The Countdown: Final Week in London

My time is coming to an end here in London and I can hardly believe it. Washington D.C. seems like it was so long ago but London has gone by in a flash. This is a really hard week to get on with. I have a lot of work to do for the museum as well as my portfolio and papers for class. It is difficult because I’d just much rather be out seeing as much of London as I can. There are so many things I haven’t had a chance to do yet and many things I know I won’t even get to see. Today I’m going to try and work hard on my responsibilities so that tomorrow I can run around and try to knock a few things off of my list of things to do. The last week has basically just consisted of work for me, and on Wednesday my group had to give our presentation for class.

We were supposed to basically talk about our work and time in London but my group decided to spice it up and write 16 stanzas of modified beat type haiku. Here are a few of our favorite and/or the most telling stanzas about life and work in London.

Living in London
London Town
I live in ghetto
I have no money for food
We work for nothing

Commuting to Work
London Town
The tube has no air
Someone is under the tracks
I think I’ll just walk

Socialization
London Town
Olympic drinkers
Frequent breaks for hydration
We also like tea

I guess it maybe won’t make sense as quite a lot of the haiku was inside jokes from our group. Our professor liked that we were creative with it though.

On to a completely different subject. This is me pretending that I am that cat on the roof of our flat complex. One night I randomly look out my window and discover that there are these weird little cat statues on our roof, knowing me I would have to get out there and get a picture with one.Thursday night we got to go see Spamalot! Those of you that know me KNOW that I love some Monty Python and this is the musical based The Holy Grail. I get to meet Terry Jones AND see Spamalot while in London. It’s almost too much! Spamalot was great, we were in the nose bleed section but what can I say, I rented the little binoculars and all was well. Before we went to the show we went to The Cambridge pub for dinner. I decided maybe I should actually start eating some traditionally British food. So I had a steak pie and it tasted just like pot roast and was quite delicious. I then came to the conclusion that I’ve essentially been a vegetarian this entire summer. Meet is expensive and we really have no way to cook anything in or flats so sandwich meat has been mostly what I have eaten. Then tere is a picture I took during the show (no flash, don’t tell)Sadly to say, just this last week at The Cambridge we discovered that there is this brochure for the classic pubs of London. If you go to five of the many listed pubs and by either food or drink you get your brochure stamped. Once you get five stamps you get a free t-shirt that has the saying “I toured the classic pubs of London” and other things on it. It’s pretty neat. So after my steak pie and an odd but tasty raspberry lemonade I got my first stamp. Last night Laura, Casey and I got on a wild hare to go and get some more stamps (our thought is that maybe we can get two t-shirts before we go home) as each pub and pub district has their own unique shirts. So off we go on a little pub crawl of our own which began at the Ye Olde Watling. I’ve discovered this wonderful things here they have called Pimm’s, it is a very light drink that is made with a ton of fresh fruit in it (as you can see in the picture below) Stamp #2.

We continued walking around finding these pubs, in total we went to three different pubs and ended up at Nicholson’s Blackfriars. This is a really brilliant little place. The decorating is absolutely smashing and the people even better. We ended up chatting with some people across the way and some guy from Brazil . The night ensued with doing the chicken dance and fighting about how there is a lot to do in London (a guy who has lived there is whole life tried to disagree). The two English guys who were with a French girl were quite interested in our little pub crawl and the free t-shirts and they began harassing one of the bartenders that they should give the three of us a free stamp…instead he got fed up and just gave us a free t-shirt! Fantastic! That means not only do we have a free shirt, we also still all have our brochures with four stamps on it, one more and that makes shirt number 2. So maybe I’ll have three.

From here we decided to walk home, which actually ended up being quite a lot farther than we had realized but it was all fun and gave us opportunity for some fun pictures. This is me making an acrobatic call from one of London’s famed red telephone booths.The drain covers or man-holes, whatever they are, in London have my name on them which I find to be odd. So I took a picture with one and then somebody was throwing eggs at us and Laura almost got hit, so we decided to keep moving on, we don’t really know what was going on .Upon arriving home we met up with Erica (another Capa intern) and her British friend Amanda who were also coming in after a night out on the town. Erica invited me over for chat and some pasta stuff, which I could resist. So we had an after midnight pasta party. I’m really going to miss