Consider this a notice of light blogging for the next week or so, since I'll be gone on break for the most of it. I'll try to put something up about Winchester and Norwich this Sunday, but then I'll be noticably absent until probably next Sunday, when you get to hear about the wonders of Canterbury, York, and Hadrian's Wall.

Also, papers are teh suck. But I think you all knew this, so we'll leave it at that.

Well, Kill Bill Volume 2 basically owned in gargantuan ways. Big big gargantuan ways. All the while being a totally different sort of movie than the first one, but still owning despite. You must end whatever pathetic mortal work you may happen to be doing, and go see it, for it is good.

Along those lines, Troy comes out while we're here, which pleases the girls to no end simply because of Brad Pitt. And pleases me for the whole concept, but. And for the guys, King Arthur may or may not come out, which means Kiera Knightly goodness. And for everyone, the Day After Tomorrow looks cool, even if it does remind me of a particular Heinlien book. Anyway.

Besides Kill Bill, my weekend has sucked, though. It's frying in this house right now, we have no idea how to fix the radiators, and it's just not good. Too, since I more or less forgot to eat for most of yesterday, I'm having fun with that, combined with massive dehydration. I did TRY to eat last night, but the fuckers at the Rat and Parrot didn't serve me until like 10 minutes before we had to leave. Fastest meal I've eaten since I dunno when. At any rate, this all means that I've had a raging headache since about midnight last night. I've at least passed the stage where all my nerves are on overdrive, meaning I feel EVERYTHING. But I got to be more or less delirious all night anyway, which I think produced some dreams where I was some sort of ancient statue or something. Very odd. It also produced me in this video game that looked an awful lot like Half-Life, except it was in a UFO: Aftermathesque city setting, and looked like it could be a lot of fun, considering I was driving this car around and capping aliens with a pistol. One of those things to think about when I'm a l33t game designer, I guess.

Oh. And I've got two papers due at the end of the week I haven't started. Maybe today. We'll see.

More Oxford than London, really, but we'll get there in a moment.

Had a strange dream this morning, wherein I went to McDonald's to try to get an ice cream cone, a McFlurry, and a milkshake, and the people at the counter couldn't understand a word I said. Eventually I got fed up, grabbed my stuff, and hopped on the tube. While this isn't quite as strange as the random dream wherein Tara and I were sitting in what looked remarkably like the Monroe Elementary School cafeteria, eating baked beans and having a very passionate argument about the Roman Empire, considering the gesturing, the ice cream dream was still pretty strange. Also a bit more relevant than the Roman beans dream, as we shall see.

Anyway. Thursday was a pretty wild day, surpassed in wildness only by Friday, but I'm getting ahead of myself again. The morning highlight was going to the British Museum and seeing another gallery of Mesopotamian stuff I hadn't seen before. A good chunk of this was bas reliefs of Assyrian royals hunting lions, which translates to "Why, yes. On this wall, I killed a record 537 lions, plus those wild asses down the panel a ways. Since my chariot and myself take up a whole panel by themselves, you ought to agree that this is quite impressive." Too, Dr. Garfinkle and Ella got into an argument over the lion-headed guardian spirit panels, to the tune of:

"So, you can see all these animal-headed guys with wings. The ones are eagles, and the others are lions."

"That doesn't look like a lion."

"Trust me. The Assyrians knew what lions looked like."

"But it has RABBIT EARS."

"No, really. If the caption on the panel, in cuneiform, written by an Assyrian, says it's a lion, it probably IS a lion."

"But lions don't have rabbit ears."

*cue one lion, two lion, red lion, blue lion hunting scene room*

"Now, Ella. Does it look like they knew what lions looked like?"

"Oh yes. These are obviously lions. Notice the lack of rabbit ears?"

And back and forth, for two whole days.

So we get out of class, and Dustin, Margalyn, and I decide we're starving, and want to try this random cafe place in the Brunswick shopping center by school, which incidentally is one of those tragic 60's concrete monstrosities that make you clutch your head in pain and wonder where it all went wrong. Hopefully I'll one day have a picture of this. It's pretty awful.

Anyway. So we go in, and it turns out that this place is cheap. Cheap by London prices, anyway, which means 3.50 pounds for a fairly decent fish and chips meal, which later turned out to be quite good. But the guy at the register apparently only spoke enough English to understand the menu, because he said "Yes please" to everything, and had absolutely NO idea what we were saying. It was pretty screwy. But we eventually got our food, and it was delicious, and life was good. And then I directed about half of the other program over to this place, because they kept wandering up in school and going "Those fish and chips smell REALLY GOOD! Where did you get them?" This was good.

To make things better, Kara and I decided to liven up our day by going down to Waterloo station to get Kara's Eurostar ticket. This was done easily enough. We caught the right bus (it said Waterloo on it), went into the station, got the ticket, and left. Then we boarded the bus that said Russell Square on it. After a time, we started getting suspicious when we didn't recognize any of the landmarks, and got off. As it turns out, the bus lied to us, and we were in Kennington, which is very, very south of where we should have been. Fortunately, Kara found this random guy, who took us to the bus stop, and told us how to work the busses. We eventually got on the right bus, and went back to the Russell Square stop, whereupon Kara was seized by a random news reporter:

"Hi, we're from Channel 5 News. Would you like to give us your opinion on the recent airing by CBS of the Princess Diana crash footage?"

"Uh, I'm an American tourist..."

"Even better!"

"Well, ok."

So Kara may or may not have actually been on the news. We all have no idea, since we sort of forgot to ask when they were airing it. Ah well.

Theater class sucked pretty horribly, since everyone was sort of tired, everyone hated Cyrano de Bergerac, and it was a damn nice day out, one of the best we've had since we got here. But we eventually got out, went home, and waited until 9pm.

9pm, you ask? Observant readers may remember that last Thursday at 9pm, we all went down to the Manor in Eastcote for...kareoke. Yup, we did it again. And good times were had by all, including Margalyn, Katie, Andrea, Kara, and a couple other people, including this random 40 y/o English guy, doing the B52's Love Shack. And then everyone proceeded to get drunk, or at least tried. Much was made of Tara's buying me my first shot, which definitely went down quite well. And then we all went home and dropped into comatose slumber in preparation for the whole 8am on Friday adventure.

Friday, you see, was our Oxford trip. And at 8am on Friday, we were all meeting for breakfast in this diner in Eastcote that's pretty good. In our case, this meant being awake around 6:30, since Mike sort of forgot to realize we were going out for breakfast, and so left us half an hour for it. Considering the amount of alcohol consumed the night before, some us were slightly more cheerful than the rest of us. And the damn waiter wouldn't bring me my damn caffiene, or my damn breakfast, which was vastly annoying considering I was starving and cranky. But somehow we managed to make it to the bus anyway, which was surprisingly short, especially considering that we all pretty much slept the whole way over.

So, Oxford. What to say about Oxford? I'm exceedingly jealous of people who go to school there, because it's one of the coolest places we've been to yet. It's a little bit more modern-looking than Bath, but there's still random Norman and Gothic architecture all over the place.

Christ Church, which as I understand it is one of the colleges, plus having Oxford's actual cathedral, is awesome. It's sort of like you're looking at this random really old building, and you suddenly realize that oh, people LIVE there. That's a DORM ROOM. Not fair, I say. Random fan vaulted ceilings abounded. And the cathedral... Oh man, the cathedral. Perhaps the single most spectacular building I've been in since I got here. Very ornate, with lots and lots of little things going on. In one corner, you've got these little books with the names of the local dead from both World Wars. And there are little monuments and I assume tombs going back into the Middle Ages. Floor tombs, wall tombs, big stone sarcophagi with statues of knights on them, you name it. Nifty, nifty place.

Then we went to the Bodelian library, which I guess was one of the first colleges at Oxford, until they decided that it needed to be turned into a library. In any case, it's got cool architecture all over, including the chapel/divinity school/dunno what else they used that room for, which has the whole airy Gothic fan vaulted ceiling thing going on, with the added bonus of having the initials of the original donaters of money to the place carved into the ceiling. Quite cool.

From there, we went to St. Mary's, the full name of which I can't remember, but had Virgin somewhere in there. At any rate, we all got to climb to the top of the bell tower to have a look around, while they were ringing the bells for St. George's Day, which is sort of like St. Patrick's Day, except that nobody actually seems to celebrate it much, or even care. In any case, you gain a new appreciation for spiral staircases, climbing up this thing. The thing was only about four or five feet wide, with barely enough room for my foot. And it kept going and going. Us moderns are fortunate enough to have rope handholds, but ye olde medieval types would've been screwed. The view, though, is quite something. You can see all of Oxford from up there, which means the scenery is spectacular. It's also built for people smaller than me - I could stand on my toes in the archways and bang my head, not to mention I had to walk through sideways. Worth it, though. Someday you can all see the pictures.

From that point, we all wandered Oxford, which is actually worse than it sounds, considering that we spent half the time looking for food, which is sort of strange considering that Oxford is a college town, and the other half looking for ice cream, a thing which is greatly lacking in England as a whole, but especially in Oxford for some reason. In any case, our noble quest eventually led us to McDonald's, where we found the fabled Holy McFlurry, which was consumed with great joy while we were entertained by the random guy playing bagpipes, and quite well, in the street below.

Eventually we found our way to the Ashmolean Museum for class, which is apparently a very famous sort of museum, but has the misfortunate to be in the same country as the British Museum, which means that the Ashmolean is sort of the ghetto version of the British Museum. Nevertheless, it has a few nifty things, like a LOT of Egyptian artifacts, and some damn fine Greek and Roman statues.

Some time later, everyone decided to go wandering again, which was even less fun than it sounded before, because we did all of nothing, and realizing this everyone decided to go punting, which involves poling around this gondola-looking thing in the river. This may or may not be more fun than it sounds, since I stayed on shore, since my legs at this point were in need of serious medical attention. The end result of this was ending up in this random park, where the ducks attacked other Mike, these two teenagers were going at it for about the hour we were there, and eventually the punters came by. This was...quite the event. The first boat, with Mike my roommate, Katie, Tara, and Allison, went by with no problems due to Mike and Katie's mad punting skillz.

Then came the other boat. Margalyn had started off with the pole, but at some point Laura grabbed it and took over, much to the detriment of the people in the boat, but much to the entertainment of the crowd on the bank. She nailed the bank a few times, then went into the bushes ("Ow! Ow! Those are STICKER BUSHES! GET OUT! OW!"), then into the bank again, then the wrong way, at which point the other boat came back going the other way. All the while we got narration by Robyn from shore, to the tune of "No, Laura! The bushes AREN'T THE WATER! The bank isn't the water either! The river is this way!" and other such things. It was the most entertaining moment of the day to date.

About that point, though, everyone decided they wanted to go home, and we decided to go meet up in Northwood at Jeremiah's and Dustin's place, never mind that nobody could get ahold of their host parents. So we all get on a couple of busses, which for me involved shelling out 7 more pounds, since my return ticket decided somewhere along the way that it liked Oxford more than it liked me.

In any case, we eventually arrived in Northwood, whereupon we finally got ahold of a host parent and got permission to come over, but lost the whole other bus somewhere, plus both Mikes and Jeremiah, who stayed in Oxford for a while. Nevertheless, we found Blockbuster (right across from the tube station), rented Kill Bill while fending off Jimmy the random English guy (quoth Olivia, "He's psycho!"), who randomly walked up and started talking to us out of nowhere. This having been accomplished, we came unto the local Pizza Hut, which was one of like two stores open at this hour, the other being the wine store. The predictable sort of thing happened: Maggie bought something like $90 worth of pizza, while Ella, Dustin, and I bought about $70 worth of assorted alcohol. And then we made this epic journey to Dustin's place, which is miles away from anything. On the other hand, it has a whole bunch of comfy leather furniture and a great big TV. At this point, I ate most of a pizza, drank a bunch of Smirinoff Ice, and watched Kill Bill, which is apparently quite amusing when you're tired and tipsy, since ALL the blood fountaining shots got laughter. Quoth Ella, "It sure wasn't this funny the first time I saw it."

Right about the time the final fight scene happens, us Eastcote folks all left, caught the last tube home, and fell into bed. And my bed, let me tell you, is a most comfortable object.

4/20/04

Or such is the description of the play Cyrano de Bergerac by some dead guy who's name I don't quite remember. We went to go see it on Monday, and it's a pretty accurate description. It's a romantic tragedy set against sort of a schoolboy's fantasy World War I, though the original was set in the 17th century, I think. It said about as much as you can expect any romance of the period to say, which is to say not much. But it does sort of remind me of how Marechal's mind works, for what that's worth. But at least the music, which was sort of medieval, and might have actually been real medieval for all I know, was very cool. And they did a few dances, one of which involved swords and was very very cool. So it was nice and flashy, but absolutely devoid of any substance. The National Theater IS cool, though. And fortunately for us who like swords, Kill Bill 2 opens Friday. Woot.

On another note, we, for values of we == Laura, Professor Garfinkle, and I, went out to dinner in Chinatown tonight. AHA was footing the bill, which meant that I was footing the bill, but since everybody else was ALSO footing the bill, it was ok. In any case, the meal was pretty good, if a bit different than I expected. Peking duck, sure. Sweet and sour chicken of course. The ginger beef and the beef in pepper sauce were a bit out there, though. Damn good, though. Worth the doing.

On yet another note, I booked tickets for my midterm break today, which is incidentally the week after next. Set me back about 100 quid, as they say, but I get to ride trains the whole way, so it's all good. And the whole thing looks like this:

Friday: Day trip to Winchester to see the cathedral and assorted nifty stuff.
Saturday: Day trip to Norwich to see the IIRC castle, cathedral, and assorted nifty stuff.
Sunday: And on the third day, he rested, because five hours on trains is a lot.
Monday: Day trip to Canterbury to see the cathedral, etc, etc.
Tuesday: Ride up to York, and browse what's apparently a really cool medieval city with lots to see, which is why we're all so spending
Wednesday: doing the same thing. But then on
Thursday: I'll go to Carlisle, on one end of Hadrian's Wall. Which means
Friday: and
Saturday: will be spent on the Wall, seeing what all I can see. Since there's apparently a village in bus range with three forts near it, that should be a lot. And then I can finally get back to London about 10pm.
Sunday: And on the tenth day, he rested. Because after that much traveling, you'd bloody well want a rest too.

Speaking of sights, and speaking of trains, why don't I elaborate a bit on my daily London travel, since I'm here. It's sort of like this. See, first, you have to pull out your handy London tube map, and see where the hell you are, and where you're going. And if you look at all those colored lines, and you're like "What the 'ell is all this rubbish?" don't worry, it's easy. First, you have to find Eastcote, which is up in the NW corner of the map, in Zone 6. Zones, we might add, have to do with ticket pricing, which we holders of the ubercool unlimited travel within Zones 1-6 Oyster card leave to mere mortals. Anyway. You'll see a purple line that runs through Eastcote, which corresponds to the Metropolitan line. Every morning, I get to take that train to King's Cross/St. Pancras, which you'll see by following the line. Sometimes I have to ride the Picadilly, which is the blue line, and to get to Embankment and the like I have to jump the Metropolitan at Baker Street and catch the Bakerloo, and if I'm going to the British Museum I'll hop off the Metropolitan at Euston Square because it's a straight shot, but for school I get off at King's Cross. Anyway. That's the tube part of our journey.

As it happens, King's Cross is pretty noisy because they're putting in what I think is a subway (which is what you call a pedestrian walkway that goes under the street here). It also happens to be across the street, or at least the enterance we went out is, from St. Pancras rail station, which is this Arabesque monster of a building, which must be four or five city blocks long, as we measure blocks in Corvallis. Huge and nifty looking. On our side of the street is the Camden town hall, which is one of those really craptastic 60's tragedies in concrete, but which happens to be next to the short way to school. This involves turning down a little alley, then going down a street full of nice old brick apartment complexes built in like 1904. Eventually you cross a road and walk by a little church (read: the size of a decent house in the States) that looks as if Ye Olde Crusaders might have dropped by at one point. Said church is right next to a rather nice little park, which if you walk through it deposits you right next to some more nice old brick apartment buildings (most of London is nice old brick somethings, but for now it's apartment buildings), whereupon it's like a block to school. Takes about ten minutes, and is pretty pleasant when it's not really windy and cold.

Tomorrow and Thursday we go back to the British Museum, which ought to be good, and then it's off to Oxford Friday, which should be interesting. And then the weekend is going to involve me writing two papers, because I totally procrastinated them forever and ever. But since we're not REALLY here to learn, that's ok. And since my parents are reading this, I assure you that while we may go through the motions, really this entire experience is about going to pubs a lot, and then going to nifty places. We go to class, too, but only because they've threatened us with starvation in a glass box if we don't. Reading and papers? Bah, I say. Bah.

Incidentally, the picture count is up to about 400, of which maybe 250 are real pictures, as opposed to shots of info plaques so I can remember what things are and bad pictures. How the hell I'm going to display all of that when I get back, I haven't the slightest clue.

4/21/04 Addendum:

Today was one of those days that starts out sucking the good suck, then decides not to on the spur of the moment. Frex, we were supposed to meet at the British Museum this morning, which observant readers of my little tube primer will realize means getting off at Euston Square. Well, the Metropolitan line wasn't running past Baker Street this morning, which if we examine our map means I get screwed. So I got to ride the slowest Metropolitan line train in known history to Harrow-on-the-Hill, stop for ten minutes, then go jerk-stop-jerk-stop to Baker Street, which means I'm getting off the tube at Baker Street about the time I'd normally be arriving at school. This did not please. Neither did the fact that 600,000 other people decided that Baker Street was the place to be, and the Circle line train I needed to catch to Euston Square was the train to be on. As a consequence, the train I DIDN'T get on was so packed nobody could move, and the doors could barely shut. Me, I just got the wannabe sardine can train, which worked, sort of. Somehow I was the first one there anyway, so it all worked. Then we toured other bits of the British Museum I somehow hadn't found, which amazed me, including this hella cool gallery of actual Roman Roman stuff, as opposed to British Roman stuff, which means you get leet gem cameo portraits of people all over the place and such. This was good.

Less good was intercultural class, which was a makeup, and therefore was vastly teh proverbial suck, since we're in there for two hours listening to a vastly entertaining woman talk about things that are essentially pointless to our existance here. This was quite annoying.

Less annoying was the whole tennis thing afterwards, where assorted people, like the two Mikes, Alden, and Katie/Andrea attempted to challenge Dr. Garfinkle at tennis and not quite doing it, whereupon people like Margalyn, Andrea, and I played frisbee. I missed frisbee, I realized. Thus playing it made me happy, and all was good and right in the world.

And the doings of Thursday and Friday were...many. Starting with how the vast part of Thursday sucked quite a lot, insofar as I was enormously tired and enormously bored because of the three hour gap I have between classes. Nevertheless, we went to the British Museum for Literacy in the ANE, which was about as cool as you might expect it to be, and then a few of us went to lunch at the Hare and Tortoise, wherein much chicken in various forms of plant matter met untimely, yet tasty, ends. Once we actually got it, anyway, because the staff decided that we were obvious losers who didn't deserve to eat before, say, the people who came in half an hour later. Ah well.

After that, I proceeded to fall asleep in the study room at AHA, then in the hall at AHA, and through a complicated process Margalyn decided to first do rap impressions in preperation for her big debut that night (kindly announced by the other Mike in Rome class on Wednesday as "Margalyn's doing karaoke at the Manor on Thursday! Everyone be there!"), then to grab my camera and take assorted random shots of people while we waited for class.

And then for theater class we proceeded to the National Theater, a big concrete structure which inspires profound thoughts in all who witness it, such as "Why God? Why concrete?" In any case, we got the backstage tour, which means all three theaters which make up the National, then all of the prop design rooms, setup areas, practice stages, workshops, and the like. This was pretty nifty. On the way home, though, and it's like 6:30 by this point, and nobody's eaten anything for ages and ages, so we're all starving, we're something like 10 feet in front of West Harrow, two stops from home, when some dog decides to leap out and attack the very much electified track, which means we're stopped in front of freaking West Harrow for like half an hour. We finally pull up to Eastcote, and I'm like "I feel like one of those Robin Hoods from the movies, wherein he goes off to fight with King Richard in the Crusades, and years later he gets back and jumps out of the boat in England and he's like 'Home! Home at last!'" The pizza we had for dinner was most excellent.

As for the Manor that night, well, Margalyn's pretty good at doing Sir Mix-a-lot ("I like big butts and I cannot lie!"), which among other things introduced us to the guy before her, an American named I believe Ray. He came over and regaled us with Navy stories for a while, during which I discovered that Smirinoff Black Ices aren't bad. Beyond that, there was assorted drinking and conversation and loud music, including a REALLY BAD rendition of U2's One. And then we all went home to attempt a few hours of sleep in preperation for Stonehenge and Bath the next day.

In the end, I think I managed about 6 hours, and I was on the upper end of the sleep scale. Woke up at 6:30, in an attempt to join up with the breakfast party that was going to form at the little diner by the tube station in Eastcote. Fortunately, they didn't open, so I had to fake breakfast by going to the little pastry shop in Eastcote. It all worked out somehow.

About here, a long bus ride should be inserted, most of which I don't remember because I was attempting to sleep in my seat. I'll just say that the bus was really nice - everyone had nice bucket seats, and there was a toilet on the bus, which is of obvious importance. At any rate, a couple hours later, we finally arrived at Stonehenge.

Stonehenge is pretty much the middle of nowhere. And by middle of nowhere, I mean taking the widest, flattest expanse you can find, as far as the eye can see, putting up some bigass stones, and then populating it with some sheep. I don't remember any houses at all, though there was this random covered wagon-looking thing. At any rate, there's not much to Stonehenge. You go, listen to their little audio tour, look at the thing, take pictures, and then go buy the "I went to Stonehenge and all I got was this overpriced t-shirt" shirt. This was done, and we all leaped back on the bus in variously energetic leaps, and travelled the hour and a half trip to Bath.

Bath deserves a great big huge plug here, not so much for the baths themselves, but because its easily the best-looking city I've ever been in. The whole place is built from this sort of cream-colored stone, and it's all freaking old. Very picturesque. There's a square in the center of the city with a great big Medieval abbey in perfect condition (which I sadly didn't get to go in), the baths (or the IIRC 18th century facade), and some shops and things. From there, other Mike, Jeremiah, Ella, Maggie, and I proceeded to go find food in this random pub with randomly excellent beef stew, and then all us guys went and got ourselves lost in the city while the girls went shopping. I recommend the getting lost thing - We found ourselves most of the way up this hill, on which was this nifty little park, whereupon we played on the swings like good little children, then took some sweet pictures, since we could see out over the entire city, which was appropriately impressive. And then we got ourselves lost some more, before winding up back in the center square at the appropriate time, passing by a random statue with the inscription "Water is Best"

And then we went into the Roman baths themselves, which were fairly cool, but for some reason not as cool as I had expected, for some reason. And not just because the water is over 100 degrees Farenheit, either. The Roman part of the baths is pretty much all ruins now, and it's all covered up by 18th century construction, which although nice isn't quite Roman. You can see a bunch of the ruins, though, including the hypocaust flooring which kept it all warm, and of course assorted baths, statues, altars, and random artifacts. I tried to take some pictures, but a bunch of them turned out horribly, since we were crowded on narrow catwalks with no lighting and a lot of people. In any case, it was interesting. I would have liked to have spent more time in the city. If you ever get the chance, go there.

And then we leaped upon the bus, for pretty much non-energetic, limping values of leaped, and spent like three hours getting back to London, whereupon we drove through like every area in which people lived just to get back to Harrow-on-the-Hill station, wherein we took the 5 minute ride back to Eastcote, got off, ate dinner, and returned to the Manor for Tara's 20th birthday celebration, wherein much alcohol was consumed (did I mention that drinking age here is 18?), cake was eaten, and good times were had, until most of us fell asleep and left. In my case, I came home to Robin Hood Men in Tights on TV, which of course had to be watched, whereupon I went to bed.

And that, as they say, was that.

Oh. And Professor Garfinkle's kids are really cute. And maintained their cuteness all day. Just thought you all should know that.

So I saw Journey's End last night. First, though, I got lost in Picadilly Circus and Soho trying to find the theater, since I conveniently took the OTHER street that leads off from Picadilly Circus station, and got myself off in the comparative middle of nowhere, if you can call five blocks from Trafalgar Square the comparative middle of nowhere. Anyway. Unfortunately, the nice Middle Eastern man I asked for directions couldn't understand me, and I couldn't understand him, and I didn't quite want to duck into one of the zillions of strip clubs to ask (the horror, I know). But I eventually found my way back, got on the right street, and found my way to the Comedy Theater, which is this very nice old Victorian theater with, among other things, a fully stocked bar. Which, as this was in fact a school function, I did not partake of. The horror, I know. Among other things, the place is about as decorated and...nice as you might expect a great big Victorian theater to be, and had this awesome curtain for the stage that was this huge portrait collection of King George V and his family. Maybe it was just for the play, I dunno. In any case, it rocked.

But anyway. Journey's End. It's a World War I tragedy, which right there should pretty much tell you everything you want to know about it. Except that it's probably the single most intense play I've ever seen in my life, which probably wasn't hurt by our possession of third row seats, which is the second-best seats I've ever had for anything.

The play itself is pretty predictable. People die, there's the appropriate amount of emotional tenseness and drama, and with the wrong sort of actors, it could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. In our case, well, it didn't. The stage, for one, was set up exactly like a World War I bunker, the actors had all the right costumage, and the actors themselves were top notch, and really, really got into their roles. You could almost physically feel the emotions the characters felt, it was that good. And the sound effects...wow. I was sort of impressed during the play, but when they basically subjected us to a minute-long artillery barrage at the end...that was pretty amazing. And for the after bit, when the actors all got on stage, they were all in their uniforms, standing in front of a big Vietnam Memorial-like wall with what I presume are a small number of names of people who died in the war. And a couple of them were actually crying. Whole theater went dead silent. Then clapped like hell.

It was quite something, let me tell you.

And if we all felt what we felt, I can only imagine what an audience in 1929 would have felt. Something about like what I hear the opening of Platoon was like, maybe, with lots of very emotional veterans. Dunno.

I do know, though, that the British, or at least Londoners, are much closer to World War I in particular than we can imagine. Everywhere you go, there are little memorials to the men who fought and died in the war. Every church, every square, every park seems to have some little thing. I've got pictures of a few. And the funny thing is that no other war, not even the Second World War, seems to get that kind of treatment. There are a few here and there, but not that many. I find that slightly odd.

On a much, much lighter note, both Further Down the Spiral and the Royal Philharmonic's U2 covers are pretty good, the one moreso than the other, but both nice.

4/11/04

As Easters go, this was a pretty good one. Everyone in London pretty much deserted the city for the holiday weekend, Jan and Paul went off to do family stuff, and Mike's in Paris, so I had the house to myself, the tube to myself, the major roads to myself, and only had to share the British Museum with about 20 zillion American tourists who were apparently thinking the same thing I was about the lack of actual British people.

Nevertheless, I spent something like two hours in the place, maybe three, and took something like 130-140 pictures. I love the British Museum. Exploring it today, I went a whole bunch of places I had already been, then took a wrong turn, and ended up in this random room jammed full of Indian art. Then I took a wrong turn from THERE, and ended up in a huge Enlightenment exhibit. Deciding to go see if there was anything I had missed on the ground floor, it turns out that there are like three or four more rooms full of random Greek artifacts I didn't know about, and that hallway covered in Assyrian bas reliefs from Nineveh I thought was cool turned out to be something more like four or five hallways and a couple of fairly serious rooms, which I'm sure you'll all agree is slightly more impressive than some random hallway.

I also picked up a few touristy items, like a Standard of Ur (which I need to go take a picture of, now that I think about it) mug, and a couple of shirts. Almost got an Egyptian cat statue, but no.

At that point, I decided that yeah, it was about 4:30, and I was starving. Hare and Tortoise to the rescue. I need to reiterate that these people give you a whole lot of food. I've had family meals served in the dishes that these people give to individuals. I almost made it through my plate. Almost.

Keeping in line with my goal for the day, which was to find the way from Euston Square tube station to Euston tube/rail station, where I'm supposed to meet Stephanie tomorrow, I actually DID find the place, which is freaking HUGE. Also managed to find a good fast route from school to King's Cross/St. Pancras tube station, which I take to and from school, so that was nice. Also explored this nice little park that's like, 20 feet from school, which was apparently a cemetary back in the day, for values of back in the day == 1650-1830 or so. Random old graves and such scattered about. Quite nice and peaceful, actually.

And I am in posession of Cadbury eggs. Nyah.

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4/12/04 Easter Monday special

It's been a good couple of days. First Easter itself, and now today, which the observant will recognize as being my day out with Stephanie. We met up at Euston station about 11, and between then and 5, when we just barely got her back to her train in time, we had ourselves quite a time. Lots of walking, of course, but this is London, and there's lots to see, so what did you expect? Perfect day for it, too - warm, decent amount of sunshine, not as many people as you might expect.

We walked from Euston pretty randomly for a while, past the British Museum (which we didn't go in), through Covent Garden (sort of an outdoor market type thing, except the outdoors in this case is big old buildings), to Trafalgar Square. From there, we walked down the Mall, where we saw what was apparently the tail end of the changing of the guard, along with a bunch of statues of famous dead people. Then we came to Buckingham Palace, and, uh, wow. Royalty gets nice houses, let us say. While there, we sort of randomly met up with Kara and Laura, who are both in the AHA group, seperately and in the space of about 5 minutes. Then we walked from there into St. James' Park, which is one of the more spectacular places on the planet - I need my pictures to do it justice, but wow.

Went from there to Westminster Abbey, where we thought about going in, but since the line was a hundred or so people long, we decided that maybe we'd skip that this time around. So instead, Kara and Laura went to sit for a while, and Stephanie and I went over to Picadilly to find some food, which we found in this rather nice little Pub in the vicinity of the Tower Records store, which we went into after. For those of us who complain about record companies in the States, get this: They sell perfectly normal CDs there for about 16.99 in POUNDS. Keep in mind that a pound = 1.8 dollars these days, and that the same CD in the States would cost about 16.99 DOLLARS. Ouch. Nevertheless, I walked out with Further Down the Spiral, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's rendition of some U2 songs, which I'm writing this to. It's not bad.

At that point, we realized that Stephanie had to get herself back to Euston in about an hour to catch her train, but we ended up going by the US Embassy anyway, simply because I hadn't seen the place. Surprisingly, no protesters, which I thought sort of odd, considering the ones in front of Parliament and the "BUSH STOP THE WAR" graffiti everywhere. Ah well.

And from there, we walked back to Euston by the slightly long way, Stephanie got on her train, and I got to almost fall asleep on the train back. All in all, a good time was had. The company was excellent, the conversation likewise, and the sites were great. Good times. Good times. Hopefully we can repeat the experience in Brussels come June.

Because I'm tired of going through N54 for this:

http://www.lurkerlounge.com/realmsbeyond/forums/

Desperately wanting a main page link for this, Gris. ;) (or am I just blind?)

And another week passes. It's Easter weekend here, which is a really big holiday, meaning we get a four day weekend, and I believe real schools get like 2 weeks off. I may or may not be going off to Leeds Castle later, depending on if people actually decide to call me or not. We shall see. In any case, I get to relax until Monday, which I really need to do, considering that even on a slow week, things are pretty busy.

Last Saturday, which I apparently decided not to relate when I posted, a fairly decent group of us went on a "pub walk" around the city, which involved such highlights as:

Katie, the map carrier from yesterday, getting lost trying to find us all at the Starbucks by Embankment station, and somehow finding herself "on a bridge," which considering Embankment, is not a good thing. In some fairness to her map skills, she did have helpful suggestions from the rest of us the day before, such as "follow the big road!"

Rather more theaters than pubs, or so it seemed. There were something like five pubs and three theaters on the thing, plus some random other buildings, including a shop specializing in antique scientific instruments, which from the window displays looked awesome. The pubs were all pretty nice, being rather historic and 19th century and the like.

The first pub, which was actually a wine bar, was talked about in the tour guide as having "intimately vaulted ceilings" which in reality translates to "small, dark, cavelike atmosphere where you expect to be assaulted by bats at any instance."

Speaking of pubs, been doing a fair amount of that this week. Saturday, then at least once more, and then Friday night, wherein other Mike - Mike my roommate and 8 others being in Paris, and those of us left behind having gotten together as the "jealous of Paris" group - bought me a thing that billed itself as a rum and coke, but was actually more akin to a rum and pepsi, since the Manor doesn't HAVE coke. Ah well. Also had a little bit of Guiness, which I will happily leave to the beer drinkers. Too, the Manor was doing karaoke, which was fairly entertaining, since Margolyn not only knew all the songs, but was singing along at the table, using a Smirinoff Black Ice bottle as a mic. SBI, incidentally, isn't bad, and I need to remember it. In any event, I recognized almost none of the songs, except when they played Elvis of all things, a bizzare disco version of a song I forget the title of, and Oasis' Champagne Supernova right as I left.

Hit the British Museum again on Tuesday, for an hour with my Roman Britain class to tour the Roman Britain section of the museum, and then for an hour on my own time, wherein I simply wandered around and toured the place superficially. I can't really do justice to the place without my pictures (of which I have 130 for the trip, which means you all will have good times when I get around to uploading them), but anywhere where there are random Roman mosaic floors hanging in the stairways along with a totem pole and a big damn Buddha statue simply because that was the only place to put them must by definition be cool. In fact, my trip here has been made worthwhile simply because of the British Museum.

Just to skip around a bunch, Monday night we went off as a class to see a play called The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder. Bizzare, bizzare play. Supposedly written about the Second World War, it involves ice ages, floods, plagues, and people in dinosaur and mammoth suits. It was good, but obviously influenced by a good deal of hallucinogin usage. This Tuesday, we'll all go see Journey's End, which is a World War I from the trenches play, with about all you'd expect from that sort of thing.

Not a lot of exploration for the week, but a bunch of class. Roman Britain and Literacy in the Ancient Near East are both really fun, because Professor Garfinkle is very very good at what he does. Which, incidentally, is why I'm ransacking his mind for a great big reading list on various things. This should be good. London Theater is sort of ok, which is about what I expected of it. It's pretty good when we're talking about a play we've already seen, like Skin of Our Teeth, but not so good when we're preparing for the play we've not yet seen, like Journey's End. This translates out to about half of each class being fun, half sort of boring. Ah well.

As it is now 11:30 and no call, I shall assume that I'm not going anywhere today, which means that today and tomorrow are likely to be days of relaxation, which is good. Monday, of course, Stephanie's over from Belgium, so that ought to be fun and entertaining and such.

On a totally other note, the tube allows one to do an awful lot of reading, which means that inside of a week, much to the amazement of various people, I've gone through Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets. Thusly, ponderances on them follow.

Sort of like how Ender's Game was the flashiest, coolest book in the original series, Ender's Shadow is the flashiest, coolest book in this series. That doesn't make the other two bad in any way, but it's certainly a different sort of book. It's not QUITE good enough to be on par with Ender's Game, but that bar is pretty high. The other two books are more along the lines of your average technothriller Larry Bondesque geopolitical novel, which has basically been done to death, but is nevertheless pretty cool simply because knowing what happens on Earth while Ender's off being spaceboy is nifty.

If I have a gripe, it's about the sort of not quite palatable characterizations of the Chinese, which seem a little too oldschool Great and Glorious Middle Kingdom and not enough Marxist-Maoist Worker's Paradise for my taste. Too, while I think Card's done a good job portraying his Christian characters as not all good and moral and righteous, Bean's leap to morality, and his relationship with Petra in particular, didn't quite set right with me. Ah well. In any case, the books are damn good, and you should be reading them.

Actually, along that line, Cryptonomicon was damn good, too, though I spent vast portions of it going "I have no idea why I think this book is so good. Why am I reading it?" Fortunately, I listened to instinct, read it, and muchly enjoyed it. I expect much agreement from Whir on this. If you haven't read it, do so.

Also, Ring of Fire was pretty good. 1632 and its attendant universe can never quite be Island in the Sea of Time, but that's ok. For what it's worth, I still enjoy time travel stories of that sort. Maybe a little odd and ahistorical for a historian, but oh well.

And Colleen McCullough needs to come out with something new so I can read it. I'm having urges to go read The First Man in Rome again.

And damn you, Conquests patch 1.22 for being 24 megs, meaning excruciating downloads on dialup. Damn you. A thank you to Whir, however, for the other stuff.

However, and this ought to make Gris happy, I should be able to play Epic 40 while I'm here. Because anything that promises to be a rehash of Epic 15, I'm totally up for.

And on another gaming note, the Surface Tension level in Half Life is pretty damn hard. Tanks that take 4 RPGs to kill and kill you in one shot are teh suck.

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Edit:

Oh yeah. Tuesday, I think, or maybe Wednesday, Mike and I went to the Indian place down the street. It rocked. Very nice atmosphere, very good food. I had chicken curry - there are about three basic meats you can get, of which lamb and chicken are two of them, and I forget the third. Added to that, there are ten or fifteen different ways you can get it, from the curry to the garlic stuff Mike had, to sweet and sour, hot and sour, and a bunch of others. I'll definitely be going back.

3/30

Well, here I am, writing on my third day in. My roommate, Mike, and I will be heading out for school here in 40 minutes or so, using London's most excellent public transportation, the tube (or the Underground, if you want to be technical about it).

The plane ride in sucked about as much as you would expect it to suck - I stayed up all night Friday for the trip up, sort of crashed on the plane to Dallas, and I mean sort of the in the sense that no, you're not really awake, but you're not really asleep, either, but you'll definitely be in pain at the end of things.

Anyway. For some reason, North Texas has these enormous circular things all over the place, which look quite green and sort of like bizzare crop circles. You might be tempted to connect them to the oil industry, if there was any indication of it, but it seems like some sort of strange Texas farm or another. Along those lines, DFW airport sucks the good suck - it's big, it's confusing - three big semi-circles, with a bunch of signs that make no sense unless you know where you're going and the worst shuttle service on the planet. Of note, I was talking to one of the airport workers, and I'm like "So how's the weather?" "Oh, a bit chilly." Turns out it's 70 degrees out or so. In Portland it was like 48 and pouring, and London's cold without the rain - nice and sunny out right now in fact, which is pretty nice.

The plane across the Atlantic was more of the same, pretty much - I sort of slept a lot, in between reading my way through Ring of Fire and the first part of Cryptonomicon. This Japanese kid next to me did almost nothing through the flight except sleep or stare at the seat in front of him while listening to the airline music.

Gatwick Airport in London is a pretty strange place. You get off the plane, go up an escalator, and almost immediately go down the grandaddy of all ramps, which takes up the better portion of a house-sized structure. This gets you to the passport line, where a small army of annoyed-looking civil servants interrogate you about your entry into their domain. Then you get to go up another escalator to baggage claim, then down another ramp to the parking garage. Quite something.

On the subject of driving, it's worth noting that England is NOT a country you want to drive in if you value your life. I haven't figured out speed limits yet, but since everyone is driving cars the size of Geo Metros, and they speed down roads barely the size of a two-lane country road in the US with cars parked on both sides, along with bus stops of all things, I'm not going to worry about the speeding thing. What's worse is, straight streets in London are sort of frowned upon, which means the road system is exceedingly chaotic, random, and hard to navigate.

Fortunately, we're not driving anywhere these days, what with the tube and all. It's pretty pleasant and clean. Not crowded if you take the Metropolitan line, which Eastcote and my house are on; crowded if you take the tiny Piccadilly line cars. It's fairly speedy, too - the slow train took us 45 minutes to get into central London, the fast train considerably less. The only problem is figuring out which train is which, a thing that apparently involves random spur of the moment judgements on the part of the passenger.

Anyway. My host family, the Longs, are both pretty cool. They've made both Mike and I pretty welcome, and opened their house to us, fed us well, and generally made themselves liked. The neighborhood we're in, Eastcote, is pretty nice, though finding something that ISN'T nice in London is pretty hard, because EVERYONE builds out of brick around here, and has for a few hundred years, which means everyone's house looks sort of delightfully old and lived in, except the poor bastards who live in what look to be 1830's-era industrial rowhouses along the tube line, which are pretty ghetto and rundown. Too, there are various parts of the tube that have some damn old brickwork, which is sort of strange to realize when you pass it by.

I've seen a brief few sites - we walked by the outside of St. Paul's, which is undergoing reconstruction and has this enormous black and white 1:1 photo of the outside over the shrouding on it, which is VERY impressive. Saw the outside of the Tower of London, which is sort of bigger than I had expected it to be. Took a trip down the river, as the Thames is known locally, and saw a few assorted bridges and such. Of note, Paul and Jan's (the Longs) daughter and son in law own a pub nearby us, so we went out to eat Sunday. Very good.

Pictures will be forthcoming, I think, since I need to hit an internet cafe to upload them, and I haven't had the time to look yet - it's REALLY busy here right now. Should have more later.

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3/31 addendum:

Tuesday was a pretty big day. We toured the University of London Union, which is pretty much an overpriced, crappy version of what any university in the US pretty much gives you. The "second biggest swimming pool in Britain" is MAYBE the size of one of OSU's pools, likely not. The gym sucks, and there's no way anybody's going to pay 105 pounds to get into the thing. For the exchange rate challenged, 1 pound is about 1.8 dollars, or a lot.

Since we were sort of in the area, we hit the British Museum, too. And, uh, damn. The moving van is going to have trouble getting all that stuff back to my house in the States (we're all calling it "the States" here, for some reason, and I don't think I did this at all at home. Oh well.). I can't do it justice without pictures, but they've got two of those big winged Babylonian lion-men flanking this big freaking GATE. And that's sort of off in this corner. The place is HUGE. And it's got tons of cool old stuff in it. Absolutely amazing.

Along those lines, we hit Trafalgar Square for kicks afterwards, and believe you me, Nelson's statue on that column is pretty freaking big. Hundred or two feet up there. It's pretty serious. And it's got, in true London tradition, this glass box at the foot of it, where these people are reading, one at a time, all the dates from like 1 million BC to 1969 AD, and 1980 AD to 1 million AD. This is somehow art. It's...bizzare.

We've been doing a bunch of pubs, too. Hit a few random ones with some of the guys during our excursion, then went out with all 21 of us Americans to this pub in Harrow (Harrow-on-the-Hill, as it were) called the Rat and Parrot, where we pretty much took over the place and had a lot of fun. Apparently we're going out tomorrow, too, which should be entertaining. Lot of drinking, here, though never to excess. Lot of smoking, too, which is sort of surprising. Dublin just banned smoking in pubs, and the citizens are in this giant uproar. Kinda funny.

Coinage in this country is pretty bizzare. There are actual paper notes down to fairly small denominations, but they also have pound and two pound COINS, along with a variety of smaller pence coins - fifty, twenty, ten, five, two of all things, and one. So I now have this giant pocket of change. Of special note to us Oasis fans, the writing on the side of the two pound coing says "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants." Heh.

Mike's going to bed, so I'll write some more when I have the time.

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4/2 Addendum

It's been a long day, made even longer by this new routine I'm in. We wake up at 7:30 or so around here, because the tube ride to King's Cross is about 45 minutes long, and with two of us sharing the bathroom, or toilet as the polite expression here goes, it takes a while. This involves eating breakfast, a thing I haven't done with regularity since high school. It's worth noting that the cereals here are sort of odd. You have your Rice Krispies, your Frosted Flakes, your Corn Flakes, your Choco Corn Flakes, your...Choco Corn Flakes? Yeah. Among other assorted oddities. Whatever. They work.

On a sort of related note, stores here are bloody well SMALL. Figure a typical grocery store here is a slight bit bigger than a 7/11 in the States, except it's, yknow, a real grocery store. There's a mall ("shopping center") in Finchley, which has a full-sized grocery, plus a bookstore about the size of a Borders back home that missed its growth spurt and ended up half the size of a real Borders.

At any rate, last night was spectacularly unspectacular for the most part, except for my having to find lunch at the Hare and Tortoise, the local Asian-themed noodle bar place, which so happens to be close to campus. This place follows the Chinese model - the food is cheap, good, and so plentiful that a plate here feeds two people anywhere else. That having been said, the waitresses are incomprehensible, so that I followed one around the place for a few minutes until I finally got the clue that she wanted me to SIT AND WAIT IN THE WAITING AREA PLEASE.

The other event of last night was the American contingent taking over a chunk of the Rat and Parrot, and having a good, alcohol-infused time of it, which I was marginally a part of due to the loud, loud music making me deaf. Fun nevertheless. Apparently the other group (the private universities have something like what we're doing) showed up randomly as well, so something like a third of the people in the pub were Americans. Unfortunately for the Rat and Parrot, we've been hearing about a good many substantially cheaper places nearby in Harrow, so we'll see how that works out. In any case, it looks as if pubs are going to be a major feature of my social life from here on out.

We hit the Tower of London today (Friday), which is sort of beyond me to describe to you in words, other than "Damn this place is huge" and "Ohwowlookatalltheneatstuffdrool" with a bit of "You think they'd miss one of those crowns? That's a lot of diamonds." Pictures at some point.

Somewhere early, I hooked up with Laura, who just so happens to look like a somewhat more familiar Laura who observant readers of this blog may have heard of once or twice before. We browsed our way through the White Tower (the central keep), which is stuffed to the brim with a variety of arms and armor, including assorted royal armor, a few walls of assorted firearms, and a staff topped with some big spikes labeled "Henry VIII's Walking Stick."

After the White Tower, we hit the Beauchamp Tower, which in and of itself isn't all that impressive, except that it's got a lot of assorted graffiti carved into the interior walls. Pretty neat. After that, we did the Jewel House and the Crown Jewels, which are just as impressive as you might imagine, and include the obligatory huge diamonds as well as a golden punch bowl thing the size of a small couch. There's a whole wall of golden scepters, most of which seem to have been made to satisfy some sort of scepter fetish on the part of William and Mary.

The Royal Fusiliers' Museum was next, which if you're Marechal is a must-see, and if you're like most of the rest of us, was merely interesting, showing a variety of objects and relating the Fusiliers' fairly lengthy history.

After the Fusiliers' Museum, we stopped to listen to a couple of folks in costume relate the tale of Sir Walter Raleigh, who's one of those guys that's almost as good as he thinks he is, which got him in trouble with a whole bunch of people, and got him locked up in the Tower three times, not to mention executed. He got a pretty nice prison, however. Two main rooms in a single tower, with a well-furnished study, and an even better furnished bedchamber, which at one time housed Raleigh, his wife, and two sons.

We also hit the area known as the Medieval Palace, which is a pair of towers made up as they would have looked in the time of Edward I (The Longshanks of Braveheart fame). Nifty stuff, which looks better in the pictures you can't see yet.

At that point, we had sort of run out of stuff to do in the Tower, so we started walking, eventually ending up going over Tower Bridge. We didn't do the lift to the top bit, since they wanted 5 pounds for admission, which is sort of a lot. So we just walked over to the other side of the Thames. While figuring out what to do next, we bumped into Dustin and Katie, and a consensus was quickly reached that food and drink might well be a good idea at some point, so this was accomplished at a handy corner market, whereupon we commenced walking from there half-way to King's Cross tube station by the long way, which took us past a whole bunch of assorted random nifty buildings (understand that enormous parts of London were built a hundred and more years ago, so random stores and houses and things are pretty nifty. The Long house, frex, was built in the 1930s, which is pretty new.), including the Banks of Scotland and England, Lloyd's, the vast covered Victorian Leadenhall Market, and St. Paul's Cathedral, which is of course as cool as they say it is, and I haven't even been inside yet.

Somewhere in there, Katie got a call on her cellphone to go meet a bunch of people at Westminster Abbey. No problem, we figure, we're halfway there, we'll walk. So about an hour later, we show up, having missed the bus group, and proceed to wander around the outside of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, before deciding that it was sort of, you know, 6 pm and some food might be a good idea. Fortunately, nobody had any idea where to go for cheap food, a total rarity in London. Eventually somebody came up with the idea of going to Finchley Road and going to the shopping center (a mall by our terms), and going to a Sainsbury, which is the big grocery store here. Some French bread and Cadbury Egg later, life was good, and we feasted upon some random rock formations in the middle of the mall. That having been done, we caught the fast train to Harrow, jumped off, and immediately got onto the Uxbridge train, the second time in as many days I've been able to do that.

And as my laptop has all of 3% battery left, I'll leave it at that. There will hopefully be pictures at some point, once I find a way to upload them.

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4/3 addendum:

Back up and running. Thankfully my power converter hasn't yet blown up my laptop, so life is at least that good. I'm not even all that sore after having walked for an entire day, which is even better, considering I could barely move last night.

It's laundry day for me, which in England is more akin to some bizzare alien ritual than, you know, doing laundry. For starters, the washer and dryer are freaking SMALL. I put in five days worth of pants, and that's stretching capacity. And while the dryer pretty much involves throwing clothes and Bounce in and hitting the button, the washer is the creation of evil gremlins. You have a bunch of wash cycles, A through I believe H, which denote different spots on this dial, and magically correspond to what kind of clothes you've put in and how clean you want them. Then you slide out this tray, which you then put a cube of this one stuff in, and then another cube, this time with a ball of something sticking out, and then a small measure of this blue liquidy stuff. Push On, and it sort of does its' thing. As long as it doesn't shrink, that's all I want.

And that's where we're at now - me and the Pringles typing, my clothes washing. We may or may not be all exciting today, but probably not - gotta do homework at SOME point. Me, I did mine, which means computer gaming time - I'm tired of walking.

A couple other observations I don't think I've made yet:

For one, it's pretty amazing, especially to a white kid from the Pacific Northwest, where everyone's pretty much either white, Mexican, or Asian, to London, which is probably one of the single most ethnically diverse places on the planet. The Longs, frex, are English. The folks running the grocery store down the street are Indian. A few of the guys working the tube are black, I've a teacher who's Scottish, the Hare and Tortoise folks are either Chinese or Japanese, and it's fairly common to see Muslim women in full robes going down the street. Sat down on the train the other day, and the girls next to me were all speaking Spanish. The conversation next to us a few nights ago was in German. It's really quite something, and something you're not likely to see in the States outside of, say, New York maybe.

Speaking of the Muslim bit, apparently a few days ago the police stopped a plot by Islamic terrorists to blow up something or another. Some of the places they've arrested people and are looking around are pretty close to Eastcote. And yet I'm not particularly worried at all.

I think I've touched on the food thing as it relates to cereal, because let's face it - Choco Corn Flakes are just strange no matter where you are, but there are a bunch of other things that may or may not be familiar to Americans. McDonalds' and Burger King are pretty familiar, and they have Dominoes and Pizza Hut here as well, and Coke is pretty familiarly Coke. On the other hand, the cherry flavor in Cherry Coke is REALLY strong compared to what it is back home, and Dr. Pepper is about the same way. And while cans of pop are the exact same size here, the 20 oz equivilent (500 mL, off top of my head), is a little bit skinnier and taller than a US 20 oz. Also, they apparently have Costco here, which ought to be interesting.

Eating well so far. I've mentioned the Hare and Tortoise, and I've mentioned the grocery stores. I've also had fish and chips, which they apparently do by taking a whole fish (minus the icky parts of course), and battering that. We've got a pretty good shop for it here in Eastcote just down the way. There's an Indian place right next to it, which I haven't had yet, but hear is pretty good. We've done a variety of chicken - sweet and sour the other day, and this breaded chicken filled with various stuff (mine was garlic and butter). My first night here, we went to a pub owned by the Longs' daughter and son in law, and I had this huge plate of lamb, potatos, and peas, which was quite good, though I'm not sure about putting mint sauce on the lamb. There's also what I hear is a good Chinese place (called "Eat Well" of all things) down the street. So I'm definitely not going to starve.

Also, I'm going to be talking about a whole bunch of people, so I suppose it's only fair I list them:

Paul and Jan - The Longs, my host family.
Prof. Garfinkle - Western Washington prof, teaches both Roman Britain and Ancient Near East Literacy.
Rebecca and Jacob - His kids, twins, who are both 5 and have all of that cuteness we all lose when we hit 10 or so.

Mike - My roommate, sometimes known as "blonde Mike" or "other Mike." Goes to Western Washington.
Mike - Another Eastcote student, "tall Mike" or "other Mike"
Alden - Other Mike's roommate
Dustin - Lives with the program director. Our resident "computer nerd" as he calls himself. Recently decided on Guiness for his second and third beers ever.
Jeremiah - Dustin's roommate, and another OSU student, who I've apparently known for like three years since he worked at Parkside Grill, but who I didn't recognize until he actually told me.
Laura - My Tower travelling buddy, who goes to U of O and is currently having lots of fun with host family kitchen remodeling.
Katie - Goes to I think U of W, one of the London travelling group of Friday.
Maggie - One of the two Maggies, I remember nothing else about her.
Margalyn - Western Washington student, the other Maggie, one of Prof. Garfinkle's students.
Ella - The most outgoing of us all, quite the party animal.
Robyn - Goes to Southern Oregon, and happens to look EXACTLY like a certain friend of mine.
Debbi - One of the people I barely know, and who I've seen about three times.
Allison - May or may not be one of the OSU group, since I can't actually remember.
Kerby - U of O girl, who I shared the cab ride in with, but haven't talked to much.
Kara - Our only actual degree holder, in Agriculture. Another of the OSU group.
Tara - Another of our really outgoing folks. I forget where she goes to school.
Zen - A girl who's full name is Zenocrite St. Clair, which is one of the single most unique names I've ever heard on a real person.
Andrea - I think another of the OSU group. Pretty quiet. Among other things, she has this really nice henna design on her hand right now.
Lindsay - Actually a returning student, she's been here a quarter already. She also doesn't hang out with us a lot, so I don't really know her.
Olivia - The other returner, she's the outgoing one, and has really taken to the group.

And that's the lot of us. It's a good bunch of people, so far. As you might except of a bunch of Americans stuck in London, we've bonded pretty well for our first week, and it's bound to get better. As it is, I feel I've known them all quite a while, and been in London even longer. Strange feeling.

And, it being lunchtime, I believe this is the end of my narrative for the time being.