Even in London, Mondays aren't as cool as Fridays.

Here is some catch up from the last few days. Weekends are crazy busy, it's been hard to keep up! Here's what I have been up to...

Thursday 30 September 2010
My first "Design as Communication" class was on Thursday. It was...interesting. It's a lecture and a five hour studio. I was very excited about this module. Elizabeth and I woke up early to cook an English breakfast complete with Heinz Beans (similiar to baked beans). People here love them for breakfast! After breakfast, I quickly got ready and headed to class. It was unreal. We spent four hours tracing out initials. We are doing a design project on perception and this part of the assignment was to zoom in on portion of your initials. It's difficult to explain. We had two "L" shaped borders that we used to create squares around a large typed version of our initials. So we weren't tracing the entire letter "L" or "P" only portions of it. Anyway, this week we are creating the shape on a design program and then editing the colors. I think it will be pretty sweet when it's finished. Kind of abstract and modern.

Thursday night, Christine, Elizabeth and I cooked dinner. Well, Elizabeh cooked and we watched. She made chicken and spaghetti noodles. She then dropped all of the noodles down the drain. She then, grabbed a handful and ate them. I passed on that. It's college and we are hungry and poor.  Pretty good dinner and nice relaxing evening.

Friday 1 October 2010
Day 3 of the internship was on Friday. It was MUCH better than the first two days. We attended some seminars and overview meetings about the company. It's weird to think we are going to spend two weeks learning abou Think London and then leaving in eight more. I was very interested. One of the sessions was about the Olympics campaign the company is doing/finishing in preparation for the 2012 Games. I know, I won't be doing any real work for the Games but it's still pretty amazing that I am a part of all of the hoopla. Colleen is the other intern from NY. She's pretty nice, a little spazzy but everyone is sometimes, right?

Friday night, I grabbed a delicious and filling (joke) at Tesco (grocery store in the UK) for 2p and headed to Christine's dorm. We hung out for awhile and chatted with some people on her floor during dinner. Elizabeth met us later when she finished class. We spent the evening, walking through town and enjoying the fact that we are in LONDON! I didn't take out my camera once and it was sooo nice. I love photo-documenting this journey, but it was nice to just be in the moment and people watch and wonder and chat.

Saturday 2 October 2010
I already wrote about Saurday's event as Kew and the bookstore.

Sunday 3 October 2010
We got up early to head to the Tate Modern, the modern art museum of London. It was the last day for a photography exhibit called "Exposed". It was about voyeurism, surveillance and hidden cameras. It was so interesing. Some of the photos were pretty provacative, but just another part of the culture difference here. We are going back to the Tate with my creative writing class so we only spent a few hours there. The St. Paul's Cathedral is across the river and of course, I got a photo of it. The first one of St. Paul's this trip!

 Tate Modern     (you can see the sign for the "Exposed" exhibit in pink)

 St. Paul's and Millenium Bridge

After the Tate I headed to the British Library. I had been wanting to check it out since I got here.  I looked up the opening times and it was supposed to be open. I get there and it is open for studying but you couldn't actually walk through any of the rooms, so I am going to have to go back. That's fine with me. It was a cool place. Huge. In the center of the library was a room surrounded entirely by books. I took a picture (of course) but it didn't turn out well. It's hard to see what it actually looks like in the picture.  There is an enormous display of imporant pieces of lierature, music etc. in the library. I saw original works from Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Mozart, Beethoven, The Beatles, Salvador Dali, Leonardo DaVinci and others. It was pretty incredible the wide variety of pieces you could see and read about. I also saw the orignal handwritten book of Alice and Wonderland. Did you know the story was written as a gift and then the author, Lew Carroll was encouraged to have it published? I also saw an exhibit on the Magna Carta. It's basically a document made by the people of England in 1215 for the King John to ensure he didn't take advantage of the people or abuse their liberties. That is a very summed up version of it, but all in all, that's the brief history of his very important document in British hisory.

 You can see the scale of these class walls by how tiny he people are sitting at the bottom. The walls were completely covered in books.

After the Library, I went to Hillsong Church for the 3:30pm service. Elizabeth had been volunteering earlier in the day and I met her. I love going to that church. The music is absolutely beautiful. It's very upbeat and contempory, which is probably what I like about it. The church is huge, like 5,000+. This was the second time we went. It's a non-denominational service which I also like. If you like worship music, you should definitely check out some of their songs online, very good stuff.

Monday 4 October 2010
Tube Strike. Ew. I left about an hour and forty-five minutes early this morning for work because I had no idea what was in store. The way to work was pretty painless, the train was delayed but nothing was closed where I needed to go. Every time I go to work, I feel like I am in a movie. The hustle and bustle of Canary Wharf is so incredible. You should feel productive walking around with all the inteligent, driven business people. It's like a wave of motivation throughout the station and the work builidings.

Today, I just did more administration work. I researched potential companies for 7 hours. During lunch, I got to "meet" (Ok. I didn't actually meet them, but I smiled and opened the door) for some very official, very important BBC executives. They had a meeting in our office all day. I'll just say I met all of them. That works for me.

I came straight home from work today. Usually I stop in Central (no one says "downtown" here) and do dinner or hang with my people. I just didn't want to deal the chaos of finding a tube back. Stations were closing early due to the strike. Big pain. The strike is supposed to get people aware the the workers aren't getting paid enough and they don't stand for it. I just can't understand how this is actually helping. Let's be real here, they are just getting paid one day less for not coming into work! In the paper today there were several articles about how this strike had only a 30% approval rating among workers and it still "passed". I guess the Prime Minister wants to create a new law that says they need 50% approval for another one to occur. I may be misunderstanding it, but that's what I got out of the article.

That's all for today. I still can't believe this is actually my life.