The Rewards of Attending Events

Hi!  No pictures this time, sorry.
On Thursday I went to a London Symphony concert that was offering £6 student tickets.  It was a really nice concert and we had good seats -- 2nd row.  The LSO never lets down students when it comes to close seats!  After the concert, we found out that my friend Christian had signed us up for a discussion group.  We trucked upstairs to their offices and were plied with free drinks and sweets.  We signed a waiver and then a man started asking us questions and trying to facilitate a conversation.  Was this our first classical concert?  What types of music do we like listening to?  Why did we come tonight, and would we come again?  Do we feel intimidated by the concert traditions and aging audience members?  It was pretty easy going, and I was enjoying the Twix bars, so I went along with it all.  Then at the end, we all got £20 for our pains!  That means a net profit of £14!  Whoa!

My friend, Kofi, who had subbed in for Pep last minute, was very happy.  Pep was a little upset though.  "Kofi doesn't owe me £6, he owes me £26!"

Then on Friday, I took a tube way way out to zone 6, a couple miles away from Heathrow.  I was supposed to catch a bus from there to a festival / symposium on electronic and analogue music.  Alas, when I got out in the town (?) of Uxbridge, I discovered that the bus strike happening in central London was in effect in Uxbridge too!  I asked for directions and then struck out on my own without a map or really any clue where I was going.  I made it there after about 40 minutes and I was really glad that I had left so early for the symposium.  I walked in with about five minutes to spare.  The symposium was really fun.  I got to play with an interactive, audio producing table.  I also got to experience a "sound cannon," can be described very simply as a device that allows sound waves to be projected in a specific area.  When the presenter swept the speakers over the audience, it sounded very faint until BOOM, the music was playing right in your ears.  It sounded like somebody had started a boombox right behind my head!  Super cool.  He demonstrated how the waves bounced off walls and objects too.  I was very excited about that.  I can post links to some of the other really cool projects that people highlighted, if you like.  Some very interesting musical instruments, a cellist who plays with two bows at once, etc.

Most importantly, I was able to talk briefly with five live coders that I want to interview for my dissertation!  They all said they'd be happy to answer some questions, so my trip out to the boonies was a success!

We went to a pub yesterday to watch the England - Italy game.  The match was a really good one (I had predicted 2 - 1 Italy, but I was very wrong).  Nobody scored, although there were some freaking close shots, and eventually the game went into a shootout.  England lost, and the pub that had previously been full of noise, drunken shouting, singing, and insult tossing became a very unpleasant place to be.  Still, it was fun watching in that environment, and I'm guessing that the Olympics will be pretty fun too.

Speaking of the Olympics, I went looking for tickets today.  They have been releasing them slowly, and I saw that there were more football tickets on the market.  I couldn't get two tickets, but I did manage to get one to a semi-final match in August at a stadium nearby.  SOOooooo if the US comes out of their group stage in 2nd place, I will likely get to see them!  Otherwise, I'm just happy that I get to see an Olympic event!  How cool!  The ticket was only £30, too.  : )

I'm going to go to a couple of the Paralympic games, because most of them are after my dissertation is handed in.  I have tickets to an equestrian event, and I'm going to buy tickets to blind judo and wheelchair tennis, I think.  All the tickets, including those to medal / final matches, are around £10, so there is really no excuse not to go!

Quittin' Time

Well!  It appears that my days of playing Mary Poppins are now over!  One week into the sordid affair and I threw in the towel.  Six more weeks of tantrums, hitting, biting, screaming, name calling, etc with no means of punishment and only bribery with sweets to encourage good behaviour did not seem to me to be a good way of spending my summer.  The child I was sitting can be very sweet when he wants to be, but he also realizes that nothing will happen to him if he acts poorly, and so he takes advantage of that fact.  My friend Lakshmi has agreed to step up to the bat in my stead, as she has worked with children developing schizophrenia for the past three years, and she is probably better equipped to babysit this child.  I also felt very uncomfortable every time I was at school to drop him off or pick him up, because I was approached by teachers who wanted me to tell his mother to call them, or parents who were wondering if I was his mother so they could tell me what horrible things he had been doing to their children.  ANYWAY, after Friday I should be done, and back to sleeping in past 6:30 in the morning!  I asked the friend who recommended me the job what she had done while babysitting, and she said she'd never had these types of problems, but she wasn't responsible for taking him to and from school, either, she just babysat occasionally in the evenings.  Sigh!

I'm afraid I haven't been terribly active in London cultural activities lately, but I will be going to a symphony concert this Thursday and the National Portrait Gallery on Saturday.  A lot of people from my dorm are leaving this Saturday, as the summer housing begins.  Already there are a few new faces in the dorm hall, but it's difficult to tell who is a new student, and who is an "illegal," as we are calling them.  Quite a few students have moved into each other's rooms and then rented out their old rooms to their friends.  It has not yet happened on my floor, which is very good, because there is only one shower and I would object to more people needing to use it.  Serene is getting very upset, because there are now four extra people on her floor and they wreck her bathroom each day (squatting on the toilet seats = a mess, hair babies in the showers, blood, etc), plus things from the kitchen have begun disappearing.  She had the vice warden retrieve her personal items from the illegals' rooms and is now keeping things in her room, but still the kitchen continues to be an issue.  Look what we found there last weekend!

The fish and prawns in the bucket were very much dead, although the crabs were still alive and doing well, it appeared.  It was stinking up the entire floor!  The vice warden was pretty angry about that, but I fear now that he has decided to pretend as if the illegals problem doesn't exist, he won't take a strong stance on the issue.  There are some new people on the ground floor (legals), who seem nice, although quiet.  I think we scared them when six people introduced themselves and started asking questions all at once, though.

The weather has been a little nicer, lately.  Now it is sunny and fine starting at about 4:30 am until 2 pm, when suddenly it becomes quite gusty, cloudy, and rainy.  There are trees that keep throwing cottony material into the air.  It comes through my bedroom window (no screen) and lands all over my room and bedspread, so I have been vacuuming quite often.

I bought tickets for the Paralympics.  I am going to see an equestrian event!  I don't know what exactly, but I'm excited.  The tickets were only £10, so I think I will get tickets to another event as well!  I hope I can still find tickets for an Olympic game.  They keep slowly releasing more and more of them, but they are quite expensive and I don't know how much I'm willing to spend to go to a match / event.

I don't have much else to add at this moment, I'm still just working on my dissertation.  I'm hoping to go to a conference on Friday for electronic music that a lot of people I would like to speak to will be attending as well.  I'm also applying for an internship so I have to mash together a CV.  Whoo!  Talk to you later!

Lazy June

Hi!  As you may have heard, the Queen's Jubilee was last week.  We dutifully tramped down to the river to see the boat parade.  The weather wasn't very nice, so we didn't leave as early as we perhaps should have.  We ended up about thirty feet away from the edge of the Thames with absolutely no view, but we watched a bit on big screens they had set up all along the route.  Here is a photo of a screen while the Queen was up!  You can see Parliament in the background.

The Queen and the Prince on their boat, surveying the Thames.

Lots of little boats!

It started to rain harder, so we beat a retreat.  I would say a hasty retreat, but it was in fact, the slowest retreat you can imagine because of the hordes of people.  We had gotten into the viewing area before they closed it off, and there were thousands of people pressing up against the dividers, milling around.  We couldn't see a way out.  We asked a security guard working the event and she said that we were pretty much trapped, because we couldn't head back the way we had came (it was so crowded there that it had taken us nearly ten minutes to extricate ourselves from the mobs), we couldn't go to the west because it was closed off there as well, the pedestrian bridge was closed behind us, and the way in front was where the dividers were.  We finally managed to slip out and into the ridiculous crowd, so after another ten minutes spent digging our way out (imagine trout jumping vainly against a waterfall), we were free!  That was enough royalist celebration for our taste, and we went home just as it started to rain buckets!

Oreo Truffles are way more fun than watching the Queen on a digital screen in the rain.

The next day, Pep, Serene, and I decided to go for a picnic in the Kensington Gardens, attached to Hyde Park.  We discovered goats only about ten minutes from our house!  Who would have thought?  This woman was feeding them, although the photo makes it look like she was alarmed.

Uh oh.

We walked through Regents Canal on our way.  We got kind of off course by following the canal, but fortunately Serene's smartphone acted as our tour guide.

The canal led us to Little Venice!  It looked very pretty.  I am sure that during nicer weather there are a lot of boat parties and events on the canal.

Kensington Gardens!  There was some sort of a movie being filmed while we were there.  We ate our lunch and then, true to form, London started to threaten rain on us again.  I swear, it has rained every day for the past two weeks, and the forecast shows more of the same in our future.  The autumn and winter were so nice and eternally sunny that I thought London's reputation was overblown, but now I see that spring and summer are practically monsoon season!

They've turned off the heat in our dorms although it still gets down to 45ish at night.  I have a little space heater (illegally) that I run occasionally to keep the temperature up for the sake of my rental cello.  This means that I get a lot of visitors to my room seeking the warmth, haha.  That seems to include bees as well!  Every time I leave my window open I end up with several dead bees on my desk.  : (  Poor little guys.  I don't know what they are doing flying in a third story window, but I can only imagine it has become an elephant graveyard type destination for them.

I think I may have a summer job opportunity in my future babysitting a few hours each day for a family near Belsize Park.  Mariana has been working for a family all last term, but now she is leaving to spend the summer in Mexico, so it looks like there is an opening and she has recommended me.  I'll keep you posted, but it sounds like it would be a good job so I'm hoping they call me!

I went to a ballet at the Royal Opera Hall last week.  We found £6 tickets and were sad to find when we showed up that they were standing tickets way, way up in the high wings of the hall.  It was a gorgeous hall, by the way.  Very opera-house looking with little individual cubbies for the rich-folk and high wings for everyone else.  During the two breaks, we scavenged around for empty chairs and ended up at least with seats, although we still couldn't see very much of the stage from where we ended up.  I'd say I could see 1/3 of the action, so that was kind of annoying, because sometimes something important happened in the blindspot!  Ah well.  It was "Prince of the Pagodas."  I'd never heard of it before and I should have read about it, because we didn't get a programme and I wasn't really able to pull out the plotline from the dancers.  Seems like somebody got turned into a lizard.  That's about as much as I know.

I'm learning Chinese (Mandarin) from Serene and teaching her Spanish in return.  I feel a little bad though, because she keeps parroting phrases to the Mexicans / Ecuadorians / Spaniards in the house and they all correct her with their own particular regional preferences.  I started teaching her Castilian Spanish, like the type spoken in Spain, but then she was told that was the wrong type of Spanish by the Americans, so then she tried her new, corrected phrases on Pep who told her it was wrong because it is not like Spanish from Spain....so she is getting a little confused, I think.  She seems to be doing fine with swear words, because she's learning the best from both regions, so at least she is prepared to cuss somebody out in Spanish, should she ever need that skill.  I haven't gotten to learn any Chinese swear words, but I can say simple things like that I'm hungry, I want something, etc.  It is a lot easier to learn than I figured it would be, because the verb never conjugates differently, unlike, say, Spanish / French / German, etc, so it's simple to memorize things.

Well, I guess I'd better get back to researching!  I would go outside but, surprise, it's raining.

End of Term and Jubilee Weekend

Summer is here!  It greeted us with 50 degrees and rain, unfortunately, but we still put together a barbecue!  We introduced Europe to the concept of s'mores last night and they went over very well!  We couldn't find graham crackers, so we were using chocolate coated biscuits.  I think the extra chocolate helped to sell the idea.
It's Jubilee weekend, so there are a lot of parties and things going on right now.  I was going to go to a giant slip and slide at Hampstead Heath, but it was so chilly this morning and I don't have any pants or sweatshirts that I want to get messed up with baby oil, so I decided against it!  I think the queen is at the races today, watching derbies and whatnot.  Tomorrow, she is going on a boat cruise on the Thames with a 500 boat fleet!  Crazy!  I want to go watch, but I don't know how early I will need to get there.  I predict that it is going to be absolutely packed, and none of the pedestrian bridges are open so anything there is to see will have to be from the shores.

I finished my last day of work yesterday!  It felt pretty good to finally be done with everything, but a bit sad too, because working at the archives was fun.  I liked all the people and my boss was very nice.  I was only there five weeks, but they got me a going away present and took me out to lunch!  They gave me a very lovely book of stuff to do in London, with different ideas for every day of the year!  That will give me something to do this summer in addition to writing my dissertation!

Meanwhile, Prometheus is coming out, so I have been helping Sanjiv to introduce various people to Alien / Aliens, etc.  It was really fun watching other people watch them (because at this point, I don't need to watch the movies anymore to know what's going on), since Pep doesn't like scary movies and was going to pieces over the suspense in Alien.  Lakshmi said she didn't like action movies but ended up at the edge of her seat during Aliens.  And the international kids thought it was funny that Bishop says the explosion will cause a crater the "size of Nebraska."

I've started looking for PT jobs to keep me afloat this summer.  I don't know how much luck I will have, but I'm also considering putting up posters about exotic petsitting.  I figure, with the olympics coming, people might be leaving town and not want to take their pet with them.  While there are constantly ads for dog walkers and dog / cat sitters, I never see any ads for people who will feed snakes, birds, tarantulas, etc, so I think I might have an edge on the market!  Haha.  We'll see!

Happy summer, everybody!