Papers

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I spent going around London doing things so I could complete a bunch of the aforementioned papers. For my English Life and Culture class, I have to write 12 short papers out of a possible 20 or so topics the professor has set for us. Some of them (watching English TV) were very easy. Others (seeing three plays: in Cambridge, out of Cambridge, Shakespeare; punting to Grantchester, reading a famous English novel and writing a report) took more work. Over the course of three days I saw two historical landmarks and ate at two foreign restaurants, bringing my totals up to the necessary three in each of those categories.

I saw the Cutty Sark, which is an old tea clipper that has been preserved and is on display near Greenwich. We also went to the Queen Elizabeth Hunting Lodge, which was interesting, though in the middle of nowhere. The people working there were volunteers, and I found the one that latched on to us to be very irritating as he kept referring to me indirectly while speaking to Tristan saying things like "your young lady won't find anything interesting here". We escaped him as fast as possible because I was not a happy little camper.

We had lunch in a Turkish restaurant, which I loved. Turkish food is generally quite plain, and mostly consists of a lot of meat with small piles of rice, shredded carrot, and lettuce. I had something called "Chicken Gallipoli" which was two chicken breasts marinaded in cold milk, garlic, and black pepper, then grilled. Tristan had some sort of mixed meat platter thing where he got little bits of chicken and two types of lamb. I tried lamb, it is revolting. We also "ate" at a French restaurant. The food was not all that great. (In case you were wondering, my third type of foreign cuisine was Indian. I despise curry because of its sliminess factor, but tried Chicken Tikka, which is spicy but fairly dry, and found it to be good enough to eat. The restaurant we went to also did some awesome garlic fried rice. Can anybody believe I'm eating all this bizarre stuff? I sure can't...)

Went back to Cambridge, and on Wednesday I had to cook common meal for not only all the people in the house, but all the people visiting us from back home because it was VU spring break. It was a nightmare, even though all we did was a sandwich buffet thing. I'm not sure I want to relive it enough to talk about it. I have to cook again next week, which is when we're all just back from break.

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