Plays, Classes, Pub Crawl, New Friends, ART

Second week of classes and things are already starting to heat up! Yesterday I handed in my first written assignment (alright, so it was only one page long..) for my black culture course. I wrote it on the shift from race-consciousness to class-consciousness in 18th century Britain. As it was so short, I didn't have time to delve into the topic, but basically it interested me that working class white London actually supported runaway slaves instead of conforming to the aristocratic slaveholders' ideas and practices.

Monday night I went to see a play called "Arcadia", which was written by Tom Stoppard and is about the events that unfold in the same house, but at different times. One story is set in the 1800s and the other is set in 2009. Basically, it was a comment/satire on academia and on the nature of knowledge. Very funny, but it went on a bit too long for my tastes. Tonight, I'm going to see Shakespeare's "As You Like It" at the Globe Theatre!

So, after a long day of classes yesterday, me and some cool girls from Oberlin decided to get dinner and go out for drinks, as none of us have class on Wednesday. We went to this cool pub and I ordered British beef lasagne which was SO good, and went perfectly with my pint of Fuller's, which is a London ale that's hand-pumped. After dinner, we strolled down the street to "The College Arms", a student-y bar, where I tried Aspall's cider. So good! It was nice to hang out with some different people, and these girls are definitely a lot more my type than some of the other people on the program. It reminded me of hanging out with friends from Grinnell.

Today, I woke up and did the usual roll-out-of-bed-and-down-the-street-to-Starbucks routine, read some magazines and then decided to head to the National Gallery to get a start on my Renaissance art journal. For the class, 50% of our grade is determined by a journal we craft that is based on one piece of art from the period. I chose "The Arnolfini Portrait" by Jan van Eyck, so I spent the afternoon looking terribly like an art student, taking notes and looking at the painting. Afterwards, I went and saw Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", and "A Wheatfield, with Cypresses", as well as some Seurat and Monet. Lovely, lovely afternoon. Afterwards, I people-watched for a bit in (where else?) Trafalgar Square.