lately

i need to run to a meeting with my professor to talk about my projects BUT quickly:

-molly and madeline (and molly's sister abby) left yesterday. i miss them a lot already. we went paddleboating in hyde park and had a picnic for their last night
-summer school treated us to "all's well that ends well" last night. it was amazing. i was kind of concerned that i was going to fall asleep, but everyone ended up having a really good time. it was a great production with strange ways of inserting modernizing quirks. somehow, there was lingerie involved?
-i'm still working on figuring out these library systems. just when i think i have wellcome down, i realize i need to go to the british library and it's a whole new ballgame. ugh. but i'll get there. i do have five new library cards so far. souvenirs?
-we watched top gun the other night and even though i fell asleep for half of it. it's just so awesomely bad.

mk off to my meeting!

missing widener

there is nothing like trying to figure out a new library system to make you feel really really dumb. as imposing as it can be, widener is at least familiar.

so far i have explored the wellcome library, the imperial college library, and the science musuem library. soon, i will get into the british library. that will be an adventure.

i just want my carrell...

and wireless internet would be nice too.

free concert fail and kew gardens

so yesterday we went to the british museum.
there was a lot of really interesting stuff there but it was kind of strange because a lot of the plaques and pamphlets were sort of self-defensive about the right of the british to even have the objects, which gave an interesting spin to this amazing place. my favorite piece though was an (exclusively british) exhibit on pharmacology in the 20th century which laid out all the pills that a single person takes in his or her life. there was one each for a man and a woman. the man died when he was 76 and the woman was still alive at 82. looking at the drugs was a really interesting way to tell someone's story. for example, for the woman, it explained how such and such pills meant that she had carried pregnancies to term twice and these meant that she had had post-partem depression and those were her birth control and some others were when she lost a baby and then there was hormone replacement therapy, pills for obesity, chemotherapy, and anti-depressants. it was probably 20 feet long and it's really striking to see them all displayed like that. this was the best picture i could get of the actual pills although it doesn't quite get at the scale. but it was long. then last night we were supposed to go to a free concert. daniela and i were exhausted after the british museum though and had some stuff to do so we ended up heading out late and getting there after the time when they stopped guaranteeing entry. we waited in line for a bit but ended up just going home. it was kind of a bust but we didn't have anything invested in the concert anyway since we hadn't paid anything for the tickets, so it wasn't too big a deal.

then today, i went to kew gardens with molly, madeline, molly's sister abby, and becca's friend linda. it was so beautiful. here are some of my favorite pictures:

the palace of king george III where he spent the time when he was crazy
we were told to "mind the ghosts" on the 2nd floor

the waterlily greenhouse

some pretty girls by some pretty flowers

a shady grove

the hydrangeas were in bloom!

i apparently love hydrangeas...

it was a beautiful day

some ugly ducklings that will soon be swans!

the palm house

end of class

yesterday marked the end of regular class, meaning that today i got to sleep in!
let's see... what happened this week?
monday oh yeah that was cambridge and we didn't get back til like 10:30pm
tuesday we got treated to amazing italian food and harry potter! which was really good
wednesday i went out with molly madeline linda and mike for chinese which was spicy
aaand yesterday, iTunes is doing this sweet thing where they hold concerts every night in the month of july and lottery off free tickets. i won tickets both for last night's show and tonight's show. last night was esser and graham coxon (who is apparently the guitarist for blur?) and tonight is a-ha and raemonn. so we went last night and it was pretty cool but the problem with a concert where everyone won free tickets is that everyone is kind of ambivalent about it and probably wouldn't have gone if it wasn't free so it's not as...energetic as other shows. for example, while we were waiting for graham to come on after esser finished, this guy and girl shove their way past us and a few minutes later come back again. the girl is standing right in front of us when she looks me in the eyes and yells "I JUST MET ESSER!!" i kind of gave her a blank stare and she continued "...you don't care do you?" and i was just like "nope...sorry..." and then she moved on. but maybe tonight's show will be better. if a-ha plays take on me.
ok i need to write a paper proposal today and then head to either the british museum or tate britain. hooray museum hopping!

punting on the cam

today we headed to cambridge to continue our whirlwind tour of everything british. today's excursion was decidedly less academic than originally planned due to the unforeseen closure of museums on monday. who knew? so we had a looksee around the library at cambridge which was having a special exhibit on darwin (150th year since origins coinciding with the 800th year of the university=reason to party and by party i mean put together an exhibit in the room in the basement). they had a couple pretty cool things including a first edition of origins that darwin had sent to wallace in which wallace had crossed out every time darwin wrote "natural selection" and substituted "survival of the fittest" instead and then some sheets of the first draft manuscript of origin that had been given to darwin's kids as drawing paper and feature such scenes as "the battle of the fruits and vegetables" on the back. so that was neat.

then we had lunch with janet browne who is a harvard professor who is super duper into darwin and has basically made her entire career on studying his correspondences. she's doing research in cambridge for the summer. so we had a nice lunch at a little cafe where i had my first full english breakfast, only the vegetarian option which replaces black pudding (ew) with french fries (yum). after this delicious lunch we made the discovery that the museum was closed. so instead, we called up the punting place where we had made reservations for later in the afternoon, moved them 2 hours earlier, bought sodas and pastries, and headed to where our boats were!

punting was an adventure to say the least. there were 15 of us which meant that we had to go in 3 boats. but only 2 people (prof. durant and paul our TF) had ever punted before. i immediately volunteered to be in the non-experienced boat and it was AWESOME. we all traded off and did it and although it took each of us a few minutes we eventually got the hang of it and were even the first ones back to the dock at the end. but not without a few minor bumps into other boats. but no one fell off and we didn't have to use the emergency paddle! we basically went up the river cam along what is known as "the backs." there are the backs of 8 of the cambridge colleges which face onto the river on either side. they are among the oldest ones and are really beautiful.

nick prays while mike gets a less-than-a-minute tutorial in punting.
and we're off!

i give it a go next. mike is totally not clutching the gunnels for dear life...

the views of two of the colleges. on the left was st. john's and i'm not sure what was on the right
we basically had no clue what we were going by but would knowledgeably repeat any tidbit we heard from passing tour guides. highly effective.

gunneling up for chelsea buns!

nick is a superior tour guide while maxwell expertly navigates the bridges.
we overheard that the bridge in this picture is called the bridge of sighs because students supposedly need to walk through it to get to where they take their exams. or something.

sometimes, things got stressful. like when those kids in the boat on the left couldn't figure out how to go straight and resorted to palming their way along the bank.

things on the other end of the boat (and the river) were much more peaceful.

afterward, in celebration of surviving, i made a new friend with an old dog on the docks!

after all this we headed to the pub next door for fish and chips for dinner just to round out the typically british day. and then, just for good measure, a few of us headed to the eagle before hopping the train back to london. the eagle was an air force hang out for both brits and americans during world war II and has lots of cool memorabilia and stickers and graffiti from that time (although i didn't see any 82nd airborne stuff in there), but more significantly for me anyway, was also the pub where watson and crick announced that they had discovered the secret to life! pretty cool.
now it's a little after 11 and i have to do some reading. normal class tomorrow but no afternoon excursion (phew!) but we are going to see harry potter!!

bristol and bath

this weekend we headed to bristol and bath and it was a very different experience than our trip to scotland to say the least.
first, we were heading there in order to see some of the engineering feats of isambard kingdom brunel (don't say those Victorians didn't know how to name people). the two major ones that we saw were the clifton suspension bridge and the ss great britain. there was a whole series of random things throughout the city that burnel did but these in particular were pretty amazing.
second, while edinburgh was a quaint town which was very much in touch with its past both culturally and architecturally, bristol was a much more industrial city and therefore suffered a lot of damage during world war II. the result is that much of the city is now much more modern apartment complexes built during the 70s and 80s taking up the river front property that had been car parks and half-destroyed buildings following the war. basically, it seems to have a lot of identity issues that edinburgh didn't have to deal with. for example, bristol has the largest surviving georgian square in england (where the first american consolate was located) a few hundred yards away from a giant tacky condo building that was build 10 years ago but already has 2x4s holding up the balconies on half the units.
third, because it's on the west coast, bristol is hit with all the weather coming off the atlantic much sooner than london. and thus is a lot rainier and generally miserable.
finally, i spent most of the weekend sick with a cold (NOT swine flu) and in my bed. saturday was our first morning without having to set an alarm in like two weeks and i took full advantage, staying in bed until the languid hour of 10 am and then getting back in for an hour and a half at 11:30.
with that as a preface, here are some pictures from bristol:

the ss great britain, which was the largest iron ship with a propeller built at the time
the whole bottom is rusty so they have to keep it dry to prevent further deterioration so it's in a dry dock with a glass casing around it and dehumidifiers which is really cool because you can walk around all underneath it!this is a view of the ship from within the dry dock, looking at the front of it. there are holes in it at some places where the rust has completely worn through the 150 year old iron. it didn't help that the boat spent probably 50 years of that time festooned off various islands.
on board the boat, we experienced life like a passenger would. one of the cabins featured someone who had to be quarantined. me too.
afterward, we headed to the park to try and see cabot tower but after hiking up a hill, we only discovered that it was closed for renovations. for all you cabot kids who might be reading this, john cabot is a big deal in bristol but i can't remember why exactly. something to do with fish trade in america in the 15th or 16th century and a wooden galleon named matthew. that's all i got for you.

overall, bath is a much better place than bristol. this is generally attributed to the fact that bath wasn't really bombed during the blitz, which is a generally positive development for any city. there wasn't too much stuff related to the course there but we had a good time going to high tea in the roman baths and hanging out around the city. we even attempted to watch a cricket game but it's a horrible spectator sport for the uninitiated. noor has since enlightened me on the rules and i think that i might vaguely sort of understand what the goal may be now. perhaps.

waiting in line for high tea in the roman baths. jamie, the four year old son of both our professors, was getting bored. he and i became friends when i literally paid him all the one and two pence coins in my wallet. i said i would "keep him posted" if i got any more and he responded "ok! you better post them to me!" he was also playing with a toy of the saber-toothed tiger from ice age and anne, his mom, asked if he knew what "saber" meant. he answered "it means to eat something slowly so you enjoy it" even though he had actually defined "savor" we were all really impressed.

anyway, high tea is amazing. more scones and pastries than you can eat. actually. but we were so hungry we didn't exactly savor it.

romans were here. there were a lot of "when in rome..." jokes, which is unusual due to the fact that we were not, in fact, in rome.

us, by the river avon


cricket, which we could only determine to be "baseball's drunk cousin" half the words on the scoreboard literally mean nothing to me.
eventually we made our way to the royal crescent which we assume is where the rich/elite/royal people hung out. we were too tired to figure this out at this point, as proven by this photo.

after an epic fight with the elements saturday night, this morning we headed back to relatively dry london. spent the train ride doing some awesome lsat prep. then most of the afternoon napping and doing reading. also got in a quick run and a group dinner.
tomorrow we're heading out bright and early to cambridge for darwin, picnicking, punting!

westward, ho

heading to bristol in a few minutes but quickly:
went to the of montreal concert the other night. it was awesome
made risotto for team summer school last night. probably the heartiest risotto ever made there was so much stuff in it. but they really liked it so that was cool.
we finally figured out to split up the readings for class and then discuss them--definitely more productive than attempting to skim over 100 pages post dinner.
this week is pretty hectic sandwiched between two trips so not too much has happened. but we did go on a field trip to the wellcome library on tuesday and it was super cool. there was some stuff there which should be really good for my thesis and i officially have a reader's card. i'm going to see how many i can rack up. so far, if you include my widener carrel card, i have 3 library cards in my wallet and there is definitely at least one more coming if not more.
(is that a lame goal?)
ok shower time.
but here are some videos from the concert:

bedlam

went for a run around regent's park last night--beautiful beautiful area. we were going to try to get tickets for the importance of being earnest which is playing in the outdoor theater there now but they ended up being sold out. just as well because this ended up being a long day as it was.
maybe as a break from the weekend which was pretty exhausting, we didn't have class today but did have a field trip out to bethlam royal hospital, aka bedlam. it was founded in 1247 and is the oldest functioning psychiatric hospital. although it used to be pretty ridiculous in there (visitors would/could just come in and wander around looking at the crazy people until the 1770s) hence the evolution of the word "bedlam", it's now a good, modern hospital.
the awesome part was when we got to look through the old case books from the 1890s. there were some really neat things including letters to and from patients in the hospital. one was a letter from a delusional girl to her deaf mother wondering if God would forgive her. it was pretty crazy to be reading this very personal thing from over a hundred years ago which was just tucked in a giant book as another piece of evidence regarding her sanity or lack thereof.
we also poked around the museum which was smaller than my bedroom (take your pick of bedrooms--home, winthrop, or london it was smaller than each of them. literally) and then headed home.
spent the afternoon dealing with getting my computer fixed and reacquainting myself with the internet which is a brilliant brilliant thing. i made some risotto for molly and i then came back to do work. some school-blogging and some reading then some not-school-blogging.
but now, some sleep!

edinburgh--harry potter theme weekend

edinburgh is probably my new favorite city. while i don't have the time or energy to go into the whole thing right now, it is amazingly quaint, beautiful, and full of so much history and pride. other thing it's full of: harry potter references. awesome. some pictures:

platform 9 and 3/4 at kings cross is actually between platforms 8 and 9

view from half way up arthur's seat, my new favorite place ever

falling rocks are pretty funny

university of edinburgh on our historical walking tour.

we were standing below where darwin would've had anatomy lecture during his short time there

in greyfriar's cemetary
the group outside the gates to the school where JK Rowling's kids went which inspired Hogwarts

where JK wrote the first chapters!
we had coffee here. and used the bathroom for good measure.

i thought daddy would enjoy the fact that they are apparently big on sailor jerry in scotland.
(they also had 10 cane)

botanic gardens lily pad pond--super cool.

on top of arthur's seat with the edinburgh castle in the background
our hostel was just below the castle and also had a sweet view of it. but not this sweet.

part of the world record largest collection of whiskey bottles
these ones are shaped like books in order to look like they belong on your shelf
there were also chess sets, little dogs, eagles, and about 300 others

a 360 of the view from the top of arthur's seat. it was pretty windy so maybe turn down the volume
in the middle there, i zoom in on the edinburgh castle which we could see from our hostel. and it finishes on the other peak of the park which i climbed half way up before turning around

back(b)logging

it's pretty late and i need to head to bed but i wanted to include some pictures from crossness pumping station last week, which is a victorian sewage pump house opened in 1865 and is pretty awesome. it's in disrepair now but they are in the process of restoring it and got one of the four 3-story engines up and running. there's a video of the place in action. also, nicole and i got to turn the one restored engine on which was cool because prince charles also did that a few years ago when they re-opened it!

(speaking of things that are up and running: my internet. somehow, i managed to delete my computer's ability to have an IP address. but the computer help people got everything back together so that's good.)

so, crossness:

wall featuring a lot of names for the toilet. tehe
this was in a prominent place in the museum area.

we also went to westminister abbey after this for evensong. i think i mentioned this but it was really cool. and while we were in there there was the first thunderstorm which really added to the effect of being in a gloomy old chuch!
on wednesday we went to the hunterian museum which is in the royal college of surgeons london. basically it was a giant collection of every kind of diseased body part or creature in i think 3,000 jars throughout two floors. it was really amazing to see. there was also a history of surgery thing with all sorts of pictures of people before/during/after surgery which was gruesome but cool as well.
later that night we met up with charlie who was visiting from brussels. he had read about john snow one of his classes so we went out there and then took some dumb pictures afterwards. they seemed necessary at the time.

no pump--no water--no cholera

thursday--headed to edinburgh!

the internet sucks but edinburgh rocks

so my internet is apparently still broken. which means it was unlikely actually related to excessive downloading and more of an actual IT problem. that sucks.

thing that doesn't suck: EDINBURGH
i want to move there. it's amazing. (minus the part where they only get like 5 hours of daylight in winter...but whatever.)
we had a great weekend, one highlight of which was going to the top of arthur's seat and seeing the whole city laid out in front of me. it was really amazing because it was almost a perfectly clear day. i'll put up some pictures once my internet is back in working condition.

oops

in an attempt to reclaim my right to pandora, i accidentally on purpose downloaded a program that was apparently more than 5gb which is apparently the limit on downloads.
thus i will have no internet for 48 hours.
(writing this on helen's comp)
48 hours puts me at thursday at about 7pm.
unforch, thursday at about 7am (roughly?) we are leaving for edinburgh for the weekend.
so unless i come across a sudden wealth of free wifi and/or internet cafes, there will be limited communication this weekend both on the blog and in general--mom, don't freak out.
in the mean time, i am getting my reading and lsat work done with shocking efficiency...

but in other more exciting news, today we went to the crossness pumping station which was built to pump sewage into the thames way downriver in 1859-65. while the station itself was in disrepair, they have restored part of it and have a working beam engine up and running (which i got to turn on!). although the actual pumping station has been replaced, the sewers that were layed down 140 years ago are still in use, which is pretty crazy. the project was on a scale much larger than the big dig. so that's pretty neat. despite the smell.

after that we went to evensong at westminister abbey today which was SO COOL. we saw the graves of lyell and darwin among other famous people. while i may have fallen asleep during part of it, the whole effect was especially awesome due to the thunderstorm that was happening outside (and apparently causing flooding?)

also charlie (my blockmate) is in town! hooray! we're going to have dinner tomorrow night
ok helen needs her computer. but more (including pics and vid) once my internet ban is up...ugh

blog roll added

apparently a blog roll is a thing that you're supposed to do, so i've added a few on the side. mostly, links to other friends' "my summer in ____" blogs, but my other friends are more adventurous than i am and are in places like africa and india. let me know if there are more to add.

free concerts in our free time

yesterday, most of the morning was spent in a flurry of blogging as our response-paper-blogs were due. after a run with molly, i packed up some lunch and helen and i headed to hyde park. there was another music festival in the same place where last week's springsteen performance was. on the bill this week: kanye west!

by the serpentine on the way to the show

sidenote: every night i am amazing by how late the sun sets. since we're so far north, it's literally still bright out close to 10 pm. the picture above was taken around 7:30 pm. it's really really cool but seriously throws off any sense of what time it is. now that i'm thinking about it, this sort of explains why tea time is so late in the day. it's weird to eat dinner when it's still bright out, but you need something to tide you over. so clever...
anyway, helen and i hung out a little bit and listened to q-tip who was on before kanye and who we unfortunately know little to nothing about. but we enjoyed ourselves. about 9, molly, madeline, mike, and whitney joined us and we had a nice little group. also, whitney had made super delicious cookies earlier which we appreciated. we didn't have the greatest view, but we still heard kanye for free!

i guess this view is why some people paid...but we loved it

it was a little chilly once the sun (finally) set

we had no class today to give us a day off before our two consecutive weekend trips, so i tagged along with molly to the imperial war museum. while she worked in the archive, i looked around for a couple hours. it was both one of the best and most depressing museums i've ever been in. the exhibit on children during world war two really got to me. the holocaust exhibit was also not the most uplifting, as is to be expected. i did think it was slightly funny though that the place where they would store the excessive number of shoes and clothes from the victims, they would refer to as "Canada" because it was the "land of plenty". i've never really thought of Canada as the utmost example of a land of plenty, but that could be me being US-centric.
in another part of the museum, they had an exhibit about post-war rations and there i saw my first can of klim!
powdered milk which is sort of like the opposite of milk which is "milk" backwards-->klim! growing up in aruba, my dad would have this instead of real milk since they coudn't transport it there. even though i've never had it, this was a nice little reminder of home in a roundabout kind of way.

after that, i met back up with molly and we headed home. but since we were almost on the end of the line, we got a whole tube car to ourselves. we found this exciting enough to warrant a photo:
she headed to the v&a to learn about 19th cent. life and i, tired from just walking around one museum, headed home to finish up laundry (hooray clean clothes) and do some work.

today is also the first day that it's rained during the day really. there was a thunderstorm a week ago saturday, but it passed pretty quickly and was after i had already settled in for the night. but this seems like it's going to sprinkle all afternoon. hopefully it will let up enough for a run. at least it's cooled down a little bit. i have the door open to the garden and it's pretty nice in here right now.