Whew, what a weekend! It’s right late and I’ve got to get up early for work so I’m keeping this short(-ish).
Saturday, I headed out early to get to the Tate Modern as it was opening. I allowed myself about 40 min for the journey, way more than was necessary. What I didn’t count on was being stunned speechless by the amazing Millennium Bridge which crosses from St. Pauls on the one side of the Thames to the Tate Modern on the other. It was absolutely gorgeous and I was about halfway across (a process which had already taken me a good ten minute as I was oogling the view) when I realized that sitting right next to the Tate on the opposite side of the river was the Globe Theatre (of Shakespearian fame) and I nearly fell in I was so exited! I had forgotten it was in the area and suddenly there it was in all of its Elizabethan glory.
I spent a lovely morning at the Tate Modern, which had some absolutely stunning Picassos, Matisses, Kalinskys and Pollacks to name just a few. I was there quite a bit longer than I had planned because there was so much to see, and I didn’t even go into the paid exhibits as there were over two floors of free show rooms.
After I had exhausted the Tate, I wandered over to the Globe and was so excited to be there that, on a whim, I bought tickets for a Sunday night performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play of which I knew the basic plot but not the details (it’s one of the relatively few plays I haven’t read by Shakespeare!). I got some poor touring couple to take my picture in front of the iconic building and wandered off towards the Tower of London (where the lines were too long and prices too steep for me to even consider going in) and caught a train up to Camden Town, already excited for my Globe experience the next night.
Camden Market is a huge sprawling outdoor market of stalls that sell everything you could possibly imagine, from clothes to shoes to food to accessories to musical instruments to fob watches (Beth, if you’re reading this, I was *so* close to getting a fob watch, but it had some naff picture of Big Ben on one side!) to toys… it was unbelievable, and I only saw a small part of the market. I bought a pair of trainers which I desperately needed and a backpack, then made my way back home to watch my Saturday night fill of Doctor Who (which didn’t remotely fill. In fact it was a total cliffhanger ending as it was the penultimate episode of the season).
Sunday was an incredibly lazy day - I cleaned house, relaxed, did some writing, and took it easy before heading off in the evening to see my play at the Globe. It was FANTASTIC! I can’t even describe what fun it was. I was there with some of the most brilliant audience members who really knew their Shakespeare, and the actors were wonderful! I was roaring with laughter the entire time, as was the rest of the crowd. The way it works is there are seats (expensive) or you can stand in the ground level, in front of the stage, where you would have stood in the Elizabethan era if you were fairly poor but wanted to see a play (hey! like me!). I was right in the middle of the action as the stage literally wrapped around where I was standing. It was so much fun, and I was grinning all the way home.
Tomorrow starts another busy work week, but hopefully I’ll have time for a few social things! Hope everyone stateside is doing well!
Whew! End of my first full week of work. It’s a good thing I love this company. My day looks something like this:
7:00am - Get out of bed, get dressed, check email, make/eat breakfast, get everything ready for work
7:45am - Leave the flat to head for a train station (the one around the corner where the trains only come every 20-30 min if I’m feeling really lazy or, more often, the one 10 min walk away where trains come every 2-3 minutes)
8:40am - Get off the train and walk a few blocks through the absolutely gorgeous bank district to catch the bus
9:00am - Hit the office, usually just in time for someone to offer me a cuppa tea - and I’m usually already ready for one!
10:00am - Someone else makes tea for everyone
11:00am - Someone else makes tea for everyone
12:00pm - Someone else makes tea for everyone (we make and drink a LOT of tea in this office)
1:00pm - Lunch time! Walk along the little canal outside to the grocery store for lunch. They have premade sandwiches and pasta salads (although no premade regular salads sadly), but I’ve been alternating those options with a French roll, goats cheese and an apple (both the tastier and generally less expensive of the two options but decidedly less healthy).
1:45pm - Back to work and… could it be time for more tea?
3:00pm - More tea and the editorial staff starts playing music on random. And when I say random, I mean random. Because we list every single event in London, we have CDs and music from every kind of band in London. I’ve heard the range: ‘C is for Cookie’ the disco version; some epic Hungarian power rock, Finnish ballads, popular hits and classic oldies.
4:30pm - Sure… just one more cup (also about this time the headphones go on. As much as I love Hungarian rock…)
6:00pm - End of the day for editorial staff. Aww, no more tea.
6:00-7:00pm - End of day for me, depending on meetings/work/site issues
7:00-8:30pm - Get home/get groceries/make and eat dinner
10:00pm - Shower and get ready for bed
10:30pm - Flatmate comes home. Hi Ann! (If I’m not already in bed!)
11:00pm - Sleep
So… as you can see, I keep busy. The killer part is the commute. I guess it’s pretty standard that it takes this long to get around. Next week I’m going to experiment with another station that might be a lot quicker. It’s a bit more of a walk, but it should cut my tube time in half at least so it might be worth it. We have a station really nearby that’s under construction and will be open again in October. Once that one’s open, I’m pretty sure I can get the commute to 40min max instead of the current 75min (the different tube lines are very different in their reliability and speed!).
This weekend I’m going to spend Saturday in London, doing more of the touristy stuff (Tate Modern, Harrods and Camden Market is the plan) and Sunday I’m going to try to get to Cambridge or Canterbury. Should be a great weekend!
Whew… so I’ve dropped the journal ball, haven’t I? Let’s see if I can get a bit caught up.
This last weekend was fantastic. I was thinking about going out to Bath but I decided that after such a crazy three weeks, it would probably be a good idea to relax at home, get familiar with the neighborhood and do some things around London. In the end it was a great choice because the plan to go to Bath and the nearby Stonehenge would have been instantly scrapped once I realized that it was Summer Solstace weekend and about ten million hippies and wiccans were going to be doing scary pagan things at Stonehenge.
Instead, on Saturday, I went to the National Portrait Gallery and saw Phantom of the Opera. Oh wow. Alright, so first off, the National Portrait Gallery was stunning in itself. It’s a fabulous building and has, as one might expect, absurd numbers of portraits from every historic style and era all the way up through modern day (there were paintings of Middle Age saints and the pop celebrity who was in yesterday’s gossip rag). But by far the most impressive to me was the only surviving portrait of the Brontes. I’m a bit of a Bronte fanatic (Charlotte Bronte write Jane Eyre, among other novels; Emily wrote Wuthering Heights and Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey) and it was so overwhelming to see this portrait. Their brother, Branwell, painted it and it’s very basic but it was found, years after they all had died, in the closet of the second wife of Charlotte’s husband. It’s still got the creases from where it was folded up for all that time.
Then I went to the theater where I had gotten last minute tickets for Phantom, which I hadn’t seen since I was 7. I got the cheapest tickets, and I was seriously in the nosebleed section - I mean, I was a football field’s length away from the stage at least and about 30 metres above it. I was a little nervous about how it would be but as soon as the play started I forgot how far away I was… that is one of the most stunning musicals of all time in my opinion. It’s sexy and gorgeous and funny and sad and I absolutely loved it. Because I hadn’t seen it since I was young, I had forgotten, or never properly understood, a lot of it and I really enjoyed seeing it again.
On Sunday, I took a very slow day to relax and enjoy being in my flat. My flatmate Ann and I spent a lot of time together just chatting and then she had to go babysit for some family friends and I took a long walk around the neighborhood and good some household supplies I needed. Unfortunately, the day was a bit of a disaster overall. I managed to have my debit card frozen (you know… they were fine when I was withdrawing money from an ATM, or shopping at convenience stores but when I bought a bedspread and a mirror, that’s when they decided something was fishy. I did tell them I was *moving* to England!); destroy 1/3 of my clothing by changing it’s color in the laundry; lose our curtain by leaving the window open during a really high wind; and was forced to throw out a bunch of food that had gone bad. Oh well, it’s a learning experience and I can’t say I was that upset about it because… well, it’s hard to be upset about anything really since I’m enjoying myself so much.
This is my first full week of work. Things have been a bit slow the last few days as I have to wait until the new version of the site is live sometime this week before I can start properly promoting it, but I really like the people and it’s been fun getting to know all of the London events scene. My commute into work is a bit of a trip - I walk about 10 min to the underground station, I take the underground for about half an hour to 40 min, I come out in the downtown financial district of the city where I catch a bus which takes about 15-20 min to get me right to my office. The bit on the bus is gorgeous and at some point I’ll need to take pictures of the route. That reminds me that I still need to put pictures from the last few weeks… eek!
Alright, well, I think I’ve been at least partially redeemed for my lack of updates and hopefully I’ll have a chance to post again before this weekend!
I’m alive! I’m doing well! I’m super super busy with work and getting settled! At some point I’ll post an update that is coherent and informative and doesn’t use so many exclaimation points!
I’ve been bad about updating lately - incredibly busy getting settled in the new flat. I had Monday and Tuesday off from work (I started today) so I did the incredibly touristy bits of London including Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, The Museum of London, The National Gallery and I stood under the London Eye but decided I didn’t want to pay 40 quid to be stuck in a tram with a screaming baby for an hour. I’ll go back later for that one :).
Today was my first day of work. It was actually a half day as things have been so busy with a site relaunch, everyone slept in this morning.
Really, I don’t have too much to say in terms of an update, I’ll have to do a full proper update at the end of the week. To tide you over, I promised a friend that I would do a glossary of some of the better British slang. Here are some of my favorites, or the ones I use quite a bit.
A bit of a lie-in = sleeping in
Absolute pants = complete trash
Fit = hot/sexy
Loo = bathroom
Tube = the subway
Ace = brilliant/fantastic
Naff = uncool
Football = soccer
Rounders = baseball (or something vaguely like, but really only played by females)
Pitch = field
Queue = line (as in, “stand in the queue or your won’t get your ticket!)
Smart = well dressed, put together, looking sharp
Taking the piss = making fun of someone or something (as in “she was taking the piss out of me for being an American but I knew it was all in good fun because that’s how British humor works”)
Spanner = monkey wrench
Uni = college/university
School = elementary school or middle school
Zed = zee (the last letter of the alphabet)
Also, for your further edification, these things have fairly negative connotations in Britain:
community
community service (implied you’ve been in prison!)
I hope you are all now prepared to come visit me here!
Wow. So… so much for avoiding the massive posts. To be fair, I’ve been quite busy so haven’t had time to take things as they come and write them down.
To be honest, most of the last few days hasn’t been particularly interesting - looking at untold numbers of flats in all parts of the city. I guess the one plus side to flat hunting is that you get to see the city in which you are living. Because I don’t think I ever would have ended up in Hackney on my own (and trust me, you wouldn’t either). Tuesday through today was pretty much full-time flat hunting, with a slight break to pick up a job. In London, it’s very common to flatshare. This means you live in a house with other people you don’t know (at first) and it’s really hit or miss what you end up with. There are flats from groups of all students who have group dinners and all live in the sitting room to groups of various aged professionals who live in a place without any sitting room at all and never see each other. And that’s just the good range of options. You can use your imagination. In any case, I’ve seen quite the range.
The best part of the week was when, on Wednesday night, I had dinner at the home of this absolutely wonderful woman named Kim and her husband. Kim is a good friend of my uncle and aunt from when she met my uncle while they were traveling the world themselves (like I’m doing now!). They’ve stayed friends and Kim was kind enough to cook me my first home-cooked meal while in London (and what a relief that was after so long having eatten out!). It was a very fabulous and a bit surreal experience. I say surreal only in that on top of the delicious food and the champagne she was very liberal with (having found out it was my birthday only a few days previous), I had mentioned I was going to the Dierks Bentley concert later that summer and she insisted putting him on the digital radio during dinner. So, I was just the slightest bit tipsy from champagne, in London, with people who knew my family but I had just met, eating a delicious homecooked meal, talking about classic literature, and listening to an American country music star. I have to say, it was fantastic.
The only thing this week that could compare is the fact that tonight, after four solid days of searching, nearly 20 flats and some pretty dodgy experiences, I have finally found a flat. I had been out all day and had come back to Mimi’s place to relax for a bit and have a quick dinner before my last look of the night. I was so disappointed in not having found a good place yet, and exhausted after a week of running about the city, I almost bailed on the last viewing but finally dragged myself out to go see.
The flat is owned by a landlord who lives out of the city but currently inhabited by a 24 year old girl named Ann who works as a radio broadcast producer for the BBC. She runs a Girl Scouts troop, loves Doctor Who and Harry Potter, is very tidy, a bit of a techno-geek, despises smoking, and has been nearly as panicky about finding a flatmate as I have been about finding a flat. I planned to stop in for five minutes then run back to relax and ended up staying for two and a half hours chatting with Ann. I’m moving in tomorrow.
The flat is in a perfect location, in Hammersmith, which is a neighborhood on the west side of the city, north of the river. It’s a really posh neighborhood and almost all residental families but with a really fantastic scattering of shops and pubs and restaurants in the area too. It’s going to be about a 45 min commute to work, but that’s about standard for the city (some places were a lot worse!!) and it’s very reasonably priced given the area. I have my own double room, we share a (huge!) bathroom and there’s a giant sitting area with attached kitchen and eating area. The flat is a bit plain at the moment but we can decorate it as we like.
I’m so so happy and I’m really glad I went with my gut instict and agreed to move in (and to keep looking before!). It just feels like the right move and by this time tomorrow I’ll be in my own place! In the morning, I’m going to do a bit of shopping for proper bed linins and such but other than that, it’s all furnished! Ann is actually out all weekend so I have the flat to myself to get settled and prepare for work next week.
Hopefully over the weekend I’ll have some time to related some of the funnier stories of my flat hunt experience but for now, I’m happy to have someplace safe, comfortable and best of all, friendly to live! I’m getting well-earned night’s rest.
Two weeks and I’m set with a job and a flat. How ace am I?
Alright, still homeless. But… I have a job! I am [unofficially as the paperwork isn't take care of yet but will be soon] employed!
I’ve been chatting for a while now with a guy named Alex Will who is the cofounder of a site called Spoonfed and playing around with the idea of me working with them and today we basically decided on it! They seem like such fun. It’s a small internet startup created by these two LSE students while they were in school. It gives London citizens the chance to view all upcoming events in tons of different genres, and get customized event suggestions based on their interests. So… all of you people who thought I had gotten out of the event planning side of things, I just can’t escape!
I’m going to be doing marketing and PR for them and I’m basically the only person working on that full time (it’s a really small group, and Alex and his cofounder do a lot of it, but they need to deal with the business development side as well and the financial and executive stuff. The rest of the group is mainly editorial staff to write the event articles). Because I’m really working on it myself, I’ve got a ton of freedom to try out tons of different methods and since they’re small, any sort of work could be helpful. It’ll be a fantastic learning experience and I hope I can be a valuable asset to them! It seems like such a fun group.
Alright, it’s really time to find a place to live now.
Super tired after a day of house-hunting. Eh, so so effort - better than before but still nada. Hopefully a more positive update on the housing hunt tomorrow!
This has been a weekend of museums!Oxford seems to be full of them and, best of all, most of them are free or very inexpensive for students (shh, don’t tell, I’m still using my Colby ID card because it doesn’t have my graduation date printed).On Sunday morning, I took a tour of the Oxford Castle, a structure built in the early eleventh century and has been used as a prison since then (it just stopped housing prisoners in 1996 and at that point it was opened to the public for the first time).I took a tour that led us up to the top of the tower which over looked the whole city – clearly at one point in history it was used to keep an eye out for invading armies but yesterday it offered a great vantage of the Oxford business school to which I’ll be applying in a few years.We then went down into the crypt, supposedly the most haunted place in Oxford and got to view the old (and newer) jail cells.After that, I got to go on a special tour (they’re only running it a few months and only on the weekends) of a new area of the castle they’re just beginning to excavate.
After the castle tour, I went over to the Ashmolean museum, another Victorian style museum with a little of everything.It had some of the most eclectic collections I’ve ever seen including a wall of fob watches, a wing full of Egyptian artifacts, a room of porcelain painted plates, and a hall of master painters including Monet, Picasso, and Cézanne.I ended up spending a lot more time there than I expected and it was getting a bit late in the afternoon by the time I left to walk through Christ Church College (the Harry Potter college) but didn’t feel like paying the L5 entrance fee to go inside a few of the buildings so walked around the meadow and down to the water where there were hundreds of students enjoying the nice weather (the weather has been spectacular this weekend).
I was quite tired so after some more Indian food for dinner I had an early night getting ready to check out of my B&B and head back to London the next day.
Today, I started off by going back to the Oxford Museum of Natural History and Pitt-Rivers Museum again because I hadn’t really had time to view them properly when I visited the Friday before.I ended up spending the entire morning there and still felt like I hadn’t see most of what they had to offer.It was great!The Pitt-Rivers museum had an exhibit on body art and appearance and covered all styles of bodily adornment from all over the world.It was really interesting and they had some very unique artifacts.
After that, I had lunch with Mikki and Sophie, the girls who took care of me on my birthday, and we ate in this cute little coffeeshop in Gloucester Green Square.They’ve been so nice to spend so much time with me when they have finals this week!After lunch, I said goodbye to my new friends and headed to the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments which was such a strange little building! I thought it was going to be a proper museum but it was a side room off of the Oxford music buildings and I had to ring a bell to be let in.It was a fantastic collection, though, and there were some really beautiful old instruments.
Now, I’m back on the Oxford Tube, heading into London.I’m spending the night with my mom’s friend Mimi again but I really hope I have a place to live before the end of the week! I’m going to take this week to get settled with house and job for the next three months.Let’s see how that goes!Besides, there’s plenty of museums to keep me busy in London alone!
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