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.