ordeal. At the end of the day (and using a downstairs oven) we actually got a pretty nice pie, though! Everybody pitched in to make something, and Pep himself made two giant wok-fulls of risotto. It's a good thing I joined a gym...
The bad news is that somebody in the house is turning to the dark side. Serene was doing laundry one day and came down to find that her drying had been tampered with. Somebody had put their own stuff in with hers in the drier, and it was underwear of all things! So she put them on the floor and took her own stuff back to her room, haha. One of the guys on first floor had a pretty nice wok go missing, though I hear that has since been found in one of the other kitchens. And a girl whose boyfriend sent her flowers never got them. The delivery service says someone signed for them, but could only give their initials. Two days later and many private investigations later we have yet to figure out what happened to her bouquet! I am glad that I don't have anything valuable in my kitchen drawers and that I always lock my door, even when I'm just going to the bathroom!

We realized that at some point this week someone had come from the residence halls and cut all the chains off of old bikes in the backyard. Not very many people know yet, and I still need to go out there and see if there's anything worth salvaging. I'm cheap, but I would be willing to buy some tubes, a seat, maybe brake pads if I thought the bike was going to work out. I'm not sure how I feel about biking in downtown London yet, but I wouldn't mind having one to go to the grocery store with! It's kind of a first come first serve basis right now, and only one person has actually gone out and bought a lock in order to claim one of the abandoned bikes, haha.

Okay, I will wrap this post up and start on the Steve Reich one, because Saturday was a pretty good day!

Nothing Super Exciting....Except STEVE REICH!

Hello!

I don't have any interesting photographs or anything to share at the moment. I've been pretty busy with school this week. Databases is kicking my butt, but I only have one more week of that until next term!

Let's see, since last week what has happened? Well, on Friday I tried to go to my architecture class and wasn't allowed to enter the building! Apparently, all the architecture students have special ID cards that gives them door access. Because I did not have this card, security wouldn't let me in to go to my class! So I emailed the professor and hopefully that won't be a problem next week. I didn't miss anything, apparently. It was an optional session to help people figure out problems, etc.

That evening I went to dodgeball club! It turns out I am rubbish at dodgeball, but I had fun. Everyone there was an undergrad, so 18 / 19, etc. I was on a team with five guys who started out just having fun and ended up getting pretty competitive. After we had won a couple games we realized we had a shot at winning the whole thing, and guess what? We did! There were some close calls, but we went undefeated during the evening! I was the designated "left runner," meaning I sprinted for the balls in the middle when the game began. That was my largest contribution to the team, because I only let one of them get away from me! My opponent was a ninja of some kind though, it wasn't my fault.

I went back to the house and everyone was going clubbing, so I joined them for a while. I got tired / my muscles were sore from dodgeball, so I left with two of the other people from my house. Pep, a guy from Barcelona, and I talked on the way back and it turns out he went to a conservatory of music in Catalonia to study piano! So we had a lot in common. He is trying to find a cheap digital keyboard to put in the ground floor kitchen so he can practice. We are also going to go see the London Symphony Orchestra this Saturday for £6! Steve Reich, a famous composer, is going to be there performing one of his own pieces, Clapping Music. I am so pumped! Coincidentally, it is a piece of music that Brian and I practiced often as a joke back in Nebraska, so I will be more than ready to step in if one of his fellow performers is suddenly struck down by illness before the show. I can't wait!!!

Saturday...I was supposed to go to a Hiking / Walking Club event but I woke up early (having only gotten a few hours of sleep), saw it was kind of dreary and cold outside and went back to sleep. A girl from the house went and said that it was nice, but she probably won't go again. They walked from St. Paul's to Greenwich, which I understand is quite a ways. They left at 9:30 and got there by 3:00 or so. That is a bit too much walking for my taste, haha. Saturday we were planning a party for the house, so the self-elected Social Committee set out for the store to buy a LOT of groceries. Our mistake was in not bringing enough people. Actually, our only real mistake was letting one of the guys walk out the door without his transport card, so then instead of taking the bus from our block to the parking lot, we had to walk back and forth toting gallons of....um, beverages, and lots of pizza. We had to take a couple breaks. It didn't help my dodgeball soreness any, let me tell you!

The party was pretty fun. A bunch of people who lived here last year showed up (how did they know? Who told them? No idea), so that was kind of fun to talk to them about their experiences. I found out that we are not the smallest dorm building that UCL owns! A girl there said that she lives with three other people smack in the center of the University Hospital! She hates it because there are sirens all of the time, lots of sick people, doctors, etc, plus it is a long walk from the door to her little apartment area through winding hospital hallways. That is super random. She is paying a similar amount of rent as we are, interestingly, even though she is just across the street from campus!

My Husker flag got ruined at the party. Not because of the festivities! Pep hung his Catalonian independence flag, so we all got inspired. Pretty quickly there was a Romanian flag up, some other things I didn't recognize, and my Husker flag! We just draped them over the top of the cabinets in the ground floor kitchen for display. When I went to take my flag down it stuck to the top. I climbed up there and was horrified to find a sticky material coating the top of the cabinets, along with several hundred dead bugs. I haven't the foggiest what the stuff is. It wouldn't even come off my hands after I touched it despite my best soapy efforts to free myself. Is it weird fly paper gone bad after decades? Is it melted insect egg residue? The product of being in a room with two ovens for too many years? I can't even guess. I have scrubbed my poor flag with soap three times and run it through the washing machine twice and it is still afflicted with this brown goop, now yellowed, so I don't know what to do. I think I'm going to have to get a new flag!

On Sunday I went to another church with Serene (I didn't like this one at all. It was all Brimstone and Sinning Sinners), then went shopping with Maia in Camden Town. We went to a grocery store that is supposed to be cheaper than the grocery store by the house. It was probably cheaper, but I'm not sure it's worth it because of the extra transit time (plus the store was super crowded). I did find some cheap kitchen utensils, like a real knife, so now I don't have to saw away at raw meat with a butter knife anymore! I also bought a ceramic 9 x 9 dish, meaning that a whole new world of options besides "saucepan" is open to me suddenly, haha.

Most of my classes went uneventfully this week. You know, I'm learning stuff and such. Today I had to go in early for GIS (it's at 9:00 am, something that most departments consider blasphemous here in the UK. Clas before 10? No thank you, they believe). It was really hot in the room. Someone later said the thermostat was set to 29 C, which is uncomfortably warm when indoors. Anyway, the combination of the heater being on, it being fairly warm outside too, and the computers in the small lab humming away must have gotten to our teacher. He had been lecturing for a while when he took a step and kind of staggered, recovered, and then suddenly went down like a sack of potatoes. The guy closest to him made a grab for him and successfully saved both the teacher's head and his laptop, luckily! Our small classroom had a bonding moment while we tried to decide if he was breathing, etc, ran to the office for help, you know the whole bit. The office assistant showed up and we were trying to decide if we should phone the hospital (the perks of having one thirty seconds away!) when our teacher kind of blinked a few times, sat up, and talked the office assistant out of making him eat anything or go to the doctor. She made him promise to stay in his chair, cranked the thermostat down, threw open all the windows, and marched off. He waited til she was around the corner then stood up and taught for the next two hours like nothing had happened! So GIS class is fun, I guess.

I accidentally went to a meeting with my course professor (he hates that term, by the way. Apparently people here are rarely "professors" as that is an honorary title, so he thinks it is extremely flattering that I keep accidentally calling him that). Everyone is freaking out about databases because the course(s) are confusing, we don't know what our assignments are or what we are expected to do. I'm not too worried because so far it seems clear enough what we are supposed to do and we don't really need to think about it until next term anyway, but a lot of my fellow students are quite concerned. I was minding my own business eating lunch in the common room for Info Studies when the course leader came in and sat down to have a chat about databases. I was a bit surprised but I told him what I knew and what other people were concerned about, etc, we talked about my elected modules and then he wandered off. About five minutes later two panicked peers ran in the room looking for him. They were late to a meeting they were supposed to have with him here about databases, oh dear! They did eventually track him down, I have been informed, but I thought it was amusing that I was accidentally their stand-in!

I am getting sick. It has been creeping up on me day by day, and my efforts to combat the illness with oranges, fluids, and sleep are only slowing it down, not stopping it. So I went by the "SuperDrug" by my house today to look at their selection. It was so cheap! It was the Wal-Greens of the UK, but with reasonable prices! haha. All of the products contained Pseudophedrine (or however you spell that), which is fine by me! I bought twenty tablets of it for £1.60...all my Nebraskan instincts are telling me that I am obligated to start a meth lab now. They must not have a problem here because there are absolutely no safeguards or restrictions on buying it. The SuperDrug is directly next to an Argos so I went in just to poke around. The whole store operates like a fancy shoe store. The idea is that you find what you want in magazines or touch screen databases, buy it at a kiosk, and then wait for an employee to bring it out from the back of the store to you. It is inconvenient because you can't look at it before you buy it, but the concept is kind of cool. I wound up buying a £5 toaster because I couldn't resist, and I really wanted toast. I had to explain how to use it to Ling, the Chinese girl who lives next to me. When I told her I bought a machine for the kitchen to make toast, she asked me what the event was. I didn't understand so she explained "whose health is the toast? With champagne?" She thought that I was going to be making toasts in the kitchen! The other American on my floor was excited about it (he has been surviving on PB&J, so this will add some variety to his meals), but so far the Chinese girls seem suspicious. I can't wait until the first one of them tries it and their bread pops out with a loud clatter, haha.

I might buy a slow cooker from Argos tomorrow too. I saw one that I really wanted for £13 but I feel guilty about spending so much money so I will have to mull it over...Argos is going to be bad for my wallet, I think.

Speaking of wallet, I paid my housing fees, tuition fees, and my student Oyster card just came in the mail so soon I can pay my metro fees! Conveniently, my weekly pass Oyster expires tomorrow morning, so I will get to put a month on my new Oyster card for less money! Hooray!

A bunch of people on my floor STILL haven't ordered internet (see! SEE! This is why I gave up and joined first floor!) but they are borrowing my phone to call O2. I have an O2 pay as you go SIM card in there at the moment and to get internet with O2 you have to have an account with them, so they are using my number for the moment. As soon as I get my phone back I am signing up with a different monthly provider and then I think everything will be done, all my monthly bills will be tied to my bank account, etc! Yay!

In three weeks it will be Reading Week, which is the week in which students are supposed to sit around, drink coffee, and cry over massive assignments. Fortunately for me I only have one massive project due after reading week, so I think I am going to travel! I haven't decide where I'll go yet, but possibilities include Prague with Maia, Scotland with Serene, France with myself, or Spain to visit Brad. I think I might visit him some weekend though instead so that he isn't at work all day. Tickets to Malaga from London are around £25 in November (they are £40 right now, meaning I should probably book Nov's soon...), so back and forth will run me the same amount as if I went to visit him in Hastings three times, haha. It will be exciting to be back in Spain! Several of the friends I made in Toledo are there now, and one of them facebooked me the other day to tell me that he had visited Toledo again which made me happy. I'm not sure I'll go to Toledo, as most bus routes run straight past it and to Madrid.

Brad is doing okay, by the way. He has an apartment that he is sharing with a girl from Canada (? I'm not positive about that) and he already has internet! He hasn't started blogging because he doesn't think his internet can handle uploading photographs. The Spanish Embassy is taking a long time to get him his first paycheck OR his health insurance card, so he is a little concerned. He is pretty sick at the moment but he doesn't want to go to the doctor until he has an insurance card, so hopefully it's just a virus that will go away soon. He rides into school every day with the professors who teach there, so that is very convenient for him!

Speaking of riding to school, today I set a personal record for metro travel! Three stations, two lines = 15 minutes flat, half of my normal time! I was very excited because my early class on Wednesdays means that I am in the thick of the rush hour crowd. It is awful. I have to take off my backpack in order to try to cram in with everyone on the train. I'm not sure if it is because the working crowd moves more quickly on platforms, staircases, etc than the 9:30 slowpokes or if there are just more trains operating, but I managed to sprint down the stairs just as the trains were about to leave. I couldn't have timed it better!

Okay, I'm going to go to bed now! There were a bunch of people making a racket in the kitchen directly above me so I couldn't sleep, but they just left! Good night!

The Last Day of Week 1

I accidentally showed up to class an hour early today, so I guess I'll update my blog.

Yesterday, Thursday, was my free day! I don't have enough homework yet to keep myself occupied all day long as I am sure I will in the future, so I was at a loss as to what to do. Maia was going to Primark in the morning, so I woke up early to go with her and see what the big deal is all about. I'm glad that we got there when the store opened, because by the time we left it was jam packed! No more shopping on Bond Street for me! The clothes were pretty inexpensive though, and most of them didn't look like horrible quality! I got some jeans for £7, whoo. It was difficult trying to guess European / English sizes, but I think I know my shoe size, pants size, and possibly shirt size now. Haha.

In the afternoon I decided to go on an adventure somewhere. I hadn't gone to the Tower of London, etc, since I've been here, so I grabbed a Circle Line train and popped out right across the street! Here is a picture of a cool wall. I would assume it is one of the original foundations of a Roman such and such, but they were doing preservation work all around its base and there was no placard up.

WWI Memorial

The Tower of London. I was tempted to go inside but tickets were £20 or something crazy...

This is a church. There would be many more in my travels so I have since forgotten their names.

Another church.

Some tombstones I found while I was creeping about behind a church.

This might be my favorite street in London so far!

A monument to the 1666 fire

I need to find a pub like this one that appears to have charm to try out. The ones around campus typically seem more like sports bars or something.

Oh hey, it's another church!

...and another.

This one claims to be the oldest Gothic church!

I found the Imperial War Museum! They were charging a couple pounds to get into that too or else I would have tried it out.

The HMS Belfast. Note the clouds moving in. I figured I had around five minutes left and I was correct...

The Tower Bridge

Another view of the Tower of London

A little street running along just off of the Thames. A placard outside the "Engine Museum" explained that back in the day people with carts would walk back and forth from the docks using the catwalks, but now this is the only street that still has them.

After a while it was cold and rainy so I wanted to call it a day. I walked up Jamaica Street towards a tube stop that I could see on my map. It turned out to be pretty far (but not further than retracing my steps back across the river, etc), though pleasant other than the cold. I started noticing that the majority of people on the streets seemed to be of African descent, wearing cloth wrapped around their heads, long robes, etc. So perhaps Jamaica Street was named after immigrants to that particular region? I tried to decide what language they were speaking but I have no idea.

We had a big meeting about internet, party planning, etc last night. After my big rant last night, the same guy who keeps derailing my plans told me to wait one more day while he talked to ANOTHER company about getting service. Meanwhile, I investigated a bit further and it turns out that three people on the first floor got their own internet but there are not enough people to use them. So I shifted the Chinese girls who had planned on signing up with my network onto one of the first floor networks, told the guy who kept changing things that he could figure it out himself, and signed up with a person on the first floor myself. So now I will have internet in around a week, I hope. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I didn't want 02 and the hassle that goes along with paying for lines brought in, etc, and the guy who kept fighting me does want it. So if he doesn't order it, it's not my problem. There are plenty of people still on the second floor who need internet.

Also, I'm now the Events Coordinator of my residence hall, so that's pretty special, I guess. It means that I actually have to figure out what is going on for Saturday!

I've had some questions about how my courses operate in terms of the workload, grading, etc, so I will address some of them quickly. I have five classes this term, plus a sixth that is only running for the first couple weeks. My classes are all three hours long and meet once a week (with the exception of Architecture, which is six hours a week). Most of my classes don't have assessments until the very end or PAST the end of the term.
E - Publishing: Grade based on a group project

Architecture: ??? Don't know yet, he didn't pass out a syllabus!
Internet Tech: One essay exam, three hours, during the final week of class

Digital Resources: A solo project comparing an analog resource to its digital counterpart
Arch GIS: 4 project assignments and one essay due in January.

Our grade is based on nothing else besides these few projects / papers, so that is kind of scary. Also, the grading system here is much different than in the US. Here, a 70% or above is considered spectacular. I need a 40% in all of my classes to graduate. So I might die a little when I find my first grades, but I will just have to work harder to make sure I get above a 70%! I will have to check, but I think if the majority of my grades are above 60% and my work placement gets good reviews, then I will graduate with distinction. Hmmm.

I have had quite a bit of homework so far, but it is all self-policed. For example, my internet technologies teacher told us that for next week we need to go online, find XHTML tags, and be prepared to use them all. There is quite a bit of "required" reading for my courses as well, but once again, other than discussions and building knowledge towards a final project, the professor isn't checking to make sure we are doing them.

Tonight: dodgeball club! I hope I can make it in time, but my class ends at 5:00 and dodgeball starts at 6:00 in a different part of town!

First Week of School!

Hello! Sorry that I haven't written for a while, but the free wireless I have been bumming in my dorm finally stopped working, and nobody else who has ordered internet from British Telecomm has gotten service yet. I should have internet again in around a week and a half, with any luck!

Term finally started on Monday and I have been quite busy already! On Monday I have E-Publishing and Intro to Programming for Architecture and Design. E-Publishing is a class that covers topics like metadata, online journals, legal issues, analysis of website designs, blogs, community edited content (wikipedia), etc. So I am not terribly interested in it so far, but I think I will learn many useful things from the course. After agonizing over the details of different programming class options, I decided to attend the class over Architecture and Design. I showed up to the room printed on my course options sheet, and found that the room was incorrect. So I quickly picked up my computer and did a search. The official time table told me another building! I ran across campus and made it to the room just in time. Then I discovered that this was ALSO incorrect, and I pulled out my computer once again. This time, I googled the syllabus and found that the class was two stories down in the same building (because I had not enroled in the course officially yet, I think I may have been out of the email notification loop). I threw myself into a seat right on the hour and got ready for class. We learned the basics of a programming language called Processing, and it was really fun, actually! Then after the class, the guy sitting next to me made some comment about how this was Programming for Studio Design and Art and I was soooo mad! I had gone to the wrong class...for three hours! Of course, then I noticed that the professor's name was different, etc. I emailed him after the class asking what was going on (and also if I could audit his class, since I was very interested), and he responded that I had actually been in the right place. So the student sitting next to me was the one who missed his class!

The Architecture and Design class may be my favorite one so far. The programming language is very high level, it would appear, so I don't need to worry about telling the computer HOW to do things, I just tell it WHAT to do. For example, if I want to create a rectangle, I tell the computer how big the dimensions of the screen should be and then say 'rect(0, 0, 10, 10)' to place it on the coordinate system and set its size. It is quite simple to use and I even figured out how to make shapes move, follow my cursor, etc, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. These are some of the projects that past students have done for this class:

Examples

They may not work if your computer doesn't have Java installed.

Tuesday, I went to Database Systems and it sucked. It is very boring but hard enough to require attention. I only take that for three weeks this term so I don't have to worry too much until January! After Database Systems, I had Internet Technologies which focuses on XHTML, HTML 5 and other such internety subjects. So far I haven't learned too much, because I'm already fairly familiar with writing HTML files, but I will start learning stuff when we get to more advanced concepts.

Today I woke up early to go to Geographical Information Systems in Archaeology I. Showing up to the metro an hour earlier made a huge difference. I could barely cram my way into the packed trains, the platforms were congested, etc. It was very unpleasant, but I don't think buses would be much better as they are at the mercy of traffic.

GIS was a bit intimidating, but I should be able to manage. Today we just learned some basics and kind of messed around with a mapping application, but soon we will need to generate data sets and feed them into the program in order to create maps, etc. Because this GIS course happens to be archaeology, I will probably be doing a lot of analysis of early human populations, ceramic fragment scatters, graveyards, etc. Whooo!

This afternoon my class was Digital Resources in the Humanities. It seems quite similar to my old Digital History grad class at UNL, but I am going to have to work a lot harder because her reading list is tremendous. Dozens and dozens of readings and websites, etc. Unfortunately, many of the books that I need for the class are sitting in a box in the US, but I'm hoping that I can just reach back in my mind and get by without reading them again, haha.

Anyway, that's enough about classes for now. Let's talk about my weekend! On Sunday I decided to check out St. John's Wood. My friend Daniel thinks that is a hilarious name and he snickers every time the underground stops at that station. But by all accounts I had heard it is a nice neighborhood so I rode the tube for a bit and got out to walk around. I think it may have been overhyped. It was a nice neighborhood but nothing fantastic. I think the charm of it must be that it is a neighborhood very close to the middle of London. Anyway, I accidentally stumbled into the crosswalk made famous by the Beatles while I was wandering. A tourist wanted me to take a picture of him walking, so then he offered to take a picture of me. I realize I am crossing the wrong way, but traffic is not overly kind to pedestrians so I did what I could without getting fatally injured. Also, I'm not confident that he knew about the zoom feature on my camera, haha:

I also found the Lord's Cricket Grounds, whooo!

A friend of mine here, Maia, called me while I was walking and asked if I'd like to meet her and a friend for tea at...where else? St. John's Wood! Perfect, so we got some stuff to eat and walked to Regent's Park. It was super crowded because the weather was nice, but here is a picture I took of a lake!

The Grand Mosque (that may or may not be its name, I can't remember, sorry) is right next to Regent's Park, so I tried to take a picture. I was losing light so it didn't come out very well. It is quite shiny in real life.

I was supposed to meet Serene and her boyfriend at 4:30 to go to a church she had found, so I said bye to Maia and booked it over to King's Cross. Here is a picture of a building next to King's Cross...that may be part of it? I don't know, it was all very confusing.

Later when we were walking back at night:

And this is a picture of Baker Street. This is where I wait for the tube most days, though occasionally I see another train that goes to my destination at a platform that I pass on the way. It is nice to have two options, as that way I can take whichever one says it is coming first!

So now you are all caught up. Ling has made it her mission in life to feed me, and she routinely comes by my room with a steaming bowl of rice, pork, peppers, etc and forces it on me. Not that she really has to force me, but I feel guilty about eating her food especially when I have my own! So last night I made some twice-baked potatoes for her to try. She said she liked them and wanted the recipe, but I think she was frustrated that she couldn't use her chopsticks very effectively when it came to the skin.

Today I was able to pick up my student loan check from the Financial Aid Office, and conveniently enough, my debit card came in on Monday! So I trooped over to the bank and now I not only have money in my checkings account, but I also have a way to access it! How exciting! Santander's also set up a savings account for me which has a separate card (only good at Santander's atms), which is nice of them, I suppose, but a bit confusing for me. I will probably only carry the debit card around. Unfortunately, that means that I am now officially living on a budget, because up until this point I was operating from my Nebraska bank account and not really trying to color inside the lines when it came to food consumption. Hopefully £40 a week for groceries will work out for me, haha.

I think I should save money on the internet though. The problem at the moment is that everyone wants to put their two cents in on what kind of internet plan we need but no one is willing to call! So a bunch of the guys on the first floor stopped us from ordering internet because they came up with a plan involving fiber optics, linked routers, etc, but then none of them was willing to call the company to see if it was possible. So I did that for them and it is not possible. So okay, then I was going to order internet just for my floor, but I was stopped again because people were concerned that we would leave people out unless we took a tally of every single room, etc. So FINE I called the company again and got the list of every room in the residence hall that has a line, has a phone, etc. And my floor does not, so they will need to bring IN a line, which costs £150 unless you sign up for an 18 month plan which has a cancellation fee of £80. Sweet, so obviously the 18 month plan is the way to go! I was THEN going to order that plan for my room and even had a floor sign up going so I could see what kind of interest there was when I was stopped AGAIN because people wanted to know if another provider has better service, and if we really need the 18 month plan. Soooooo guess who got to call them again? And the service may be better, but they have no legal rights to the building that we are in and only British Telecomm is allowed to alter the lines. Now the choices are pay £150 for a line and use a different provider that is not much cheaper, or just pay the £80 fee. And each day we wait means another day we don't have internet. So at this point I am kind of thinking, screw it, I am going to order internet for myself, put the line and router in my room, tie it to my bank account, and if people want in then I will let them in for a portion of the cost and the cancellation fee. If they don't like it then they can get their own damn internet. I budgeted for £40 / mo on internet which will more than cover the service even if I am the only person on the line, but I think once I have internet then the people on my floor will suddenly appear again out of the shadows.
Meanwhile, though the guy whose internet I was using finally changed his password, Maia should have internet by next week and she said I could use hers until mine came through. Yay! She ordered internet as soon as she moved in, but now she is getting the same heat as I am from everyone asking if there are better options, etc. Well, not really, so get over it. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh. I don't really understand people's inability to do a little research themselves. There may be a language barrier problem as well, but it's ticking me off. I'm tired of answering the same questions over and over and over to the same couple people!

Meanwhile, I asked permission from all of my teachers and I think I am going to buy a plane ticket home from Wednesday of the last week of school. I have no class on Thursday and I wiggled out of two classes on Friday, so I will save around $400 by coming back on Wednesday instead of Saturday or Sunday. It is pretty sweet.
Also, Maia and Serene and I may be going to Scotland soon for a weekend trip or something. We are also checking plane tickets for deals on going to Holland, Sweden, or the Czech Republic for 'reading week,' which is kind of like dead week, essentially, but with zero classes. Perhaps in a few weeks I will have some cool pictures up here of windmills or ... things that are often associated with Sweden / Czech Republic...? I'm going to need to read up on those countries before I go, I think.

Time to leave the computer lab and get some dinner!