A Visitor from Home

This past week has been a hectic one, but fun, primarily because my mom came all the way across the Atlantic to see me! It was so exciting to see someone from "my old life" and show them all the things I have been up to here. We did a lot of fun sightseeing including:

- taking in the christmas lights on Oxford and Regents streets

- Checking out the British Museum, yet again for me. Never get tired of that place. Got to show mom the fabulous Reading Room and look at all the fun mummies which I missed my first time there.

- Went to the Museum of London. I'd never heard of this one before, but it was pretty cool, I would recomend it. It traces the history of London, starting in prehistoric times and leading all the way up through modern day. It was really interesting, especially having spent the past three months here getting to know the city, to see it's evolution and the ways it has changed and evolved as a physical place.

- Went to the Victoria and Albert Museum (we just went museum crazy this week)! I was pretty impressed by this one, it is an absolutly gigantic decorative arts museum. My internship this past summer was at a decorative arts museum so I had some interest in what they had to show. I loved this modern glass chandelier that was in the lobby, it is made out of hundreds of blown glass piecs all strung together. I also really enjoyed their Canova sculptures, he is one of my favorites, and the exhibit they had on fashion. By the way I love the fact that, like DC, all of the museums I have mentioned were completly free. I just wish I had more time to explore them all...

- Went to the Charles Dicken's House Museum which I have been meaning to check out ever since I got here. It is literally a block away from my house. It is a house where Dicken's lived when he wrote Nicholas Nicholby and Oliver Twist, and it is now a museum about his life. He was an interesting guy that Dickens, he was a prolific writer, social activist and performer. He had 9 children, was a notorious flirt and at 50 something years old he left his wife for an 18 year old actress. Men...

- Went to not one but two West End musicals. I love musicals, I just can't help myself. This week I was lucky enough to see two! We got cheap TKTS booth tickets for Guys and Dolls starring the famous stage actor Patrick Swayze as Nathan Detroit. It wasn't bad, but Patrick left a little something to be desired I thought. His New York accent was not very good, not nearly as good as the one most of the brits pulled off.

Then Monday night we got tickets to see Evita! My mama spoils me, she knows my unstoppable (and inexplicable) love for Andrew Lloyd Webber. What can I say, the man knows how to do a musical! It was a really impressive production and I loved it. I remember seeing the movie when it came out in theaters and this was so much better. Thanks mom! now if i could just figure out a way to see Phantom of the Opera before I leave...

Over the weekend we went out to High Wycombe and spent time with my Aunt. That was a nice little vacation from the hustle and bustle of London. We did what I always do when I'm with that side of my family-shop! We hit up all the thrift stores in town (quite a lot suprisingly) a cute street market and ASDA, the british Walmart. It was a lot of fun, I also spent time reading and paper writing. Oh and watching british tv. I soooo wish I had a television here, I am missing so much! hilarious talk shows, absurd quiz shows and Strictly Come Dancing, the british Dancing wiht the Stars. And my new favorite East Enders. This is a class british soap opera about the East End of London. It was so much smarter then American soap operas (ie things actually happened) yet so much more devious. Truly brilliant.

So it was a fun week, but now it is super hard work time. I have around 10,000 words to write by the 15th, and beleive it or not I have it light compared to some!

Night at the Theater

Whew, halfway through those epic trip posts. It is taking me almost as many days to write them as it did to actually go on the trip! Thanks if you actually read all this, and hopefully it isn't too boring for you!
It's back to life as usual here at UCL, which is, of course, not at all usual in any form. Tuesday night I went to see the play Bent, starring Alan Cummings. If you don't know, Alan Cummings is a Scottish actor who was Nightcrawler in X-men and has been in tons of other movies, usually as kind of quirky offbeat roles. The play was about homosexuality in Nazi Germany, as you can imagine it was very intense and sad but very, very good. This is actually the second play I've seen in London, the first was Galileo by Brecht at the National Theater. This one was more interesting to me personally. I was really impressed and moved by it. Pretty much everyone in the audience was sobbing afterwards, it was that powerful. Afterwards we waited at the stage door for Alan Cummings (my friend insisted). Apparently waiting around stage doors isn't as prevalent in the UK, we were almost the only ones back there. We did manage to catch him and meet him, he was extremely nice and had a very cute dog named Honey. The picture is ,of course, Alan trying to get his dog to pose for Stef's camera (the dog seemed kind of confused). On our way back home we saw the Queen's motorcade- she was apparenlty on her way home from the James Bond premere. Two brushes with stardom in one night! I also took these pictures of Trafalgar Square at night:

It's getting dark now around 4 pm which is depressing but I try to make the most of the few daylight hours we have. I have less then a month in London to go which saddens me to end. I'm trying to make a list of important things to see and do before I leave. This is complicated by intense busyness. Next weekend I will be in Scotland, the weekend after that my Mother will be here and we will be in High Wykham. Hopefully when she is in town we will do some major sightseeing though. School is keeping me crazy busy, it's getting to be crunch time so I am expecting some not-so-fun late nights. I am constantly torn between doing school work and doing something in London. I just can't decide which is more important. This weekend I am actually in town for a change so I'm going to play tourist hopefully and knock a few things off my to-do list!

The Eastern Bloc: Praha Part One

This past week was Reading Week at University College London, a time for students to catch up on the massive amounts of work the professors pile on us. Or, if you are an American, time to go on a European vacation! Which is exactly what three of my awesome London friends and I did, spending our week in Prague and Budapest. I will warn you guys that this is going to be a several part story because we did an absurd amount this week.
We arrived in Prague early Saturday (note on future travels: flights/trains before 9am are simply not feasible). I was really excited for Prague because so many people have told me about it and because I had never been anywhere so far east. Both Hungary and the Czech Republic were of course part of the Soviet Bloc until 17 years ago. I wasn't sure what to respect in that regard, but I think Prague has changed dramatically since then. Everything I learned in IB twentieth century topics came rushing back to me this week. This picture is me with a giant statue of Vladimir Lenin at the cities Communist Museum. It was an interesting study in contrasts that that museum was located above a McDonalds and next to a casino. A fast changing place indeed. Wenceslas Square, the large central boulevard in Nove Mesto (translated as "New Town" although it's actually about 600 years old) has seen 4 revolutions in the past 100 years. That is a lot of murder, violence and suicide in one place. Everything is peaceful now though and it is a major shopping area actually.
Of Course Prague has a history stretching way back past communism. The city is 1000 years old, and this can best be seen in Stare Mesto, the Old Town. This area is full of old buildings and churches remarkable preserved and still used. A dominant feature is the Astronomical Clock, a giant medieval clock which shows the time, the phase of the moon, the star sign and a variety of other important facts. It is quite beautiful and people crowd around it right before the hour to watch the various mechanical figures dance when it strikes the hour. My favorite part was a small dancing skeleton figure holding an hourglass- he is supposed to remind the citizens to be aware of their own mortality. Kind of dark but kind of cool too. Most of the Old Town is very touristy, full of restaurants and gift shops selling nesting dolls and tee shirts. Even so it is very pretty, especially when the sun comes out, as it only did one afternoon of our four day stay in Prague.
Prague is known as a party city but it also has some pretty cool shows at night as well. My favorite that we went to was an all marionette version of Don Giovanni. Puppets singing opera sounds kind of lame, and isn't for everyone, but it was actually pretty funny and well done. We also saw a black light show which was incredibly stange and trippy. Not really my thing, but if you like dancing eyeballs wearing powder wigs or a three foot tall red mouth singing yellow submarine, definatly worth checking out.

Coming up: Churches, Castles and Nazis!