BOSTON!

That's right, I'm in Boston. Most of you that are reading this probably all ready know this, but I'm letting you know anyway. I have been here for a little over a week and I cannot believe how different my life is all ready.

Let me start by saying that I am here for graduate school. I am enrolled at Boston University's Science Journalism program. Details about the program may be found here. However, before I could start classes, I had to move 1,200+ miles from Murray to here, get settled in, deal with the newness of everything and still keep my composure (for those of you that know me well, you probably guessed that the last thing on that list didn't quite happen).

So, the drive. The drive was actually a lot of fun. It was tiring and a bit of a drag, but it was oddly exciting to have all my belongings packed into the back of a Dodge Caravan while we caravanned across the eastern half of the United States. I thought I could drive on forever. Needless to say, we reached Boston on Thursday, September 1 to a lot of unpleasant surprises. First: the tenants who had previously occupied my apartment had not completely moved out. They left virtually everything in the kitchen, several pieces of small furniture, everything in the bathroom (yuck!) and had not cleaned an inch of the space. So after a day-and-a-half of driving and a week of packing prior to that, my roommate, Patrick, Christopher (Patrick's brother who flew up to Boston to help with the move) and I had to clean out the place before we could move in. And the apartment wasn't exactly how I had pictured it (and I mean that literally--I had only seen pictures of the place). If I was unsure of the move before, this definitely didn't help. But I tried (very, very sincerely) to take it in my stride and move on.

We spent the next few days both moving my things in and helping me get settled as well as making sure that Patrick and Chris got the Boston Experience. The very night we reached Boston, we had tickets to see the Red Sox play the Yankees at Fenway Park. While I don't follow baseball, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The sheer energy of the thousands of fans seated at Fenway was enough to get even the most reluctant person into the sport. Mind you, I still don't understand baseball, but I would not mind signing up to sing some "Sweet Caroline" and watch angry, drunk fans yell at fans of the opposing team.

We also walked parts of the Freedom Trail, an historic walking tour of Boston. We visited Faneuil Hall Marketplace, the North End and its vivacious Italian residents, Harvard and its more composed residents and took time familiarizing ourselves with the T: Boston's public transit system.

After a teary goodbye to Patrick and Chris on Sunday, I was ready for classes to begin. Classes began on Tuesday, September 6 and I have had a whirlwind of a time all ready. I have an assistantship with the Career Services office at the College of Communication, and so on the first day, I was there all day before my first class at 6 that night. My first class, Broadcast Science Journalism, is a documentary making class. While that may sound cool, it is also very intimidating. The professor, Gino del Guercio, is a prominent director who has worked (and still does work) with PBS Nova, among other things. As if that isn't intimidating enough, I have no experience with anything video-related, whether it be iMovie or FinalCut Pro. And I'll need to use both for this class. Our first assignment, however, is just taking pictures of things around Boston. I spent a good part of my afternoon today doing just that. Depending on how well my work is graded, I may decide to post my pictures on here.

My second class, Science and the Mass Media, meets on Wednesday mornings. It is led by one of the co-directors of the Science Journalism program, Douglas Starr. While this class is also challenging, it is more in line with what I am here to do, which is write about science. Our first assignment, which all ready led me to break down in tears, was to find a published scientific article (one from a scientific journal, not magazine article), interview the primary author of the piece, interview a secondary person who is familiar with the field but not involved with the study, and write a one-page magazine "short" about the study. Apart from the fact that there are millions of articles to choose from, I quickly learned that most of the people involved with these studies do not like to talk and/or are unavailable. Brainy graduate assistants who have managed to publish, however, are much easier to get a hold of and likely much more fun to talk with. The article I decided to work in is based on a study conducted in California about the effect of hormonal contraceptive pills on emotional memory. According to the study, women who used some sort of contraception recalled emotional/stressful/sexual memories differently than did women who did not use contraceptive pills. How different were these recollections from each set of women? I will post my "short" here when I am done with it and then you can read for yourself. In that same vein, another scary part about this assignment: my writing will be projected onto a screen in class and the entire class will read it together, i.e. tear my writing apart. Doug Starr was brutally honest about that last part.

Since this past Monday was Labor Day, I didn't get to attend two of my classes, one of which is a workshop for the graduate magazine for the College of Communication, The Comment. I was accepted to write for the magazine in early August and I interviewed to be its Student Editor (which is another assistantship position) on Thursday. I am happy to report that I got the position, so I will get to direct/work with my staff to get out the 2012 issue of the magazine (and I will make more money!). To check out previous issues of The Comment, go here. However, we are changing the structure of the magazine. The magazine currently reads like a literary journal; however, it is supposed to represent the College of Communication. The restructuring will involve getting pieces in there that represent the various disciplines within COM: journalism, advertising, PR, etc. It should be a really good learning experience, considering I don't have much of a COM background. The other class I usually have on Mondays is in BU's School of Public Health: it's Essentials of Public Health Law, a class I'm very excited about. Since it is partially a law class, I have loads of reading all ready, and unfortunately for me, none of it is exactly stimulating.

The last class I attended this past week was Science News writing with Karen Weintraub. She is amazing. She had no journalism experience when she entered the field, much like my peers and I, and has still managed to come so far. She is chock full of advice about the "real world" and as new journalists, we devoured her every word. She gave us lots of advice about freelancing, working as a communications person for a laboratory, what to present to an editor (since she worked as an editor for The Boston Globe) and so much more. Our first assignment for her class is a relatively simple Q&A piece, in which we interview a classmate and write a 600-word article about it.

I hope you've gotten a sense of how much I have all ready done and how much I am going to be doing for a while. Not only is school work overwhelming, but I have to manage the house, go grocery shopping, pay bills, deal with the cable and Internet people, deal with the property management people...the list is endless. I have made several friends and knowing that we are all in a similar boat helps us all keep sane. In good news, Patrick will be moving up here! He has a job with a new tech company, a company he is very excited about, and so he will be here by the end of the month.

I still don't have wireless at the apartment--just an ethernet cord that my roommate and I take turns plugging in--so it may be a while before my next update. Until then, keep your fingers crossed that I make it through my first round of assignments!

An Anglophile Plus One

I'm adventuring again! Only this time Patrick is going with me (hence the "plus one"). Two years ago, I explored as much of London and the United Kingdom as much as possible; this time, we are out to explore other areas influenced by the British--we're in India this summer! I'm here for a month, and Patrick is here for about 2.5 weeks. We left Nashville on May 22, flew a very turbulent flight to Chicago, got delayed about two hours in Chicago, got engaged on the way to Brussels, missed our connection in Brussels, flew to London, explored London and then finally reached India. Yes, we have had a very eventful trip already. Let me go back to some of the journey's highlights.

First of all, Patrick and I are engaged! Most of you reading this blog are familiar with our story--we have been dating for about 3.5 years, so I expected an engagement sometime soon, but didn't quite realize when. What happened was this: I was having a bad time on the flight because I hadn't gotten to sleep much and although the flight was smooth, I was feeling sick to my stomach. The in-flight entertainment had thus far been a movie and some NBC movies. It then switched to show the flight map and we saw that we were flying over the UK, more accurately, over London. Then Patrick turned to me (he was in the window seat, I was on the aisle), told me that I meant a lot to him, etc., and then he said he had something for me. The moment he said that, I was skeptical and said, "Wait, are you kidding?," and as he reached for his bag, I continued to ask him if he was kidding. I even told him that if this was his idea of a joke, it wasn't very funny (he had faked proposals before, hence my skepticism). But he brought out a Tiffany box, and even then I was skeptical. He said that he would have opened up the box and shown me the ring, but that he knew how much I enjoyed the Tiffany wrapping and wanted me to relish it. So I opened the box--still half-skeptical--and the ring box within the box and there it was! My Tiffany flower collection engagement ring. I was in utter disbelief, and could only say, "Are you serious?" He then asked me THE question, and before I could answer he had put the ring on my finger, at which I said, jokingly, "I guess my answer is yes, then." We didn't make a big deal on the flight, no one else really saw, and that's how I liked it. It was surreal from that point on: I couldn't stop looking at my finger, and neither could I believe that I was engaged. My very pretty ring:

Given that we were 2 hours late in taking off from Chicago, we didn't make our connection from Brussels to Mumbai. Instead, we were re-routed to London! We had a 9 hour layover, and so we deliberated over whether to ask an immigration officer to issue me a visa (Patrick carries an American passport and can travel to many places without a visa), and much to our excitement, he did! And so we spent close to 5 hours touring London! If only we had known that we would actually get to go to London, Patrick could have probably waited to propose then! Regardless, it was a welcome detour and a great way to celebrate our engagement. We rode the tube from Heathrow to King's Cross Station, where Patrick took a picture with the Harry Potter Trolley on Platform 9 and 3/4 (except, it's not between platforms 9 and 10, but rather outside the station). We then headed to Tower Hill to get a quick look at the Tower of London--we're both big fans of the TV show The Tudors, in which several people are sent to the Tower to be hanged, and seeing the Tower offered us a way to bring the show to life. Right behind the Tower is the Tower Bridge, and so we enjoyed lunch by the river bank with a view of Tower Bridge and The Egg, London's Municipal Office building. We then went to Westminster, to see the Houses of Parliament, the Big Ben Clock Tower, the London Eye, and Westminster Abbey. We went back underground to take a train to St. James' Park and walked to Buckingham Palace--although we didn't realize it, Barack and Michelle Obama were in the Palace at that time! We took the tube back to Heathrow and finally made our plane to India.

Although I am behind in keeping you all up-to-date, I am going to have to stop at this point to get ready for today's activities. I figured, getting all the pre-India details done would be a good stopping point. I will try and update as and when possible. For now, enjoy our pictures from London:

Patrick at Platform 9 and 3/4.

The two of us with Tower Bridge behind us and the Thames on the side.

Patrick by the Houses of Parliament.

So Long, Farewell

Today was my last day in London. I have truly grown accustomed to this place, and feel more like a resident now than a tourist. For one thing, I don't find the need to bring out my camera whenever I see something new (I'm going to attribute that to being less-touristy than tired). And for another, the thought of leaving London is making me sick. Seriously. I started to fall sick this morning, and now I have a sore throat.
I left all by my lonesome to the borough of Hammersmith this morning, to see a clothing store I had passed by earlier last week. Everything in that store was £5, and they had incredibly cute things. So I waited for nearly 45 minutes at the mall, before the shop (called Lime Soda) opened, and I got some really cute dresses for super cheap. After that, I had just enough time to commute from Hammersmith to Liverpool Street to meet up with friends to go to Petticoat Lane, a huge Sunday market with all sorts of clothes and accesories for dirt cheap prices. We spent about an hour there and then walked to the Tower of London. We decided to get lunch at a Dim Sum place on St. Catherine's Docks before we went to the Tower, and so that was a lot of fun.
The Tower of London was fantastic. Unfortunately, we couldn't dedicate as much time as we should have owing to the fact that we still had things to get done in the day, mainly packing. We got an excellent tour from one of the Yeomen at the Tower, looked at an exhibity of Henry VIII's armor, the Crown Jewels and some torture devices that were used at the Tower. We then hurried to Oxford Circus to finish some last minute shopping and then went to Westminster to see Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament one last time. We took buses to a lot of these places and so went via a lot of the big parts of town, in effect seeing them for the last time and thus being able to say goodbye. Every so often I had to choke back tears at the sight of something simple like a red post box or a sign that read City of London or Westminster, as the case may have been. Finally, around 9pm we got back to Hampstead, having taken our last tube ride from Great Portland Street to Finchley Road, got pizza for dinner, and then sat down to pack our belongings. I am definitely worried about the weight, and am concerned for my back considering I'm stuffing all superfluous things in my backpack.
I'm now going to go spend the rest of the night watching a movie and talking with my friends, trying not to be too sad about going home to Murray. London has been....more than words could ever describe, and if there's anything I know, it's that the city life suits me a lot. I still have a lot of unfinished business here, so I have to come back at some point and take care of all those things (Poets Corner, for example, was left univisited). I love public transportation way too much to ever worry about getting a car, and I wish America ran on trains.
This, then, will be my last blog from London. I may post some pictures from today after I get back to Murray. I hope I have done a good enough job giving descriptions of my ever so busy days, and slight insights into the life here. I didn't, for many reasons, include every single observation I made, but I'm sure a conversation or two with me, will rectify that.
I'm glad to have had this opportunity in London. Now that this place has been seen sufficiently, I only have all the other places in the world to visit.

Oxford and Cambridge

Today was...very tiring. I didn't get to sleep until 3.30 last night, and after that I was woken up by drunk, belligerent people outside my window at 4.30 in the morning yelling at each other. I had to wake up by 7.30, hurriedly get dressed and go down to breakfast to meet the others. We managed to leave on time, but it took me the entire ride to Cambridge to finally gain some consciousness. The weather, thankfully, was very good and I was able to enjot being outdoors. Cambridge was a fantastic college town. It reminded me incredibly of Boston, minus the paved roads and skyscrapers. Cobblestone streets everywhere, ancient yet beautiful architecture for each one of the colleges of the university and tourists were what met our eyes. We took a sightseeing bus tour that gave us a brief history of the place, including information on the University system at Cambridge. It sounded very serious (all students get a private tutor), but very exciting. It was at Cambridge that Watson and Crick found DNA, and Rutherford opened up the nucleus of an atom to discover its contents. We didn't have very much time planned for Cambridge, because Oxford was going to be the focus of the two places. We got t-shirts, walked by the River Cam and ate Indian food for lunch, after which we left Cambridge to get to Oxford. Unfortunately, it was 2.45 by the time we left Cambridge, and for some reason there is no train that runs between Cambridge and Oxford. So we had to come back to London King's Cross, take the underground to London Paddington and then go to Oxford.
We didn't get to Oxford until almost 5 and proceeded to walk fast to the city centre to try and make it to as many attractions as possible. I really wanted to get an Oxford sweatshirt, which I did get, so that was one thing off the list. I wanted to go to Blackwell's Bookstore, which is 3 stories of amazing books for really cheap prices. I had been saving diligently so I could splurge here. Unfortunately for me, the bookstore was closed when we got there. That kind of put me in a bad mood for the rest of the trip. We didn't get a proper tour, but one of our group had been to Oxford before and gave us a brief introduction to the buildings that we saw. It was very similar to Cambridge, except there didn't seem to be much else to Oxford than the university itself. There were two main streets, but perhaps because of the lateness of the hour, we couldn't witness much of town life. We walked to Christ Church, which was used for filming the Great Hall in the Harry Potter films. Again, it was closed to tourists, and we could only see the exterior of the building. I was thoroughly disappointed. Oxford had been something I was looking forward to incredibly, and we only had about 2 hours there, and we couldn't do anything to improve the experience. So we boarded the 7pm train back to London Paddington, at which point I promptly fell asleep. We got back around 8pm, got back to Hampstead and ate at a local joint- Wetherspoons. By local, I mean very London. It's a chain all over London, but it has really good, really cheap food and drinks. All of us were incredibly tired at this point and finished our dinners only to come back to campus to relex for the night.
As of this minute, I have less than 36 hours left in London. There is still a lot I want to see, in spite of the fact that plans are in place to see and do a lot of things tomorrow. I am very sad to be leaving, but the fact that I have unfinished business here only warrants my coming back to London some other time. For now, I'm going to do some packing so I can relax with my friends tomorrow and enjoy our last day in London.

Cambridge University-Department of Engineering.

St. John's College, Cambridge.

The River Cam.

This is where the students at Oxford used to take their examinations. It is now used for graduation ceremonies.

Christ Church, Oxford. Where The Great Hall at Hogwarts comes to life.

The oldest building in Oxford. It is from the Saxons' time.

We Apologize for the Delay

Once again, these last couple of days here are going to be very hectic and there is a good chance my blog won't be updated as frequently as it has been in the past. Yesterday was a series of adventures-both good and bad. It marked the day of the last field trip with the theatre class. We toured the National Theatre. The tour was excellent. In the hour and fifteen minutes that we toured every aspect of the theatre, I felt like I had learned more than I had in the four weeks of being in class. We went backstage and learned about fly towers (used for storage of sets and for dropping scenery, etc.), we saw the props table and learned how most of the props used were made from scratch using a plethora of materials. We ran into a set desginer who was working on an upcoming production and got to see his process of turning a vision into reality. It was very interesting.
After the field trip, I rushed back to campus to work on my final paper for the Jane Austen class. I stopped to pick up lunch at a Subway (because it's cheap) and had the best sandwich yet: Chicken Tikka on Italian Herbs and Cheese bread, with tomato and cucumber and hot chilli sauce. Amazing. I worked on my paper for about an hour, after which I left to meet friends at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms. The BBC Proms are a series of live concerts from July until September that are performed primarily in the Royal Albert Hall, but are also transmitted via the BBC radio stations. After what seemed like a futile search for my friends, I decided to give up and started walking towards the tube station when I caught up with them, and we finally made it through into the Royal Albert Hall. Words cannot describe the majesty of the Hall. Unfortunately, I did not take my camera with me, but it is a magnificent dome decorated in red and gold, with amazing acoustic quality and a seating capability of thousands. We were seated in the circle with an excellent view of everyone below us, including the orchestra. The program for the night was performed by the BBC Philharmonic, with special performances by mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux. I don't have the program handy, else I would give details on the pieces that were performed. Suffice it to say that the performance was beyond anything I have ever heard. What was more amazing to me, if possible, than the performance itself was the audience's depth of knowledge. They knew not to clap between movements of symphonies, and would indicate this by coughing and clearing their throats. It was quite amusing, actually, to listen for their unanimous responses in coughs after a particular movement.
The ride back from the concert was my only bad experience with public transportation yet. It has been raining ever since 7pm that night, and apart from the tube stations being humid, the trains were very slow. Before our last stop, there was a signal failure at our station, Finchley Road, and so the train stopped and started and moved slowly, making a 5 minute journey last for over 30 minutes. It was quite irksome.
The next day, today, was the finals day. I only had to turn in my final paper for the Jane Austen class and talk about my whole theatre experience in London for the theatre class. I got off pretty easily because there were others who had study sessions last night and were genuinely worried for themselves. While I waited for friends to finish their final exams, I did laundry for the last time here. By the time all that was done, it was time to leave campus to go out for the night. One of my friends' birthday is on Tuesday, and she wanted to celebrate it here with some of us. She wanted to go to Harrods, get desserts (because they have exemplary ones) and go to a park and eat them. We met up outside Harrods at 5, and went into the store. It was my first time in there and I was in complete awe at everything. It was very, very upmarket, yet there were commonfolk like me walking around the entire place. The chocolate-patisserie area where we purchased our desserts was a fantasy land unto itself. Displays upon displays of decadent, flavorful chocolate candy were all around me, and I managed to escape their lures by finding the dessert display. It was a sight to behold. Familiar desserts like strawberry cheesecake and tiramisu were present, but so were desserts like knickerbocker glory and berry pavlova.

Ultimately, I settled for tiramisu that was packed in a very cute Harrods box. I also decided, with general consent, that we needed to surprise the birthday girl with a cake from Harrods and so we created distractions while the cake was being purchased, etc. We went to Green Park to eat the desserts and it was very peaceful to indulge ourselves in the richness of it all. Here are all of us in the party minus Mia, who took this picture.

Everyone can see me. Starting to the left, with the girl in the pink dress- that's Catherine (we call her Cat), then Miranda, then Savannah (the birthday girl), then Rebecca and finally Ben. It's very family portraitesque, and I love this picture. We decided to wait on the cake until after dinner (Savannah still had no idea). We went to Piccadilly Circus to this place called Adam's Rib, where we all finally managed to get some Mexican food. It was not comparable to Mexican food back in the States, but it was still really good. I went up to ask the waitress for some plates for the cake that was about to be presented, and she said she could light a candle on it and bring it out to surprise her. And that's exactly what we did. We totally embarrassed her by singing aloud, but it was great.

All of us at Adam's Rib.

Savannah blowing the candle on the very pretty cake.
After dinner, we decided to watch a movie (Adam) but couldn't find anywhere close enough that played it. So we returned to Hampstead, after quite a bit of an adventure. We were so busy talking on the tube from the Leicester Square station that we didn't realize until it was too late when we arrived at our changing station, Green Park. Mia and I realized it and sprang out of our seats and out of the train, but the others were too slow. Miranda had had a similar experience earlier in the day where she was left behind owing to overcrowded trains, so her face looked incredibly amazed at a repetition of such an event. She looked somewhat amused and somewhat angry when the doors shut in front of her, but Mia and I could not help but laugh at the situation. We waited until the others went down to the next station and got back on the next train back up to Green Park.
When we got to Hampstead, we were somewhat tired but still in the mood to watch a movie. So Miranda, Mia and I went to our local mall, the O2 centre and got tickets for the late showing of The Ugly Truth, a romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. It was not quite as romantic as we were hoping, but it was comedic. It was very explicit, but I was glad for the entertainment. A long wait at the bus stop later, we finally got back to campus, after which I got here to catch all of you up on my latest adventures.
Tomorrow we go to Oxford and Cambridge, which will be phenomenal. Barring excessive sleepiness tomorrow, there should be an update on that trip.

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.

Ordinary Day

Today was our last field trip for the Jane Austen class. Unfortunately, it was not memorable. We took two trains and a bus to get to the Brentford area of London to visit Syon Park. The tour guide himself told us that it had little to nothing to do with Jane Austen and he mentioned her for 30 seconds in all the 3.5 hours that we were there. It was disappointing. The Park was home to a magnificent mansion, extensive gardens with a conservatory and a big garden shop. The tour guide was very thorough in his information about the history and architecture of the house; it just had nothing to do with Jane Austen. We listened attentively to most of his descriptions of all the architectural details, paintings and sculptures within the house before we realized that there was nothing more to look forward to in the tour. The area belongs to the Duke of Northumberland and has been visited by famous monarchs. Its most recent claim to fame, however, is the fact that it was used for filming a significant portion of Gosford Park. There really isn't much I can say about the place...no photography was allowed inside so I cannot point to things and describe them further. Here are pictures of the exterior, however.


The Conservatory in the grounds.

This is Syon House.
After we were done with the tour, we boarded the trains back to the city, but a trio of us stopped at Westfield mall, which is the biggest mall in all of Europe. We ate lunch at a Japanese restaraunt, which was excellent and incredibly spicy, and then proceeded to explore the mall. I cannot even begin to describe the size and grandeur of the mall. We entered from the "wrong" end of the place and the shops that we saw were Louis Vuitton, Prada, Tiffany & Co, De Beers, etc. There were some stores that had good sales, but the UK sizes still confuse me and I didn't quite want to spend time trying on outfits that I knew I couldn't buy, so I just window shopped. The mall was pretty packed, even for a Tuesday, and I left feeling jealous of all the people that earned in pounds and could afford all that the mall had to offer.

We got back in time for dinner, but it was practically inedible, so I had to rely on snacks and water to fill me up. Then a friend and I decided to go watch Coco Avant Chanel (Coco before Chanel), a French movie starring Audrey Tautou (of Amelie and Da Vinci Code fame). I don't know why but it never occurred to me, even during the movie, that the movie was about Coco Chanel, the designer. I recognized the Chanel part, and I did know that she was Coco Chanel, but I never pieced it together until the credits when we were given a glimpse into her future. The movie was phenomenal. For being the story of a designer, it wasn't particularly girly or glamorous at all. It completely touched me and I am very inclined to go out and buy the first Chanel item that I can find. I was especially glad to see it because it would never come to Murray, at least not for a while. The movie was in French, with subtitles, and was very beautifully done. Needless to say, that was the best part of my day.
Tomorrow is the last day of class. People are starting to panic about the imminent departure on Monday and hardly anyone is ready to go home. We are having somewhat of a departure meeting tomorrow with the entire group, with no idea of what it is going to entail. I am, of course, going to make the best of every minute I have left here. I all ready have plans for the rest of the week, all of which will be unraveled in time.