So this week has been both long and short. School started on Monday and my schedule is Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning and most of the day Wednesday. The way that school works here is that we meet once a week and have an hour lecture and then an hour seminar where we are broken up and assigned to small groups to discuss what we learned in the lecture. The seminars are what I am used to because it is more like my classes at home. My classes seem very interesting and not to intimidating, which is always a plus. I was interested to discover just how few British people were in some of my classes. It seems that either the students are exchange students or students who have come to live here from another country. In that way it is so different from home because even though everyone speaks some level of English, we are all coming from completely different backgrounds and everyone has a different opinion on whatever subject we are talking about. The classes that I am in are Public and Cultural Diplomacy, International Security, Europe in the Global System and Security, Politics and the Environment. One thing that I do love about school here is that it is not necessary to buy textbooks. Most of the textbooks are available as free e-books through the schools library or available through library loan. It is something that I think the US should try doing! I feel as through I will learn a lot more here because the classes are so independent that most of the work is done outside of class through reading books and articles on the extensive reading lists. Alright well enough about the logistics of school, let me tell you about the fun stuff that happened this week! I don't remember if I put this in my last post so I will talk about it briefly, we watched the Super Bowl here and it was so weird because we didn't see any of the commercials. It would go to a British commentary with two Americans and it was hilarious. The half time show was acceptable, at least it wasn't some old guy singing old songs like the past couple years. However, the audio did not match up with the video which made the sound even worse. All complaints aside, it was nice to have a little bit of the US here. However, with the time difference the Super Bowl ended at 3:30am for us. Tuesday we went out and had an interesting experience with one of Sarah's new British friends. Lets just say the bar that we went to was not something any of us ladies had ever been to before and while we had a good laugh, we parted ways with Nat and Stacey and went out in search of some noodles, which we found and they were amazing! Noodles are mine and Nikki's new second favorite thing.Thursday brought the start of my weekend and the first experience of doing laundry. It was quite a hassle. Sarah and I ventured to get detergent and then went to the laundry room where I learned that my card was not activated so I had to have the front desk do that for me and then I was finally able to figure out the contraption that is the laundry system. Needless to say it look probably close to two hours to do my laundry and after that we didn't want to do anything else so we continued our Harry Potter movie gallery and watched Chamber of Secrets. Friday we (Nikki, Sarah and I) took a trip to Poundland, which is a glorified Dollar Store, and bought some things to clean our rooms with. We then took a trip to North Campus to let Sarah get to class and for Nikki and I to have an adventure trying to print things of the computer. Then came the most awesome walking journey I have taken in a long time for multiple reasons. We walked from housing all the way to the River Thames and then took the Tube home. All in all we were walking for almost two hours and saw amazing things, some of which we took pictures of that will be up soon. Nikki and I made an AMAZING discovery on our journey. Pastry Shops. The pastries here are sooooo good and if you go at the end of the day, everything is so cheap because they don't want to throw it away but they can't keep it for tomorrow. We both got a Yum-Yum Donut, which was mind-blowing, and a baguette sandwich which was also very good. All of this came to a pound 55. Saturday was another GSE adventure and we went to the National Gallery and Tate Modern. These were both very interesting art museums but I will say that the Tate Modern was definitely more my thing because the National Gallery was all very old paintings from a very long time ago. However it was interesting to see some of the big names like Monet and other people i forgot, oops. Tate Modern had more modern art, which I'm sure you all guessed, and was fascinating. There was an amazing exhibit with ceramic sunflower seeds, 100 million of them I believe, that were all hand painted by the artist. I will post pictures of that soon. We went to the 7th floor and there was an amazing view from the restaurant where we sat and pondered for a minute the fact that we are all living in London. It still seems surreal sometimes. After getting back to our rooms and relaxing a little, we went out to a local pub and had a great time once again dancing and singing American songs. I am not sure what this next week will hold in store but when I know, you'll know so until then...
-Meghan
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