This is how we define 'a busy week' here

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My week both started and ended on Queen Street in Cardiff, although last Saturday there wasnt a gigantic Christmas tree and ropes of glistening icicle lights lighting up the entire city. Some other minor differences - last Saturday I was dressed as a soldier pretending to beat monks with sticks (some incriminating photos might soon become available of when the police pulled me aside and took my stick away) as part of the Amnesty international street theater against the violence in Burma, and this Saturday I just went shopping with my roommate. I had my third chance encounter with a famous person while we were waiting for the bus into Llantwit, when the Nobel Peace Prize winner who had given us the Friday Lecture the night before was just leaving campus and offered us a lift. He really deserved the prize too, because only a person who really is looking out for the overall well-being of humanity will give eight students a lift (along with his luggage, and his daughter who rode in the boot) in his tiny Toyota. As a slightly more important achievement, he also helped to completely ban the use of land mines. In two months, I've borrowed jam from a Tibetan Lama, hitchhiked with the 1997 Nobel Peace prize winner, and bumped into the girl who plays Kaitlyn on The OC in the sale section of Urban Outfitters; aside from the possibility that Bill Murray came to my parents' inn while I was a fetus, I'd never had random encounters with famous people before. However, my music teacher may make it a daily possibility; after the Thursday concert, when I sang the Queen Of The Night aria after stressing out about the three high Fs (a half-step below the highest note ever written in opera) and the four measure triplet run at the end, he went and called his contacts from the Welsh Opera about a possible internship. I'm still deciding what my summer project is going to be - the Malaysia project sounds fantastic but expensive, the Egypt-Israel project meeting is tonight, and I still need to go home and earn some money for my thrift shopping habit at some point - and being a stagehand for the Welsh Opera Company might maybe possibly perhaps hopefully join the list. Aside from maybe opening up an entirely new career path for me, the Queen of the night aria also parlays itself into lots of free food - I sing the triplets in the dayroom, I get some of Frosso's real Greek baklava, I hit a high F for Akshat and get some stropwaffels. My other song, the lovely dramatic French cabaret piece that I waould have sung for the Dutch prince if I hadn't been coughing up a lung, even made the French people think I was French, which is really flattering. Since I've sort of 'proved myself' as it were, they all speak French to me now, and apparently I actually speak with a Quebecois accent, so Montreal may have worked its slangy and nasal magic. It's the best possible way, really, to keep up my French, which surprisingly helps a lot with Spanish too. I've heard so many horror stories about my Spanish class from the second years that I had debated switching out, but it's my favorite class and I got a 6 plus on my last test so I'm going to stick with it and put in a good half hour of spanish study every day (at least that's the plan - it's surprisingly easy to get instantly distracted /demotivated here. No one uses the actual study time they give us for studying). I've done really well in all my classes over the past week; I got 7s in both my math and physics tests (the two classes with which I've got an ongoing love-hate relationship) and my English essay, which is justified as it took me four hours and half a bottle of TippEx to write (translation: TippEx= WiteOut. Everyone who doesn't have a laptop is an absolute slave to the brand). I actually justified eating as much as I did at the American Thanksgiving dinner on Friday and the Emma meal (there's five of us, making it just about the most common girl's name in the school) last night as a prize for getting the high Fs and the good grades. The stuffing that Andrea and I made for Thanksgiving was delicious if you closed your eyes; although people actually had to ask us what it was, the general consensus was "Oh my god! It tastes SO much better than it looks!" Since we are officially the least bonded national group besides the Brits, it was fun to have a night of talking loudly, eating fast, interrupting each other constantly and pronouncing 'herb' the right way, without the h. It was yet another time when I realized just how far away I am from home. Walking with my brimming Primark bag down the twinkling streets of Cardiff reminded me curiously of Church Street in Burlington, and I thought of just how weird it's going to be to be back home in 1 1/2 weeks. It'll be nice to go back, but I just don't want my entire first term to be over yet. I've been here long enough now that it really feels like home, and it's just going to be so odd to go back to what was my home until the middle of September. With all this inescapable Christmas spirit (even the charity shop is selling teddy bears with santa hats on), I'm looking forward to the Christmas tree in my own living room as opposed to the paltry garlands in our dayroom. I wonder what influential humanitarian I'll accidentally wind up sitting next to on the plane home?

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