Monster Catch Up Post

First of all, Happy Birthday Mom! I hope you had a wonderful day.

I hope this won't be toooooo long but I have to catch up on this week before leaving for Wales at the ungodly hour of 5:45 am tomorrow morning. Otherwise I'll have too much schoolwork and last minute London things to do when I get back and I'll never be done. So bear with me.

Monday
Our first papers for literature were due on Monday, so after dropping John off at a train to the airport around 10am, I went in search of an internet cafe to print off my paper. People like me who brought laptops are not allowed access to the computer labs in the basement of James Lighthill House, where we live. It is some rule of UCL's, so every time we need to print something we have to pay for both internet use and the actual printing. Sigh. Anyway, I succesfully printed off my paper and went to class after picking up some tea. Class was apparently unremarkable because I don't really remember what happened but overall class has been better this week. Literature has picked up, probably due to the fact that most people much preferred Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway' to the last book we read. British culture continues to be slow, but it's hard to do much else with a class that is 2.5 hours long twice a week. However, from random comments made by our professor recently we have started to realize that she was not only living during the whole time period we're discussing, post 1945, she was also in the very center of a lot of the social movements. For example, during a presentation about feminism the other day the student was naming some famous feminists of the period and my professor said "Oh my daughter is named after her. She is one of my closest friends, and I was at that protest as well just not throwing things about like everyone else." Tuesday she brought in a book in which the author mentions her father as a top debator at Oxford, as well as a photograph of her waving a banner in front of a famous politician's car, and today she brought in a feminist needlepoint banner that was made for her by a famous playwright, another one of her good friends. She is truly amazing and I wish that we could just talk to her the entire class period and ask her questions.

After class I headed straight to Madame Tussauds with my half price ticket that I bought online. I unfortunately went by myself because I had to do my presentation on it the next day and bought my ticket online late the night before (it is almost 10 pounds cheaper that way) and didn't get to tell anyone else. It was a really strange experience, because when you walk into the celebrity rooms the wax figures are just standing amongst the hordes of tourists with cameras and it is easy to bump into Jennifer Aniston and apologize before you realize she is not real. It is very difficult to tell who is real and who is fake and I'm pretty sure I missed a couple of big ones (like the brand new one of the actor who plays Harry Potter) because I was going through rather quickly, and there are just so many. I didn't get too many pictures with celebrities because I would have had to ask someone every time and really, I didn't think I would want a bunch of pictures of myself with various fake celebrities, but I did take one of myself with Albert Einstein and one with Queen Victoria. I also took pictures of just statues, and I'll put some up soon. I particularly enjoyed the historical figures room and the bizarre Chamber of Horrors which still includes the death masks that Madame Tussaud made of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI after their executions (she had to root through lots of bodies to find them) and the guillotine blade that is said to have killed Marie Antoinette. It also has models of more recent serial killers, some of whom were killed on death row and their actual suits are on display and others that are still alive, which I find seriously disturbing.

At the end of Madame Tussauds there is a cheesy ride called "The Spirit of London" in which you get into a cab and pass lots of scenes from London at various times, complete with moving wax figures, much like Spaceship Earth at Disney World. It was pretty fabulous. Lastly, there was a really terrible movie in the Planetarium (which apparently did not draw enough people to remain a planetarium) by the makers of Wallace and Grommit about aliens studying the "stars" of the Earth who then proceed to come and cut open the dome of the planetarium and take pictures of you, since the audience is supposedly made up of stars. They really love the awful pun about stars, and the whole thing was an unsatisfying end to my Madame Tussaud experience. Oh well.

Afterward I came home and wrote up notes for my presentation, and I don't think I did much else. Oh I made dinner too, but the pancake mix that John and I bought but never made turned out pretty badly. Or maybe electric burners and I just don't get along.

Tuesday

Tuesday I woke up and went to class, where I did not get to do my presentation on Madame Tussauds because the other presentations were much longer than they needed to be/should have been since they're only supposed to be 5 minutes long. So I dragged my laptop to class for nothing which was relatively unfortunate. After class I stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few essentials for the week, along with snacks for my trip to Wales this weekend in an effort to avoid buying more expensive meals and snacks while I'm there. We went to the theatre that night, to see The Hothouse by Harold Pinter, apparently the world's best living dramatist. It was hysterically funny but also a very black comedy, so difficult to watch at times. However, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and even more so because one of the lead actors, Finbar Lynch, was with the Royal Shakespeare Company when they came to Ann Arbor last fall. He has a really amazing voice, which sounds strange but everyone notices it, so it was fun to listen to him talk for 2.5 hours.

Wednesday

Wednesday is our class excursions day and this week we our destination was to Oxford. We went by coach, and left at around 9am, which I don't understand because the schedule said 7am and it would have been really nice to be there just as everything was opening for the day so we could have had a few more hours. The drive is about an hour and a half in decent traffic, so by the time we got there it was already after 10. Sigh. This is one of the things about the program that I do not understand, their desire to have us spend as little time as possible each place we go. However, the people who run the international studies program at U of M are coming to visit next week and have invited us for afternoon tea so hopefully they will ask us what we think about it and we can tel them honestly.

Anyway, back to Oxford. I had been once before, four years ago when our girl scout troop came to Europe, and it was basically what I had remembered. A group of us got some coffee and walked up the main drag of the town, stopping in little stores and at booths along the road. Our destination was yet another cheesy indoor ride called "The Oxford Experience" about the history of Oxford. It was much like "The Spirit of London" except the figures were certainly not as nice as at Madame Tussauds and we rode around in desks instead of taxi cabs. It was still pretty entertaining, and our professor even joined us for that one. After the ride we picked up some lunch (well, I brought my lunch and picked up a tasty maple pastry) at "The Campus Buttery" and walked around some more, including stopping at the Alice in Wonderland shop, which used to be a candy store where the real Alice bought her sweets, and in the gardens of Christ's Church College (there are a lot of colleges, which are really residencies, that make up Oxford University), which is where the inspiration for Hogwards in the movie came from. Then we met up with the rest of our group to go on a walking tour of the town with a guide. It was interesting to hear trivia bits about where bits of Alice and Wonderland were inspired and about the history of the town in general, which is very long and turbulent. It has been a student town since at least the middle of the 1300s, which is pretty impressive. It is beautiful but incredibly touristy, and I'm not sure I would want to go to school in that crazy of an atmosphere. We also went into Christ's Church College, which the program paid for. We saw places where some of the Harry Potter movies have been filmed, and the great hall which inspired the dining hall at Hogwarts, althouh no filiming took place there, just on a set that looked like it. Students still eat in the hall every day, which is kind of odd because hundreds of tourists walk through it when it is not mealtime. The college buildings really are quite beautiful however. Our last stop was at the Christ's Church Cathedral, in which the real Alice's sister was immortalized in stained glass as the model for a saint, before she died at a young age, after being engaged to her lover for only four days. So sad.

We got back to the dorm around 5pm and I made dinner and did some homework before going out with my friend Maureen for a drink at the pub down the road to celebrate the fact that I am finally no longer sick. I had a Magner's hard cider, which was tasty but not as flavorful as I was expecting. Afterwards I came back to start/finish the abstract for my history paper which was due today.

Today!

I am finally caught up! Props to you if you made it this far, although I have to admit that I half write these things for myself anway, so I don't forget what I did (it is much quicker than writing in my real journal). Today I had to leave early again to print off my abstract and my ticket for our tour of Wales, which leaves tomorrow morning at 7:15am. Class was fine, and now I'm at home getting things together for Wales. Woopy is actually staying very close to my dorm so hopefully I will somehow meet up with her tonight so she can leave her big suitcase in my room for the weekend, since her program at the London School of Economics doesn't start until next week. Right now I think I'm going to make a quick run to the grocery store for a few more snacks for this weekend and to the ATM for cash to pay the hostels. I hope you all have fabulous weekends and I'll be back Sunday night!