Pub Quizzes and Afternoon Tea

I am so sad that my first three weeks in London are almost up! I received my timetable and reading list for my Shakespeare course today and though I'm extremely excited about starting that on Monday, I'm sad that all my new international friends are dispersing to all their home countries - we've had so many great discussions (in class and out) and fun nights out together. A few of the girls especially I've become quite close with, so hopefully I'll be able to visit them when I'm traveling in the time between when King's Summer School ends and UCL begins (Amsterdam and Vienna are now top of my list!). It's also going to be quite hard to switch from our fantastic classroom to a normal room - I'm completely spoiled with being able to see Tower Bridge and Big Ben for five hours of class each day. It turned out that this Multicultural London Literature course was pretty much the best course I could have asked for to start my time in London. We got to travel around the city to places I probably never would have visited by myself (Docklands, Brixton, the British Library) and trace the history of the city over the course of more than four centuries. At least I'm really excited about my next class (which includes trips to the National Portrait Gallery + Tower of London and three plays) so I'll be able to jump right in to something new.

I haven't been posting often because we've been doing so many things it's been hard to have time to sit and write it all down! Last Friday was an afternoon of firsts - the first time I had traditional afternoon English tea, the first time riding on the London Eye, and first time seeing someone actually slip on a banana peel (like chipmunks, which I had never seen until I went to school in Michigan, I thought that might be something one could only ever see in a cartoon). The banana peel was hilarious, the Eye exhilarating (I'm a little afraid of heights to I had to sit down in the middle of the capsule when we were on the very top - but the views were incredible), and the tea was absolutely scrumptious (thanks Donna!). Turns out 'clotted cream', which to me sounded like a horrible combination between cottage cheese and whipped cream, is a delicious topping for freshly baked scones and one of my new favorite food combinations.

Monday evening was another first - most of the girls in our class got together at a pub around the corner (the White Hart) and participated in their weekly pub quiz! We placed 7th (out of 7, shockingly) but enjoyed ourselves immensely nonetheless. The pub quiz host, a delightfully kooky lady named 'Bunnie', took pity on us and gave us some extra prizes at the end, including a bicycle horn and some small lightsaber-like contraptions that turned out to be 'bubble swords' (we only knew their name because, as we were blowing bubbles at passing taxis on the street outside the pub, disgruntled pub quiz participants who did not receive the same prizes walked by and exclaimed "Aw, how come WE didn't get bubble swords!"). With questions like "How many feet high is a regulation football (soccer) goal?" (8) and "What product is advertised by the tagline 'Reassuringly Expensive'?" (Stella Artois), we didn't feel too bad about our last place showing. Tomorrow evening is the King's Summer School Session 1 wrap-up event, another pub quiz at their student bar (The Waterfront, which overlooks the Thames). Given our vast amounts of practice regarding pub quizzes, I am hopeful for "Team Dorian's" chances tomorrow evening. Wish us luck!

Exploring

I have now been in London for 1 week, and what a week! On Wednesday, our class (which consists of about 13 students, all girls - I guess no "blokes", as our professor calls them, were interested in Multicultural London Literature) went to the Museum of London at the Docklands to look at the "London, Sugar and Slavery" exhibit. It was a fairly small museum but quite interesting , and included an "immersive" area called Sailortown that recreates what the streets would have looked like back when the docks were working and a section where members of the community responded with writing or art to the slavery exhibit. Thursday we took another trip to the Museum of London in Barbican, where we got a tour by one of the curators. The Museum of London in Barbican was absolutely fantastic, and as we didn't have any time to wander around by ourselves I can't wait to go back and spend some more time there. We visited the three galleries of modern London (1666-today) which are very interactive and tactile. I definitely want to check out those exhibits more as well as the galleries of earlier historical periods and the museum's current exhibition on London street photography. Our guide is also involved with curating the Dickens exhibit that will open in December, so I'm planning on visiting again in the winter when that opens. Being able to speak with one of the curators was a great experience - hearing him talk about why the exhibits were set up the way they were, what goes in to choosing what to display, and what kind of responses they get from visitors was a really different way of thinking about a trip to a museum!

Friday we didn't have any class, so I met up with a few of the girls from my course (two American girls, a girl from Austria, and two Dutch girls) to visit Westminster Abbey. It turned out to be incredibly crowded so we decided to come back another day and instead wandered down to Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Chinatown (where you can buy lychee, rambutan and even durian!). Yesterday we visited Notting Hill, where the market on Portobello Road was absolutely thronged with tourists. We walked around for quite a while and then made our way down to Kensington Gardens, which was a lovely bit of greenery after all the city walking we've been doing! We had some ice cream on the grass by Round Pond and napped in the sunshine - after the weather the past week I understand why all the Londoners go outside at even the slightest hint of sun. We spent the evening in Camden where we found a great little burger restaurant called Hache that was absolutely delicious.

Today we visited the Spitalfields market and the nearby Sunday Up Market (off of Brick Lane), which is a lovely little collection of shops and market stalls, especially after the crowds and obvious touristy feeling of Portobello Road yesterday. There was a great collection of food stalls from around the world: Ethiopian food, Spanish tapas, sushi, Indian curries, vats of paella, a stall selling oysters, and plenty of sweets. I'm definitely going to go back to buy both clothes and food - there was a really interesting vibe to the place and the food looked delectable.

Off to read now - we have to turn in a paper next Monday for our class on one of the texts on our primary reading list, so I'm trying to finish Heart of Darkness and Small Island so I can decide what to start writing about.

Photos

In addition to the photos I'm putting up on this blog, I'm putting up more photos on this Picasa site:

Roger M. Jones Journal

Enjoy!

First few days in London

I arrived in London on Sunday morning, bright and early. I was able to take the express train from the airport to Paddington Station, where I did not see any bears (though apparently there's a statue of Paddington Bear somewhere in the station - I'll have to go back and look for it!) I took a taxi cab (they're so much cooler here than American taxi cabs!) from Paddington to the Stamford Street apartments, where I'm staying during my courses at King's. Since I arrived about 9:30am and couldn't check in til after 2, I wandered towards the only thing I could identify from the street - the London Eye. I quickly found myself on the South Bank riverfront, with a gorgeous view of Big Ben. I spent the morning crisscrossing the Thames on several bridges and finding Trafalgar Square, St. Martin in the Fields (one of the few places I remember from visiting London when I was 8) and Villiers Street, where I got a taco for lunch (apparently tacos aren't the most popular food in London - the placemats had directions for how to correctly order and eat Mexican food!).

I was finally able to check in to my room after lunch, so I unpacked and got myself settled. Each set of 5 rooms shares a kitchen area with a microwave, stove and tea kettle (of course!), but unfortunately there are no pots or pans or cooking supplies! Our rooms have mini-fridges though, and there are a ton of places to get good little take-away meals plus quite a few supermarkets and pharmacies within walking distance.

Yesterday, I started my first course, Multicultural London Literature, after an introductory session and a tour of the King's Strand campus. I've been amazed by how great the location is - you can walk from campus to Fleet Street, Trafalgar Square, or Covent Garden within just a few minutes. And the view from our classroom, on the 8th floor of King's, is by far the best view I've ever had from a classroom - we look down directly on Somerset House (the building in the foreground of the photo) with the London Eye and Big Ben in the background! So far, the class has been really interesting. This week, we're looking at London as "the Imperial Metropolis," reading excerpts by Joseph Conrad, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Olaudah Equiano, Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens and examining their depictions of London from as early as 1787. Class consists of a lecture by our tutor, Dr. Dorian Hayes, every morning from 10-11, followed by class discussion of the lecture material until 12:30 or 1, lunch, then either a seminar from 2-4 (which involves close reading and discussion of the excerpts in our course reader) or a field trip. Tomorrow we go to the Museum in Docklands, Thursday to the Museum of London in Barbican, then next week the Black British and Caribbean collections at the British Library, the National Maritime museum in Greenwich, and finally the last week to the Black Cultural Archive in Kennington and Brixton.

It's been a whirlwind few days but I'm finally starting to settle in, despite the jetlag that keeps waking me up at 2am each morning, and I'm getting used to the idea that I'm living in London! I still get excited every time I see a double decker bus (I'm sure that will wear off soon - they are everywhere) or a telephone booth. There are all these little things to notice that just make me smile, like the fact that the break rooms (at least the ones on the 8th floor of King's) are called "tea points" or that my professor uses words like "chuffed". Though the first two days I was here were sunny and beautiful, it's supposed to rain for the rest of the week - but I guess that's all a part of the London experience. Until next time, cheers!

Off to London!

Hello!

I am Jessie Carr, the 2011-2012 recipient of the Roger M. Jones Fellowship. I graduated from UM this past April with my degree in biomedical engineering, and with this Fellowship I am off to London for the next year to study humanities! I am doing two separate programs: first 2 three-week sessions at King's College London over the summer (July 4 - August 12) and then the academic year (Sept 2011 - June 2012) at University College London (UCL). At King's I'll be focusing on English literature, taking "Multicultural London Literature" and "Shakespeare in London", while at UCL I'll be taking some classical studies courses ("Greek Myths" and "Greek Authors: Homer') and some literature-based (yet-to-be-determined) courses.

I am currently waiting for my flight (SFO to LHR!) to board. I should land in London Sunday morning at 7am London time, though I won't be able to get in to the dorm that I'm staying at until the afternoon. I'm hoping I'll be able to store my bags at the dorm and walk around London a bit to get a sense of things (and combat jetlag) before classes start on Monday, maybe try to get a mobile phone worked out, then unpack and set up my room a bit. Hopefully I'll get some sleep on the plane so I won't be completely exhausted by the time I get there!

My plan is to post about once a week, hopefully including some pictures (and possibly videos) of my adventures. I've really enjoyed reading past RMJ Fellows' blogs, and I'm excited to be finally writing one myself! Much more information to come...

P.S. Got some great views of the Golden Gate flying out of SFO this morning (yesterday morning? Can't keep the days straight right now). Thought I'd post one picture of home before I start with all the London pictures!