Week Two in London

Sorry for the un-creative title. Another week has passed, and classes have started. The first week of classes were pretty easy (considering I only have class 2 days a week….whaa??).  Classes started on Tuesday with “Social Problems” in Ladbroke house, which was not too easy to get to. For all my other classes, I can take the tube right to the campus. However, Ladbroke House isn’t close to campus. It’s close to nothing.
As you can see, there’s a tube station, Holloway Road, right by all the buildings at North Campus. Except Ladbroke house. There’s only a bus station there. I thought I had it figured out which bus station we needed to get to to catch the right bus, but we ended up running around the rain for 5 min looking for it, only to miss it by a minute. We had to wait for 15 more minutes until the next bus came in time. Somehow, we still made it to class 5 minutes early.
The actual class was really easy and the instructor seems really cool. The only assignment for the entire semester is one 2,000 word essay, due the last day of class. I think I can manage that.
The way the classes are set up is you have a lecture for the first hour, and then the class is divided up into smaller “seminar” classes for the last 2 hours. We didn’t have a seminar in the class the first week, which rocked.
Later that afternoon I had a study-abroad-only program, “Art in London.” Each week, the class visits a different art gallery in London, fo free. The only downside to this class is that it will probably be the most work; we have to keep a journal for each exhibit we visit, and talk about pieces we saw, etc. However it should be really cool to have a non-traditional class like that, and it’ll also be a great opportunity to see art.
My last day of classes for the week (ha!) is Wednesday, which starts off with “19th Century Fiction”…i.e. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, etc….i.e. right up my alley.  The three novels I’ll be reading this semester are Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and She by H. Rider Haggard.

Technically, this class will probably have more out-of-class work involved than Art in London, but srsly reading novels is not work to me.  I’ve never read any of these books, so it’s even more enjoyable.
Last class of the week is the one I’d been looking forward to the most, “Theatre in London.” Like in “Art in London,” we’ll be going to a different play/musical each week. Not fo free, but that’s ok. I’m so excited for the class, as I’m a big big theater fan. I’ve never heard of some of the plays we’re going to see, but I love learning about new shows so it’s awesome. Two I had heard of that I’ll be seeing are Annie, Get Your Gun and Inherit the Wind, which is  apparently staring Kevin Spacey.

This week I also got to experience some more quintessential London things, such as seeing a play at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.

This was the last weekend of shows at the theater, and as we wouldn’t be going to any with my theatre class we didn’t want to pass up the opportunity. We saw “Love’s Labours Lost,” which was a Shakespeare comedy. The play was great, it really was funny and the actors were awesome. The only thing was I wish I had read a summary of the play beforehand; with the actors’ British accents and on top of that the Shakespearean language, it was a little hard to follow sometimes. It all worked out in the end though, and it was a really fun experience.

On Sunday, while some friends took a trip to Oxford, Rachel and I decided to spend the day in Hyde park. It was a little misty, but it was really nice to walk through the park, which is HUGE by the way. Rachel and I had a cup of tea and enjoyed the scenery. Fun times.

This past weekend we also made a day trip to Bath/Stonehenge/Salisbury, which was great. The weather was beautiful.  Bath and Salisbury were really cool towns. Bath has the Roman Baths there, but it was also cool to just walk around there and see old churches and buildings.  Same with Salisbury, which had a church built in 1200 AD.  Stonehenge was neat to see too, although I wouldn’t go back. I would def go back to Bath.

The Roman baths in Bath 

Natural hot spring bath, discovered by the Romans

Bath Abbey 

  Stonehenge

Salisbury Cathedral

Salisbury Cathedral

Me at Stonehenge…doing a dance.

On the agenda for this week is classes (obvs), figuring out and booking the rest of the trips for this sem., and then taking a trip to the Lake District and Manchester/Liverpool this weekend.