It's Some Sort of Delicious Biscuit

[late]BES Assignment 5: East End Walk

    Obviously none of us read the paper correctly because we must have gotten off at the wrong station and had to do pretty much the whole walk in reverse order. Also we chose the one day the art gallery was closed to go on the walk. We went towards the beginning of our stay here and I don’t think we knew how get around well enough yet or what we were supposed to be doing on the walk really.
    There was a candy stall in the station, of course I had to get some flying saucers, so I was set for the whole walk. I wasn’t going to die of cream puff deficiency.
    The market was cool, at least what was open was pretty nice. The market didn’t have much in it, I expect it was closed too or the weather wasn’t good enough for it, but it wasn’t raining, just gloomy.
    There was more graffiti around there than around Westminster. It definitely wasn’t as nice looking in the East End, but I guess it’s not as touristy a place. It just looked like a place where people live.
    We went to the Bell Foundry and was pretty cool. They had a giant bell mold or something over the door and it was huge! The Place was lit light a museum so you couldn’t see just how big it was in any photos. In their shop they had some chimes out that you could play. But the only the sheet music out was for ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ and the chime lineup was missing the C chime, which was literally every other note in the song. And none of the few hand bells out were C either. We didn’t see where they actually make the bells (I don’t know where they would have had room for the foundry anyways, unless there isn’t much need for bells anywhere anymore.)
    The church looked just like every other church we’ve seen (here and in the US), donation box/sign right there as you walk in and thank goodness lots of chairs. A weird thing is that  it had a coffee stall right out side the doors (on what is probably church property). There’s another church on the way to class with the same thing. At my church you only get coffee on Sunday mornings and you have to have come from mass, and it’s not good coffee.
    There were lots of Indian people, restaurants, and shops. The shop and street signs were in English and Hindi (I think) it was like an other country or something. It was like when we went through Wales, it was cool they had their street signs in Welsh and English, same thing in Ireland.
    We saw the old redone house but we didn’t go in, it just looked like an old house amongst shabbier looking old houses. We saw the brewery too but didn’t go in there either. We did see some guy filming a girl repeatedly walk down the street for no apparent reason and they didn’t mind us giving them weird looks (while probably in shot too).
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[late]BES Assignment 9: Reflection

    I don’t think I’ve really changed at all. I didn’t even lose any weight! If I have changed I don’t realise it, and I probably won’t until I get home and notice I’m doing something different or someone points out to me I’ve changed. If I have changed I think my normality will all spring back in place when I get back home. Like hanging out with people all the time, I cannot wait to get back to my own bedroom and house, where everything is where it should be and is clean. I can get everything myself and when I want it. I can leave doors unlocked. I won’t have to walk around being bag paranoid all the time. I can eat again, have real fizzy pop, and root beer! And my car, I can drive! But I will definitely miss the tube and buses that come every few minutes, unlike the buses in Boise (and we don’t even have trains or subways).
    I learned how to travel cheaply and at odd hours. How to sleep in weird chairs and how to pack even more lightly than I did coming here. I learned I can find something I will eat anywhere (well everywhere I’ve gone so far, I might not make it in real Africa).
    I  learned how to deal with an almost real job. Not sure if I would have made it if I had to do that more than 2 days a week though. I think that’s what I like about school, knowing the end day, when it s and for how long. I never want to leave school, but I want it to be over at the same time.
    I leaned to walk (really really) fast. I walked fast in Boise, but here it wasn’t even half Londoner speed. I hate when I don’t know where I’m going here, because I know I’m messing up the flow of everything and I feel like tourist again.
    I’m not sure what I will want to tell people about first, there wasn’t any one big thing really, except coming here, and that’s 4 month of stuff to get through. Probably the trips we took while here are the most important things. Our first ferriy ride to France going all wrong, staying at hostels, waiting in the airport for over 12 hours, losing Hope in Rome…. looking back I didn’t really do anything in London because it was like home base and you never do anything at home only go places from there.
    It was fairly easy getting used to it here, but knowing it was only for 4 months was great. Living here forever would be really hard I think.
    Hopefully having studied abroad will help me get a job and be more independent, even when I get home.
    Taking the bus is always an experience. Being in a bus or car, or even watching others drive is just scary. I have never seen cars so close before or seen so many near misses. That actually surprises me that I haven’t seen any car wrecks here, drivers in Idaho are way more careful than London drivers and I’ve seen plenty of wrecks at home.
    I thought radio was a big thing here, but now I don’t know how when not many people have cars. And even at work Radio 1 is like the only station they won’t play for some reason. I really thought the only radio station here were BBC’s stations. They have so many American TV shows and movies on here. And so many antique-ing shows. Also Iron Man has been shown about 9 times since we got here why is that?
    Best piece of advice ever: Get all the tourist stuff you want to do done in the beginning of the trip, because if you wait too long you will start to hate all other tourists in about a month and won’t want to go anywhere near a large group of them.
    Take the bus if you have time, and sit on top. It’s a great way to see what’s around you and and a bus ride is always an adventure. A must do is go to Asda and go see a show or play. Make British friends besides some at your internship, I wish I did. Watch the news and read the newspapers, keep up on American news as well. And know your politics before you leave. And do the things you want to do even if you have to do them alone.

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[late]BES Assignment 3: Interview

    I interviewed Jess, who I work with at the Golden Hinde. Interviewing her at lunch in a the full office might not have been the best choice because after the first few questions i could tell she was getting a little nervous. And having others there kind of invited their opinions, mostly our friend Jerry’s.
    Jess lives just outside London with her grandpa. Her dad is from South Africa and her mother from New Zealand, and they are now separated. Jess thinks marriage is a nice institution but you have to have what it takes to work at it and make it work. She thinks having children outside of marriage isn’t a problem, but it would provide more stability. She feels no pressure to have to get married and would be a nice option. The biggest issues facing young people, she thought, was not having a good enough education. Kids can leave school at 16 and not even know how to read or do basic math. And how life changes so rapidly and society can’t keep up, so some people get missed and left behind. But also she thinks there’s lots of kids being pressured to succeed by very driven, pushy parents and that’s not good either.
    Religion isn’t really a big part of he life, but she did go to a Catholic school when she was younger. She said that the Church of England is downplayed to be accepting of other religious or trying not to be offensive.
    Jess said she “likes” the US (I feel like I ruined this because there is always a conversation about how fat the US is and how they make the rest of the word fat or how we all just pop pills all day and I always end up defending the US and I think she was a little scared to speak up about possibly not liking the US very much). She would like to visit but maybe not really live there. She said sometime we act like we are the world police and get in other country’s ways. But she likes our sweets she said she finally tried a Reeses and loved it.
    She said she’s glad she’s not a student anymore (she’s already graduated and got a masters!) because the tuition is going up and up, that is a huge issue. Her dream after university was to work at the British Museum. She likes the Golden Hinde but it’s not what she wants to do as a real job, even if she was getting paid.
    Her hobbies are spending time with her friends, she likes to go out for drinks but not dancing, just sitting and talking is good. She said she doesn’t do sports and hasn’t since she was really young. And obviously she does volunteering at the Golden Hinde.

BES Assignment 6: Greenwich

    The river boat to Greenwich was pretty fun, not too much like a ferry, ferries make me feel weird. It was freezing cold outside on the boat but warm inside. Seeing all the buildings along the river and the Golden Hinde was cool.
    It was quite a walk up to the Royal Observatory. It was steepest and longest hill ever. I don’t know how some of the slow old people made it up there to shuffle around the museum.
    I really liked the Royal Observatory. I like machines and things with gears you can see whirring away. It was like the clock room in (I think) the V&A, it was full of clocks ticking and it was really loud. You could see all sort of different kinds of clocks and see inside most of them, and they had an atomic clock.
    We went further up the hill but we couldn’t find the planetarium and I really really wanted to go there. I love the sky and stars! Even fake ones. The planetarium in Boise is small and always the same, I was really looking forward to going to a (I assumed it was) bigger one.
    The Queen’s House was as expected, just another museum and really boring. But I did find a picture of Sir Francis Drake and what I think could possibly be the Golden Hinde in another painting. But at that time I didn’t know The Golden Hinde was known as The Pelican first, so It might have been it)
    The National Maritime Museum was pretty cool. Some of their exhibits were touchable, kind of like the Science museum. They had compass cards or something you could stamp at a few of the stories, but I don’t know where to get them. And the interactive “touch screen” things were cool too but they didn’t work half the time. I didn’t see anything about the Golden Hinde there, and I would have expected there to at least be a little mention that actually you can see a replica of it just down the river. Nothing.
    I also wanted to go on to the Cutty Sark but it wasn’t open yet.
    There was lots of cool stuff in the market. I got a jingly bracelet there which gave me the idea to buy a bracelet in every country I visited on spring break (mostly because my plan to eat McDonalds and cotton candy in each country i visit on this entire four month trip, was ruined  the first one on spring break). The market was full of  some cool antiques and craft stuff but they were kind of expensive. Even their candy store was really expensive too. So the bracelet was the only thing I bought there.
    I rode the DLR for the first time on the way back to London. It was nicer than the other Tube lines and Anna said it was an automatic train with no driver. She has to take it everyday to her internship.

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BES Assignment 4: Join an Organisation

    In the beginning I wanted to join a lacrosse team but then I thought about all the equipment it takes (thank goodness not as much as men’s lacrosse does though that’s way way too much!) and having to buy a second pair of stuff here that I already have at home just to play for a few months and leave it here was just a ridiculous idea and expensive. And I guess lacrosse isn’t as big a thing here as I thought it was, because it was really hard to find a women’s team near here.
    The one kind of club I didn’t want to join was a dancing club, because I can’t move dancily. the only dance I can do is on Wii Just Dance or on DDR and they can’t really be called dancing. I can’t move my arms and legs at the same time I guess. But Anna, Hope, Lindsey, and Shelby over ruled me and decided on a dancing class.
    At our class we wold learn a different dance each time. We learned the Cha Cha, Rock N Roll, Samba, Mamba, and Country dances. But the Cha Cha, Samba, and Mamba were all kind of the same. And Rock N Roll and Country dancing were a little random and not what you would think they would be (at least not how they would be in the US). In the country class I was expecting to hear real country music, but really they only had 2 “country” songs, one was a Rednex song and the other a country song in Italian (our instructor was Italian). And Rock N Roll was only learning a dance to “Greased Lightening”, I was actually pretty good at that one I think.
    Our instructor was Italian so he would throw in some Italian phrases all the time, I had no idea what he was saying.
    We would spend the hour learning each step little by little and putting the dance together as went along. And after a lot of stepping on toes and running into people we would try and do it all together one last time. Usually it was to a really fast but fun song and I some times had it sort of down by then. Everyone else had it down pat  like half an hour ago, they picked up all the dances easily.
    At the end of the hour there was a free dance time where new instructors took over, but they didn’t care if you didn’t know the steps or not they would just go super fast adding complicated moves every which way and I couldn’t catch on to any of them, but the others did.
    We met an old lady there named Carol (not Carol I work with), who’s husband hates dancing and will never go with her. She love hearing about how we are enjoying our time studying abroad and she travels too. We told her she should be a HOST parent she thought it was a great idea.

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BES Assignment 8: Hampstead

    Today Anna, Lindsey, and I went to Hampstead. After finally getting on the right track and map orientation we set off to the church. There weren’t many people out when we first got there, whether it was due to it being church time or too early, I don’t know. We visited the church’s cemetery and wandered around for a while. There was a plaque that had a list of the famous people buried there, but I didn’t know any of them, Anna and Lindsey did though. Compared to the church, the cemetery was huge the path wound around and around and I know we still missed half the graves because we missed a turn somewhere. I can’t think of any churches in Boise that have a cemetery attached to them, lots have schools though.
    Then it was time to go to “Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe”!! And after walking down the street for quite a while and still no sign of the sweet shop we asked a shopkeeper where it was. Only to find out the worst had happened and it’s been closed down!!
    So without a candy refreshment we then tried to find Parliament Hill. Basically you had to follow all the super excited dogs. Even though it was sort of cold the dogs were all too happy to jump in and out of the lakes. I saw a variety of dog sizes there. In London it’s like only the big dogs get to be taken to the parks, but in Hampstead there were a few giant Newfoundlands and then we even saw the tiniest miniature Dachshund puppy ever, who could probably have fit in a hot dog bun! Also most of the dogs weren’t on leashes, they were all so well behaved and would, for the most part, leave other dogs alone and just follow their owner. My wiener dog could never do that!
    At the top of the hill lots of people had kites up there, I mean really big and really nice kites. There were also tons of children. Everywhere in Hampstead was full of children and strollers, taking up the entire sidewalk and zipping by on their scooters and pedal-less bikes. There weren’t many old people, mostly just people with children that looked no older than 15.
    After the hill we went to a pub for a Sunday roast. The pub had a small crepe stall outside and the line from the stall almost completely blocked the pub entrance! And that made me think that actually I had heard quite a few people speaking French there. Or they could be really good crepes because they smelled amazing!
    The pub was sort of fancy. I thought more people would be there for the roast but I guess they get this every Sunday. I just got some chips and a pint of Diet Coke. The server asked if by chips I meant fries, I wonder if they really get confused Americans that often when they think they’ve asked for crisps chips.

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