Jan 25th

Hi,

I finally found out about my internship this week. I’m going to be working, hopefully, at an organization called PAN UK. Its an international NGO that focuses on getting pesticides out of organic products and works to promote truly organic and natural food and fibers and stuff like that. I would be working on an initiative to clean up the production of cotton. They’ve done a lot of work so far from what I can tell by there website, but I’ll be working on fundraising and putting out material on the project. I have a copy of a brochure from the program I think I’ll be working on and can send a copy to people if anyone would like. I have in interview next Tuesday, so wish me luck. Here’s the website:

http://www.pan-uk.org

The project I think I’m working on this project, but I’m not really sure:

http://www.pan-uk.org/Projects/Cotton/index.htm

I’ll let you know more when I know more.


Jan 21st

I got up fairly early for myself, like nine, and went for my run. I got a little lost today and it ended up being a little shorter than I had intended, but it was a nice day so it was all good. I went to the British Museum today. That was a really cool place. The entire building is built around a big atrium in the middle with a big circular structure in the center. It’s a huge library that houses all sorts of important works of literature and science. It used to be an invitation only thing to get in, so for a while the list of people who could in was pretty exclusive. There all sorts of people on these big plaques, from Darwin to Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens if you prefer. I walked around there for a while and just admired this place. After that I headed over to check out the Rosetta stone. It was much simpler than I had imagined, but it was still pretty cool. I spent the most time going through the gallery that contains a bunch of carvings from the Parthenon. A British noble had been over in Greece and found all these friezes just lying around, so he bought a lot of them from the Turks, who ruled Greece at the time. It was absolutely amazing. The big pieces were from either end of the building and were made to fit into the triangular part formed by the roof of the building. The vast majority of the pieces was from the sides of the building and represents a hue procession going to meet the gods. I took an inordinate number of pictures of these things because they were so cool. What I found really amazing was the amount of time and effort that went into these things. They took the time to carve out the back of statues that would never be seen from that angle and parts of sculptures that were going to be covered. It was so cool. From there, I went to look at the Egyptian mummy collection. I couldn’t find it, so I’ll have to go back and check it out later. I did spend a lot of time walking through the rest of the exhibit and took even more pictures. In my wanderings to find the mummies I came across these amazing mosaics from Rome or someplace in the middle east that were just huge. They must have been millions of tiles that went into their construction, and I can’t even imagine the time it would take to put this all together. I walked through a couple of more sections after that which were nice, but not of the same caliber as the earlier ones. They had a display from the Mausoleum that was set up a lot like the Parthenon, but much smaller. I hopped the tube back when the battery in my camera died and got home. I pretty much just sat around all night because I didn’t have anything better to do and a night to rest sounded pretty good.

Jan 22nd

Today I had a little bit of class with the teacher who is supervising the group and then we went to the Imperial War Museum. We talked for a while in class and then took the Tube to get to this place. We had a presentation about the condition of the British soldiers in World War One and some the stuff that went on with the people back home. It was pretty cool. The coolest part was that they had actual clothing and implements from the war that we could take a look at and handle. The guy himself was really nice and pretty good humored. After we got done with that I walked through an area on the British during the time around our War of Independence. That was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. It was taken from a very different perspective than I was used to and there were lots of little things different. The way they described the colonies was as rebels, and the war was won by more luck than anything else, or at least the was the part that they focused on. I got back from that a little later than I normally would have for class so I had to get ready for my first practice with the cross country team here pretty quickly. That was an interesting experience. They do circuit training on Mondays. I thought this was going to be sprint training or something like that, but it was actually anaerobic strength training kind of stuff. We were doing jumping jacks and push-ups and stuff like that. For about half an hour in a circuit with a bunch of different stations and the intensity varied up ad down as the time progressed. That felt really good. I met the people I had been emailing about getting into the group and they’re selling uniforms, so I think I’ll have to pick up one of those. I went for a short run after that. When I got back, almost everyone had left but a couple of girls were watching a movie called Amelie, or something like that. It’s a French film that made waves when it was introduced in the US a couple of years back. I thought it was an interesting film and I liked it. There was a definitive Frenchness about the movie that I’m not quite sure if I like or not.

Jan 23rd

This was a really great day. I got up early to go get tickets for a play that night. There a few little booths not to far from where I live that sell tickets really cheap on the day of the show. They’re tickets that haven’t been purchased yet so the theaters are just trying to get them sold. The group today was going to go see a play called Spam A Lot. This is loosely based on a movie by a group called Monty Python named The Quest for the Holy Grail. Its’ humorous slant on King Arthur and his rule. We got to the booth pretty early to make sure that they had tickets and got all that we needed. After that, I didn’t have anything to do for the rest of the day until we left. Almost everyone else had class so I had the flat to myself for the most part and relaxed. I needed that because my legs were really sore from the workout the day before.
We headed for the play and the playhouse itself was really cool. It was this really old building that you really couldn’t tell was a playhouse if it wasn’t for the huge sign on the front, which gave it away. We really didn’t pay that much for the tickets but they really weren’t that bad at all. We were on the fourth level which put us about six or seven stories up. The view was fine though. The play itself was absolutely hilarious. We all were laughing the entire time. I would highly recommend it to anyone. Even if you’ve never heard of the movie before you’d still get a kick out of this show. We headed out after the show and one of the guys bought a hot dog from a vendor out front and it smelled so good that I had to try it. He had this little cart with hotdogs and fired onions to put on them and they were so good too. Just delicious. We hopped the Tube back and that was the night.

Jan 24th

This is my long day of class, so I didn’t do much at all. I had enough time to get up and go for a run in the morning and then eat lunch before going to class. The first class today, Ethnography, was pretty interesting. We got on the topic of drug use in the Midwest and our teacher was just amazed that meth was a problem in the Midwest. He had a very rose colored view I guess. We spent a ton of time going over trailer parks and things like that that don’t really exist in London or England really. We quickly covered a lot of that and a good chunk of the class gave their accounts of rural Midwest living. Good stuff. I went and got some food after class and waited around in the basement of the building for my next class. That was the first classroom class I’ve had so far for my theater class and I’m really looking forward to it. We went over how the theaters in London are structured and things about British theater in general. We also got a list of some of the plays we would be going to. So far we know that we’ll be attending Bash and Mary Poppins. I think they’ll both be pretty good. After class got out, I ran to the grocery store to stock up for a while and then that was my day.

Jan 25th

I got up, had some breakfast and went for my long run. I didn’t have class today, so instead I went on a brewery tour. That was a ton of fun. The Fuller’s company ran the brewery we went to and was in a part of London called Chiswich. I really learned a lot about brewing beer on the tour. The brewery used to use well water, but the wells dried up so now they use tap water. To make sure the water is just right, they add gypsum to it match the composition of the old tap water. This is also where the phrase to get plastered comes from. Since gypsum is used in wallboards and prepping wallboards, that was brought in to mean someone had drunk too much. They also don’t waste any of the material either. All the left over grain they have goes to a cattle farm as feed and the huge amounts of yeast they have left over goes to a pig farm as feed. Another thing that I had found really interesting was that this brewery is the only one in the world who can legally use their specific strain of yeast they have. They have been using this one strain for a hundred or more years in their brewing process. After the tour of the brewery itself, we got to go and taste some of the beers. I also learned about tow different kinds of beer they make there: cask and keg beer. Keg beer is the generic Kind that you find in the states. The cask beer is something you don’t see in the states though. They don’t pasteurize this beer, so it still has live yeast in the barrel. This stuff is also hand pumped, so its not really carbonated like keg beer. So this cask beer has to be handled with kid gloves. A special chemical has to be added to make the yeast fall to the bottom of the barrel and the publicans have to be specially trained to know how to care for it. Really cool stuff. We tried about eight different kinds of there beers and they were all pretty good. The best by far was called Vintage Ale. This is like a cask beer in that it has live yeast in the bottle. It was just delicious. Our tour guide also told us some great stories. Breweries used to be wet, the people there could drink on the job. They would be given a certain number of tokens every week and they could earn more by working hard during the day. Some of these guys could drink fifteen pints of beer a day and still function on the job. It was just amazing. I really didn’t do much for the rest of the night, because we had a big day tomorrow.