Costumes, elections and media moguls

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Hello everyone,

So it's been a while since the last post and that would be because not too much has been happening that's been news worthy and also because I've been quite busy trying to avoid writing essays (Hey, guess what I'm not doing right now!).

Halloween over here was quite a fun event. I, along with about half of my class went over to a friends house to celebrate. It was a good time and there were quite a few impressive costumes. The day after that I went to see Quantum of Solace with some friends and I would definitely recommend the movie. I also found out that Halloween is kinda a entire weekend long thing over here. I found it really strange to be walking down the middle of Buchanan Street at midnight and seeing people dressed up as Superman and the Joker (man were there a lot of Jokers) when it wasn't Halloween.

On Tuesday I went over to my friend Robin's flat to watch the election. I didn't manage to make it the entire night (the election wasn't called until around 4am here) but it was pretty much over once Pennsylvania was called for Obama. On that note there were quite a few celebrations going on over here once Obama won and all the Americans were super excited when Pennsylvania was called. For whatever reason almost all the Americans I'm friends with over here come from Philadelphia.

BBC coverage of the election was a little unorganized, which I found surprising, but did have a couple gems in their coverage. John Bolton, former UN ambassador to the UN under Bush and a horrible human being, freaked out at a BBC reporter who was asking a perfectly reasonable question. Gore Vidal showed up and I'm pretty sure he was drunk. Also David Dimbleby, crown jewel of the BBC, kept referring to New Hampshire as North Hampshire and I don;t think anyone ever corrected him. I also saw some of the coverage on Sky, but all I'll say about that is that they are owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News, so that shold tell you all you'll need to know.

Last night I had an informal seminar that was held at the house of Alan Clements and Kirsty Wark. He is the director of content for STV, the 2nd biggest tv station in Scotland, and she is the anchorwoman for Newsnight, which is the big news show on the BBC. I had no idea who these people were but the UKers in my class described them as the royal family of British media; kinda like if Katie Couric and Ted Coppel were married and had you over to their house. To make it even more surreal it was also his daughter's 18th birthday so there was another party going on along with ours and we were even invited in for cake at one point.

A note on his house, it was freaking huge! I'm the living room where we were hanging out was about 5 times the size of my room and I would say his ground floor was a little bigger than the size of my house. There were as far as I can tell 4 floors and I heard from one of my professors that thy even have a Jacuzzi. You have to keep in mind that land over here is a lot harder to come by and building tend to be really tiny when you compare them to an equivalently priced one in North America.

The actual seminar was given by a Green Peace PR guy and it was quite interesting to hear his perspective on advertising campaigns and lobbying government. It was an informal thing where he talked for about a half hour and then everyone just kinda mingled around. It was definitely a good chance to meet people and find out about possible jobs once we're done and network, though I hate that word.

Anyways I should really be writing an essay so that's all for now.

Cheers,
Nate

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Photos

Group shot
From left to right Me(John McCain), David, Hannah, Laura, Amy, Lucy, Simon and Donal

Halloween
Another Halloween shot. I ripped these off of facebook so the quality isn't that good.

Stay Puft Marshmellow
Probably my favorite costume was Kirsten's