Thursday was our first day of class. It was pretty quick, it was basically going through basic British History. It was also here that we learned that our professor (a physics professor) is a bit fast and loose with historical facts. It was in this class that we learned that not St. Augustine, but St. Petersburg was the first permanent settlement in North America. The historian in me also twitched a bit every time he spoke about the “Dark Ages”. I hate that term. Grrrr. Anyways, after that we bummed around a little. We went to Victoria Station to get railcards, had French bagette lunches, exchanged the £25 into £24.67 and then ate standing up due to lack of benches.

So, we’d been here a couple of days but still had no internet. Desperate for email checking and not wanting to park in the common room (where there is a communal internet plug), we went in search, backpacks and laptops in tow, of free WiFi. Most of the places we passed by with free WiFi were restaurant-type places and even the Starbucks did not have WiFi. On our second pass, we passed a place called Coffee Republic; we all got something to eat/drink and parked. The WiFi they offered you had to buy food for minutes but we were able to find another WiFi that was unprotected and used that. Apparently, the British don’t have the same park and surf mentality that we do. After dinner, we went to our first play, Spamalot. Everyone was very good and the play was very funny. I was very proud of myself; most of the cultural jokes did not go over my head. Walking there was fun too; we had to walk past Chinatown.