More London

This is a cute video. This one is more OMG.

Ok, back to London news. I'm still really tired, but it's not jetlag or anything. I'm pretty well adjusted to the time here and when to go to sleep. It's that all this weekend we've been walking. Friday we had a tour of the part of town we live in so we can find the grocer's and the tube stop and school. Saturday we had a photo scavenger hunt all across London. We rode the Tube a lot, but there was so much walking. Today, Sunday, we went to Hampton Court and walked up and down it.





(btw that's a foot and a half step up into the train. gap indeed.)

I feel like I've mastered the tube system though I've only rode a train once so far (up to Hampton Court) and I still don't really understand the buses yet. Apparently it's a matter of understanding the layout of the city, then finding a bus going mostly the way you want to go, then hopping off when you get close. I'll have to use it Tuesday night though, because...

I have a ticket to go see Scissor Sisters!

And apparently I can't just take the tube there, I need to use the buses too. Very exciting.

In more scholarly news I have done all of the work due for the first week of classes, which starts tomorrow. And despite the pub food I'm still eating healthy. Tesco has cheap apples and carrots. On the way to Hampton Court I ate an entire box of grapes. And they do have macaroni and cheese over here- only it would be better to label it "macaroni in nutmeg cream sauce". Yuck. Glad I brought four boxes of it from Kroger at home.

SHIELD COINS COLLECTED: 5/7



Also London has a vampire problem. (besides all the twilight posters everywhere). Really I think it's a PSA for car accidents but...

Really really tired

This sums up everything I have ever learned about living with other people.

Yawn. Fighting jet lag by staying awake as long as possible is soul crushing. I woke up on the plane this morning at... 9AM brit time or something and ate this delicious cinnamon cake they gave me in my breakfast box. And I have been awake ever since and it is... 9PM brit time now and I feel like it's the longest day there has ever been. Midnight sun, six month days, kind of long.

The dorms we're in are nice. From the outside they look like brutalist architecture but it's more soviet looking than that. I'll take a pic tomorrow when it's not so drizzly outside. On the inside the dorms are yellow. And the windows open. Window. And I have a sink.

Earlier we went to a pub to see the england/algeria (?) match. There's nothing like standing in a mad crush of people who are all shouting at each other about work today then howling like werewolves when the ball gets close to the goal and realizing you have no idea how football/soccer is played.

Ok. Super tired. Bed now.

TOMORROW: SCAVENGER HUNT

SHIELD COIN COLLECTION: 1/7

Oh, I also forgot to mention the 50p of custard I bought at Tesco's. It was more custard than a Ben and Jerry's carton could hold. For 50p. So good.

A Hell of a Life

You know a person had a rollicking good time being alive when their obituary containes the following:


His personal humour often whirled into the surreal, as his fellow journalist Peter Tory learned to his cost. One night, in a Blackpool restaurant during a Conservative party conference, Waterhouse inveigled Tory into a bet which resulted in Tory losing his trousers. Waterhouse made off into the night with the item of clothing and Tory had to borrow a pair of the chef's pants.

Back at the bar of the Imperial hotel, he made himself busy introducing Tory's trousers to various Conservative party grandees, insisting they shake a proffered leg by way of greeting. In later weeks, Tory would receive sinister, late-night calls, claiming to be from his trousers, relating, in a falsetto, northern accent, the various risque adventures he was enjoying with his new master.


Copied from here. Found it while doing a paper for theater class.

This Just In From The Newsroom-

I am somewhere in the AJC. No, really. It's a one week long contractor job typing up address on raffle tickets, but it's still a newspaper building.

I went on a tour the first day I was here and got to see the big presses, vats of ink the size of showers, rolls of paper half the size of my car... There's actually this miniture train type thing built into the floor to drive the reams of paper around and load them into the presses. And the coffee machines they have here...

The one down in the bullpen area is the most amazing. It autobrews three 12-cup pots at a time, with warming plates and everything. When you go down there to use it all the journalists make growly faces and sort of lunge towards you, like maybe you were sent there to break the machine.

It's adorable.

Unfortunatly unlike on TV the journalists do not appear to be friendly. None of them have spoken so far besides glaring to communicate when you go near the coffee machine.

In other news, it is sixteen days til London.

All the books in the world.... except one

Scan of some comic.

Found this randomly, it's really great.

meh

Wow. I was sort of expecting about fifty flames over that last post.

Sorry I haven't written much lately. Spring semester was a nightmare and there's been some personal stuff going on. Nothing worth writing about though.

Right now it's seventeen days to London. Still have a lot to do before I can roll out. Like pack.

I finally saw Iron Man 2 today. Despite all the "it's not Iron Man 1" hype I thought it was pretty good. I feel a little gypped that Iron Man and Warmachine didn't fistbump in costume- but that was pretty much my biggest complaint. The movie didn't suck and for a sequel that a miracle, right? Tony did his big self-destruct thing which was fun to watch on the big screen. No matter how much they told me the Russian guy was a physicist I couldn't believe it- silver nail polish, dyed streaks in his hair, the prison tattoos. All I could think was "world's smartest hooker". He did have a good villain laugh, though.

On another note I saw Prince of Persia. (Spoilers) I don't even know what to say about it. Lots of parkour stuff and sharp objects and a princess. Mostly I think I feel cheated for the Prince guy since he lived through the whole movie and then went back to five minutes in.

Back to Iron Man- Jarvis could have talked 5000x more in the movie and it would have been awesome. Likewise that Jason Hammer dude could have stopped talking three hours before the movie started and I'd have been happy.

Scapegoat

I'm not really into politics. In the sense I have no idea what is going on most days or what things mean. Some guy was on the tv the other night howling about the oil spill in the gulf and the anchor covering it was like "this DEMOCRAT says this about the oil spill.... even a DEMOCRAT feels this way..." and I had to ask why they were stressing the word 'democrat' like maybe they hate the environment or can't see oil or something.

Basically I don't get it.

Anyway. Not that I know anything about politics but I have noticed one thing that I don't really get. I know a lot of people don't like Obama because they think he's not an American or he's secretly Muslim or something- but there's moments where they're talking about the economy on tv and they get really angry he hasn't made more jobs yet.

Like he's the Cadbury Bunny and he lays jobs instead of Creme Eggs.

I don't know. Maybe presidents have powers like that, but I have no idea. I don't think they do.

What brought this to mind was the oil spill press conference thing this afternoon. It seems like everyone is like "you, president guy, why did you let the oil spill happen? how could you do this to us?!". Even when he was saying that we've never had an oil spill accident on this level and that people weren't prepared for it because we didn't know a spill could be this bad- people seemed to be blaming him for not being psychic. Or people are wanting to know why he hasn't stopped this yet, or hasn't cleaned up the gulf yet- and it's BP's fault and problem as far as I understand.

Don't know. Like I said, I don't get politics.

In other news, is anyone else completely freaking out about the Bones season finale? CAN'T. WAIT. FOR. FALL.