It's lucky that I decided to write this blog because the Student Life program here offered £10 for anyone who is keeping a blog and would submit it to be included in the weekly newsletter. There are like six or seven of us in the program who submitted them, but most of the other kids haven't updated for a while. Understandable, since we barely have any free time, but I want a record of what I do here anyway. One of the kids named his blog like mine, but he wasn't an idiot like me and didn't publish it with a typo, so it's HISNAMEinlondon. A-hole.
Anyway, Monday is pretty much my only weekday during which I have time to do touristy things, because I only have class from 1:15-5:15, so I can get up early and do something first. This week, Alice and I planned t o go to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, but we got there and found out Westminster was closed. A lot of things are randomly closed on Mondays, actually. We had already wasted some time, but we didn't want to do nothing with our morning so we went over to St. Paul's. We had been there before when we went on on a BU-run daytrip to the Tower of London, but we hadn't actually gone too far inside because there were services going on.
It's kind of funny that at this point, I've been to more churches in my life than temples. The only ones I've been bored in so far were the two Jesuit churches we went to in Rome (I guess after the Pantheon and the Vatican, nothing was really going to match up), but St. Paul's was pretty and unique. The artwork on the ceiling sparkled, but I don't know what made it do that. Obviously, I couldn't get close enough to figure it out. We did get to go up high into the Cathedral because they had a place you could stand in the dome at the top called the Whispering Gallery, where you can supposedly whisper something and the people on the other side can hear. There was too much noise in the church to try this out. You could also go up even further (all by freakin' steps, everything toursity involves millions of steps) and see the view from the top, outside. This was pretty, but I wasn't in awe or anything because we had a better view from the London Eye.
With that day over (including an internship tutorial at the end of the day, for which I have to write papers about my internship for, as if I don't have enough frickin' stuff to do with class and work), I'm back to the running-around-and-working schedule. There isn't too much I can do on weeknights when I have work because I don't get back to the dorm until almost seven, at which point I'm starving and only really want to relax for a bit before bed. Yesterday I stopped at Marks & Spencer for jeans, though (they have some really good deals) and today I'm seeing Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is supposed to be set in London but Hollywood decided to move to New York (which is dumb, but they shot some scenes at the Hearst building so I get really excited when I see the commercials).
One final thing about the UK: political correctness does not really exist here, or at least not in the hyper-sensitive way that it does in the US. One of the galleries I compiled for work today included pictures of signs in China and Japan that were also translated into English, but the translation is horrible. When my boss and I were coming up with names for all of the galleries I made, he said I could have fun with this one. "Um, I think I better leave that to you," I told him. He came up with, "Harrow? What you say Engrish man?" Clearly, something that un-PC would never even occur to me. But it's totally OK here.
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