Our lovely presenters for today were Megan and Elena. Megan presented on Hans Sloane who invented milk chocolate, among other things but really, what is more important than chocolate? She also included “Happy Birthday Ryan” and “Happy Birthday Amanda” slides in her presentation. Elena presented on Alfred Lord Wallace, a man who also came up with Natural Selection but was beaten to the publishing punch by Darwin. Our afternoon expedition to a fellow named John Soanne’s House. Soanne was an architect; a fairly wealthy one by the end of his life so during it he bought three townhouses in a fancy neighborhood, connected them all and made it one giant house. He also piled all sorts of random stuff into his house. There were busts everywhere, a room dedicated to Holborn paintings, the Sarcophagus of Seti I, vases, statues and over 6,000 books. Now, when he connected the three houses together, for the most part, he did not knock down walls to make rooms bigger and with all the stuff in his house, It was incredibly hard to walk through and was very cramped. You also weren’t allowed to take pictures, but I got a postcard! Now for many days previous, since I went to go buy chocolate cake mix for Panda, I was bent on making Ryan a Dora the Explorer cake. When we went to get it, we discovered that they were Dora the Explorer cupcakes but got them anyways. We also got him a £4 Dalek water bottle. Once again, we made our cake thing with no measuring cups to speak of. It all turned out for the tastiest. People from other kitchens came over and sang Happy Birthday and ate cupcakes, was a good time. James’ friend Joe also made the treck over to visit while Ryan indulged in his twenty-one-ness

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.

Today was the second day of presentations, Ryan and Amanda went, presenting on Mary Shelley and William and Caroline Hershel respectively, all knowledgeable and what not. Ryan tried to play teacher and call on people as well as play favorites a bit. They averaged out at around and hour each and after lunch we were off on our excursion for the afternoon, science museums. First we went to The Science Museum and scuttled around in the 18th century and computer sections, kind of interested but mostly wanting to check out this thing they had called launchpad. Then we headed over to the Natural History Museum where we were greeted by a giant dinosaur in the front lobby. We saw a bunch of fossils, some collected by Mary Anning (a Victorian fond of fossil hunting), and a giant sloth skeleton. Eager to get back over and find out what this launchpad thing was and yet intrigued by a picture of a giant baby we saw somewhere advertising other sections of the museum. We found it in a section called “the Wonders of Life”, after sifting through the bit on actual conception. Lo and behold, it was a giant baby, a fetus to be precise, at 7 months gestation I believe. Since has been a joke of James and Ryan’s to call Amanda a baby, they made her take a picture with the giant baby and she threatened them with bodily harm the entire time. After that we ran back over to the Science Museum and up to launchpad which turned out to be an interactive science thing, like the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, for kids but that didn’t stop us. We spent a good hour in there playing with everything. My favorite part was this machine had a metal rod sticking out of it. You slid a straw onto the rod (for hygiene), bit down onto the straw, put your fingers in your ears and tada! you could hear music. Kids always get the fun stuff to do in these museums.

We started presentations today. Nicole went first and talked about Christopher Wren, which was pretty interesting though she did kind of just read from a paper but I’m not really one to talk since that’s pretty much what I’m going to do. The second was James who presented on Charles Babbage but his was kind of boring and a bit scattered, and long. We ran upstairs, some literally since for the past couple of days only one elevator has been working, ate lunch and then assembled back downstairs for our trip to the Royal Society. The Royal Society was kind of interesting. We got a bit of a tour from the archivist there and he pulled different things on each person’s ingenious person except for the three of us who had people not belonging to the Royal Society. It was kind of cool to look at the handwriting of William Hershel (who had fantastic handwriting by the way), Charles Babbage, James Cook, and others along with and instrument of Christopher Wren’s and some other things. The tour did not take that long and since the Royal Society could offer me nothing in the way of research, I did not really feel like bothering them by becoming a reader there. That’s really all that’s happened, James presented today, Amanda and Ryan present tomorrow and I present on Wednesday so it’s basically been presentation crackdown time. We do have a list though, of things we want to do after presentations are over. I still haven’t had time to investigate the TV yet, although on the 2nd while walking back to the Tube, I passed a poster for Secret Diary of a Call Girl which is a TV show I watched last semester. Today I looked it up on the internet and through some clicking came across another show on the same network called Lost in Austen. Basically, it’s about a modern girl who switches places with Elizabeth Bennett and the plotline chaos that ensues. I’ve been watching it all day because it’s a streaming video and the internet here does not like streaming videos.

We started off our weekend with the idea that we would visit Stonehenge on Saturday after the market. So, we decided to go to the Portobello Street market. It’s a giant flea/farmers/random stuff market that stretches for a good ½ mile to a mile. There was so much stuff everywhere. James, Ryan, and I got £10 pocket watches and Panda and I were on the lookout for purses (which we still do not have). There was a guy selling old cameras, so many different scarves, glassware, random crafts; it was all so colorful and crowded and gigantic, it was wonderful. The second half of the market had a lot of food and we all got some very cheap vegetables (including some okra). Once we were all done there, we headed over to the Duke of York market (the one near us) and bought a few things including pies and dried mangos. While we were at the Portobello market, we decided that while we probably could make it there and back to Stonehenge, we could also go Sunday. So the rest of Saturday was spent working on presentations and watching internet TV. Sunday, we got up early-ish but did not get moving for quite awhile due to our very slow guys friends. Putting it lightly, Amanda almost killed them. We made it to the train station, bought tickets, rode a little train to Channing Cross, waited for a half hour, indulged in smoothies, and hot drinks before our real train arrived and we were off. The train takes you to Salisbury and Stonehenge is about six miles away. Luckily for us, we found a Stonehenge tour bus. It drove you through Salisbury and up to Stonehenge. It was quite a fabulous tour, the only real problem was a group of Portuguese (Amanda said it wasn’t Spanish, I knew it wasn’t Italian, so we settled on Portuguese) who, I’m guessing, couldn’t understand the English tour and just talked through it very loudly. We passed by Old Sarum which was the old town of Salisbury when it was on a hill (it moved because there was no water source in the town. We also passed by Amesbury which is a town that has grown up within a Stonehenge like site. Eventually we got to Stonehenge, walked around, listened to a complementary audio tour, passed a grinning pagan woman with a head on a staff. We snooped around in the shop, bought some trinkets and waited around for the bus to come pick us up. While we were waiting, we went down to an archeological dig that was going on and one of the diggers gave us a little tour. He told us about the possible use for Stonehenge. How there used to be a wood henge farther up the Avon which could have represented the land of the living. During the winter solstice, they would bring the remains of those who had died by boat up to where Stonehenge was, and then carry them over land and up the hill to Stonehenge, the land of the dead. It was extremely interesting and well worth while.

Our second day trip was only a boat-ride down the Thames to Greenwich. The seats were really wet since it had been raining before we went and would rain later, so eventually we went to the lower level of the boat, napped, and made up a to-do list for the rest of our time in London. Once there, we wandered around looking for the National Maritime Museum and saw a very intricate and decorated church in what used to be the Naval Hospital. Eventually we found the museum and headed almost immediately into the Queen’s House, which is only technically part of the museum. It was a house built by the wives of Charles I and Charles II and the only problem I had with it was that they had essentially turned it into an art museum and I really wanted to know what the uses for each room had been. I found out later where the Queen’s bedroom would have been but there were a lot of rooms in that building. After we were done there, we were left alone to eat lunch and explore the museum. The only thing I really felt like seeing was the coat Horatio Nelson was shot in and it took a good long while to find. The bullet hole is also really difficult to find too, it’s up on the shoulder but really just blends in. There’s also a lot of blood on the uniform but apparently it isn’t Nelson’s blood, it’s the blood of Nelson’s secretary who was shot an hour before. While we were up there, who should we hear, but a familiar voice from our first walking tour of London. We peer around the corner and lo and behold, it’s Simon! The fantastic tour guide we had our first real day in London is here with us in the museum. We tried to follow him and hear some of his tour but they headed into a movie where he didn’t have to speak. We started to walk away, we had to go meet up with our group, when Simon came up to us and told us not to wander too far away from the tour. We tried to explain that we weren’t on the tour but he must have recognized us from our tour last week and reminded us again not to stray. We had a good laugh over this and went to go meet our group. It was then we walked up to the former Royal Observatory (it’s in Edinburg now) and boy was that a walk. It wasn’t far, it’s just that the Observatory is on a hill, the path to get to that his is incredibly steep and any picture I took could never do it justice. Once we got home, birthday celebrating commenced. Today is Amanda’s birthday so I decided to make her a chocolate cake from a box. I quickly discovered that, not only did we not have a cake pan; we didn’t have measuring spoons or cups at all. So, I approximated and used the baking pan that we use for everything else. It worked out fine for the most part, I cut it in half, realized I didn’t have a spatula either, and the cake didn’t really come out all in one piece. I slathered it with icing and it was good. There was half a cake left too so, desert tomorrow! Now we get to the adventure portion of the evening. Ryan has a friend who goes to the Imperial College of London who he wanted us to go hang out with. We rode the Victoria line to the end, got on a bus eventually, and at the end of the line was assured that her house wasn’t that far away, lets just walk. He lied. We walked a good 1 ½ - 2 miles for about thirty-five minutes. Eventually we made it, cursing Ryan the entire time. What we had been told would be a party, ended up being her, two of her friends and us. The boys indulged in the drinks she had provided, and James seems to have found love with a certain whiskey he met but did not get the name of. Alice, Amanda, and I just had water, being as dehydrated as we were. We did not stay too long since Alice is going somewhere early tomorrow. Needless to say, we caught a bus back.

There is not too much to say about what we did today. We went to the British Museum which was all kinds of amazing. It’s absolutely gigantic and we definitely didn’t see it all but we had a valiant effort and took many, many pictures. On our way back to the underground, we stopped in on a tourist shop and bought a few twenty pence postcards then Amanda and I amused ourselves for a few minutes while James and Ryan went into a gamming shop. I pointed us toward the tube and that was the end of that adventure.

Virtually all the excursions this week are during the afternoon, today was the Tate British, an art museum. We had a tour but it was pretty boring for me since I really do not like to walk slowly through art museums. I like to look, marvel and move on. The tour guide was wonderful and very knowledgeable but it was just not what I wanted to be doing. I did find one painting I really liked called “Head III” in the modern art section. They also had about five or six people running down the hall as an art fixture. To get to the museum we had to get off at a station kind of far away and walked, to get back we were determined to find a closer station but ended up failing in that and made our way after getting a little lost back to the station we came from.

Our excursion today was a scientific walking tour of London. When our tour guide showed up, she was this little old woman; I spent a good while wishing that when she spoke, she would sound like a Monty Python “lady”. She did not disappoint. The tour itself was ok; it was heavy on the walking but not so much with the tour. We did get to see Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle’s house where he wrote some of his Sherlock Holmes but overall the tour was so-so. After the tour finished we headed off on the tube for Abbey Road. One in our company has much love for the Beatles. When we got there, we took lots of pictures and the wall part of the gate had the writing of various visitors on it. I drew my nurse chicken on the wall of Abbey Road and took a picture of it. Next, some decided they wanted to recreate the album cover to Abbey Road. This took forever. The road is quite busy and cars kept stopping to let them cross the road that they had to wave on. I was one of the photographers along with Andrew and while it took a long time, it was very fun. We also walked over to Paul McCartney’s house for Cheryl and teased her about being a stalker which caused her to keep shushing us while we were outside his house.

So, our first day of real class, not counting the introduction to history we had Friday and it went reasonably uneventfully. A few people fell asleep, not used to having to wake up at 8 in the morning. We broke for lunch and then reassembled for our excursion to the British Library. Quite interesting in theory, it was suggested to us to become readers at the British Library but when we got there found out that we needed bibliographies of what we wanted to use and our passports. We were denied amazing old books but there were public sections to the Library, which we partook in. The main public room was sort of a greatest hits of what the British Library had. They had letters and books written by Jane Austen, Elizabeth, Edward, and Mary Tudor, Blake’s journal where he started jotting down verses to Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, things by the Beatles, the Magna Carta and so many other things. Then we went to the back, into a lonely building not actually connected to the rest of the Library, which was the center for conservation. They had some hands on activities and a couple of chairs where you could sit, put on headphones, and listen to recordings of Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Alfred Lord Tennyson speaking among others. Everyone found someone different to listen to wide-eyed. After milling around out there, we decided to sit outside in this little courtyard where we were soon joined by various members of our seminar group. Someone, I think it was Cheryl, suggested going to this Caribbean street festival thing down in Notting Hill. With nothing else to do and a desire to expand from just the four-person clique we had developed, we joined in. It didn’t take that long to discover we had the wrong day for the festival, there was a curious lack of people. We decided instead to walk around a bit and look for someplace to eat. I kind of want to go back at some point just to look through all the shops they have. There are so many different shops closing down and new ones taking up the empty space all over London so there are constantly “Going out of Business” and “75% off sales”. Plus after the near-fatal death of my green bag, I kind of need a new bag. We found a pub, whose name escapes me and settled down in the beer garden to look and menus. Basically, the way a pub works is, you come in, sit wherever you feel like, look at a menu and when you decide, you walk up to the bar, order, pay and wait for them to bring you food. We had to split into two tables and upon noticing that they served Tikka Masala, was completely sold. I confused the Bartender by ordering a screwdriver. I ordered it, he turned to go make it, then turned back with a big “a What?” the older guys at the bar thought that was very funny. The food was good and some of our company ordered desert including an apple pie for Alice and spotted dick for Andrew. After we were done, all walked back to the tube and rode home to sleep eventually.