London: day seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three, and seventy-four

Tuesday:
One of those reminders that you are indeed in a foreign country: your professor has no clue what a moose looks like.

Yep that happened.

It was the professor for my City University class who had a picture on her Powerpoint slide of a moose standing in a swimming pool to cool itself off to represent homeostasis, but when she tried to explain it, she stumbled, “…so as you see, that’s what this, uh…elk, of some sort, is doing…” She looked at it sideways for a second, “um, yeah.”

Earlier in the day we received the grade for our British Youth Culture projects and we did very well. The best thing about it though was that our professor, when discussing it with us said that our paper was one of the most well written papers that he received. “Seriously, this introduction was one of the best I have read. When I was going through these I was flipping through just kind of going, ‘yeah…yeah...yeah…’ but when I got to this one it was like, ‘Oh! I am actually interested in reading this one.’ It made me want to sit back with a cup of tea and just read.” – So, especially since I basically wrote that whole paper (our group all contributed the actual factual information, I was just the one who reworked the thing until it was readable and fit our argument), and since he himself is an author; that was quite the compliment. I could have done better with it however, I know I could have, but being the night before it was due, and trying to rework the entire thing, I really only had time for one round of editing. If I’d had time to go through it again, I probably could have cleared it up more and made our points more clear so that we wouldn’t have been docked the points we were; but honestly, B+/A- is pretty well good enough.

Wednesday:
After class, Alyssa and I again made a trip to the British Museum and got to see a good portion of the first floor which included artifacts from Mesopotamia, Greece, more from Egypt and the Rosetta Stone, itself. We’ve been making some good progress in the museum, it feels good to finally be getting through some of these gargantuan museums – it’s rather overwhelming and is quite the process to actually see every exhibit in the major London museums as none of them are doable in a day – at least, not comfortably.

That night I worked on my music blog (if you haven’t checked it out yet, please do!) after finally finding and watching online the Metallica movie “Through the Never.” It definitely would have been much better on a big screen, but even on my computer, it was worth watching. The good majority of it featured concert footage of the band, but it was not boring as the film did very, very well showing the spectacle and inner workings of their absolutely stunning stage performance. The storyline knit throughout was also interesting. I rather expected more of it, but it worked well the way it was, I felt. I would consider this to be up near the top of my list of quality rock movies. Definitely worth the watch.

Thursday:
After class (received my essay back for that class as well and had a solid A), I headed back to NIDO and met up with Alyssa again. This time, we made our way to the Victoria and Albert Museum and wandered around there for quite some time – for me, two floors down, three more to go… We got to see some really interesting things, particularly in the Theater and Entertainment section which housed various props and costumes from stage productions, concert and theater posters, a small section dedicated to Shakespeare, a broken guitar that once belonged to Pete Townsend, and the “Joey” prop used in the production of War Horse which is currently being shown in the theater (same production company that put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream – so a very similar style of prop).

After the museum, we decided that we wanted Bubble Tea, so we made our way to the shop we had previously gone to with Abi and Hannah. It was a long bus ride from where we were, but worth it as we were also able to get some good food there.

That night I decided to watch the Kenneth Brannagh film interpretation of Hamlet so as to get myself into the spirit to write my essay for Shakespeare class, which I spent most of today doing…

Today:

Basically, I did just work on my essay for most of the day and bummed around a bit. As much as I want to go off on a tangent here and talk about just how much I love Hamlet and how it continually amazes me the more I study it, I am going to refrain as it would turn a blog post into a novel. I will, however, post my essay here when I do finish it – that, I hope, will give some idea as to just how incredible this work is and why I love it so much. I did homework today because I needed to get done as much as I could since tomorrow I will be heading to York with the IES group for an overnight trip. I am excited and curious, though I do not know what to expect. I do know that this is the farthest North in England that I will get because I was not able to go on the Scotland trip. Update you later…