Hello to all. So it has been brought to my attention that I haven't emailed in awhile. My apologies. I really haven't done anything terribly exciting lately. Mostly a lot of going to class, doing a ton of homework and running through the many circles of bureaucratic hell. (yes, for those of you who were unaware, Hell is not fiery but an elaborate labyrinth of bureaucracy). Anyways, if anyone is curious about the fine details of these adventures, you have but to ask and i can send you a long ranting email about them. It is a subject I enjoy ranting on. For the rest of you I will spare you and sum up. American Embassy = a fortress of security, queuing, playing "guess that form", a little bit of white lying and wide-eyed innocence ("What? my appointment's next week? but I need to get in today cause I might be flying to europe soon and can't wait a whole month!). Plus the building is really really ugly. America, where is our pride? But far worse is the British Home Office. Ok, I have to rant about this one. Honestly, Dorthy had an easier time seeing the Wizard than I'm having just getting an APPOINTMENT to get into the home office. The number is always busy, the website is confusing and misdirecting, the London office says "can't help you, call or go to Croydon office" (20 min. by train outside of London), Croydon number, no answer, long trip to Croydon office, standing outside Croydon office in the cold for half hour, Croydon office says "you can't even enter the building without a pre-registered appointment which you can only get over the phone", I say "I've tried the number, no one ever answers" Croydon "oh, you're calling too late in the day (11am-2pm is very late) try calling at 8:30am when they first get there (actually no one's there till 9)". SOMEONE ANSWERS THE PHONE! phone person "have you filled out your NTOT forms?" "No, but I have a I.S. 116 form the airport gave me" "No idea what that form is, but I can mail you the NTOT forms you need then if you still feel you need an appointment then you can call us back and schedule it". It has now been 5 to 10 business days later. I received the forms today (after 2pm so no chance of a phone call working) so tomorrow I might, maybe, possibly, be worthy of an appointment with the Croydon home office. The moral of this story is "Never loose your passport". Good news though! I do have a passport again! As of yesterday. In other news, everyone here is/was/has been getting sick. I only got a little sick earlier last week, cause I decided to sleep a whole lot, invest in Night Nurse (the god of cold medicines) and lots of oranges. Others have not been so fortunate, which made for a very boring week/weekend and low class attendance (by both teachers and students alike). Ok, happy news, to end this email on a lighter note. I got a really cool christmas present from my friend Tim, which is a board game called Cinematique. It is the Lord of movie board games and no one can defeat me at it! (or not yet at least). Oh and Jessica and I had a visit from our friend the traveling australian friend, Mike, 2 weekends ago so he wouldn't have to celebrate his birthday alone. There was an awesome chocolate caterpillar cake included there. (The cake was not made of caterpillars, but in the shape of one). There is an awesome picture of it somewhere, I will try to find it for next time. Sorry, once again this is a really long email. Congratulations if you've made it to the end without a break or scanning over everything, if you've done the latter, don't worry, my feelings aren't hurt, I like to ramble. Farewell for now!
jan. 5, 2008
hope everyone had lovely holidays. I was glad to see those I could while I was home for the break. Some of you are on Aubree's email list too so you have already heard about the um "exciting" trip to London. For those of you who don't know I'll give a short synopsis. Aubree flew back with me cause she's studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh this semester. We set out from Dallas airport at 6:00am Jan. 31st or we should have, the flight left late which meant we had to speed walk through O'Hare to make our connecting flight to Heathrow. The flight was uneventful except the last hour where I discovered that I couldn't find my passport. Somewhere between the plane out of Dallas and the plane to Heathrow my passport disappeared. Fortuantly I still made it through customs, though it took an extra hour to convince them not to send me back. Now I have to go to the American Embassy to get a new passport and the British Home office to let them know I'm in the country legally or something like that. So we celebrated the coming of the new year on the tube platform. Then there was a bunch of crazy tube business with some stations being closed and a bunch of people getting on in central London and we couldn't push our way off the train before the doors closed again and then I left my brand new coat which I love in the taxi which dropped us off at my flat. I made a desperate run after the taxi, but alas I was not fast enough. So our New Year's Eve sucked, but we still made it into the country and slept in the next day so the world was ok again. Since then Aubree and I have been doing some touristy stuff thrown in with errarnd type stuff like getting student rail cards, getting tickets to Edinburgh tomorrow (I'm helping her move up, she has a lot of heavy luggage) and stuff I had to do at school for next week and calling the american embassy and the taxi lost and found dept. (there will be more stories on that next week no doubt). We saw the Tower of London, the National Gallery, Camden Market, Oxford Street, Picadilly Circus etc. Also we went to see Stomp
last night which is a very awesome percussive show. They do music and dance stuff with brooms and trash cans and plungers etc. I highly recommend it to anyone. Ok, I think that's all my news for now
