“OhMiGod You Guys!”

It’s been an extremely long week but I’m happy to say that I’m done till next Tuesday. And next week actually has a lot of really exciting things happening but more on that later. Since I haven’t written since Sunday, I figure I should fill you in on the rest of my week.

After a downhearted and slightly depressing day of listening to the names of 9/11 victims on Sunday, Monday was considerably better. I spent most of the day working but had a “brief” break to do my weekly Skype Bible study with Steven. I put brief in quotation marks because we ended up talking for two and a half hours and using up the majority of my bandwidth for the week which doesn’t get reset until Saturday. So I apologize to the friends and family who have wanted to talk this week. It might be easiest to set up times to talk to me and I can go to a pub with free wifi and actually have a conversation with you face to face. I’ll be working on it. But later Monday night I dipped into my bank account for the first time this trip and booked my ticket to Iceland for fall break. It should be a really amazing trip. We’ll get to see the Northern Lights, relax in the Blue Lagoon, and go horseback riding on solid lava. It’ll be nice to have some time to relax and not worry about school.

Tuesday my Performing Culture class went to Brick Lane for a field trip. It was mostly irrelevant and I don’t really know why we went but it was interesting to walk around. We had lunch in the last-standing Jewish bagel shop (If you don’t know the story of Brick Lane, in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s it was an entirely Jewish immigrant community but has since become almost entirely Bengali immigrants now.) It went from bagel shops and synagogues to curry restaurants and mosques, leaving only two Jewish places left, one of which was the bagel shop we stopped at. It was REALLY good. I had a crispy bacon bagel (they don’t keep kosher any more) and it was definitely one of my favorite things I’ve tried so far. Come to think of it, most of my favorites here involve bacon. Yum. But after lunch it was time to head back    We saw Top Girls and to be honest, I couldn’t tell you what it was about. It was thoroughly confusing and honestly, I left with a headache. Don’t get me wrong, the acting was amazing but it jumped around in time and was generally very vague and abstract. Kind of like this description. What’s bad is that I have to write a review on it by Tuesday and I have no idea what happened. Oh well. I guess that’s what Wikipedia is for!

Wednesday was a normal work day but it was followed up with a great girl’s night out with Bree to see Legally Blonde the Musical. We got front row tickets which were amazing except that we couldn’t see the dogs when they crossed the stage. But it was an absolutely amazing show! It was especially fun for me because I’d seen it already and I got to pick up on all the changes they made to make it funnier for the British audience. Even though it’s definitely an American show, they turned a lot of the American pop culture references into more UK friendly references and since I pretty much had the show memorized, I noticed all the little details. It was also really nice to be able to see all the actors up close. I’m already in love with the character of Emit Forest so you can imagine how happy I was to see that he was basically a brunette Steven. He even had Steven’s blue eyes and bad dancing skills. It was AWESOME.

Today was less awesome but still good. We had a painfully boring Music, Culture and Identity class in which at one point he literally said “don’t worry about the music, it’s just there.” It’s going to be an incredibly long semester. But afterwards we had British Life and Culture with Quintessential British Professor. We went on a walk of the Westminster area and learned some really interesting things not only about London’s past but about London’s future as well. I’m kind of super sad that I’m one program early for being here during the 2012 Summer Olympics. The group that does the London semester next year will not only be around the Games, they’ll get all the updated tubes. Right now all the lines close every weekend starting on Thursdays for updates and repairs, making it incredibly difficult to get anywhere on time. But good for them.

Tomorrow we’re headed out to a market and possibly the Tower of London. And I don’t think there’s much going on this weekend but Monday starts an extremely fun week. Monday is the Harry Potter walking tour around London and on Thursday we leave for Scotland till Sunday night. And apparently they’ve got a ton of really awesome things planned for us while we’re there so it should be good times.

Everyone here is sick with a horrible cough/flu epidemic and I’m hoping and praying not to catch it. Especially since the last time I had a cough, I stopped breathing. I’ve been drinking two glasses of orange juice a day and getting lots of sleep so hopefully I’ll outlast whatever this stupid bug is.

It sounds like we’re planning a short trip to Ireland after Iceland which would be really fun, I just don’t know how much I want to spend. But I definitely want to visit Ireland before I leave, even if it’s just for a weekend. We’ll see how that goes. It’s been a long day and we’re watching X-MEN: The Last Stand so I think I’ll leave you with that. Hope everyone’s doing well!