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King's Cross I
Outside of King's Cross Station I guess it's time for me to bring up the main reason why I came to London this summer.... to take classes. I needed to take 8 units over the summer to guarantee that I will be indeed graduating come May 2009, and I wanted the chance to study abroad as part of my education, so this program seemed like a good fit. So far, it's a great fit!
I started my classes on Tuesday: Travel Writing with Professor Goldfarb and Reporting the Arts with Professor Sierz. Travel Writing is going to be a very "sense oriented" class, where we write with our feelings and emotions instead of writing hard news pieces. It's been a while since I've done any creative writing, so we'll see how that goes. Goldfarb stressed the importance of writing with our "I and eye," meaning we have to put ourselves into our pieces and use the things that we are personally seeing and experiencing. Our first assignment is a short essay on our first impressions of London. I'll post that in here when I complete it. Reporting the Arts is going to be way rad but very expensive and a lot of work. We get
King's Cross II
Confusion as masses of people exit the tube. assigned to see two pieces a week and we have to write a review about one of them. Sierz is a funny, laid back professor but he keeps us on our toes by firing out questions while he teaches and he expects us to answer right away (things like "Name a really good popular opera!" or "What are some of the government subsidized productions in London right now?"). We had a short assignment due a few days ago. We simply had to go about London and find a good arts story to write a brief about it. The exercise was less about writing and more about getting familiar with how to find out about arts events in London. Here is the brief that I wrote:
As if housing 650 exotic animals isn’t wild enough, the Port Lympne Wild Animal Park is about to throw another dangerous species into the mix.
The Zoo Thousand Music Festival launches this weekend at the Kent-based animal park, where more than 100 live musical acts are scheduled to perform. The park is holding the event on sight to raise funds for some of the United Kingdom’s leaders in wildlife conservation and environmentalism.
Festival attendees
King
The train station. Does it look kinda familiar? Maybe from a Harry Potter movie or something =)? can enjoy three days worth of popular bands, including The Hives and British Sea Power, while also contributing to reducing their individual carbon footprint. The fest will be mainly solar-powered, and all consumables will be recycled.
I saw a flier for this event when I was walking around Camden Town (more on that later) and did a bit more research on it when I got back to my flat. The animal park is really similar to the San Diego Wild Animal Park in that its a safari-style zoo. If you buy a ticket to the festival, you also get entry to the park for the day. It's held far, far away from the animal enclosures, so the noise won't disturb them or hurt their ears. It sounds like a blast, and if I wasn't already holding a ticket for another festival this weekend I'd totally go to this one instead. You know me and my love for animals =).
In between classes on Tuesday, I went over to Oxford Street with Hayley and Susan. Oxford Street is a really popular shopping neighborhood, kind of like Herald Square in New York or Union Square in San Francisco. We wanted
to go there for one reason only: Top Shop. This store is like H&M but bigger and better. When the three of us walked in, our mouths immediately dropped. Clothes upon clothes upon clothes jammed in every possible corner of the massive four-story shop. It was brand new shopping territory with styles I hadn't even seen in my wildest dreams. It took us a good hour and a half to get through two levels of the store, not including the shoes and other accessories. I tried on a good 15-20 items, most of them dresses. Women's fashion here is not nearly as casual as it is in the States. You don't see too many young women wearing jeans, and if they are you can tell they are high-fashion denim in super hot cuts and washes. High-waisted stuff is also really popular, so I tried on some high-waisted shorts with a cami tucked in. In the end, I didn't purchase anything because I kept doing the currency math in my head. Doubling prices is very upsetting. It took a lot of will power, but I was able to leave empty handed without having a melt down. Pardon my French, but if I was in Dante's Inferno that would definately be my circle of Hell - being trapped in a store with beautiful clothings and not being able to afford any of it.
After class, a bunch of girls and I head out to Leicester Square to go see a play we were assigned to see for Reporting the Arts. Unfortunately, we didn't make it very far. At King's Cross/St. Pancras station, everyone was ordered to evacuate the train and the tube station due to fire warnings. It was a little frightening, seeing as this tube stop is a major station to catch connecting lines. Everyone was fleeing the station in swarms and it was really chaotic. Outside was even worse, with all the people from the tube trying to grab cabs and pile on to the bus. Luckily we didn't buy tickets for the play before hand, because we couldn't even make it to the neighborhood. We trudged back home feeling very defeated.
One thing that I constantly have to be reminding myself of is that I am here to do schoolwork. I'm a terrible procrastinator as it is, and now that I'm in a foreign land I can tell it's gonna be even worse. Luckily the assignments are fun and require that I get out and do things as inspiration for my work. Hopefully it won't be that bad.
Speaking of which, I better start gathering my thoughts for my first impressions piece...
Cheers,
xo Leah
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lulu
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i love reading this journal, leah! if your reporting skills are anything like your journaling, your professors will no doubt be entertained and impressed : )