Lessons Learned

I'm finally starting to feel a little at home here in London. Maybe it's all the walking around and exploring or the fact that now I've been in New Cross for almost a week and a half. Might even be the fact that I triumphantly found my way home from a random tube stop on Sunday morning after crashing at UCL for the night. Whatever it is, I'm finding my feet.

This past weekend I did a mixture of New Cross and real London (I know I shouldn't make that distinction, but I feel like it's okay since we're technically in Zone 2 so not in the heart heart of London). Friday night I went with Hannah from my flat to an event at the Student Union called Love Music, Hate Racism. It was live music which was pretty cool and a nice change from random pub nights. Then on Saturday I had a welcome meeting in central London that all the Penn kids from various universities were at. It was awesome getting to see people I know and I hung out with the UCL kids for the day. Saw Shom's dorm, went to the Tate Modern, walked along the Thames and, in true Penn fashion, went to a BYO (known to the rest of the world as a BYOB, not sure why we drop the last B). Honestly, only with other Penn kids would I wind up at what I can only assume is one of a small number of BYOs in London. I did get my very first fish and chips since being here. Not only was the meal great, but I felt like I checked off a little box on my to do list, right up there with the tea & crumpets. If I had to name a regret from the day it would be finding 2 bottles of potent wine for £3 each (Parents and dearly respected elders: ignore this?). Lessons learned from the night: more than a bottle a person is never necessary, and it is a fabulous thing to have friends with beds/floors to crash on when one finds oneself far from the Goldsmiths campus.

Other things I've noted/learned about London:
-There must be something in the air/water here, because my skin is suffering terribly since I got here. As someone who has never had terrible skin issues I'm appalled by the state of my face since getting here.
-I understand it's a tea kind of place, but apparently that also translates into very bleh coffee, a travesty for a caffeine addict like myself. Most places if you order coffee it's just an Americano, which is fine but generally weak and not enough to keep me up on a day like today where I was up at 7:30.
-Free museums make getting cultured so much more fun. So far I've done the National Gallery and a little of the Tate Modern and both have been so amazing.
-Hair dryers are impossible to find.
-Not having a British credit/debit card makes certain parts of everyday life that I take for granted much more difficult. Having found a hair dryer the other day I couldn't buy it because Boots doesn't take cards without a "chip" in them, which apparently the cards here have. Also I can't automatically top up my oyster card (a travel card for the tube/buses) because my card isn't linked to a British address. Not the end of the world, but an inconvenience nonetheless.

Also, classes started today. I finally feel a little bit like a real person, although not too much since I don't have any class again tomorrow. I had 2 hours of lecture and 2 hours of seminars today, all for my two comm classes: Communication, Psychology & Experience and Representation & Textual Analysis. I really like both of my lectures and it'll be interesting to see how they continue. The professors, one of whom is from New Zealand, both seem really cool and relatively laid back. The Psych class seems really interesting, despite the fact that one person made the obligatory first day "Are you saying there's no free will?" comment. The Representation class deals with semiotics, media construction and things like "truth" in media, including celebrity representations, all of which is right up my nerdy media-loving alley. Then one of my seminars I loved. The other.. eh. Maybe this is just my junior-year cynicism but I'm increasingly noticing how much college students like to hear themselves talk. And college is the perfect breeding ground for the kind of self-indulgent, narcissistic rambling that I have an insanely low tolerance for and I'm sure have also been guilty of before. But one of my seminars is full of people with seemingly uninformed forceful opinions who love the sound of their own voices. I'm sure I'll get over (or I wont and I'll sulk in silence...) but it was just more noticeable to me than ever today. Other than that, I can tell I'm really going to like my Comm classes. On Wednesday I'll have the first day of my London Theater class where we see a show every week and on Thursday I'll have my comparative literature class, both of which I'm excited about.

It'll be interesting to see how the experience of being here changes as classes pick up and I turn into a real class-going, essay-writing student. Luckily with the imminent arrival of the fabulous Annie Bellis (a fellow Chi O for those of you not lucky enough to know my favorite Kansas City dweller), I can put off being a real person for a while longer. I could get used to this..

Addendum: re-reading my own post I do in fact the irony of complaining about self-indulgent rambling on a blog, perhaps the most self-admiring and narcississtic of all media. Do I get credit for the fact that whoever read my blog chose to subject themselves to it, as opposed to the inane tangents that are imposed on the rest of the students in my seminar by the worst offenders?