Hello to all. I'm still keeping myself pretty busy over here and still
having a blast. The coolest thing that happened this past week was
that Brena came down from St. Andrews for a visit. We had an awesome
weekend which included shopping in Camden Market, visiting Tate
Britian, going to some cool pubs and seeing Avenue Q (which is a
hysterical musical and not appropriate for young children). We also
had to help Isabella out with her filming project, but that turned out
to be pretty amusing too.
And speaking of all the random student films I've helped out with
lately, here is a link if anyone wants to see the most, um, peculiar
film I've starred in so far.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0hfTnGHKdQ
And also 4 of us will be starting a youtube soap opera soon which
should also be very amusing and crazy.
I have also spent some time in the past 2 weeks part-time job hunting,
which I'm sure everyone knows is more fun than a barrel of monkeys,
but I need some money to support my rock and roll life-style and I'm
trying for jobs that are more in a media related area so my cv will
look even better for the future (and they are cvs over here not
resumes and they're formated a little different and I've forgotten
what cv actually stands for).
Oh, and since England doesn't have to wait till after thanksgiving to
start on christmas stuff all the major streets around london are
having christmas lighting ceremonies in the next few weeks. Last night
Marylebone High Street (the street my school is on) had their big
lighting ceremony. I missed the first bit since I was studying in the
library, but I got to see most of it as I came out. It was really cool
and now the street looks so festive.
Oh, and last week it rained really hard one day (my shower doesn't get
that kind of water pressure) and it even started hailing for a bit, I
had pieces of ice on my sleeve, and I was walking home and stuck
between bus stops so I just got soaked. It was really awful. I've
included a picture.
Tomorrow I'm taking the train up to Leicester to visit some of my
friends from back when I studied abroad. It should be loads of fun.
Ok, well, that's all my news for now!

halloween, fireworks, filming & the flu

Ok, it's been about 2 weeks since I last emailed mostly because I got
a nasty cold and spent most of last week sleeping a lot. But now I'm
much better and I'm going to try to sum up what I've been doing.
Classes are still going well, though they keep me pretty busy.
I had a good birthday party with my flatmates and friends.
Halloween was fun even though I had to drug myself up on cold meds to
go out. A bunch of us dressed up and went on a London Ghost tour which
turned out to be lame so we went bowling in Piccadilly Circus instead.
The British do celebrate halloween, in fact they stretch the
celebrations out for about a week to combine with Bonfire Night (aka
Guy Fawkes Night, aka Tonight). So basically there's been a lot of
firework shows and bonfires all weekend with a bunch of people walking
around in costumes. We went out saturday night to the Thames to watch
fireworks, but the other nights we just kept seeing them from our
windows.
I also want to mention that any story I tell will probably include a
written or unwritten "and then we walked for awhile" because
everything is a "short" walk away or we all get bored or indecisive so
we start walking somewhere else. And here is a London definition of
distances Jessica and I compiled:
"it's not far" means probably less than a mile
"it's not that far" means somewhere between 1-2 miles
"it's a bit of a walk" means 3-4 miles (this is the distance between
my flat and the school)
"it's quite a walk" means 5-6 miles
"it's rather far" means 5-10 miles
there is some variation with these definitions depending on who you
are talking to, but generally this is how I gage distance when people
are describing where we are walking to.
I also spent quite a lot of time this past weekend helping my friends
film stuff for their video tech class. And by "help" I mostly mean
"acted in" because that is always what film students need the most. I
never really knew this before, but I'm pretty decent at acting and
don't really mind doing it. I'm not planning on a career in it or
anything, I much prefer being behind the camera or running the lights
(which I've been doing a lot too), but it's quite funny when I'm being
fought over for who's film I'm going to be in, and as a rule I'm fed
for my services.
Anyways, so I think that's all the new news I have for now.