The Rewards of Attending Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quittin' Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lazy June

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

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

Lots of little boats!

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

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

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

Uh oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of Term and Jubilee Weekend

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

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

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

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

Happy summer, everybody!

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!