Last Day of Classes

All the activities are finally catching up to me and I've finally gotten into a routine to where I cannot stay up late every night blogging about that day, so I'm resorting to doing it the next day. Yesterday was the last day of classes. I was incredibly upset about not being in the same room with all the people from my Jane Austen class, but I cannot quite say the same about my Theatre class. The dynamics in both classes is very different, and I vastly prefer the former to the latter. We finished up our discussion of Emma in the Jane Austen class, several of us talked about why it was our favorite (Mr. Knightley's relationship with Emma being a leading reason) and went through a final assessment of Jane Austen herself. Before this class, I had only ever read Jane Austen for pleasure, had looked into her writing some, but mostly examined the stories. I am happy to say that I will never look at her works the same anymore. There are 20 different narrative techniques that we have explored with regards to Jane Austen and they are abundant even in other writing because Jane Austen set the precedent for most later writers.
Unfortunately, I don't really know what to take away from my theatre class. I know to be thorough in my critiques of plays, to look into every possible aspect of production, but I am still clueless when it comes to technicalities of theatre. I got to watch 4 shows at the expense of taking the course, and that about sums up the goals of the course.
After classes, we had a brief orientation about our departure and the arrangements that had been made for that. The coach leaving to Heathrow airport, aboard which I will be, will be leaving at 5.30am. Most of the coaches leave around the same time so my friends and I have decided not to sleep that night, but to stay up all night, talking and perhaps saying goodbye to London by night.
Dinner in the refectory did not look appealing at all, so a few of us went to the closest Pizza Express to eat dinner. After that, we went on our last pub crawl as part of the Ale Trail. This time, however, we spent a lot of time talking with one another and didn't quite get to finish the Trail to claim our third T-shirt. Whilst talking, however, I learned a lot of things that put me in a very awkward situation. It all started when I saw a friend wearing a Powershift shirt (Powershift was this gigantic environmental conference I attended in Washington D.C. back in February) and I asked her if she had been there. She hadn't, but the shirt belonged to a friend who was there. Then I spoke to my friends about how amazing the conference was and asked them if they supported any of the causes I supported. They looked at me and one of them said, "My family is into coal mining. It's what pays for my college." I didn't know quite what to say and I tried to make my point about coal mining in Eastern Kentucky without offending her, but I guess she had heard a lot of it and didn't seem interested in another discussion, so we dropped it. Later on, I found out that another one of the girls who went on the pub crawl comes from a very rich background, thanks to Exxon and Esso. She seemed incredibly liberal, so I wondered aloud if she thought differently than her grandparents (her grandfather made his fortune through the company), and she said she really wanted to, but it was paying for her college, and it had provided her with a lot of opportunities.
I don't know. I want to empathize with their situation, but I think they need to be more righteous, for the lack of a better word, when it comes to defending their views. They are not opposed to my point of view, they even agree with it, but familial connections and money are what keep them from making the commitment otherwise. I felt incredibly outnumbered and very despised for holding liberal views even though we dropped the discussion and moved onto something else. It was enlightening, to say the least.
We got back from the pub crawl at around 11.30, and went directly to bed. I slept in until 9.30 this morning, and am now waiting to go on the last field trip with my Theatre class. We are touring the National Theatre, after which I plan to come back to campus and finish writing my final paper for the Jane Austen class. It's very simple; it's just a matter of writing it. I want to get it out of the way before I go to the BBC Proms tonight. It's a 3 month long music festival held in Royal Albert Hall, and has all sorts of musicians and performers from July to September. It is open to anyone and seats start from £7.00. I am very excited. More on the experience later.