So after a bit of reasonably frantic picture searches I finally finished my presentation last night and had everything all printed and lovely. When I got to class, my professor handed me his copy of Mountains of the Moon, a movie about Richard Burton (my presentation) and John Speke’s quest to find the source of the Nile. There was a part in the movie where a beetle crawls into Speke’s ear that I really wanted to show so I spent the beginning of class cueing that up. Jess went and her presentation was pretty short, she presented on Robert Hooke. I liked the short time, with a lot of the presentations, even if you’re doing really well, 40 min+ tends to get really boring no matter the topic. My presentation was very long first of all, I was really struggling with how to skim Burton’s life since he did so much but I definitely could have lessened up on information about his early life. I rushed the end of my presentation because my battery was dying and I didn’t feel much like talking with a dead computer and without my PowerPoint. Amanda said I talked for about an hour and ten minutes but after that I was done and so didn’t care all that much. Except for my journals and creating a twenty-page paper out of my PowerPoint due in November, I’m completely done. Our class outing was scheduled for the evening so we were basically free to do our own thing, we decided to finally do the Eye for it was the middle of the week and that plan was pulled off fabulously. There was virtually no line although the tickets burned holes in all of our pockets at £15 each. The Eye wasn’t anything to rave about, it did what it promised, be a giant ferris wheel and the views were nice. It only took thirty minutes, so when we were done after some conversation and ice cream squeezed out of a plastic container into a cup, we decided to go visit Harrods. Harrods is beyond a giant department store. Harrods is five or six stories of designer brand everything you could think of. We found £139 beach towels. They had a bookstore named Waterstones on one level (in the same way a Borders has a Starbucks) where Panda and I both got student cookbooks for £10 each, she got a normal book and I got a vegetarian one. After walking around trying to find the tube, we finally found it and headed back to IES and bummed around/ate dinner until 7:30 when we assembled for our travel up to the Globe Theater. When we got off the tube, there was a bit of wandering before we got to cross the Millennium foot bridge (the only pedestrian-only bridge over the Thames). Right after we got off the bridge, there were people with telescopes looking at hawks nesting on the tower of the Tate Modern. The one I looked at was all fuzzy and sleepy but you could see hawks flying to the tower. After that, we waited around in the courtyard of the Globe until they opened the doors. We had groundling tickets (i.e. standing in the center for three hours), and we had a very good view of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was really good, very colorful and we had an excellent Puck for our show. We all stumbled back to our dorm and collapsed with tired feet.