Cambridge!

Hello!  It's time for another update.  The last couple weeks have been fun.  It rained an awful lot but recently it has been really sunny, so it's hard to concentrate on sitting at a computer for so long!

For the 4th of July me and some folks went to a blues bar to watch a hot dog eating competition.  Despite the number of competitors, the competition was really quite pathetic!  They had thirty minutes, but the winning contestant only at 10.5 hotdogs!  What kind of American Spirit is that?!  Roy and I ate three each just watching them (we got hot dogs whenever the kitchen made too many so they passed them out quite frequently...they too overestimated the amount that the eaters could handle).  We accidentally beat several of the contestants while leisurely enjoying our free dinner.

I helped Sanjiv put together a gaming computer, which was fun.  He ordered all the components himself and they arrived box by box over the course of about a week.  Here you can see a massive cooling system for his graphics card.  You will NOT see a hard drive, because he got a fancy solid state one.  It is very small, as small as a cell phone, and so it is tucked away out of sight in this photo.

I bought these at the grocery store for £1.50 and three weeks later they are still blooming!  Nice!

On the way to Cambridge to interview a live coder.  I'll leave out his name because I don't want this post to come up in search results.  Looks a bit like Nebraska!

He let me play around with the environment he is developing. You can write a program to react to the fancy little device in the front.  In this case, he wrote it so that every time you press a button, the next chord or note of the piece (specific to each hand of the piano part) will ring out.  So in order to play the song you need to simply tap in the rhythm.  One hand at a time was fine, but try putting two hands together, I dare you!  It took me about three tries before I was able to play something somewhat recognisable, and I still wasn't trying to incorporate volume or phrasing!

The rest of the day I walked around Cambridge looking around on my own.  It is pretty small.  The colour of the stones and things reminded me of Bath.  The only part I didn't like was that they charged upwards of £6 to go into each "college's" grounds, so for the most part I just took photos of the outsides.  I had hoped that my backpack and studenty look would get me in, but alas!

A lot of the churches were free!  I went in quite a few just because of that, haha.

Bells!

I took a photo of this because it reminded me of the Ballad, haha.

I did pay to get into one college just so that I could see the Bridge of Sighs.  Looks like Hogwarts!

There's the Bridge of Sighs!

Around the back of the college were these super looking buildings.  The leaflet I got said that they were award winning and inspired a great deal of architecture, but I think they just look ugly.  Particularly when back to back with a castle-looking structure, below!

I sat next to the same lady on the bus coming to a from Cambridge.  She lives in West London but farther out than I do, and was still upset about the Olympics.  She hasn't been able to get tickets and has been inconvenienced by the tube work, etc, etc.  This is not an uncommon sentiment, haha.  I am surprised by how Big Brotherish the UK has gotten about the Olympics, actually.  McDonald's bought rights to the concept of "chips," so now UK shops within 10 km or something of Olympic events are not allowed to sell chips.  Unless they are a paying sponsor of the Olympics, organisations, individuals, pubs, etc, are not allowed to post the words "London, 2012, Olympics, sport, games, etc" on the outside of their building.  So if a pub wanted to advertise "Come watch the games," or "Tennis Finals Tuesday 8pm" they would be in trouble.  People have been making fun of the regulations quite a bit, and I've seen quite a few shops that put up signs saying "Watch the 2210 Olimpyc Gmes Here!" with a version of the Olympic rings underneath, perhaps as squares or smiley faces, etc.

Here is a photo of a giant banner across the way from St. Paul's celebrating the Queen's Jubilee.  It really is massive, it's hard to gain an idea of the scale.  There are huge Olympic rings hanging on the Tower Bridge too.

I have been trying to take photos of the neighbourhood for the yearbook that I'm putting together.  Here is a nice one of the church just around the corner.  Serene lent me her cool camera, so the shots look very crisp!

Last weekend we went to the Tate Modern Lates event for a silent disco.  The silent disco that I went to at the Science Museum was really awesome, but the Tate's was kind of lame.  We did get to pain a giant skull, though.  Sanjiv, Lakshmi and I painted the one on the far right in between the blue and gold, like 8 from the bottom.  Super exciting.  The polka dot one is Pep's and Maia's.  This is the second time I have been encouraged to paint skulls in London.  Weird.

Sanjiv got a couple of us tickets to see Batman yesterday and told us "Sunday, 8:40."  I agreed because I figured even though it was expensive, I wouldn't often get to see a movie in an imax.  Then I found out that Sanjiv had gotten us tickets for 8:40 am!  WTF!  So we all woke up early and went down the street to the imax, haha.  It was really huge.  When we walked in we found a big dining / reception hall that was serving breakfast quietly to nicely dressed folks.  Weird.  The imax itself was pretty grand too.  Lots of staircases and walkways with railings.  The lights stayed up for about twenty minutes after the show was supposed to start.  In the UK, I was aware that going to the "cinema" was a bit different -- assigned seats, outrageously priced, etc, but I was NOT aware that for £12 they would make you sit through 30 minutes of commercials for cell phones and cars.  I was getting pretty antsy by the time the trailers for movies finally started.  Batman was a good movie, I would recommend it, although it seemed pretty slow at parts.  Maybe it was because of how long I had to sit before it actually started!  I'm glad the only shows I went to were in Spain, where they were cheap!  Plus now I can see the Avengers again, and it will feel like the first time!  haha

Kofi had never been in a movie theatre before, so I think he was particularly surprised by the experience.  He said they have cinemas in Ghana but they are mostly benches sitting in front of a projection on a wall showing low budget movies from Nigeria.  Rarely can a theatre afford to bring in a big name movie or something, even if it is a nice cinema, so he had never gone.  He had never been to a symphony performance before either, so it was fun when we took him to see the London Symphony a few weeks ago.  Next up, we just have to convince him that girls are as smart as guys and can do math and science!  Although initially surprised, he has accepted the idea that girls can play football with guys (especially considering the unskilled efforts of the several of the less athletic guys in the house, haha), and the counter to his argument that "if women were as smart as men there would be more of them in the sciences" then "if black men are as smart as white / asian men there should be more of them in the sciences" seems to have given him pause.  I'm giving him a little time to mull that one over before Lakshmi and I start round two of Feminism Training.  It's interesting though, he considers himself to be a feminist, although I haven't figured out how, exactly. 

Kofi is a really good cook and has been showing me and Mariana how to make traditional Ghanian dishes.  One of them proved to be exceptionally good, but I was in a hurry so I crammed a bunch down and was out the door before I suddenly realised that I was crying a little from the heat.  Then I started sweating profusely, even though it was a cool night.  It took me a while to figure it out.  I had realised that what I was eating was pretty spicy, my lips and mouth were burning, but the reason I was suddenly feeling so ill was definitely because of the food!  It was so good, but I'll need to be careful if I eat it again.  I sweated and trembled and breathed fire for a good two hours while I was babysitting, and I was pretty worried I was going to have to lose my dinner too (which could have awoken the sleeping dragon child I was supposed to be watching).  I can honestly say I've never gotten the shakes from eating spicy food before, and I wouldn't recommend the experience.  I considered digging through their fridge for yogurt or cream or anything to help my sad plight, but since she hadn't told me to help myself I sat and suffered instead.

Pep left for Spain for a few weeks and he lent me his piano!  That means I can now torture my neighbour with three different instruments on a daily basis!  How very exciting.  I'm practicing Chopin but it sounds silly without a pedal.  I am gonna go now!  I am going to try studying in the backyard, although I don't know how successful I will be.  I feel like I need to take advantage of this awesome weather, though!