This week has been...a week.
On Monday, I had class where apparently nothing much happened, then went for a long walk in Hyde Park because it was relatively warm out. That's just one more thing I'm going to miss--I know a walk is a walk, but the atmosphere of Hyde Park is pretty unique (in my opinion).
That evening I went to a football match!! Lucky for a few of my friends and me, one of the guys from Earlham is a huge fan of Chelsea, so he let us know that there was a game that night for only £3! It was a youth match, so it included all of the guys in training to play for the actual premier league (and some of them already did play for it). Obviously the players were really talented, and we had amazing seats since they only sold 3,000 tickets (opposed to the 40,000ish tickets they usually sell). For those of you who care, it was Chelsea v. Blackburn, and Chelsea won easily.
Tuesday I had more class, then went on a tour of Shakespeare's Globe theatre. It's not the original (that burned down after they set off a cannon to announce the presence of royalty in the theatre and a spark went into the thatch roofing, and you can imagine what happened from there), but they tried to stay faithful to it, thatched roof and all. There were subtle hints of the times...such as the concrete floor and electric lights. Our tour guide was quite good though--knowledgeable and funny. After pointing out various things about the actual theatre, he spent a good hour talking to us about Shakespeare and how it was "meant to be heard" and how the stage directions are almost always written directly into the play since sets weren't so elaborate back in those days (what light through yonder window breaks...well, there's a window and the sun is rising...). We also talked about the scripts (or lack of scripts) that actors used to receive--they got only their lines and a three-word cue before them--never the whole play.
Wednesday I attended my first full day event for my internship, where students and business people volunteers came together and did a huge variety of activities that mimicked the business world. My duties included helping set up the hall for what felt like 500 students but was probably more like 50, handing lots of things out, explaining activities, retrieving wandering girls from the bathroom, buying band aids for a girl who cut her food (and finding out that the term "band aid" does not exist here--they are called plasters), generally wandering among the students/volunteers like a hawk, being told by the teachers that I should come work at their school (the worst school in the borough), and helping clean up by stacking chairs, basically throwing tables on the ground, blowing trash around with a leafblower, and being told by the clean up guy (the leafblower was his idea) that I was from Canada, no matter what I tried to tell him. Overall, a very interesting day.
Somehow at the end of that I had enough energy to attempt to go to a free comedy show, but when we arrived we discovered that you had to buy at least two drinks per person, so we wandered around and eventually found a very cool pub...with a painting of a toaster, which made me reaaaaally like it.
Thursday I proofread a large information packet for an updated program (where volunteers help students learn a foreign language), and I have to admit it was nice to essentially copy edit, although I am terrified of going over it with the woman in charge because I am afraid she is going to think I am being pretentious by pointing out that she uses commas where she should use semicolons. I also spontaneously helped out at a mock-interview program where they were short of volunteers. I "interviewed" three different 16-year-old girls, and I was extremely impressed by how passionate they were about their course of study. The last girl I interviewed was possibly one of the sweetest 16-year-old girls on the planet, and she may or may not have single handedly affirmed my faith in teenagers. Additionally my boss gave me a very large chocolate egg with my name on it, and I was very entertained on the tube watching a tiny man get extremely huffy and push his way over to the doors every time the train stopped...while we were still in the tunnel (which happened at least four times).
My week takes a nosedive from that point, because Thursday night I had some fake meat which I have now discovered has been the source of my constant sickness. I was up most of the night wishing that it didn't feel like someone was stabbing me in the stomach, so Friday I took it easy...with my two roommates, who have horrible colds and had to stay home from work too.
By Saturday I had recovered, and was able to enjoy the CHOCOLATE FESTIVAL that was held near the Embankment area (close to everything basically--Westminster area, the Eye, etc). It was full of lots of free samples of some seriously quality chocolate. We wandered around the area and saw a ton of truly bizarre street performers, and some impressive chocolate sculptures. I also had sushi for the first time in my life (cucumber), and thoroughly enjoyed it.
That night I got to see where another pair of people from the program live, which is in an incredibly adorable townhouse-like thing, complete with WWII graffiti in a random closet.
Sunday, which is today, we went to Oxford and essentially wandered around. We also took a three-hour walking tour through the various colleges, and saw various Harry Potter places, such as the place where Mad Eye Moody turns Malfoy into a ferret. Oxford is really beautiful, and the weather was very nice to us, but the entire group was definitely lagging--we just changed to Daylight Savings Time 1AM today.
I am far too tired to put pictures up right now, but soon this post will look a lot prettier.
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