Walking in Rome

The Fountain of Triton

Hello!  I will try to make this brief, because I'm still pretty tired from this weekend and I need to get to sleep!  I spent the last four days in Rome, whoo!  I shall take you through my epic journey.  Wednesday night I arrived at around 7:30 in Fiumuncino, a town about an hour away from Rome.  By the time I got through customs and waited for my severely delayed bus, it was around 10:00 when I finally got to the main train station in Rome.  Fortunately, I was able to find my hostel without too much trouble (I kind of got lost for about twenty minutes though, haha), and checked in.  They had a very weird setup.  They were running a mom and pop type of hostel out of a restaurant, so you checked in at the restaurant and then had to go a couple blocks away to a little apartment complex to find the actual rooms.  It was a nice hostel because of the homey touch and very small size (three rooms, maybe 12 people there?), but the bathrooms were pretty horrifying.  Still, breakfast was included, so they won their way to my heart!

Because I had left London at 3 and didn't get to Rome until 10, I hadn't eaten dinner, but I didn't feel too keen to venture out on my own.  I was also really thirsty, but I'd been told not to drink the tap water in the hostel, so I was having a rough night.  To make matters worse, the night was pretty cold and I shivered my way through.  The next night I got set up with an extra comforter, but that first night I was a pretty sad, hungry, cold person.  It just made me get up all the earlier to start my adventuring, so I can't complain too much!

Thursday I ate my free breakfast and started walking.  I made a map to track my journey (I was curious to see how far I actually walked), so if you want you can look at my ramblings here.  I ended up walking 14 miles, according to google!

Here's the famous Trevi Fountain!

A pillar that I recognize from a lot of texts, although I can't place what subject it would be from!  I remember that Augustus or somebody is pictured several dozen times on it, but never in battle, which is a little strange since the whole thing is basically one big battle.

Here is a boat at the bottom of the Spanish Stairs, next to the house where Keats died.  I don't really know very much about Keats, but I'm starting to dislike him.  He keeps showing up in the same places where I am (like Hampstead), and he is always a downer.  Getting sick or dying...I dunno, whatever.

From the bottom of the steps:

From the top of the steps!

I found a burial mound / mausoleum that they built for Augustus!

This is the Piazza del Popolo.  It was one of my favorite plazas, and it lies right underneath the big estate of the Borghese (as featured by Respighi).  I tried to figure out how to visit the house, but the roads all seemed like they were only for cars, and the best I could do was to find the horse corrals on their property, haha.  Defeated, I returned to the Piazza where I saw a cool church, the Santa Maria del Popolo, so I went on in.  It was very cool on the inside and had some Raphael artwork, etc, etc.

I found this in the hallway of the church by the bathroom.  Poor Respighi!  Although I looked it up, and these aren't actually his remains, so that makes me feel a little better!

I left the piazza and wandered along next to the river for a while.  I saw lots of cool buildings and stuff, but afte ra while I came to the Castel Sant'Angelo.

You can see St. Peters from the river!

Here's the castle!

I was fortunate to come during "Cultural Week" so a lot of the museums and things were free free free!  I got to go into the castle and poke around!  If you feel like it, you should read up on the history.  It was set up by Hadrian as an elaborate tomb, but after a while it got built into the walls and things and used strategically.  There is an aqueduct looking thing that connects to the Vatican that used to be an escape route / communication point.

Some photos from inside the castle:

From the top of the castle!

There is an angel statue on top of the castle that was put up after an angel was miraculously sighted at its peak!

To be honest, I can't remember what this is right now...

The Pantheon!

Inside the Pantheon!

I believe this is now in a different church.  I get a bit confused, because all churches were free so I poked my head in most of them, and because of the cultural week thing a heck of a lot of museums were free, so I just bopped on through them, even the art ones.  They had bathrooms and they had benches to sit on, so I took advantage of the free ticket in almost every case.  I think I went to five museums on the first day?  It was quite a few.
Anyway, the below picture is from a church where they built a model of the "churches of the world."  They even had one for the US.

The dome on the right is a painting!  But the effect was pretty good!

Hey, it's a basilica!

Weary and sore, I returned back to the hostel to wait for Brad.  The manager of the hostel brought a couple people over at about the time Brad was supposed to show up, and I thought I heard his voice, so when the manager and two girls walked in and I jumped to my feet they all thought I was crazy.  I mentioned I was waiting for a friend from Nebraska and one girl said, "Oh, isn't that crazy?  We just met a guy from Nebraska who is staying here.  Small world."  I was a little suspicious at this point, but I figured she must have meant somebody else already at the hostel.  "Yeah, he said he was going to meet a friend or something, so that means there are going to be four of you Nebraskans here."  Seriously?  So anyway, long story short, Brad had in fact arrived with them but was in a different room, and I learned that the two girls weren't the sharpest tools in the shed in one blow.

We went to find some dinner and then Brad wanted to look around.  I mustered my weary strength and set out again! We went south towards the Colosseum and all of that jazz, although we didn't find it at night.  We still found a lot of other cool things to look at!

The Monument to Vittorio Emanuel II.  He gets a whole building + museum!

The next morning, we walked back to where we had been at night!  We were looking for the Colosseum but it didn't make sense on the map, so we spent a good 30 minutes dithering back and forth by this building until we used our eyes instead of the map and realized that we could see it on the horizon.  We are not the sharpest tools either...

Walking towards the Colosseum past a bunch of ruins in the Foro Traiano and the Foro di Augusto / Cesare!

We had bought tickets online that got us into the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Palatine Hill.

I was really impressed by the size of the Colosseum.  I was less impressed by how very little information they had posted about it.  There were maybe two plaques and otherwise it was mostly random information about restoration.

View from the Colosseum towards the Palatine Hill!

We continued our journey to the Palatino, and got to kick around with some old Roman stuff, also not very well explained at all.  If you were lucky, there would be a little sign with something like, "Ville di Augosto" in a corner by the bushes.

A storm brewed up while we were on the top of the hill, and there was some sweet thunder, so we decided rather than die at the top of a historic place, we'd rather spent 30 minutes in an art museum, haha.

Waiting for the storm to clear.

These are the excavations of original houses built on the hill, back before the Roman Republic was a Republic, etc.

Look how much it was raining!  You can see it running down the stairs.

They seemed to be doing a lot of restoration work, which is awesome!

Look at all that water!  I was really glad that I stuffed a spare set of shoes into my backpack.

Back at the Monument, we decided to look for a bathroom and found a whole museum!  It turns out later that it wasn't free, but somehow we managed to get in despite just blindly wandering past the guards.  There were about seven big rooms dedicated to Italian military conflict in the past three centuries that conveniently focused a lot on Garibaldi and WWI and did not mention anything past 1924.  No joke!  I thought that was very interesting.

This was just a big seagull.  I wanted to take a photo, haha.

Inside the military history museum.

I think this was Santa Maria in Cosmedin, but I might be wrong.  It had a very, very different style of ceiling for a cathedral and I'm guessing it's a lot older than most.  I liked it a lot.

Some random statues, etc.

For dinner, we went to an actual restaurant because we were getting tired of eating to-go food in the cold and rain.  I asked for a "club sandwich" and got a mushroom salmon surprise!  All my foes combined in one dish!  I actually did eat everything except the mushrooms, so I counted it as a victory.

The rest of the day we just wandered around the "Circo Massimo" / chariot grounds and some random churches and parks by the Colosseum area.  That night we went back into the center of town to look for some nightlife that involved sitting, since we were both really tired, but we didn't have a lot of luck so we ended up going back to the hostel pretty early.  Before we went back I made Brad go to the cool Popolo church to look around, and we accidentally went in during some sort of a service.  A few Italian ladies bustled up to us and told us to write down prayers and things, light a candle, and take part.  We spent a few minutes in the service before we continued on our way, but I think that was very nice of them to include us.  Then it was an early bedtime!  No regrets, I love to sleep!

The next morning we got up and went to the Vatican!  It was ridiculous getting there.  You almost had to fight off people trying to swarm you with tour offers.  "Skip the lines, I can get you in right now!" etc.  One guy got pretty ticked at us, because he ran up to me and Brad and said, "Hey, you speak English?"  I shook my head no in order to get rid of him, but Brad shook his head yes, so the guy got pretty pissy.  "Oh, so YOU don't speak English, huh?  Enjoy the two hour line!"  PS:  The line took fifteen minutes...

Before standing in line, however, we went to the Vatican museums.  I was most enamoured by the ceilings and frescos.  The actual museum was a madhouse of people, but otherwise it seemed very much like the British Museum.  There was stuff ranging from mummies to Assyrian pottery, etc, etc, etc.  Pretty interesting, but I was there to see the Sistine Chapel, dangit!

My favorite ceiling:

Some Raphael paintings, I guess?  I dunno, people were all very impressed, so I took a photo or two even though they don't seem particularly interesting to me.

We weren't allowed to took photos in the actual Sistine Chapel, but to be honest, I was underwhelmed.  There are so many churches / cathedrals with much more impressive artwork....I am not an art history appreciator, clearly.   Sorry!

We went back and stood in the line, which did seem ridiculously long, but which moved rather quickly.  They basically just wanted people to put their bags through an x-ray but they weren't stopping anyone from entering otherwise.  We decided to climb to the top of the basilica.  Intense!

I paid the 2 euro extra to ride the elevator...it would have been 500 some steps without it!

First break on the staircases was inside the church's dome!  I had some crazy vertigo, because the walls were sloping in at that point and there was just a wire frame around the edge of the walkway.  You can see how small the people are down there, ahhhh.  The mosaics were ridiculous.  There was a mosaic that, seen from the floor, appeared to have someone holding a quill of a very reasonable size.  But once you are up there you realize the quill in the mosaic is bigger than a person!

As we climbed higher, the sides of the walls sloped steeper and steeper, which was very disorienting.  I felt like I was in a Halloween fun house, but not in a good way.

Finally at the top!  Phew!

We went to Mass at the church in the evening, which was a cool experience.  I wouldn't have predicted a year ago that I would one day attend a Catholic mass in Italian in St. Peter's Basilica!

Dinner!

Using the guidebook that Sena got me for my birthday, we looked up all the gelato recommendations they had and tracked them down one by one.  It was worth the extra walking, because we found this place.  The counter curves around the corner, but there were easily 80 flavors, and it was all very cheap!  I got three scoops for €2.50:  mango, chocolate guianijjdaj (long name), and toffee.  Pretty neat!

Gelato in hand, we went back to the Castle to look at it by night.

And the Vatican as well!  There were nuns playing football in the courtyard with some kids.  : )

The next morning Brad left for Spain, so I was left to my own devices.  I wanted to visit the Catacombs south of the city along the Appian Way, but there was a strike and I was confused about whether the buses were running or not, etc.  If I had been able to understand Italian I would have had a shot at figuring it out, but alas, I decided I was going to have to try on foot!

The church of San Giovanni Laterano.  The Popes used to live here until the 14th century?  That is what I understood from the Italian plaque out front.

Another cool church next door.

Trying to find the Appian way.  Unfortunately, my map didn't extend that far south, so once I was off the edge I started getting nervous about where I was going, especially because there were no running buses that I could just hop back on to retrace my steps!

I had to admit defeat over the stupid Catacombs (sad face), but I did find the old Baths!  The Terme di Caracella were incredibly impressive.  I couldn't believe how much of them still exist, and they were so massive!  Once again, my free admission urged me to wander around inside for awhile, haha.

In the afternoon I walked back to the city center (that took a LONG TIME), and was wandering around when I came across another church.  This one was charging admission, which surprised me, but it had a sign that said "crypt" so I was intrigued.  One euro later, I found myself face to face with hundreds of human skulls and lots more bones.  It was pretty messed up.  They had posed entire skeletons in monk clothes and bowed them in prayer, etc, and made ceiling decorations with vertebres.  There was even a room decorated with baby skeletons.  A lot of them still had skin on them.  What creeped me out most was that all the bones down low on the walls were shiny where people had been touching them, and the skulls were worn down through the skin where people could reach them.  WTF is wrong with people?  That is nasty!!!  I didn't take any photos, but you can read more about the weird chapel here:  Capuchin Crypt.  So even though I didn't get to see the Catacombs I guess I still got my fair share of the macabre...?

I was getting nervous about getting to my bus on time, so I headed back to the hostel after a while.  Here is another church I spotted.  It looked cool so I climbed up the hill to look inside and nearly crashed a wedding!  Whoops!

I ended up getting to the airport wayyyy too early.  I had to wait two hours to check in, even, because the small airline I was using wasn't staffing the station until they had to, I guess.  My flight was delayed a long time because of a health problem (and then when they weren't flying they had to remove their luggage, etc), and we kind of messed up the entire airport.  When we finally left, we were waiting in a queue of planes about nine deep.  It was kind of funny, actually, because they all sat there on the tarmac in a row, patiently waiting to take their turn on the runway while others taxied towards the back of the line.  We also had a new pilot, so it took quite a bit longer to land than I was hoping as well.  We circled a few times, haha.  We also bounced when we hit.  I don't mean bumped, I mean, the wheels struck really hard and then we caught some air against for a good five seconds before we hit again, haha.  I feel bad for the plane's landing gear!

So I think that's it!  I wish I remember the names of all the random museums and stuff I went in.  Lots of "palaces," old villas, etc.  Including one that overlooks a main square with a big balcony that apparently Mussolini did quite a bit of yelling from!  By my estimates, I would say I walked about 50 miles in total, maybe a bit more, in 3.5 days, so I am understandably a bit tired!  haha

I started my work placement today, but I'll have to make a separate post about that later.  I also am expecting Will tomorrow, and I hope that he doesn't mind, but I haven't gone grocery shopping or cleaned my room since getting back yesterday, hahaha.  It can't be worse than my hostel was, so he can't complain too much!  Anyway, ciao!

Lots of learning, not a lot of homeworking

Hello everyone!
Two days until I leave for Rome! I've been at the Supercollider 2012 Symposium all weekend, trying to glean interesting information for my dissertation and attending workshops. Supercollider is a program (and programming language) for audio synthesis among other things. I struggled a bit with some of the workshops, since I don't actually know the language, but for the most part I had a lot of fun kicking around in the computer music world. Before I go into any of the details, here are some photos that I should have put up with the last blog post!

The Easter Bunny Cake:

The eggs that we decorated by melting crayons!

A photo of us post-rollercoaster. Triumphant! You should have seen our faces while we were on the ride though: we were terrified!

The rhubarb-berry pie that I made! I know that it's not particularly relevant to this blog (and will just fuel more jokes about my obsession with food), but isn't it pretty?


Anyway, most of the symposium so far has been at Goldsmith's, another of the University of London branches. It is fairly far south, so I have to take a train to get there, although it takes no longer to get to campus than it does to get most places in London, to be honest. The best workshop I went to was led by a pretty famous live-coder who has written his own "language" to stack on top of Supercollider. I embedded a video below of some messing around that I tried to do with the language after the workshop.

I also went to a live coding concert last night, which was really interesting. I've seen a laptop ensemble before a few years ago, but last night presented a very broad range of styles and languages / methods. I had brought a friend from the dorm with me, and while he really liked the first set, he had to leave during the second because he couldn't take it anymore! To be honest, I was having trouble listening to it as well, because it sounded like ten tornado sirens all going at once. The third act was pretty hard to consider from a subjective, musical stance as well, because I was thinking the whole time about how much I wished I'd brought my earplugs. But the fourth set was by a laptop quartet who did a very nice job of working together to present a couple different musical ideas, from ambient to more club, driving beat. If I ever give live coding a try for real, I would like to go for their type of style. I can give you names if you would like to look up any of the artists and give them a listen, but I'm trying to keep it brief for the sake of the padres and grandma. : )


So here is a video that I made while I was messing around with learning a live coding language. The language is called Ixi Lang, and it is very nice because the synths and effects are prebuilt, so all you have to do is call them up and execute them. For a beginner like me, it's just really fun to make cool noises with a couple keystrokes. See if you can recognize the theme that I'm riffing off of after it gets going! haha

Rollercoasters!

Hello!

A couple of days ago, a small group of folks from the house and myself set our alarms early and woke up ready for a day full of theme park adventures! We headed to an amusement park about 1 hours out of London, so we took a tube to Waterloo and then a train towards Reading. We hopped off at a small little stop, caught a bus, and finally found ourselves at Thorpe Park! We had student vouchers that got us in for around £20, which was awesome. There were a lot of big rides, so I was really excited about that. They were a bit bigger than the standard fare at Worlds of Fun, but the lines were all twice as long as well, so that's the trade off I guess.

We went on a couple large, but fairly average roller coasters, one of which corkscrewed ten times in a row! That was a bit extreme for poor Jessica's stomach, but I soldiered on! We also went on this ride called Stealth, which looked like it would be kind of boring from a distance, as it appeared to just go up and then back down again right away, but our residence director told us that we needed to wait for the front row seats on that one, so we stood in line twice as long in order to win the privilege. It was worth it. The ride accelerates from 0 to 80 mph in less than two seconds! I've never experienced something like that before. All of the photos that the ride took of us captured absolutely petrified expressions. It was a lot of fun, and we rode it more than once, but each time the terrifying acceleration brought forth real screams of fear, haha. We also went on a water ride, since the lines were not very long, but regretted it later when we schlepped around in 50 degree weather with wet pants and shoes.

All told, it was a fun day, but we were all very glad to finally get back to the house. I will post photos once other people put theirs up. I didn't bring a camera because I didn't want to have to take care of it all day.

I went to east London yesterday to meet up with the organizers of a symposium that I am volunteering at this weekend and next week. I got to see Queen Mary's campus, another of the University of London organizations, and I must say, it is much prettier than UCL! It had a huge rolling lawn, little duck ponds, etc. Still, the reputation of east London as being a less pleasant part of town certainly held true a bit, and I wouldn't necessarily want to stay on campus after dark!

I've been trying to work on homework for the past couple of days. I have an assignment due next week that I wanted to finish tomorrow, but I'm kind of stuck with a part of the programming, so I don't know what I'll do! Meanwhile, I'm trying to gear up for Rome, since I'll be volunteering right up until the day I leave. I have plane tickets, bus tickets to and from both airports, hostel tickets, and tickets to the Vatican and Colosseum, PLUS a map of Rome, so hopefully I will be okay! There are no public computers at the hostel. I won't be able to email or check touristy things on the internet while I'm there, and I'm trying to get it all done in advance.

I'm flying out of Luton this time, which will bring my tour of London's airports nearly to its conclusion! Despite the flight being much cheaper, I'm a little concerned that Luton is more hassle than the value is worth. I booked train tickets to the Luton Airpark Station, which appeared on the site as if it was close to the airport, but then I found out that it's actually two miles away, and a shuttle service only operates every hour, so that kind of screws over people who are arriving on the train service every ten minutes. I got a refund (phew) and started scheming, limited only by the fact that I am getting back late on Sunday night after the tubes close, and I didn't want to try to figure out night buses from an unfamiliar station. Fortunately, I eventually found a bus that comes right by my house, so hopefully THAT will drop me off right by the airport. If not, I might not make it to Rome! haha. Once I'm there, I think it will be a snap to find my hostel, because the bus drops me right by the main Roman Termini station, and my hostel is about three blocks away!

The next couple weeks are going to be pretty crazy. Symposium, then I immediately leave for Rome, then the day I get back I start work placement in the morning, then Will (as in Peter and Laura's son) stays with me the next night, then Kourtney shows up the next night and stays for a week, then I leave for Sweden, then I have a weekend off, and then I go to Madrid to see the Coldplay concert, and then a giant assignment is due, and two days later I have a test! Then the next week my work placement ends and my dissertation and job hunting begin in earnest. I am trying to get everything done ahead of time, but I am keeping myself very busy!

Well, I will try to post photos before I leave for Rome, otherwise, more updates in about two weeks!

Visitors!

It has been awhile since I updated my blog! My family came to visit for about a week, which was really fun. We saw Bath, Stonehenge, and Windsor Castle on one day, not to mention lots of museums, parks, and grocery store visits! I'm not going to go over the visit here because Matt already posted photos on facebook and my parents have the rest, so by now I'm sure the grandmas, church folks, etc have gotten caught up with that part of the story.


If anyone wants me to post the couple photos I have though, I would be more than happy to!
In the meantime, I went to my first "Silent Disco," which was really awesome. Everybody got headphones which allowed you to switch between three channels controlled by different DJs. There were colored lights on the headphones so you could see what everybody was listening to. I felt bad for one of the DJs, because nobody was tuning into the green channel! It was fun because you could individually control your own volume, so I didn't leave with my ears ringing like in a normal club! Awesome! PLUS, I didn't have to listen to stupid Rihanna all night, haha. I could switch whenever a lame song came on.

On Friday night, Bradley showed up! On Saturday, we went to Greenwich. That will make Mom mad, but it was a huge ordeal and I'm not sure she would have liked getting there. Our problem was that we took the tube to North Greenwich, thinking that it was within walking distance. Around 90 minutes later, walking through the cold wind and rain sprinkles, we regretted our decision not to use a bus to close in on "historic" Greenwich. By the time we finally got there, we were pretty tired. Here's a boat. It is called the Cutty Sark. Apparently there was a fire a while ago, so the boat was closed for renovations or else I could tell you more about it, haha.


Here's the famous clock!

This is from the top of the observatory hill! The couple buildings around the Maritime museum and Observatory were really pretty, and the grounds were large, but otherwise I was underwhelmed with Greenwich! It could be because I didn't enjoy being cold and hungry, haha.

We came back from Greenwich and made some tarragon chicken, yummers! We considered going to some nightclubs and things around Camden, but we were kind of feeling lazy, so we went to the comedy club where I've been a few times. The first two acts were ridiculous. It's like they had barely prepared at all. The crowd was nice enough to kind of chuckle a few times, but most people were just appalled by the awkwardness. After that, the acts were hilarious, so that made up for the wackiness of the openers.

On Sunday, we went to Wembley to get Southern Indian food! It was Brad's very first Indian food experience. He said it was good, but I think he was a bit overwhelmed by the spiciness of the dish he got. Sanjiv and Lakshmi took us to a candy store afterwards and got to pick out Indian candies / sweets. Then Brad and I went to Soho for a few hours to poke around and I convinced him to walk back to the house to avoid paying for the tube. We walked through Regents Park which was very nice. It was about a four mile walk, which I hadn't really thought about, because I normally start from campus not from Trafalgar Square! We were pooped. Fortunately, we got to sit down for a while when we went to Palm Sunday mass.
We tried to take people star tripping in the evening, but there are just too many lights in London! We couldn't find a good place for it, although we managed to stun a couple of people. Then candy poker and bedtime!

On Monday it was off to Canterbury! There were severe delays getting out of the city, so it took almost 3 hours to get there instead of 2, blah. I got so hungry that I ended up eating the sandwich I had packed on the bus instead of waiting until we got to town. Canterbury is a nice little place. It is around 40,000 people big, but all of the touristy stuff is inside the old city walls (which are remarkably well preserved). We went straightaway to the Canterbury Cathedral, a 6th (but mostly 15th) century building that serves as the seat for the Anglican Church. It's also famous because Thomas Becket was murdered there. Photos:


There were a ridiculous amount of detailed stained glass windows. I loved them! They have several full time glaziers working for the church. In the below photo, there is also a super old painting, whoo.

Stained glass!

Here is the Cathedral as viewed from the cloister next door.


After we visited the cathedral, we wandered around the town. The museums wound up being crazy expensive, so we sought alternate amusement. We walked for about half a mile and found a couple other little tiny churches and cemeteries, which were pretty cool!

Walking around Canterbury...

The old city walls!

We walked along the walls and found an old Roman burial mound to climb on. Here's the view from the top!



We also came across a Norman castle! It's too bad that it was falling down. It doesn't look like anybody is responsible for keeping it up. We found some staircases in the corners, but they were partially sealed off. We still got to go up to the second floor in one. A sign informed us that it used to be three stories!

We killed some time by hanging around the castle and wandering along the river before we went back to the Cathedral for their evening service. Normally they have a Vespers type service, but because it is Holy Week, everything was very somber. They moved the "evensong" service to the basement crypt (where lots of people are buried, like the Black Prince) and made it a spoken service only. The crypt is the oldest part of the cathedral, having been started in 597 or something like that. It was a pretty cool service. The choir was practicing upstairs during the service, so we heard faint echoes down in the crypt. It was awesome. We tried to listen to them practicing on the way out, but they were closing down the church so we didn't get to stick around long.
We went to a pub for dinner that claimed to be built in the 1600s with a secret tunnel to help monks escape from the cathedral (escape from what)? Brad was cold and shaky, which was weird because the crypt wasn't that chilly. He barely ate any dinner either. By the time we eventually got back to London that night, he was about to toss his cookies. I woke him up at 6:30 am all ready to go to Cambridge but it was pretty clear he had the flu or some gnarly bug in his system. So Cambridge was cancelled and he slept until almost 10 or something. He felt really bad about missing Cambridge, but it is almost 3 hours by bus, so the whole sick-to-his-stomach thing wouldn't have worked out particularly well, I predict. I dragged him to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum because he wanted to at least see part of London despite his illness, and he had to sit down for breathers after every stairwell, haha. That sucks because I'm guessing I'm next now! : (

The Natural History museum is in an absolutely amazing building. I tried to take a photo of the interior, but it's hard to catch the scope and intricacies of the decorations. Their dinosaur exhibit is pretty amazing too. The children were all enthralled by a robot t-rex that thrashes its tale and roars. I'm not going to lie, it's a very realistic animatronic creature with shockingly realistic eye movements, head bobs, etc.

Brad napped for a while and then we headed to see Zach Braff's show, All New People, at the Duke of York theatre. Here's the theatre! It was a dark comedy. I still don't know if I liked it so much as I can appreciate it as a stagework. It was about a guy who tries to commit suicide, but is narrowly rescued when an estate agent showing the house makes a surprise visit. She invites her drug-dealing firefighter friend, a prostitute shows up, and as they try to cheer him up it is revealed that all of them are semi-broken people with pretty twisted histories and drug problems. Mr. Braff's depressed character winds up being the most well adjusted person of them all, as it turns out. I was most impressed with how much work goes into resetting the stage for each show! They threw around a lot of cheetos, hundreds of beads from a "priceless piece of art", snow, lights, the "ceiling" of the house, and pretty much did everything they could to trash the set in 120 minutes.

After the show, we were starting to walk away when we saw a gaggle of people waiting outside the side of the theatre. We stood there for a second and then decided we didn't want to be too creepy, so we left. When we were about half a block away, we suddenly heard clapping and cheering, so we went back. There was Mr. Zach Braff himself! We were getting blocked from seeing him by a girl with a giant pink umbrella, and we were afraid that we might miss him entirely, but he spent a substantial amount of time with the people who were waiting. He had brought a marker with him and signed programs, shirts, and photos. He was a pro at taking photos; he took most of the photos himself in order to cut out the step of handing the camera to another person in the crowd. He seemed really tired and a bit uninterested, but he was still very nice. I can't blame him for being bored -- on a Tuesday night right after one of dozens of shows he probably really didn't want to stand around doing the celebrity service stuff, but he stayed around for a good fifteen minutes to make sure that he got to almost everybody. He even gave people the chance to take a second photo if the first came out blurry. We were trying not to be pushy and were afraid we might miss the chance to meet him because it looked like he was starting to think about leaving, but right at the end he swung around to us and took a photo! Definitely one of the highlights of the whole year so far. I was scared I was going to break my camera or accidentally delete the photo the whole way home, so once I uploaded it I made sure to email it everywhere in order to preserve it in digital form at least, haha. I'm really glad that none of us closed our eyes or had crazy hair!

Spring in London

Well, it's getting close to being spring here in London. A lot of daffodils are in full bloom, it seems to rain every afternoon, and best of all, we're in the penultimate week of classes! Whoo!

Here are some updates since last time...
1. Hugh Laurie's letter is gone. The resident doctor in the house knocked on my door and asked if he could see it, and then the next thing we all knew he had "taken it back" to Hugh Laurie's house by himself. I'm not buying it. A lot of people in the house are very upset with him whether or not he took it back or kept it -- either way is just mean.

2. I went to a proper pub quiz by Liverpool Street. The rest of my team was way more knowledgeable than me, although I totally knocked out "What is the highest peak in North America," and "Which singer was backed by the band, 'The Heartbreakers?' " But what was the name of Elvis's twin brother? What is the name of a play when the blah blah bat blah in a game of cricket? haha. What is the longest word in the English language made up of entirely pairs of letters? That stuff was HARD! Our team was getting kind of competitive with the other young team next to us, but in the end we both tied with 31 / 70, while the top three teams that placed were octogenarians! SIGH they knew all the answers to rather prevalent antebellum era pop culture references...

3. I went to the Ig Nobel Prizes traveling presentation tonight! The Ig Nobels are a humorous alternative to the Nobel Prizes, and featured the research of many leading figures from scientific fields. I learned about a paper exploring the correlation between bladder control and control in other areas (such as gambling, food consumption, etc), which was actually quite interesting. I heard about a PhD dissertation mathematically mapping the activities of cows in fields (orientation, standing, eating, etc) and their milk produce. I also learned about a Japanese team who invented the first wasabi alarm clock, made after meticulous research into the minimum amount of airborne wasabi necessary to wake a sleeping person. It was a funny evening, and I got to go to Imperial College, which is another of the University of London colleges (and therefore one of UCL's sister schools). I went there straight after class, so I was running ahead of time and I got out a tube station early just to walk around. The first thing I noticed was that it was jam packed. I came out right by a massive Harrod's at rush hour, so that made sense. But then I saw the dozens of firetrucks, meters and meters of cordoned off police activity, ambulances, etc, and horses. Lots of horses! Everything smelled very strongly of gas, despite there being so much wind. Buses were stacking up and pedestrians were trapped and milling around in the streets between the big vehicles. I tried to get around the police block to find my way to Imperial, but I was having no luck. I tried going through Hyde Park but even that was closed off! So I ended up walking down to another station to use the underground to overshoot the disaster scene, and wound up about five minutes late to the show, although I should have been about a half hour early! I found out just now that it was a huge gas leak underneath the police stables, so they had to evacuate around 200 horses, which explains the unexpected abundance of them in the area and why the park was out of bounds!

4. The American Food Cook-Off!
I was challenged to a duel last weekend. A friend of mine here told me that Saturday was the American Food Cook-Off, and that he was inviting a bunch of his friends to compete and I was invited as well. I wasn't allowed to do chili or jambalaya, as apparently his friends had already called those, so I settled for corn bread, mac and cheese, and root beer floats to represent the midwest, haha. I also taught Serene and Lakshmi how to make Oreo truffles a few days ago, so they made those in the kitchen while I tried to create my masterpieces. Unfortunately, the only sauce pan that I have is pretty small, so I had to borrow a pan to boil noodles in while I was mixing the cornbread. I tripled the cornbread recipe, so it must have had six or seven cans of corn / creamed corn in it, and around 8 cups of corn flour! I had to pour it into a gigantic turkey broiling pan that I got for 2 quid at the beginning of the year (it has come in handy so many times)! The mac and cheese I poured into a mixture of bread tins, casserole pans, and other things I could scrounge up, because I tried to make a lot of that as well. Both of those items were very popular, but the root beer floats didn't go over so well. People seemed very confused about the idea of combining "ginger beer" (as Fiery Jamaican Ginger Soda was the closest I could find to Barq's, haha) and ice cream.
In the end, I supposedly lost to someone who made fajitas, but based on the buzz that I heard, I'm pretty sure my cornbread won the day! Humph!


As most of you know, my family is flying in next Friday! I say most of you because I'm pretty sure my parents are the only people reading this, haha. That will be fun; I'm going to make them eat a Sunday roast at a pub! Also, I've been saving the Imperial War Museum for their visit. Yay museums! The Tower of London, Bath, and other sites await as well, although I might pass on the British Museum. Four times in so many months is getting to be excessive!

And then I think two weeks later Brad flies in! We were originally going to try to go to Scotland, but it's too pricey. I bought a book at the store the other day (I had to buy it once I realized I'd been reading it for 30 minutes) that is a guide to day trips from London. It has a lot of interesting historical perspective on why you should visit places, which I quite liked. So per its excellent sounding advice, I convinced Brad to go to Canterbury and Cambridge. Canterbury is only £8 away, round trip, and I am quite excited about it. Everyone who goes to Cambridge raves about it, so I guess I'll give it a go, even though from what I hear they charge you admission at every single college in the university (of which there are several dozen, ugh).

I wrote my first algorithmically generated piece of music last night. I was trying to get the effect of water dripping into a metal bowl that increases in pitch as the level rises. My teacher said it was okay, but I need to make it as if there were several bowls and they empty into eachother when they get full, etc, etc so I have quite a bit of work ahead of me in the next few weeks, BESIDES the databases assignment that I'm coding like a mad person for at the moment. Ahhh. And then I start planning code for another of my classes! Meanwhile, the term is almost completely over and I still haven't heard about my grades from two classes last semester! :(

I got some grades back for a databases assignment that we digital humanities folks had to do in lieu of a test. We basically just were told in an open-ended fashion, to create a "glossary of terms related to the internet and databases." Well, as you can image that is basically everything ever, so my glossary ended up being about fifteen pages double-sided, small text, carefully cited, etc, and the only comment I got on the front (besides where they circled a spelling error, hahaha), was "Too long for a glossary, A-"
I'm okay with that though, because most people seemed to get Cs or Bs, so I'll settle for an A-, haha.

Anyway, I've got to go. In my free time (ha what is that?!) at the end of the term, I have been trying to finish a 1300 page book that I would like to send back to the States with my parents so that I don't have to lug it back in September. Only 400 more pages to go!

Also, everyone here is very excited about their Nebraska shirts! One week until the dorm is going to be sporting some seriously cool attire, haha.

My Neighbors

Exciting news in our humble abode! Serene was sorting the mail yesterday and found a letter addressed to "Hugh Laurie, Lancaster Grove." We don't know what to do with it. There is no number on it, and while the internet reveals that he most likely lives at #17, just about four houses over from us. I for one am not prepared to waltz up to a stranger's house in an attempt to deliver a letter, although I am guessing that ten or fifteen people in the house are already plotting attempts to steal the letter and frame it, so maybe it's not the worst decision. The post system here is not quite like in the US. Mail only goes OUT if you put it in a post box somewhere, as the mailpeople only deliver stuff to the houses, they don't take it away.

Meanwhile, I guess it's pretty cool that I live next to Dr. House?
I am pretty sure we took berries off of his bushes to give our snowman buttons, haha.

A couple of the other work placements are coming in. A couple people have been assigned to UCL, which is fine because they'll definitely be doing interesting stuff and they get paid for their time (that is the trade off: UCL = paid, non-UCL = cool resume). My friend Isabel, who studied Russian history, art, etc as an undergrad was surprised to find that she had been placed as a fluent Russian interpreter for an aviation company.....very surprising considering that she has only taken two years of Russian and did not put on her resume that she was a fluent Russian speaker, so she is hoping that her work placement can be switched up. :/

A couple weeks ago, Isabel, Holly, and I went to get burritos after class at a little Mexican place near campus. They stuck burro hats on us and took our photos on an old Polaroid. We went back today and found ourselves on the wall in the middle of the T of 'burritos.'

We are working hard on our databases projects. I have been putting a couple hours a day in coding, coding, coding. So today I felt like I was taking a break when I started making the website look cool (with other languages, like CSS, but hey, it was a change)! Here's our logo!
It's like a mixture of the UCL logo and teaching website, Moodle, which is why it's funny. It looks cooler when it has a background behind it, etc. I was originally going to make a little dog house for the logo to play on the little portico building in the UCL logo, but it always looked stupid no matter what I did. Unfortunately, now that the logo is done, it's back to coding for me! The whole project should wrap up during the week that you folks (my parents) get here, so if I am sleep-deprived that'll be why.

Time for bed! I'll let you know if I figure out where Chris Martin lives, haha.