Feb 4th

Hello.

I’ve done a lot this week, which is why I haven’t written anything on here for so long. I went to two plays this week, but the really big event was I finally had my interview with the company I will be interning with. The NGO is called PAN UK, which stands for Pesticide Action Network. They work al over the world to help promote organic growing of crops and other sustainable organic fibers and such. I’m going to be spending most of my time working on a project centered around making sure that cotton is grown organically. They work with local groups that help farmers make the transfer to organic farming. Those groups help to provide the farmers with a means to move not using pesticides any more. PAN UK spends most of its time working to help provide information about where they can buy organic cotton and keeps tabs on the progress on the amount of cotton sold in the UK and they’re starting to work to get information on the rest of EU. I’ll be working on getting their database up to date an fixing it up so they can move all the information over to a new program. That’s going to take me quite a bit of time. Later I’ll get to do some more interesting stuff, like collecting information on the companies that sell organic cotton for a report they put out every year. I start there this Tuesday.

Jan 29th

For Senior Sem this week we went to the Imperial War Museum. It’s a place that has all sorts of artifacts and weapons from the various world wars. They had old tanks, planes, parts of planes and even a couple of miniature subs that the Axis powers used at various times. It was pretty cool. We had an assignment that we had to do so I went and look around for those things. We also had tickets to go to an exhibit on the use of animals in wars over time. It was kind of interesting, but it made these animals out to be more like soldiers than anything else, like they all actively choose to be there. I guess I felt they glorified it too much. There was one quote at the end that acknowledged this, but it was more in passing than anything else. One exhibit that was really cool was a recreated trench down in the basement. They had models posing in various actions that soldiers would have been doing in the trench. They had people writing letters, talking with superiors, soldiers getting ready to make a raid, and then people being brought back from being injured at some point. The atmosphere was really spooky and I’m not going to say that it felt like I was there, but it felt authentic. It did fell really desolate and disheartening.

After finishing up there, I found a place to grab some food and then went to go find the place where I was interning and get an idea of how long it would take me to get there on Tuesday. I got a little lost on my way there, but it wasn’t too bad. The station is under a big roundabout, so I couldn’t really figure out which road was what. Once I got that figured out it was alright. I got that figured out than came back and sat for a little way before I went to practice at Imperial. It was going really good until the fire alarm went off and we had to sit outside for like half an hour. We finished up and I headed home didn’t really do anything for the rest of the night.

Jan 30th

Over the last couple of days, my computer was giving me some problems. I couldn’t get it to start for some reason and I didn’t have the stuff to fix it. So, I found the nearest Apple store and took the tube there first thing in the morning. It was a pretty cool place. It was two floors and had a ton of cool stuff. I couldn’t get my computer in that day, so I left pretty quickly. I had a lot of time until I had my interview and luckily I managed to get it working in that period of time. Whatever. I headed to my interview and stopped to get some coffee because I got there really early. The Tube got there a lot quicker than I thought it would. I went up to there offices and a women by the name Katie showed me around. She talked to me about what I would be doing and then showed me around the office. After that I met the guy who I would be working with by the name of Damien, he’s from France actually. I find that somewhat ironic that I did this to work with British people and now I’m working with a French man. Oh well, we spent about an hour going over the projects I would be working on and all the stuff I would have to do. I also found out I might be helping Katie write a bunch of thank you notes for a new project that this group just got up and running. During the 80’s a pesticide plane in Bhoupal India exploded and caused all sorts of bad things. PAN UK set up a group to help fund a hospital in the area, so I might get to write some thank you notes to all the people who helped.

I got back from that and I had a play to go too for class. The play was called Bash: The Latter Day plays. It was three plays that all centered around how a person had made a bad choice that ended up costing someone there life. The first one was a businessperson who let his daughter die because he thought he was going to loose his job. The second one centered on some guys who say a homosexual couple kissing in the park and then hunted him down and killed him. The last one was about a girl who fell in love with a teacher and had a son with him. She realized years latter that the guy had just been using her and she then killed her son as a way to get back at him. They we all done as a monologue. They were pretty good, and something different. I liked it. I had actually seen a version of the second act in high school at a speech event during debate. We stopped at a pub after that and I went shopping after that.

Jan 31st

I went for a run and then had class for the rest of the day. First was Ethno which was interesting. We covered a bunch of different aspects of the British government system and how it all interacted. We got talked at a lot, but it was still pretty interesting. After that I headed out to the Globe Theater for a tour. We met our teacher there and we had a tour guide who was an actual director, which was a lot cooler than having just a regular tour guide. He knew a ton about the theater culture in the city and he talked about a lot of different things. I would describe the stage and inside myself, but I took some good pictures. He told us about how the stage only had one set and things didn’t change from show to show. (They’re in the album, Museums and Other Places of Interest.) The actors only had the morning to rehearse a new play. And they did a new one every day. They would only repeat the play every couple of months. They also only got part of the script so that people couldn’t copy it all and to save on copying parts. They got their part in rolled up scroll and they would practice from that. That’s also where the terms came from. He also explained how they only had the last three words of the speech as a queue to know when they were going to speak. It was all really interesting. We spent about an hour there and I even got up and we all did a little mock play to illustrate how it would have been done. He also told us the real genius of Shakespeare was his ability to imagine the set and how he used his wording to put people there. Like I said, the set didn’t change ever, so he had to describe everything that was going on. When he wanted people to know that Juliet was looking through a window, he had to say she was looking through window. Little things like that were really cool to think about.

Feb 1st

I got up this morning early to make go get tickets to Wicked. We got to the ticket booth and the guy working there told us to wait for about half an hour because better tickets might become available. So we went to a little café on the corner and I had a chance to try a full English breakfast. I’m pretty sure that it’s only a tourist thing at this point, but it was really cool. It consisted of sausage, fired eggs, toast, English bacon, baked beans, and fired tomatoes. It was all really good. I really enjoyed it. We finished up there and went back and got out tickets. They were really good and we got a really great price on them. I came back, ran and did some homework before we headed out. The theater itself was pretty cool. It had a ton of green lights on the outside to give it a nice glow. It made it pretty easy to find too. Our tickets were pretty much dead center on the balcony and we could see all but the very back of the stage. The cast was excellent and performed really well. I think they had changed some of the wording to have it make more sense for the British audience, but it wasn’t really anything that was incredibly apparent and I could have been imagining it. Everyone I went with really enjoyed and we all had a great night.

I had a friend coming out to stay for the weekend, so once we got back I sat around waiting for him to get back. His flight got in around 2100 and the bus ride into town was about 2 hours plus the time it took him to walk here since everything was shut down. He got to out flat at about 230 and I went to bed so after that.

Feb 2nd

Today we went to Windsor Castle. My friend couldn’t come along because we were taking a train and Cynthia couldn’t get any more tickets, so he got to explore London on his own. I thought I talked to her about this before, but I guess I forgot. The ride out there was pretty uneventful and it only took about an hour. It wasn’t that bad at all. I did a bunch of reading for my internship. We got to the castle just in time to catch the end of the changing of the guard, which was kind of cool. After that we walked into the Cathedral of St. George (I think). It was a really cool place. There were some many member of the royalty buried there, it was kind of surreal actually. You would be walking around and then realize you’re walking on the grave of some King. Pretty crazy. In the choir, there was the base of the Knights of the Garter. This is a special order that the monarch picks the members of for great service to the empire and the world. There are people who have donated money to the arts, other monarchs, and heads of state. Each person has their crest on the very top of the choir with a helm. They also have a brass plaque on the wall in the back of their chair. When they died, the person’s trappings were taken down except for the plaque. So one could look at all the plaques and you would have had complete record of all the people ever in the order. We talked to a women working there who talked to us for about half an hour about the people in the order and all the things that were associated with it. It was really interesting.

After that we went into the castle itself. We entered through the public galleries that had pictures and things like that on display. They had a huge dollhouse that was supposed to show how the really rich lived when it was made. It was pretty amazing. It had working electricity and plumbing. Working plumbing, I just didn’t get that. I guess when you have that much money to throw around you can do that sort of thing. After that there was some pictures of the Queen, some pictures and papers from Da Vinci’s folios. I really like seeing those. Other than that it was just a lot of really extravagant rooms with huge tables, pictures and things like that. It was cool to see, but I wasn’t really drawn into any of it. We walked through the semi-private living spaces and it was more of the same. One thing I really did like was little garden right outside the big tower. That was really nice.

Once we finished up with the castle, we went to a pub to get some lunch. We had quite a bit of time before out train left, so we sat around talking and eating. It was a really good time. I got back and rested for a while before I went out with Sam to a couple of Pubs. That was a good time. I came back and watched a movie before I went to bed.

I’m going to go for a run now, so I’ll finish this up when I get back. We’re going to watch the Superbowl here tonight. That’s going to be a great time.