Tuesday, February 3, 2009

View from London!!

Hello all!

So I am currently in London, studying at Regent's College for the semester! I've been here almost 3 weeks(as of Thursday) and I still can't believe I'm here. London is such an AMAZING city. So much to offer, and the night life is ridiculously entertaining; always meeting new and interesting people! So far we(my friends Melissa, Brittany, Geralyn, Alaina and Kirsten) have pretty much been trying to meet people we're going to school with, and it's been great getting to know new people from all over the US as well as some locals! Here's a picture of us in front of Parliament and Big Ben :)

Classes here are starting to pick up very quickly. I'm taking a Contemporary Theatre class, and we've already had to go to a play on our own and write a 6 page analysis! It was rough seeing as I've never written a theatre analysis, but I think I did fine. The play we chose to see is called "The 39 Steps". It's a spoof off of the Hitchcock thriller movie made in the 1930s, and there are 4 actors who play over 50 different roles throughout the performance! It was hilarious and way better than I expected. Since I've been here I have also seen the musical Wicked, which was absolutely amazing, and last night I went to see a show with my theatre class called Shunkin. Shunkin was very interesting because it was entirely in Japanese, with English subtitles. I loved it, and I thought I would hate it and be frustrated with having to read subtitles for 2 hours, but it was one of the best plays I have ever seen. Right now, I'm trying to write a paper on postmodernism for my Art in London class. Any help would be much appreciated :) I have no idea how to even begin this paper! So blogging is a nice distraction.. :)

Last Saturday we went to Bath for a daytrip planned by our school! I posted a picture of me and some girls touching the Roman Bath water. It was really fun, about 90 students went, and we got to tour the ancient Roman Baths and just basically explore the amazing city of Bath. It seemed kind of gloomy, because every single building was the same, sandstone color, but then I realized it was part of it's uniqueness. The shopping in Bath is amazing as well, tons and tons of stores! It was very tempting.. but then I remembered I need to have enough money for the rest of the semester! Which reminds me... I'm going to Rome on Friday!!!!! AHH. I can't believe it!! I'm really excited! I will post pictures of Rome in my next blog!

Also, London got about 5 inches of snow yesterday, and the entire city pretty much shut down! It was hilarious, all the Londoners were sooo excited for snow... people went sledding on lunch trays at Primrose Hill! Haha, so funny to think that 5 inches is a lot of snow, but it was the most snow London has seen since 1991. Nuts. 5 inches is NOTHING back home! And I was really upset to see snow, I guess us New Englanders brought it with us ;) Speaking of New Englanders, I've been trying to catch up with people from home(like CG ;) ) but my power cord to my laptop blew when I plugged it in 2 weeks ago, so I'm hardly on my computer at all! It's really hard to keep in touch without the internet, but soon my new power cord will come in which I'm very excited for..

OK so I suppose I really should go write my art paper, but I will blog again soon!

xxRachel