So this is it. We made it through two weeks of frantic travels through foreign lands, where we made new friends, tasted new foods, tried to conquer language barriers in our most broken German/Dutch/French/Italian, learned that showers are overrated and jeans don’t need washing, discovered what a three hour hike straight up a mountain feels like, and had a generally amazing time. We made it through six weeks living and studying in London, which, while a huge change of pace from our carefree travels, was an awesome experience as well. We learned that we really could spend two straight weeks (give or take) poring over archives in the library, that Victorian sewage pumping stations still smell like poop, that twelve people spending every second together can and will get on eachother’s nerves, that you should always bring an umbrella when you go somewhere in London, and that it really is possible to start and finish a paper before the day it is due. And I don’t want to speak for Krystal here, but I think she and I have become so much closer because of this experience; I honestly can’t imagine what we’re going to do without eachother till school starts. We literally spent every waking hour together, and it shows, because we finish eachother’s sentances (sandwiches), think eachother’s thoughts, and generally act like a married couple.
I didn’t mean for this post to be all nostalgic and corny but that’s sort of what it became. I just need to make it known how thankful I am to my family for making this summer possible, and recognize how lucky I am to have had such a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Traveling is something I have really grown to love, and I hope to be able to do a lot more of it in the future. That said, I am SO HAPPY to be going home tomorrow! I can’t wait to get some sun, spend time with my parents and sister and Brady, and see my friends for a few weeks before I’m off to Texas for polo. I also am so excited for home cooked food! I honestly have eaten tomato and mozzerella cheese for 2/3 meals per day since I’ve been here.
I want to thank anyone who has been reading the blog during our travels. It means a lot to me that you care enough to keep tabs on us. I really have no idea if there are 2 or 20 people reading, but I’m glad you did! Anyway, I’d better get back to packing. My suitcase is guaranteed twice as heavy as when I came, and I’m hoping the airline doesn’t make me pay a ridiculous fee if it’s overweight. Tonight, one last meal with the group. Tomorrow, off to the airport in the morning, catching a flight at 3 (London time), and seeing my family by 5! Thanks for reading :)
We are both essentially finished with our papers! It’s our last day in London, so I plan to go and see everything important that I missed (Big Ben, Parliament, etc). I’ll post pictures and thoughts on the trip being over (!) when I get back this afternoon.
Our time here in London is winding down. Everyone in the program is working frantically on their projects, due Wednesday and Friday. Sadly, these two “free” weeks turned out to be a lot less free and a lot less fun than I thought they’d be, taken up mostly by research in the library and worrying about papers and projects. But, on the bright side, this time next week I will be sitting on the beach on Cape Cod!
We didn’t do too many noteworthy things last week; on Wednesday, the group went to watch Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which was interesting to say the least. Friday we met a friend from Harvard and went to the famous Ministry of Sound nightclub. It was pretty much what I expected, all strobe lights and fog machines and really loud techno music. We left fairly early, but didn’t get back till very very late because of a series of unfortunate pubic transportation snafus including a bus that took 45 minutes to arrive and another that was stuck on a street for hours because of an accident.
Saturday, we went to Portobello Road Market (again, in my case). We bought a bunch of posters for our room and souvenirs for the roomies. I also found this record store I had been wanting to go to for a while. After that, we had a mini Harvard reunion, with Krystal’s friend Dave from Glee Club, our blockmate Julie and friend Billy, and another friend Brian from Kirkland.
Sunday, we slept in and then went out for lunch at a pub nearby. After that, we set out to find Abbey Road so we could take a replica Beatles photo. It took us forever to get there, because a bunch of lines on the Tube were closed, but we finally made it. The road is pretty busy, and we were wondering how in the world we would take the picture, since there were only four of us. We found a nice Asian couple to take it for us. The actual taking of the picture required us to run out in the street when there was a break in traffic and pose, then get honked at by cars as we ran off to the side. In the end, the picture turned out pretty well. Each of us dressed in the correct colors and everything so it would look authentic.
Anyway, I should be working on papers and whatnot, so I’m off to the library. I’m hoping to have one more day of touristing (I still need to see Big Ben, Parliament, and Buckingham Palace) and will post pictures if and when I do so.
Today, we met with our professors in the morning to talk about our project proposals. My meeting with John went fine, and he seemed to like my topic and think I was on the right track. Anne, on the other hand, did not seem so pleased about my project topic for her part of the class, although I still have no idea why.
After the meetings, Krystal and I headed over to the Tate Modern Museum. We stopped along the way for lunch, and shopping, and didn’t end up getting there till about 3:30. After spending about 45 minutes in the museum, we had both decided modern art is definitely not our thing. I don’t know if these exhibits are meant to be “deep” and I just don’t understand them, or they really are as ridiculous as they seem. Krystal and I went into this one room where there was a large piece of rope lying in a pattern on the floor. That’s it. That was the art. Another one was a mirror hung up on a wall in place of a painting. I’m sorry, but a mirror hanging up on a wall is not art, regardless of whether the artist “wants to make a statement about how art is self-reflective.” Sorry, but I’m calling BS. The only cool part about this museum was the Andy Warhol stuff. I’m a big Warhol fan, mostly because his art is eye catching and really cool to look at, unlike a piece of wire shaped like a question mark and glued to a canvas, or a piece of driftwood painted yellow.
We left the Tate in a hurry and came back to relax for a while. I then went with some of the other students to the historic Royal Albert Hall for a BBC Prom. BBC Proms are classical concerts held every night of the summer for really really cheap; our seats cost only 11 pounds. I’m definitely the first to admit I really don’t get classical music (I guess sort of like I don’t get modern art), but I can appreciate the talent and I figured I could sit through two hours of it in the hopes of becoming more cultured (or something). It was surprisingly not as boring as I thought it would be, despite being a good two and a half hours long. The concert was made up of a few different composers, but my favorites were pieces by Bartok and Stravinsky.
Tomorrow will likely be a day full of research and reading, so I probably won’t update the blog for fear of boring you to tears.
Portobello Road Market! Huge open air flea market with hundreds of stalls and thousands of people.
I’m pretty sure that me saying I’ll post more often is a guarantee that I will NOT post more often. I am very sorry for my silence all week; although Grandpa insinuated via Skype last night that my absence was due to “all the bars and pubs you’ve been going to,” it’s acutally just because we were crazily busy with finishing up classes. We had to read a ton each night (one night, our assignment was two whole novels), and on Friday, we handed in proposals for our two final research projects. One is a 7-10 page research paper and the other is a short presentation on any object. I chose to do my research paper on the emergence of eugenics as a result of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and my object is a painting that a crazy guy in Bethlem Royal Hospital did while he was there. Pretty exciting stuff. I’m going to meet with my professors in a few hours about the ideas, so hopefully they like them and all that.
As a result of all the boring work-type stuff we had to do, the week was pretty uneventful blog-wise. On Monday, we spent the day in Cambridge, which was really beautiful and medieval looking and whatnot. Cambridge University is celebrating its 800th anniversary this year (yes, that means it was founded in 1209—and we think Harvard is old!) and it also happens to be the 150th anniversary of something Darwin did that I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to figure out the math for. Anyway, we were there studying Darwin things, so we went to the University Library and looked at some of his letters, books, notes, etc. They had a whole exhibition set up for him. My favorite thing in the exhibition was a drawing his children did on the back of one of his manuscripts; it was called “the battle of the fruits versus the vegetables,” and it showed two kings facing off, one riding a carrot-horse and one riding a blueberry-horse. Those kids had some kind of artistic talent.
Anyway, after the library, we went to meet this Harvard professor, Jan Browne, for lunch. She is a Darwin expert, and we read part of one of her books for the class. Unfortunately, we all got separated into two tables, and she was sitting at the other table, so I didn’t get to talk to her at all. Oh well. After lunch, we were meant to go to some other museum, but it turned out that it was closed (apparently museums close on Mondays?) but Professor Durant didn’t seem too upset about it. We got the rest of the afternoon to do fun things, so John bought us a bunch of these famous “Chelsea Buns,” which are mainly just glorified sticky buns, and we went punting on the Cam. If the phrase “punting on the Cam” means absolutely nothing to you, let me explain. The Cam is the river that runs through Cambridge. People “Punt,” which is to say they take little gondola-type boats out on the river and navigate with a long pole, which they push off of the shallow bottom of the river. It looks quite easy, but let me tell you it is way more of a challenge than it seems. Our group split into three boats, and I was in the boat with John (professor Durant) who attended Cambridge University and is an excellent punter. He punted for a good while, then we all took a turn trying it. I was surprisingly not terrible at it (I think it requires a lot of upper body strength, thanks polo!), but some of the other girls in our group (cough Krystal cough) had us crashing into other boats and walls. John is hilariously English and proper, so whenever we would be heading towards a wall about to crash, he would say in his British accent “Oh, looks like we’re about to go admire the brickwork over here.” It was really a fun time, and we punted all along what are called “the backs,” which is basically the back side of the ancient colleges. The Cam is really narrow but very pretty, and we got to see a lot of the University that way.
We pulled off to the side of the river to picnic on sticky buns and soda and talk about Darwiny things. After punting, we had a really yummy dinner at the pub next to the punt rental place, and then headed back to London on the train. We didn’t get back until about 10:30, and we still had like 100 pages of reading to do for class the next day, which was unfortunate.
Tuesday and Wednesday were uneventful, with class in the morning and then reading and proposal-writing in the afternoon. Wednesday evening, I met up with our friends Julie and Billy, who are studying in Oxford for the summer. They were in London on a field trip, so we all went out to dinner together before they headed back to Oxford. Thursday, more things happened that are too boring to mention on this blog, but it was our last day of class!! We were all very very excited about that. Friday, more boring stuff, I went running and worked on my project proposals some more, then we all stayed in and watched Shaun of the Dead in Whitney’s room.
Saturday, I went to Portobello Road with a few others, which is a huge open-air flea market that is open only on Saturdays. This place is enormous; it’s about 6 blocks of stalls, with wall-to-wall people the whole way. There are antiques, fruits and vegetables, food stalls, vintage and new clothes, tourist stalls, and really just anything you can possible think of wanting, they have it there. We tried staying together at first, but it was pretty futile so we went our separate ways soon enough. I ended up wandering around the vintage clothing area for the most amount of time, but I also checked out a few record stores and this delicious cupcake bakery called Hummingbird.
Saturday afternoon and Sunday were also boring, filled with much acaademic blogging (all our posts were due at midnight last night, so we were all finishing up the posts we had neglected over the four weeks of class). Highlights were seeing my family (and Grandma and Grandpa!) via Skype. I’m looking forward to exploring London in these next few weeks, but I also really can’t wait to be home!
I’m not going to sign off with a promise of posting more, because that seems to jinx it, but I’ll try to update as much as is realistically possible. I’ll also upload Cambridge pictures as soon as I can!
