Again, I have fallen short in the blogging category over the past week or so.... more like "or so".... I apologize. I'll really try to get better at keeping up with it.
In other news, I have a job! I will be interning at MSN UK News and I start Monday! I'm super excited about that and I'll keep you posted. The building is only a few tube stops away and is really slick, sophisticated and modern... everything you'd expect from a Microsoft establishment... pretty neat. If you want to see it from above, visit the site below. It's the big one that looks like a floppy piece of steel and glass pie.... :
http://maps.live.com/?v=2&sp=Point.skgh3ygznffr_100%20Victoria%20St%2C%20London%20SW1E%205%2C%20United%20Kingdom___&encType=1
My flatmates all got hired at great places too, and, one of them, Maneeza, is also working at MSN with me, but in a different department. So that will be cool to have a buddy to go to work with each day :)
Since I last posted I've been going to class, going to interview for my internship, waiting to see if I got it, chilling with my flatmates, and doing some generally excellent galavanting around London and the countryside seeing the sights. Some activities included seeing A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe theatre on the Thames, Stonehenge, Bath, Warwick Castle, and Stratford-Upon-Avon, or as I like to refer to it, Shakespeareland. Much like Disney World, but with more pubs, and more rain, and more tourist traps. No, I'm not lying on that last one. It was mildly disappointing, but at least I can check it off the life list of things to see. I also sampled my first little half pint of Guinness in the "oldest pub in town" while it was pouring down rain there.... I liken it to drinking a loaf of bread, but I enjoyed it. But more about S-U-A to the von later. I'll have Facebook albums up of those other places soon, and brief descriptions of what I did at each one a bit farther down the post.
Yesterday was, by far, the most tantalizing of all of our days for me. We had a tour of Parliament (absolutely incredible) in the morning and then went to tour the BBC in the afternoon..... politics and journalism in one day? Did I enjoy myself? Um, YES. We got all business-casual-ed up and took the tube to Westminster at the lovely hour of 7:45 am and were sitting in the Liverpool Room of the Parliament building (er, more like castle/cathedral) at around 8:30, after a brief walk and rousing security frisk.
In the Liverpool Room, Conservative Minister of Parliament (MP, like a Representative in the House back home) Graham Brady gave us a lengthy, but fascinating, introduction to Parliament and shared some insight on the current British political landscape and the history of British parliamentary politics over the past half century or so..... from his point of view ;)
We were then whisked away back to the Great Hall where Winston Churchill and many famous others have lain in state and where Henry VIII played tennis with his family (they found the leather tennis balls in the rafters hundreds of years later!). We met up with a guide who would be our, well, guide, around the place for the rest of the afternoon. He showed us the House of Commons, where elected members of Parliament meet, and the House of Lords, where appointed/hereditary members of Parliament meet. The two groups have huge contempt for each other reinforced by policies like calling the House of Lords "The Other Place" when you're in the House of Commons, and vice versa. Like the House of Representative chambers in the US, the chambers for Parliament look bigger on T.V. than they actually are, but unlike those in the US, the MPs vote by hand, in person, the old fashioned way, standing in line, on paper. I think that's awesome. That being said, the amount of gold (22 carat) in the House of Lords where the Queen sits (once a year) is similar to the amount of sweat on Kurt Cobain in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video.... so there's lots of it. Insane amounts.... but it's shiny, and pretty and does not smell like Teen Spirit... more like old room / tourist place / dust... you know the smell... moving on....
Bottom line: The Parliament building is an old palace and the amount of glitz and political theatre and men in tights and wigs and rules like "tourists or non-Lords cannot sit down in the House of Lords" make our political system and buildings (even in D.C.) look downright homely and casual. But, hey, I guess that was the point of our independence, eh? I wish I could illustrate this point with pictures, but, of course, photography was forbidden. So, please see the photo album I made of my few pictures from the tour on Facebook....... which will be up soon. Really.
After eating a Cornish pasty in the cafe in the bottom of Parliament, and keeping a "House of Commons" paper napkin as a souvenir (classy, I know), we went out into the London sunshine and headed to the long tube ride out to the BBC, or as I like to think of it, a Mecca of high quality journalism. We were shown around the huge place, saw the newsroom, a massive studio the size of a high school gym, the set of the children's show "Blue Peter," and a dressing room that Coldplay supposedly used. Very cool, very interesting, learned that 8,000 people work there. Took some dorky pictures there, almost bought a pen, end of story.
Now back to my previous adventures. These will be brief summaries as it is almost 1 am.... if you want more detail ask me!
Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe on the Thames: Great play done by passionate actors in an incredible setting. We were the groundlings, so we stood the entire time, but it was worth it. I've seen this play twice and performed it once and this was, by far, the most excellent performance. Definitely check out the Globe if you can if you ever make it to London.
Stonehenge: Big circle of stones in an empty field. Beautiful English countryside, mystical origins, expensive concessions, surrounded by sheep and plagued by june bugs. Very neat, but only would visit once... check out the pictures on the FB.
Bath: What a neat city! Everything there is made from a honey-colored stone and the city was the height of fashion and culture in the Victorian era and the Roman one! I saw the Roman baths, touched the "toxic" and "slightly radioactive" water that I wasn't supposed to (I mean, really, how could I resist...) and drank some from the spring (mildly purified I'm sure) for the price of 50p. The intricacy of the Roman network of pipes and bath rooms was amazing and fascinating, and the Bath Abbey nearby was absolutely the most incredible church (if I could even call it that) I have ever been inside.... though I haven't been to Westminster Abbey yet..... or the inside of St. Pauls.... I wish I could have spent some more time in Bath, and maybe eat there every day! My lunch, including a Cornish pasty, can of Diet Coke, and a blondie-like "flapjack bar" was only 3 pounds. That's less than half what my lunch would cost in London... more like a third...
Warwick Castle: A really really awesome castle where a few scenes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail were filmed, and one of England's best preserved. An entire section of the castle was an exhibit called "A Royal Weekend Party" depicting a gathering of important and royal figures using wax models from Madam Tussaud's. It was fascinating. Also interesting was the Warwick Ghosts Alive "exhibit" I decided to go see...... I should have known better. I was scared shite-less. It was the depiction of a lord that used to own the tower and his murder, by stabbing, reenacted. It was dark, smoky, and the actors got centimeters from my face. I'm still scared actually. It's dark now and I don't even like writing about it. So I'll stop. The castle was cool though, don't get me wrong. Again, pics on Facebook soon of the castle... not the ghost thing. EWWWWWWW. Never again. Like trying olives again after a 17 year hiatus earlier this year, trying a haunted something-or-other again just to see if I'd like it was a bad idea. Oh well.
And finally, back to Shakespeareland. After seeing Warwick in the morning, we traveled to Shakespeareland in the afternoon where we saw Will's birthplace, his wife's, Anne Hathaway, digs a short distance off, and saw Taming of the Shrew at the Courtyard Theatre performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the evening... and got home at 1 am. The birthplace and Anne Hathaway's cottage were fairly what you'd expect... I wasn't too impressed, but they were neat to see nonetheless. The play in the evening was pretty interesting.... confusingly interpreted/presented by the RSC though. The whole play had changing scenes and costumes from traditional Shakespearean garb to modern clothing and various states in-between.... very hard to follow.... but, on the upside, the actress that plays the Indian love interest in The Darjeeling Limited, Amara Karan (yes I looked it up), played Bianca... and came down the stairs and asked us to let her by before the show! Brush with famous person.... cool beans. I have to owe it to Maneeza on that one who, when Amara hopped over the shoulder of one of my friends said, "Oh my god, I think that's the girl from The Darjeeling Limited!" after having seen her for probably 1/16th of a second. Mad props yo.
Well, it's officially 2 am here and I'm signing off.... going to shop on Oxford Street or maybe up in Camden or somewhere tomorrow... after the Science Museum today and a yummy dinner at nearby quick neo-Portuguese eatery Nando's (free refills and ICE for soft drinks = unheard of and AWESOME), I'm calling it a lazy day.
Miss you all! Lots of love to the fam and the friends!
God Save the Queen! Or at least the architect of the MSN building and his/her vision of creating a piece-of-pie building... must have been hungry...... success I'd say! Cheers :)
No comments:
Post a Comment