Daleks and Tea

So apparently I've been in London for two weeks as of yesterday, wow. This week has been significantly less hectic than last week now that I'm settled in and able to sleep. That last fact due in large part because I switched rooms. When I first arrived I was placed in a quad with three other girls, and while they were very nice, we had completely opposite sleeping patterns. The three of them habitually stayed up until all hours of the morning which, though they weren't intending to, kept me up, and then they slept later then me and napped during the day and I'm sure I woke them up while I was moving around the room. After about a week of this I requested a room change. I moved to the building nest door, also owned by the school. I now have a single (pictured below) in a flat shared with thirteen students from Lewis and Clark University in Oregon.

I like my new setup much better except for one small detail. See the large window that makes up one of my walls in the first picture? That is in fact a door leading out onto a picturesqu balcony, and it is locked. Next to it there is a small box, like the kind you see around fire alarms, with a key inside it that's labeled "break glass for key"with, of course, the implication that this is to be done only in case of a fire. This means that despite how much I want to throw open the doors and stride out onto my adorable little balcony (preferably while singing either show tunes or Disney) I never can.

Moving past this disappointing realization, this week as part of a class field trip for British Politics I got to go to the Churchill War Rooms where Churchill and other major members of the British government sheltered from the Blitz and did much of the planning for World War II. The War Rooms were originally a basement that was fortified to be bomb resistant (not bomb proof, a direct hit would have taken them out) under the Foreign Office, Number 10 Downing Street, and some other government buildings. 

Everything in the War Rooms is either original or made to look like it would have during World War II.  In this hallway there was even a recording of Churchill (judging by the sound quality an actors protrayal) yelling at some soldiers for whistling, apparently it was a pet peeve of his.

Churchill and his wife both had rooms in the bunker where they could stay the night it needed (I don't know how often they had to). The room on the left was Mrs. Churchill's and the room on the left is Mr. Churchill's, his bedroom doubled as an office and was used to make some of his radio broadcasts to the public during the war. One of the rooms on the tour was an open area with some chairs where you could sit and listen to one of his more famous broadcasts.

This is the kitchen. Along the way there were TV screens playing interviews with people who had worked in the war rooms, and apparently the food wasn't very good. Because of rationing there wasn't very much of it and what there was for food was extremely plain.

 These pictures are all of charts and the communications room where much of the actual planning for the war occurred during the 1940s. Flying Bombs were what we would call ballistic missiles today.

 During the war this room would have been filled with smoke. Not only was it legal to smoke inside at the time (despite the terrible ventilation that the war rooms had) put the air that was pumped in from the outside was filled with smog. One of the women featured in the interviews they were playing said that she requested a transfer because she started to have trouble breathing because the air quality was so bad.

Part of the war rooms is a museum dedicated to Churchill, I didn't get to spend as much time exploring this part as I wanted to because we had to look at the exhibits the Professor wanted to highlight. (On a side note he is the most stereotypical English person I've met yet. Every day he wears a full tweed suit, with a matching overcoat, gloves, a briefcase, and a hat. And instead of getting the hat at a regular store he goes to a hat maker.) One thing I did manage to get a picture of was one of the cigars Churchill was known for having almost continually lit.

On a funny note as we were leaving I heard one of the people who works at the exhibit talking to someone about the average age of the people who come to see the War Rooms. The worker said it's a fairly consistent mix of older people and school field trips but then said (which made me so happy) "A couple of years ago we had a bunch of kids coming through in their shorts and t-shirts all of a sudden, I think Doctor Who did an episode on them or something like that, but now it's back to normal." Yes grumpy sir, yes they did and it was a wonderful episode full of Daleks offering people tea and robots working in the War Rooms thank you very much! 

The same day I also went on a field trip to Brixton, one of the other boroughs. Brixton was where many of the African and Caribbean immigrants settled when they moved here. We walked through the market area and saw Electric Avenue (yes the one mentioned in the song) which was the first street in London to use electric street lights (hence the name). It was mildly interesting but by the time we got there it was starting to get dark so I didn't take any pictures. We also went out for a Jamaican meal where I learned the jerk chicken is extremely spicy.

This weekend I'm going to the Sherlock Holmes Museum with some friends and to see some places around town where the BBC Sherlock series is filmed so I'm sure I'll have a ton of pictures and plenty of nerdy facts to share (because you know I really need to learn some more).

Fish and Chips

So today Shira, Morgan, and I decided to go to Speakers Corner. As I mentioned yesterday Speakers Corner is a area of Hyde Park where people go from 12:30 onward on Sunday's to talk about and debate anything they want to. And while this description is certainly true it ended up being very different than I expected. 

For staters Hyde Park is much bigger than I thought. We knew that Speakers Corner was on the opposite end of the park from us, but we didn't realize exactly how far that was. Anyway after walking for probably about 45 minutes we arrived at our designation. Upon our arrival we discovered that most of the people who come to speak are in fact preaching about the coming apocalypse. Needless to say I was less than interested in listening to them. After working our way through those who thought the world was about to end we stumbled upon the man pictured below. He was talking about Marxist theory and it's application and implementation in the modern world. I didn't agree with everything he said, but some of his points were really interesting. One thing he pointed out was that Communism can only exist in societies that have already experienced capitalism and and industrial revolution because they have a fully developed infrastructure already, something communism is incapable of developing.

We listened to the guy above talk for a little while before we had to go meet another girl named Sara (I don't now if she uses an "h" or not) at the Gloucester Arms, one of the local pubs. Sara's a big fan of the football team that was playing today (sorry I don't remember which one, big surprise). Anyway we would never have made it in time walking so we decided to take the Tube, and we made it a few minutes before kickoff.

Despite the fact that I'm not a big sports person it was kind of cool to watch a football game in an English pub, at least once anyway. Also I got to have fish and chips for the first time since I got here, and they were delicious. 

Also if anyone is planning to come to London at any point in time I highly recommend purchasing the booklet below. It's saved my ass several times, including today when we thought we got lost in Hyde Park.

One Week Down

Hello everyone! So at this point I've been in London for a little more than a week (it was a week on Wednesday) and I feel like I've been here forever and only for a few minutes at the same time. This week was my first full week of classes. I'm taking British Life and Culture, British Politics, Islam and the West, and Transnational Studies. I really like three of my professors, the other one's nice enough, but kinda dry and since our classes are three hours long his tends to drag. But all-in-all one ok professor and three great ones is pretty good. Since the classes are three hours long we have time to do things other than lecture, at least once a week I have a field trip in one class or another to a different section of London and they all seem really fun, they start next week.

Last night a large group from the school went to see the play The 39 Steps which was hilarious! It's a murder-mystery-comedy preformed with four actors, all but one playing multiple parts. It was fantastic, I highly recommend seeing it if you ever have a chance. The show was in Picadilly Circus, which is kinda like a toned down version of Times Square in London, and there are a ton of good restaurants in the area.

Here are some observations about the city that I've made in my first week:

1) London drivers could eat Massholes for breakfast. The drivers here are INSANE! As soon as a light turns green they floor it, and God help you if you are in a crosswalk when this happens, I've almost been run over  several times already and consider it an accomplishment that I've made it this long without being hit.

2) You know those really cute red phone booths that you see in the movies all the time that are essentially the universal symbol for London? (If not there's a pic below) They really are all around the city, along with some modern versions, but they aren't quite as cute as the movies, or my picture, make them seem. In reality the inside is full of pictures of women not wearing much and numbers to call said women (lol gee I wonder why the movies omit this?) This my not be the case in the more touristy parts of town, but in the residential neighborhood I live in it seems to be the rule.

3) Everything here is prettier than in America. Seriously. I have come to the conclusion we don't know how how to build things. Plenty of these building are, as one of the speakers at orientation put it, older than the country we come from, and they are BEAUTIFUL! The pictures below are from the inside of the Museum of Natural History which looks like a palace.

4) Museum's that are owned by the government, like the one pictured above are FREE! Which means I get to see cool stuff, like this life sized model of a blue whale, and dinosaur skeletons without paying a single pence (penny). (I should probably add that those skeletons are of various whales I didn't get any good pictures of the dino's). 

5) This song is more accurate than I ever expected, and I spend way too much time with it stuck in my head while walking around the city. 

6) I enjoy living in the city a lot more than I expected to. It's nice to not have to rely on a car and be able to walk or take the train to where ever I need, or want to be. And there's always something to do or see if you're board. As I get more used to being in the city I'm more willing to just aimlessly wander, and I'm getting better at doing so and not getting lost (a very useful skill to have in case you were wondering).

7) As strange as it sounds English isn't all that common in London. There are over 300 languages spoken in the city, the most in the world, with the result that any time you talk to someone there's only about a 50% chance they have an English accent. Despite this I still feel like I stand out whenever I talk in public, for some reason I still feel like I'm going to be judged for not being British as crazy as that sounds.

8) On a similar note even though I (obviously) still speak with an American accent I'm beginning to occasionally think in a British one. This is especially true after class when I've been listening to a professor with a British accent talk for three hours. 

Tomorrow I'm going to a place caller Speaker's Corner with my friend's Shira and Morgan. It's an area of Hyde Park where people go starting at 12:30 on Sunday, every Sunday, and make speeches and debate different subjects. Needless to say I am super excited for this!

Hyde Park, Kensington Place, and a few other Random Pictures

This is the outside of my dorm, I live in the basement of number 13 (the one to the left).

Hyde Park is about a 15-20 min walk away from my dorm

Sarah made a friend. The pigeon was even kind enough to look at the camera for the picture.

THE CLOCK'S TARDIS BLUE!!!!! (For those of you who don't get the reference it's from Doctor Who.)

 Kensington Palace from every angle

 The gate's so fancy!

This is what happens when you order a cup of tea in a cafe here

In the early 1900s an artist carved a bunch of fairies into a live oak tree in Hyde Park. The tree has since died but they kept the part of it with the fairies standing outside the Princess Diana Memorial Playground. 

Here Goes Nothing...

Hello everyone! I'm going to assume it's friends and family reading this and as you probably know I'm spending spring semester this year studying in London at the Foundation for International Education (FIE) in South Kensington. (Also called "The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea"which I feel really fancy saying.) Anyway I decided since I have too many family members to count never mind talk to on a regular basis while oversea's, while still having time to go to classes and explore, I'm going to keep this blog with posts and pictures about what I'm doing. If anyone does want to talk to me my email is sriordan9256@westfield.ma.edu, or if you have a smart phone there's an app called textme that allows you to text internationally for free as long as you are connected to wifi, my username for that is scriordan942288.

 (Since I know it's going to come up, I am aware that my spelling is terrible, please ignore any words I butcher since my attempts at spelling are sometimes beyond the help of spell check.)

So for a brief overview of the last six days. I flew out of Logan Airport at 9:10 Tuesday night and landed at Heathrow around 8:30 the following morning. I made it through immigration and customs with no problem, and was actually able to find someone on my flight who was also coming to FIE who was willing to share a cab (thank goodness because they aren't cheep). Now one thing about FIE that's very different from Westfield (aside from the fact that it's in a different country) is that it doesn't really have a campus. South Kensington is a mainly residential area, with a few museums and shops, and the school bought a few buildings all within a few blocks of each other in this area. So we went to one of the buildings to check in, the girl I was sharing a cab with was really lucky and happened to live in that building while I was assigned to one down the road. I decided to try and walk there since it wasn't far and the directions seemed simple enough. That was a bad decision. The street signs here a- don't look like the ones in the US and b- are much lower than the ones in the US so consequently I couldn't find them. I walked a few blocks with all my luggage got confused and had to back track to the checkin building to ask for help. After that I decided I was too stressed and my luggage weighed too much to try and walk it again so I just got a cab to bring me to my dorm. I'm sharing a flat with 3 other girls from the US. The flat consists of one bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen, and it's very nice.

The rest of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday passed in a bit of a blur. We had to go to lots of information meetings as part of orientation, were given a tour of the general area to see where to buy food and other basic necessities, and went food shopping. To be perfectly honest it didn't really hit me that I was in London until yesterday when I went on a tour of the Palace at Westminster (Parliament). My roommates and I took the tube to central London and as we came up the stairs out of the station the Eye was right in front of us across the Thames, and Big Ben was literally right above us. It's so beautiful! We took a bunch of pictures, and I was smiling and giggling like an idiot the whole time because this was the first time it had really hit me that I was in London, England, and not any other city.

The tour itself was awesome as well. You aren't allowed to take pictures in the building but I took a ton of the outside. Our guides name was Nigel (seriously can you think of a more English name for a tour guide) and he was awesome, he knew so much about the building and it's history and was also really funny and entertaining.

That was yesterday, today we went on a bus tour of the city, getting on and off at a few locations. We saw Buckingham Palace, also extremely beautiful (I apologize in advance for how much I'm going to overuse that word). The Eye, and Bug Ben again, drove over London Bridge (thankfully it didn't fall down), and saw Saint Peter's (Feed the Birds from Marry Popins was stuck in my head for a while after that) among other things.

I've taken a bunch of pictures and I'm going to try and upload some, sorry if it doesn't work I'll figure out how to eventually and I'll write another one of these in a few days.