It's done!

My exam is over!  Yay!  That means I'm done with all the coursework and tests for my degree.  Three more days of work placement and then all I've got is my dissertation!

The exam was scary hard, actually.  I didn't quite finish it, which is unusual for me.  I think the last time I didn't finish a test was maybe in 6th grade on one of those speed multiplication ones.  There were a surprising amount of computer coding ones, which is too bad since we didn't have computers!  I was trying to remember the syntax and stuff so I could write it out on paper.  I had to skip one or two that I definitely knew just because I didn't have time to do them.  There were some nicer questions that just took a little longer to write about like "Describe iterative and Markovian approaches to algorithmic composition."  The last page was all very theoretical, like "design your own system to support lead sheet notation and discuss drawbacks, etc etc" which was great except that there just wasn't enough time!

Oh well.  I have counted up the minimum amount of points that I probably got and it looks like I probably passed!  I felt like I was taking the ACT or something.  No cell phones allowed in the room, all purses, etc, went in a back area, only pens, ID, etc on the desk, lots of proctors...blargh.  I prefer just showing up with my greenbook and going to town in a familiar environment instead of in a massive auditorium with assigned seats.  But now I'm done, yay!

Brad finally posted some photos of the Coldplay concert, so here they are!  The first one he found on their website or twitter feed or something (I would be happy to take it down if Coldplay or the photographer requests) from the stage looking out at the crowd.  In that photo, we would be on the very far left in the stands.

Here are some photos that Brad took on his little iPod.  Before the concert (I'm talking like, four hours before, haha):

Looking at the stage and the big screens they had set up!

The wristbands in action!  This is not a very good example of how powerful they were.  There are a lot of videos on youtube though, if you are curious!

It was a pretty fun concert, and a good "farewell" to Europe for Brad, I think.  He moves back in three days!

Speaking of videos, I'm not sure I ever posted the video that our group had to make for the databases class!  Here's the link to youtube, if you are interested.  It's not that much fun unless if you really like databases and their front end, but since it was our very first foray into the scary world of database design, management, and interface design, we are pretty proud of it.  Poodle!

My favorite part of the assignment was populating the database.  Myself and one member of the group were very creative, so there are a lot of Butch Cassidy / Sundance Kid types in there, Harry Potter characters, Wizard of Oz, Disney princesses, and other colorful characters enrolled in classes like Pottery as taught by Han Solo, or Advanced Lightsaber Techniques and Spectrograph Analysis taught by Obi Wan Kenobi.  If they were very unlucky, students would end up going by the name of Blah1, Blah2, Blah3, etc and would find themselves taking a course taught by Blah4 called Consumer Informatics.

The project I'm helping with at the National Theatre Archives soft launched this week, meaning that the website is now up and running online, but is not currently open to the wider public because it is still being tested, corrected, etc.  Hopefully in the next couple weeks I can put up the URL and then you can see what wonderful and beautiful graphs I have created, haha.  Thanks google charts!

Yesterday was my birthday, and instead of studying (ahhh how I regret NOT studying now, having seen the test) I found myself a willing participant in many birthday celebrations on my behalf.  Ice cream, stuffed animals, rainbow cake, and free Chipotle, plus a fun walk back from Baker Street with a gaggle of friends.  Sanjiv even made me a birthday card written in Galactic Basic Standard (from Star Wars).  Haha awesome.

Well, talk to you later!  I have lots of things to do with my free afternoon, like sitting around and doing nothing!  Bye!

Chris Martin and I Go to Visit Brad in Madrid

Hi! I just turned in a massive assignment, and now I finally have time to update the ole blog.

So as you may know, I went to Spain last weekend to say goodbye to Brad and to see a Coldplay concert!  I actually left from Stansted at a reasonable time of day this time -- 8 am, so I didn't have to walk to the bus until 5 am, hooray....?

I got to Spain well before Brad and checked into the hostel, which was nice because then I got to drop off all my stuff.  My poor backpack might not survive this year.  I have crammed four and five days worth of clothes, plus extra shoes, into it several times now and it is starting to get pretty torn up.  Anyway!  I have been in Madrid before, although not for an extensive visit, so I didn't want to do the typical touristy stuff a second time.  I skipped the Prado and instead went to the Botanical Gardens next door.  When I showed up on Friday afternoon, I just walked in, but I think I may have cheated the system because when I tried to go back on Sunday they were charging admission!

Anyway, the park was really nice.  There were some greenhouses that I checked out with pretty familiar plants, if you ask me!

Recognize this one?

I made sure to take pictures of their names as well, so that I can track them down later (although I'll have to figure out what their English names are first).  Most of the plants that Grandma Pat had in California are from Africa originally.  Kind of interesting!
Here is a Venus Flytrap, haha.  I posted this on facebook and William (Peter and Laura's son) posted a photo that he had taken of the exact same plant!  It is kind of weird to think about the fact that we stood in the exact same spot and looked at the same little plant in Madrid.  haha.

I didn't have a lot going on so I just sat in the gardens for a while people watching.

The Spanish "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier" equivalent.

Finally, Brad showed up and we went to have adventures.  We found the royal palace and a basilica.  Here is a view from the side of the basilica, overlooking all of the gardens.

Going back towards the main squares.  We didn't really have a map, so I don't know the names of most of these places.  If I say Gran Via, I might be wrong, but we'll go with that for now.

I think this was the Correo building, so like the USPS headquarters, essentially.

Friday night Brad and I went to see Los Vengadores -- The Avengers -- in a cinema.  It was about £6 cheaper than seeing it in London, so I was pretty okay with it.  Disturbingly, I had written down how to get to three theatres before we went and two of them were closed!  We finally found one that was open, but the manager kicked us out when we walked in and said "Come back at nine thirty."  Which was ten minutes after the movie started....but whatever, we had some dessert and then toodled back to the theatre.  We were some of the only people there.  It was really depressing that on a Friday night, on one of the busiest shopping streets of Madrid, there were only about 5 people in the entire theatre including the two guys selling popcorn.
I followed along with the movie pretty well, for the most part.  There were a couple dialogue intensive scenes that I lost track of, so that will give me a good excuse to watch it again, I guess!

The next day, Brad and I went to Toledo.  It was fun being back in familiar bus stations, etc again.  I showed him the outside of the place I used to live, the ice cream stand I went to, etc, and we tried to track down my friend Marina at the shop where she used to work.  She didn't get off work until 8:30, and was now at a different shop, so we had all day to spend a'wandering.  I made sure Brad got a good look at the museum with all the famous El Greco paintings (he was super excited...not), and the Alcazar (castle), cathedral, and Juderia (Jewish quarter) of the town.  Below is one of my favorite places in Toledo in a little church near the river.  Yay!

I even showed him my campus when I got us lost and we accidentally wandered past, which was convenient because then I was able to get my bearings again.  I'd say for the most part I remembered the overall layout of the town, but I had forgotten how some of the winding streets connected, etc, so there were a few points that I was turned around until I saw a landmark church or something.

A lot of the shops and restaurants were closed, and not just for siesta, which is sad.  The only non touristy place we found for dinner was serving sort of Spanishy pub food, but it was fitting because the Championship League games were going on.  One of the Spanish footballers, Fernando Torres, plays for the team that won, so people watching the match were freaking out, and it was a fun atmosphere to eat dinner in.  Oh!  Also I should mention that while the forecast had originally said 80 before I left, it was actually more like 50 while I was there, so I was only wearing a t-shirt and suffered for my foolishness.  It hailed while we were eating dinner and we were pretty glad that we'd chosen an indoor option.

We met up with Marina and one of her friends at a bar near the house where I used to live and had some tapas, for free!  We used to just get a discount for being girls, basically, but I guess Marina is something of a regular and the waitstaff are her friends now, so that was cool.  We had to hurry because the last bus back to Madrid is at 10:30, so at about 9:15 Brad and I headed back to the bus station on foot.  I took a blurry image of Toledo as we walked.  Goodbye!  I don't know if I'll be back again, truthfully.  It is kind of out of the way, as European towns go.

We had a bit of a nasty scare at the bus station, actually.  All the lights were off (the station is underground) so it was very dark, and none of the platform indicators had destinations on them.  Could it be that the hours are different on a Saturday?  We went upstairs and checked those boards and it said a bus was coming in five minutes.  Ten minutes later, nothing, although a few more people were milling around.  I shouldn't have worried, I just forgot that Spain Time is Late Time.  The next bus to Madrid that showed up was going through the pueblos and not heading there directly, but we figured we would take what we could get without complaining.  The journey only took about 20 extra minutes, and it was really interesting.  We stopped at lots of little towns that were completely boarded up.  Nobody was on the streets, etc, and it was only 10 at night, which is when most Spaniards go out to do things like Bible Study, shopping, and drinking of course.  I'm not joking about the Bible Study.  We made it back in one piece and headed back to the hostel.  We got back at around 11:30 just as many of our roommates were getting ready to party.  We definitely picked a "party" hostel, although in this case it worked out well because they left as we got back, and arrived as we were waking up.  We met a couple cool guys that were our friends for the duration of the trip, but they were much more hardcore than us and wanted to drop €30 a night just to get into clubs, etc, and Brad and I prefer to sleep and eat, so we didn't end up going out with them at all, actually.  My favorite guy was from Switzerland, but he learned English from an Aussie, so his accent was spectacularly weird.  When he first said 'hi' I had him marked as a German, but then the other side of his accent would come out and throw everything off.  I can't really describe it, but it was funny.

Sunday, Brad was freaking out about the Coldplay concert, so we didn't really do too much.  We wandered around in the morning (it was coooooooold) and looked for Masses for Brad to attend.  We found a bunch, but decided to wait for the main basilica's mass at 11:00.  About quarter to 11 we rolled up to the door and found that mass had started a long time ago.  We stood around for part of the service looking at the church from the back and then left.  The next mass was supposed to be at 1:00, so once again, we showed up and found that they had started long before.  WTF?!  So we decided rather than go to the basilica AGAIN, we would go to the "crypt" around the corner at 2:30.  I think you can see where this is going.  After a snack to hold us off until Spanish lunch time, we got there at about 2:15 ready to rumble and the freaking service had already started.  Apparently, Catholics have to be at mass by a certain stage or it doesn't count, otherwise I was ready to add 1/2 and 1/2 to get 1, but fortunately for Brad, we had made it just in time for this service.  I was really surprised at the number of callous tourists in there.  The church was closed except for participants of Mass, but people were saying they wanted to "worship" and then were just whipping out cameras, walking around, talking, etc.  It was annoying.  The crypt was cool though!  It would have been really creepy before electricity, let me tell you.

Here is the palace from the garden side.  It was a very pretty building, and very long!

We were super hungry after our long day of trying to go to church, and were walking down the street past door after door of boarded up restaurants when suddenly, like a beacon shining forth, Nebraska!

Yessir, we got ourselves our own restaurant in Madrid.  Pardon the French, I don't understand why the menus weren't in Spanish.  I think our waiter gave us the "non-Spanish" menu or something.  But look!  A Lincoln Burger!

There were all kinds of photos of "celebrities" around the walls, but none of them were actually from Nebraska.  In fact, nothing about the place was remotely Nebraskan, not even the logo or the colors, so that was funny.  But I appreciated that they made acceptable burgers (although I'm not sure I would enjoy the Spanishburger....mmmm potatoes).

Brad and I went to a different park for the afternoon, because the Reina Sofia museum was closed.  I wanted to see the Guernica, seeing as how this was the second time I've been in Madrid and I have yet to see it, but alas, Sundays are not art museum days, I guess.  Here's a lake:

After a while, Brad was getting pretty antsy about Coldplay, so we went back to the hostel to look up directions (they had free computer access -- an unheard of thing in hostel destinations!!!!  Seriously, they didn't even make you drop a euro in to use the machine)!  The estadio was within walking distance, we hoped, so even though it was only 5:30 and the concert started at 8:00, we figured we would go check it out.  I brought a jacket and gloves because I learned my lesson from freezing in Toledo, but Brad wanted to show off his Coldplay gear so he only brought a sweatshirt.  Haha, bad choice.  We made it to the stadium in about 30 minutes and already there were hundreds of people milling around.  Brad bought me a Coldplay shirt for my birthday that I put on as an extra layer, haha.  We also learned that inside the stadium, euros would not be accepted -- only vouchers that you could purchase for 1 voucher = €3 (minimum of 5 vouchers when buying).  What the heck!  There weren't any places to eat for a long ways around simply because of the masses of people, so I decided to forgo dinner.  I wasn't going to pay €15 just to buy a lousy hotdog or something. 

We went into the stadium early and got our bracelets!  Coldplay has been doing a new thing at their concerts this year where each member in the audience gets a bracelet that lights up in response to radio signals timed to the music.  Pretty cool stuff!  It looked like mine was possibly defective and I couldn't manage to fix it on my own, so I took it back and got a new one.  Brad and I had joked that one of our bracelets probably wouldn't work before, and we were going to have to fight over it, so I wanted to make sure that I at least had the working one!  Then the rain started.  A LOT of rain.  We had awesome seats (open seating within areas) and didn't want to lose it, but I ended up retreating underneath and Brad eventually followed suit because he was pretty cold without a jacket.  The first opening act went ahead and performed in the rain although I felt pretty bad for her as she was not dressed for the weather at all, haha.  There was even some lightning and I was worried they would cancel the show.  When the rain started letting up a little, Brad and I went back out and managed to get even BETTER seats than before, simply because we were willing to get wet to earn them.  It finally stopped raining by the time Coldplay started.  Yay!  During one of the first big songs, fireworks went up and everyone's bracelets started to light up......but neither Brad's nor mine worked!  What a bummer!  I was irrationally depressed about it for at least 10 minutes.  It looked like maybe 1 out of 20 didn't work judging by the crowd around me, but the overall effect was still pretty spectacular, and the stadium flashed along with the rhythms and things.  Very cool.

The concert went by really fast.  It was fun because listening to a stadium full of non-English speakers shout along to English lyrics was really interesting.  Additionally, when Coldplay "left" after the concert (before the encore, naturally), the crowd started singing "Olé" to bring them back on, which was a riot.  I had a good time, I got a shirt courtesy of Brad, and I stole the bracelet because I figured by gum, if the darned thing didn't work then I was going to keep it!  It would have just been a disappointment to whoever got it in the next concert.

I didn't bring my camera with me to the concert, but Brad took some photos so as soon as he puts those up I will post them here.  Now it's bed time!  I don't have to go to work tomorrow because I have a big dissertation research methods seminar thinger at UCL all day, so it will be fun to catch up with all the Digital Humanities people and see how their work placements are going, etc.

Talk to you later!

Hanging out in London

Hi everyone!

Since coming back from Stockholm, I have been scrambling to catch up with homework.  I think I'm pretty much back on track, so I can relax a bit.  Yesterday, me and a friend went to see the London Symphony Orchestra in an outdoor concert at Trafalgar Square!  They were playing mostly Stravinsky (encore was Prokofiev) and it was really awesome.  There were a couple thousand people there, really impressive.

Today is the last day of the Premiere League, a big football (soccer) tournament for English club teams.  I don't know who to root for.  I live by Arsenal's stadium, but I don't really support them, haha.

I am starting to get a reputation for talking about food too much in this blog, but real fast, let me tell you about my work placement!
So last week I worked on taking data from a database and working out statistics about the contents ("in 1980, 73% of the roles in plays were for male actors" etc).  Then I stuck it into nice little JavaScript charts that are interactive.  It is pretty neat, I will try to post one soon.  But more importantly, I get £5 for lunch every day, and boy have I been taking advantage of that!  There is a market about two blocks away from work with all kinds of food stalls and I go there every day!  A lot of the food stands change by the day so I always have new choices.  I have been eating a lot of Senegalese, Moroccan, Thai, and a pseudo Indian thing (like....Indian kebabs with falafel?  It's confusing but tasty).

Anyway, I'll talk to some of you tonight!  Happy Mother's Day!

Hello!  I just got back from Sweden last night and here are the pictures!
Serene and I got there at around 9 am (yup, that meant we left London pretty danged early).  Now, pay attention, because the next part gets confusing!  If you are more interested in the photos, just skip ahead!  We took a bus for around 90 minutes to get into Stockholm and a friend of a friend of Serene's met us at the station.  Anna, the friend of a friend, is studying abroad in Stockholm for the year at a school about twenty minutes by train outside of town in the suburbs, along with Serene's friend Eston, who was unable to meet us at the station.  She was very nice and sent us on our way with some food and instructions on how to get back to Stockholm.  We met another one of Serene's friends (who knew so many people from Singapore go to Sweden???) who is earning a degree partly in Stockholm, partly somewhere in the Netherlands.  She took us to her boyfriend's apartment which was at the top of a hill right next to the harbor!  Here's the view from the street leading to his house!

Stockholm (overlooking the harbor on a cloudy day)

We had some tea and lunch at her boyfriend's place and Serene and I were introduced to yet another Singaporean girl who was also doing the tourism thing, so we hung out with her for the rest of the day.  We decided to take a boat over to another little island that has a lot of museums.  We went to the "largest open air museum," Skansen, in the afternoon.  If you paid them 100 crowns (€10 / $13), you could play in an enclosure with some lemurs!  I am not made of money or else I totally would have done it!

The rest of Skansen, the outdoor museum, was not all that interesting, actually.  It was very pretty, and there were a lot of animals.  They had various pens with "Scandinavian" animals, so that was cool.  Stocky northern looking ponies, moose, sheep, etc.  They also had accumulated, moved, and scattered different buildings from Sweden all over the park, so you could see a 17th century farmhouse, 18th century windmill, and one pretty decent sized granary building that I think was several centuries old.  I was kind of getting the "Silver Town Colorado" type vibe with reenactments and hands on history stuff, although there was only one person on duty in a little farm building while we were there.  It looks like they are set up to do a lot more during the summer.

View from the edge of Skansen Museet

It started to rain on us while we were in the park, and the temperature was dropping pretty fast, so we headed back towards the center of town and found a giant shopping mall.  H&M has its home in Sweden, so we wandered around the store(s) for a while looking at stuff, got some dinner, etc.  Serene and I went grocery shopping as well, because there was quite a lot of interesting food to look at.  It would appear that Sweden's cuisine focuses mainly on desserts, because almost the entirely grocery store was dedicated to sweet breads, chocolate, sugared items, candy, and berry compotes, haha.  Serene and I stocked up a bit and then headed back to the dorm.  Or so we thought!  It had seemed very easy to reach during the day, but when we came out of the commuter train station everything looked different by night!  We tried both directions and just got confused, so we called the girl who had originally picked us up.  Alas, she didn't know what we were talking about when we described where we were, so we wandered a bit more.  We finally called her again and she realized we had taken the wrong exit (we didn't know that there were two exits) and so we were on campus instead of by the dorms.  She had to talk us through a bit before we made it back to the room!

It was very pretty by their dorm.  There were quite a few trees and steep ledges / rock formations and hiking trails.  The dorm itself was very new and colorful.  The room we were staying in had two beds, a small kitchen, and bathroom, plus a tiny balcony!  Serene's friend wasn't there the first night, so we got the two beds to ourselves, hahaha!  We got up the next morning to go on a free walking tour of Stockholm's old city, the Gamla Stan.

Our tour guide was not so great.  He told us more about himself than about the city, to be honest.  We walked up to the palace just as the changing of the guards was happening.  "Oh, we are so lucky, this is hard to catch," he said.  "Let me say a few words before we take a peek."  He then talked for the next five minutes until the changing of the guards was over.  "Oh well, you can still look if you want to," he said nonchalantly as he strolled off with most of the group in tow.  Serene and I were a bit miffed about that, but we took a few pictures of them leaving the square anyway.

Here's a statue commemorating chasing those pesky Danes out of Sweden.

A view of Stockholm from the cliffs on the south (?) side of the harbor.

After lunch, we took a boat back over to the island of the first day in order to go to the Vasamuseet!  The Vasa was a 17th century boat that was top heavy and sank fifteen minutes into her first voyage in the Stockholm harbor.  She stayed there until they rediscovered her and managed (through a lot of really scary diving work, it looks like) to lift her up in one piece!  Because of the brackish water, the ship is very well preserved, and they recovered thousands of items from the ship, including a lot of well preserved skeletons.
The ship was really massive.  The museum is seven stories and starts at the base of the ship until the top, if that gives you an idea of the scope.  It looks like most of the ship is structurally sound enough that people can walk in it, although we weren't allowed to.  We just saw on videos that archaeologists and specialists were jauntily strolling through the insides of the hold and gun decks, etc, as if they weren't worried about the centuries old wood breaking.  They said that 90% of the original timber is still intact.

I was very impressed with the Vasa.  After a few hours in the museum, we got a call from Serene's friend Eston.  He had made it back into town and wanted to know where we should meet up.  We suggested the city center, but he kind of make a big deal about not wanting to spend a fortune on food (it turns out he had never eaten out in Stockholm, which I thought was impressive considering he has been there as long as I have been in London!), so we went back to the dorm to meet him.  He made us some swedish meatballs with sauce and lignon berries (kind of like small, sourer cranberries), plus potatoes.  Serene and I had brought a sweetbread that we found at the store, so overall we had a pretty awesome meal.  He was trying to ply us with alcohol and seemed very depressed that we are not the nightlife type of people, but we did go out with him to town to go to a bar (although at our request he did acquiesce to go to a bar that didn't charge a crazy high admission fee.  Stockholm, seriously, you are expensive!)

Here's a picture of the harbor by night!  I stuck my hand in the Baltic Sea just for funsies and I have decided that it is not as cold as Lake Huron, which still takes the cake for Coldest Water Ever.  I was surprised, because I thought that the sea would be painfully cold, but it basically felt like garden hose water in terms of temperature.

The next day, Eston wanted to go to an art museum, so we found a bus and went out to one of the piers pretty far from Stockholm's center.  Here are some churches that I saw that looked cool, haha.

We had trouble finding lunch since we weren't really in a happening part of town anymore, and it was a Sunday so all the actual establishments were closed.  We finally did find a pretty nice diner, where due to my inability to read Swedish, I foolishly picked something that sounded like chicken but was actually salmon.  Alas!  Every country I go to, I somehow wind up eating fish!

We headed back to the old city after lunch and wandered around a bit.  We didn't feel like paying for a museum (I'm telling you, ridiculously high rates), so we just looked around.  Here's a cool fish sign.

We got lucky, and as we were walking around we heard the changing of the guards happening again!  We ran to the royal palace and were just in time to see everything happening, although there were no horses this time.  :(

Here is one of the guards.  I really like her uniform, it is way cooler than the Swiss Guards at the Vatican, who look like they are encouraging people to mess with them.

This square was the site of the Stockholm Bloodbath, where a bunch of Swedes got chopped when Denmark got the upper hand.  The red building has bricks commemorating each head, supposedly.

We found a cool church, the Deutcher Kerche, or something like that.  It was quite small but very beautiful on the inside.

We stopped for a snack in the Bloodbath square before our bus to the airport.  They gave us hot chocolate in bowls!  So awesome.  That's Eston, our kind host, and Serene!

For an airport with only five gates, the line for security was crazy!  Serene and I got through with only about ten minutes before our gate closed, and we should have had forty minutes or so.  We ordered nachos before we realized how little time we had, so we had to stuff it in a to-go box and dash for the plane.  We also had intended to spend our remaining 100 or so crowns on random stuff at the airport, but instead had to spend it on M&Ms and things on the plane.  The flight attendant was amused when we put the bill in his hand and said, "What can we get for that?"  I had an apple juice incident, so it appeared as if I had wet my pants and I rode in squishy shame for the rest of the trip (and on the bus trip back to London later, sigh).

Overall it was a fun trip!  I met a lot of people and I didn't really spend much money at all thanks to Serene's friend being nice enough to let us stay with him!  I felt a serious Canada vibe while I was there.  I guess the hockey world championships were going on, so there were a lot of hockey jerseys.  There was a lot of moose paraphernalia and pine trees, so I think I can understand my Canadian perceptions.

I think I would prefer to see the back country of Sweden more.  Stockholm as a city was not particularly notable, in my opinion.  It had nice features but it doesn't stand out to me all that much.  I loved the water, cliffs, and their incorporation into the city, though!  Anyway, I have to go, but in two weeks I go to Madrid!  Probably more updates then!

Small Updates

Hi everyone!

I decided I needed to update my blog because I forgot to mention a couple weeks ago that I went to a pillow fight in Trafalgar Square!  It was part of "International Pillow Fight Day" and came up on my facebook feed, so I rode the tube downtown with my pillow in order to do battle.  There are hundreds of pictures online.  I had a navy pillowcase so I was hoping I could find myself in one of them but I didn't try too hard.  It was fun, although some people were not playing very nice at all (as if you could "win" a pillowfight?).  A bunch of people had brought down pillows and they exploded every once in a while in a bluft of feathers and cough-tastic fluffing.  The made everything look very picturesque, but they also made it very difficult to breathe and I was still coughing up feathers several hours later!

I've been trying very hard to settle down and do homework before I take off for the weekend, but people and things keep getting in my way!  Yesterday was May Day, so I took it upon myself to bake little cookies for the whole dorm, so I ran door to door ding dong ditching.  It got a lot less stressful once I realized that nobody knew they were supposed to chase me.  The only guy who did give chase spent a lot of time in the US in the past, so I was halfway expecting it.  I guess it's not a big thing in the UK at all, as nobody in the house knew what I was doing besides him!

I got free tickets to a show at the National tonight, compliments of the archive (thanks!), so although I only found out a few hours ahead of time I went back after dinner to watch "Travelling Light."  It's a new production that follows a small town in eastern Europe as they throw themselves behind making a silent movie in the early 1900s.  It was advertised as a "tragicomedy," and I was very confused even 90 minutes in, because nothing all that sad had happened.  A supposedly brilliant, young, aspiring filmmaker had met The Girl, artistic disputes between himself and the carpenter-producer were being settled over shots and "L'Chaims," and all seemed well.  I'll spoil the end, since I don't think any of you will probably see it.  Basically, at the end the girl tells him she's pregnant, he tells her to get rid of it, and so she tells him it might not even be his and storms out.  He decides to break the box where the townsfolk had put in all the money to buy film and stuff for his expensive moving picture camera and run off during the night without saying goodbye to his aunt or any of the other villagers.  He goes to America, where, at the beginning of the movie we are told he has become a famous American filmmaker and has dropped his Jewish name.  He always wondered what happened to the villagers but never saw any of them again.  At the end of the movie, basically, he finds out that there was a progrom and a lot of them died.  His girlfriend died in childbirth, etc, etc, so the ending would be the tragic part.  Dunno why, but it was pretty effective, there were an awful lot of teary eyes in the theatre, haha.

I leave for Sweden on Friday, and I might not update again before I get back, but take care!  Sorry that this was a pretty boring update, haha.

Work Placement and More Visitors

Hello!

I just finished my first week of work placement at the National Theatre Archives.  So far it has been pretty uneventful, but I got to see some cool parts of the theatre and learned a lot about their database management system, haha.

On Tuesday I went on a backstage tour of the National Theatre which was awesome!  There are three theatres / venues in the building.  The biggest, the Olivier, is a giant auditorium designed around the concept of a Greek amphitheater.  There is a gigantic fly system in place above the theatre.  The National runs more than one production at a time on each stage, so when a show is not needed one night, the entire set is hooked and raised into the ceiling to wait its turn.  There is also a drum revolver on the floor (like an elevator, basically...Kimball recital hall has one too which is quite fun to ride), so that when stages are built on it, they can be revolved around easily or lowered into the floor.  Anything that can't be stored above the stage in the flies is lowered five stories down and rolled to one side in a storage area.  The drum also splits in half, so while a show is going on in front of, for example, a set building, the back half of the drum can lower down, have a new set placed on it, be raised up again, and then rotate into a brand new set all during the performance.  Pretty slick!  The drum can take up to 60 tons of weight, which seems incredibly impressive to me!

The medium sized theatre, the Lyttleton, has a pretty ingenious system for changing entire shows quickly as well.  Sets are built on rolling wagons that can be pushed around easily.  When a set needs to go into place for the night's show, they push the wagon out onto the stage and then lower a second of the floor just enough so that the wagon's top is even with the stage floor, then lock it into place.  That way, even though there are usually two plays going on at one time in the stage, it only takes a few minutes to change between shows each day.

The smallest theatre is almost like a black box theatre.  It is modeled kind of like the Globe or an old operating lecture room, where there are stalls around the walls like balconies so that the audience can see from all sides of the stage.

I also got to see a War Horse!  For those who don't know what that is, basically there is a play called War Horse (based on the book) which uses giant wooden puppets.  The tour guide climbed inside the head and neck portion and manipulated it...I was taken aback by how realistic it seemed!  Seriously, everything about the horse's head and movement were accurate, it was crazy!  During the staging, each war horse has three people inside.  Two for legs, one for the head / neck.  The legs are usually ex-gymnasts or very built, but short people, who can bear a lot of weight, as the puppets need to be able to be ridden as well.  I'm waiting for the ticket prices to drop, but I think I'm just going to have to suck it up and go see the show, because it's killing me that I haven't seen it yet!

My actual work at the theatre hasn't really gotten off the ground yet.  I'm helping with a project called the Black Plays Archive, which is basically a collection of data surrounding the works of black playwrights in the UK.  The site is supposed to do a beta launch soon, so I helped to do a bit of website checking with the links, displays, error messages, etc, but nothing too intense.  It sounds like the archive wants me to work on developing digital tools like map interfaces, timelines, etc....probably a bit out of my capabilities at this point as I am NOT a software developer, but I have decided to give it a try to see what happens.  I can at least make a prototype or model that the actual tech guys can build off of later, hopefully!  Yesterday I had a meeting with some of the actual developers, and they are going to give me access to one of the databases and its interface system so that I can noodle around a little bit.  They just have to clear my access with security first, so that they can make sure I'm not going to accidentally wipe their entire database (hopefully it is better backed up than that, but either way I do not want to accidentally delete anything either, haha).

On Tuesday I met Will at a pub and we had dinner with one of his friends.  He is doing a study abroad program in Paris right now and used a break in classes to tour around Amsterdam, London, Barcelona, etc.  We had a good time.  I showed them the view from Primrose Hill, etc.  The next day Kourtney came, but we didn't have time to do very much because she had a family emergency and had to get a flight back as soon as possible.  I am starting to think that Cambridge is cursed, because I have had the bus tickets to go all lined up now twice, and people get sick, etc and we have to cancel!  So I don't think I will be trying to go back again for a while, haha.



Yesterday I went to Westfields Mall in west London.  I hadn't ever gone before because I assumed it was far away, but it turns out it is only about thirty minutes from my house by tube, so I am going to be going back soon!  There were so many stores!  We thought about going to see a movie, but they cost £14, so....nope!  haha.

It has been rainy and terrible in London every day for about two weeks now, but I'm hoping that it will get better soon.  I head to Sweden on Friday, hooray!  I think at this rate it might be a nicer, warmer climate than London!

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!