This is the first morning I've gotten to sleep in since arriving in London. Let me just say that it is ten thousand times better than sleeping in anywhere else, because the grey skies and tiny, whimpering cars didn't wake me once.
Yesterday was my second day of classes: British Media & Society and Film Adaptations. Our professor for Society is hilarious. He is the typical goofy, suspender-wearing dad (except here they call suspenders "braces," with a full head of long, flowing, salt-and-pepper colored hair. Oh, and he is so skinny that two of him could fit in his trousers, and the waist would still button.
After two hours of lecture, he took us to the British Museum to show us the artifacts behind the history of the Aztecs, Plains Indians, Romans and Mesopotamians. Somehow, he managed to tie all of that into British society in the last two hours of class.
Film Adaptions was a little more hands-on than the museum trip. (By the way, we have outings for almost every 4-hour class, so we're constantly seeing new places and people.) Our professor showed us clips from Little Miss Sunshine (supposedly the best beginning to a film ever), Great Expectations (not the Ethan Hawke/Gwyneth Paltrow version...boo), Hamlet (ffffuuuuuu...) and some other movies, then he took us to a tour guide in Bank via the tube. The tour guide is an actor, .k.a. he has been an extra in lots of movies and likes to walk around feeling famous, and he's friendly and loud as hell. He took us all over the City of London, showing us places that have been used as film sets. Most notably were the buildings that were shown in Harry Potter and Bridget Jones' Diary. (Mom, it was so cool. You would have flipped out. I did. Several times.) We walked by scenes from The Theory of Flight, The Heart of Me, East is East, The Avengers, Mamma Mia, Hackers, Match Point, Basic Instinct 2, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (<3 Heath Ledger), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, About a Boy, 101 Dalmations, Young Americans, Mission Impossible, and about 50 other movies. All the Harry Potter geeks on this trip had a ball taking pictures in front of the leaky closet thingy, the hairy guy's house and a bunch of other spots that they recognized instantly from watching the movies 28 too many times.
As far as my own nerdiness goes, (and this is specifically for your pleasure, Mom), we walked parallel to the bridge that Bridget walks across, smiling with her hair blowing in the wind, right after she sleeps with Danial Cleaver for the first time. We also saw her flat in the movie (not as cute in real life), the restaurant that Daniel and Mark Darcy fight in when they crash through the window. Aw, and the shop that Mark goes to at the end to buy her a new diary. We stood where she stands in her underwear, kissing him in the snow! I took on the job of reenacting every character's lines from every scene whose sets we visited. "It's a fight! A real fight!" And, "Mark, I didn't mean it." "I know, I was just buying you a new one." You would've been proud.
School ended at 6pm. Tessa, Rob and I walked across the Tower Bridge for the first time on our way to dinner at an extremely over-priced Indian restaurant. I'm not going to eat out again for weeks. It was delicious, though, and we didn't get food poisoning! After dinner we walked to a really pretty pub that was right on the Thames River. We got beers, sat on the stone wall above the water, and watched the sun set. We had the "encounter" (inside joke) of Tessa trying to convince us that the Tower Bridge was, in fact, the Tower of London. When Rob and I doubted her, she got furious that we didn't believe her since she'd been to London five times before AND had toured the Tower Bridge. In the end, we were right. Aaaand boom goes the dynamite. It's OK, though, because she later argued with us that her way of getting home in the tube was faster than the way we'd been taking, so she raced us home. She won.
Today is my first free day, at least until our meeting tonight at 6-something. I'm catching up on my online class for JMU, buying a camera battery charger, and going for a run around Russell Square Park if it ever stops raining, which is highly unlikely. Also, my boss at Proud Camden called me today and wants me to start work tomorrow at 9:30.
There have been a lot of sights here that, by just looking at them, have changed how I felt about something or another.
The museum's Roman exhibit as a whole was overwhelming. From the detailed sculptures of men and women physically leaning on each other to the stories of warfare and daily life carved, scene by scene, into the stone walls of buildings and homes, first-handedly seeing pieces of work like those felt like an honor.
Here's one of the scenes: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/galleries/ancient_greece_and_rome/rooms_83-84_roman_sculpture.aspx
This is a photo I took of our view from the pub with Rob's camera as we watched the sunset last night: http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs658.snc3/32501_399125727814_793197814_4254732_6266024_n.jpg
And another photo I took of the bridge one the sun had gone down: http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs618.snc3/32501_399125757814_793197814_4254735_165889_n.jpg
I hope you all at home have more sunshine and warmer weather than we have here. As much as it feels like I'm a different world here, I am still conscious of the fact that your lives, too, are continuing. Keep me updated!
"Lead" by Mary Oliver
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
Why I Don't Write Autobiographical Poems
ReplyDeleteby Mary Wallach
Vengeance doesn't work in a poem, nor do digs at anatomical parts
or mean-spirited, see-what-I-mean, anecdotal jibes. For example
you write an epic tirade against "Bob." Who is Bob to me, the reader?
The fact that he lied, cheated, was lousy in bed, that doesn't make Bob
special, nor does your problem with Bob make me feel different about my life.
However, speak to me of Bob's kitchen, of its perfect, painted walls
of deep and shiny teal with high-gloss white moldings, (he was into that
Southwestern look), of the way Bob's toast had to be cooked evenly on
both sides, and of Bob, himself, draped, regally, in a raggedy old kimono,
dragging on a filthy, filterless cigarette, his hand as graceful as a gazelle in
slow-motion, the nervousness suspended, of how each word he spoke was
always articulated as neatly, separately, yet as packed with juice as a
champagne grape – and I can begin to feel more impassioned. And when,
after several years of cohabitation, he drops you as carelessly as he flicks
an ash, you allow me to be devastated.
yo mama.