March 11th

March 7th

I got up for my run today and I was feeling much better. I was still wasn’t feeling a hundred percent, but I really wanted to get out and run. That turned out to be a really good idea actually. That seemed to clear me up right away and I was feeling better the entire day.

The first class today, Ethno, was a lot of fun. We spent about twenty minutes in class finishing up our talk on the Kray twins then we took the Tube to see their old stomping grounds. That was pretty interesting. The East end is a very different place from where I live. First off, it was hit really hard by the Blitz during World War One, so the architecture is very broken up in the sense that is doesn’t have the consistency that my neighbourhood does. There are also a lot of empty spaces where they just never rebuilt and turned into parks. While this is the seedier side of London by a lot of accounts, it really wasn’t that bad. I guess when I think of a high crime area in the States, I think of a nasty intercity place where you just don’t go. Here, there where families walking around and while you could definitely see some of the bad apples, if you will, I wouldn’t mind living there. We also walked by Gilbert and George’s house. There artists that I’m guessing Hanna may have heard of. They have a big exhibit up in the Tate Modern right now. They lived in a group of flats that was worth around million pounds each, right in the middle of this neighbourhood. That is what I really found interesting about this place. There are no stark divisions like you see in the US. Here, the socio-economic status of people just sort of blend together without and really sharp contrasts. At the very end of the tour we stopped at Spitalfield’s Market. It’s a covered market that sells all sorts of cool stuff. I picked up a shirt as we were walking around, King of Rice. I thought it was funny at least.

I got back to the Foundation House about ten minutes before my next class was supposed to start, so I didn’t get a chance to eat. We talked about the plays we had seen and what they meant. I did get a new understanding about the War Next Door, but it really didn’t make me want to like the play any better. If anything, it just sort of turned it into an interesting experiment, but a bad play. We then all tried our hand at writing a scene. The prof gave us three lines that had to be incorporated into as a starting point. It was easier than I thought it would be, but it proved to me once again I really shouldn’t be a creative writer.

After class I came home and made4 myself some dinner. The Patriot was on and a bunch of people were up watching that. I had some the popcorn that was brought out for me, which was really good.

March 8th

I got up for another run this morning and I still feel a lot better. The back of my throat is still a little dry so I’ve been coughing a bit, but I feel fine. Work today was pretty average. I spent almost the entire day trying to get the reader all finished up. I had a bunch of little things left to do like finish up the Index and redo all the page numberings. Nothing really big was left, just a lot of the finishing up stuff. I almost managed to finish it up and I thought only had an hour or so left of stuff to do and I would be done.

After work today was a great time. A group of us were going to see The Lion King on stage. People had gone to pick up ticket while I was at work and they picked up some pretty good seats. I and one other person had seen it and we both recommended that we get seats on the floor because of all the cool costumes and the parade at the beginning of the show. We ended up in the second and third rows. Before the play started though, I had some time to wander. I got off the tube at Covenant Garden and just starting wandering around. I hadn’t seen much of that area so I thought it would be cool to explore. Its supposed to be this cool shopping area, so I thought I might see some interesting things. I was somewhat disappointed. All the shops seem to cater to the yuppie with to much time and money on his or her hands. Maybe if I would have come back on the weekend it would have been better, but there really wasn’t anything I couldn’t see there that I couldn’t find in a mall back home. That and it was really marked up too. I grabbed a bite to eat a couple of blocks away from the actual market then walked in. When I was walking around I saw a little patisserie type place that I though looked good, so I stopped in. It was someone what expensive, but it looked good so I thought why not. My first sign of trouble should have been when the women behind the counter started second guessing my order. The food was pretty lame too. I ended up walking around the area until I found the theatre, but I still had about half and hour before the rest of the group would show up. The theatre was right next to the Thames, so I walked across a bridge and just looked at the city. London is a very pretty city at night. The lights come on and everything seems very nice. Part of that is because you can’t see how dirty it is, but its still nice.

The play itself was amazing. We were within ten feet of the stage and the actors were so close. It was especially great with all the costumes and set pieces there because we could see them so well. We paid quite a bit for the tickets, but it was well worth it. Everyone there seemed to really enjoy it too so that was plus. Once I got back from there, I pretty much just crashed.

March 9th

I got up and ran again today and I’m still felling better. Throat’s still a little raspy, but its not a big deal. Work today was interesting. The stuff with the reader that I thought would take an hour or so to do ended up taking me the entire morning. What happened was that as I started adding elements into the final draft, page number started to change. That meant I had to go through the entire index that I had made and change every single entry. That happened twice. Once there was no way I could get around it since it happened because I was actually adding the index itself and it happened another time when I was finishing up the directory. I had added a few articles that weren’t in the original copy I had and when I added those, it upped the number of pages. Oh well. The rest of the day I helped Damien get some mailings out. There is a world wide conference of some kind, I can’t remember what, and on its agenda is the banning of a pesticide called endosulfide. Pretty nasty stuff. So Damien wanted to get out some recently published literature to the people that would be voting on it. So we stuffed envelopes and got all the mail franked and sent off. We have some more to do next week for members of other PAN groups and NGO’s, but those aren’t real time sensitive so they can wait. After that I started looking up some companies for the database and spent the rest of the day doing that.

It took me a long time to get home tonight and I really don’t know why. The Tube ride just took forever. When I got home, I just sort of settled in for the night. I really didn’t feel like going out so I made some tea and just sat around and watched some TV. I can’t say I really did much at all that night.

March 10th

Today we had to be up and on a bus at 8 in the morning. We were heading to Stonehenge and Bath. Stonehenge was an interesting place. The first thing you notice about it however is that its right off the A366, a big road leading out of London. That kind of gives it a tourist trap type fell to be honest, but apparently there is a big project underway to build a tunnel to hide the road and really isolate the spot from view. It really is a quite impressive place to see when you walk around it. The stones are just absolutely massive and some were transported from 200 hundred miles away. Its just nuts. They were even dragged most of the way. The country around it very pretty too. Its nothing but rolling, green hills. Its just a wonderful place.

From there we headed to Bath, famous for its hot springs. There has been a settlement in this area for over two thousand years. The things we came to see was the remains of the posh Roman baths that once stood there. They’re now about 16 feet underground because of all the building and the dirt that haw built up over the last two thousand years or so. They were pretty cool. The most amazing part of all this was that all the plumbing still worked. It had to be cleaned of silt and debris that had built up over the years, but once hat was done it still worked perfectly. I don’t think we’ll be saying that about many of our accomplishments. That was all pretty cool. There were also some frescos left that were pretty nice to look at as well. I even ventured out and tried some of this mystical water. The water from this spring was thought to have healing powers, which is why the population here has persisted. The water was supposed to be really nasty though, foul smelling and having a very peculiar taste. I was kind of disappointed. It tasted just like well water, or really hard water. It was weird that it was hot, but if it had been room temperature it would have been fine. From there we moved on to the Assembly rooms. There were used by the upper class in the city as a place to meet and socialize. There was a ball room, card room and a tea room. There was also a dress room downstairs that I decided to skip. The place was nice, mostly because the architecture was much simpler than the Victorian places that we had visited before. I liked that. I did a quick walk through, then spent the rest of the time colouring finger puppets with a group from the trip, because there really wasn’t much to see there.

We took a long bus ride home, somewhere around four hours I think. The traffic was really bad, which made it even worse. I got some reading I had wanted to do though, so that was nice. When I got back I made some dinner, and then went out to a pub with some people. It was a place called the Seven Stars and it was really nice. It was a small place with nice wooden panelling and just a great little atmosphere. They even had pub cats that were wandering around. That was nifty.

I headed home after that with the intention of going to bed, but Minority Report was on and that drew my attention in. I got stuck watching that then headed to bed.