Old Friends, My Museum, and More Stars!

Greetings again from across the pond! I hope everyone voted, is in good health, and good spirits as well, because it’s a pretty grey day in London, but it’s still an awesome place to be!

Here’s the quick update on the most recent events of my life over the past few days, just to keep everyone on their toes. On Thursday, Oct. 30th, our flat hosted one of my great friends from back in middle school, Jason Lericos. He’s currently studying in Sussex which is about 45 minutes south of London by train, and he was coming up for the weekend to visit with his program, and decided to pop in a night early for another chance to catch up and hang out. It was great seeing an old friend again, and sharing some more funny stories, having him meet my flat mates, and showing him around London a bit more.

Friday was of course Halloween, which isn’t hugely celebrated in the UK, but there are always people interested in dressing up though, so during the day I caught up on my normal everyday things like laundry and such, but I also took Jason to Westminster Abbey (we went inside, which is really gorgeous, and has a lot of famous people buried there – Mary Queen of Scots, Oliver Cromwell…etc) but we also had some time to walk along the Thames and we saw tons of living statues and street performers that were all dancing around, acting about, juggling things, all for the little kids that happened to be dressed up for Halloween, so that was fun as well.

Friday night I called it early actually, because I was originally supposed to go to with one of my co-workers to a huge Halloween bash that had live bands playing, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. I’ve also never been a hardcore Halloween celebrator, so I didn’t feel like I missed out on a ton or anything though, besides, I needed sleep.

Saturday morning brought on the first of November, and it was chilly here for sure. By the way, I must thank my grandmother for the wonderful scarf that she gave me before I came over here, because, although I’m not normally a typical scarf kinda guy, I’ve sure adopted the metropolitan look recently and man is it warm! I frequently get lots of compliments on its quality and attractive nature, so that’s always a plus, so once again, Gram Star…thanks a lot! Needless to say, Saturday had pretty dull weather, it rained most of the day and was rather gross, so I didn’t get really any cultural excursions in or anything, but I did go get a pair of jeans, since I ripped a hole in my other ones that I wore almost daily, so I guess that was rather exciting.

Sunday brought better weather, we hung out for part of the morning with some Elon friends who came from Paris to visit us for the weekend, and then I decided that in addition to errands, I’d get some culture out of my Sunday afternoon, so I went to the Tate Modern (naturally, because it’s my name), which is the Modern Art Gallery in London, and spent some time on my own checking out the newest contemporary art. I must say, I don’t really get any of it, and frankly, some of it confuses me, but I’m sure it all took a great deal of time to do, so I guess I can respect that for sure…needless to say, I feel as though I may be able to be a contemporary artist if all of my other career endeavours fall through and I buy some finger paint.

Anyhow, now is the boring part of my blog because on Monday morning I woke up sick. I didn’t end up going to work for the first time this semester, and I slept quite a lot, ate soup, and took lots of meds for my cold that I got. I’m lucky to have survived this long though to be honest, because most of the people in the office I work in, have been sick sometime over the last month, so I guess I caught the tail end of that. Oh well.

Needless to say, Monday night I went out with the Theater class to a production of WarHorse, which was originally a children’s novel (a rather dark one at that though) that was turned into a stage production. It’s a story about a horse (obviously) and the book is told through the perspective of this horse, named Joey, who eventually is sold to the War (WWI) and traded many times between the British, then captured by the Germans, then eventually finds the British again, and in the end, is reunited with his original owner, a young boy named Albert. It’s cute, not gonna lie. However, the play itself…took forever. It was something like 3ish hours long, and also had an almost like 30 minute interval, plus, they had technical difficulties as well in the middle of a scene, which was unfortunate and that set the play back a while too. It was very cool how they portrayed the story though, because they used giant, puppet horses, manned by 3 men each, of which two puppeteers were actually inside the horse…hard to actually picture, I know, but it was a unique way of portraying horse-like movements and such, so that was something I was impressed with.

Tuesday of course brought on class, and that wasn’t too shabby, and I also met a few of my flatmates at the local pub near school, to talk history with their history professor. That was very awesome, because I’m not taking a history course while I’m over here, so any opportunity to talk history is always something I look forward to. After that, I headed home to cook a quick pasta dinner and got ready again, because we had a second play to see this week last night in the West End.

Last night’s show was an adaptation of Chekov’s Ivanov which is the story about a depressed man named Ivanov (played by Kenneth Branagh – he’s the guy that played Lockhart in Harry Potter) who deals with a lot of gossiping neighbours, bad funds, and a dying wife, and is just kinda stuck in a giant conundrum. It’s actually a really really compelling show, I enjoyed it a lot, and it had a stellar cast too! It also featured Kevin McNally, who played Mr. Gibbs in Pirates of the Carribean (my friends got a picture with him, which is kinda cool too), and I really enjoyed the show all around. So it was an enjoyable evening.

Additionally, it was of course, election night, so most of my flatmates and other peers stayed up to the wee hours of the morning to watch all of the BBC’s election coverage of the Presidential Race. So despite the fact that the US election went until about 5AM in the morning UK-Time, most all of my friends survived the entire thing, just to see the final results. I must say, that I went to bed around 2:30 London Time, as I assumed (because all of my friends here are like political analysts) that Virginia would go Democrat for the first time in forever, and I was awake for Obama to win Ohio, which was also pretty monumental, so I went to bed after that.

Nevertheless, it’s a grey Wednesday in London town and I’m back at work at Xtreme Info. Feeling alright and still on the road to speedy recovery and looking forward to the weekend. I’m finishing up school work, still trying to do cultural things around London and the greater area, since I still need to complete those sort of things before the end of my adventures here, and I’m looking forward to my few trips that I have planned already for the month of November. Here’s the rundown of expeditions that will take me across the continent.

From Nov 14-16: I’ll be meeting my friend from Elon (Kat) in Athens, Greece
From Nov 28-30: I’ll be in Amsterdam, Netherlands for the weekend, reuniting with friends from Barcelona, and meeting new ones too I hope

I am also looking to plan a trip to Switzerland before I head back across the pond, and also extend my visit in Europe beyond the semester’s end as well.

I hope that you’ll email me updates and let me know what’s new in the US, aside from the presidency, because I’m kinda burnt out on all of that, but either way, I miss you all and can’t wait to see you soon enough…of course, after I tour more of the world  Cheers!! Bye!