Day 66: Castle Climbing

(This is for Saturday 1 November)

  

(Photo from castle-climbing.co.uk)

One of my friends from ND here has a membership at a castle – er, a climbing gym, so we headed there on Saturday. It's called Castle Climbing, and it's predictably a two (or three?) story climbing gym in a castle. Quite awesome.

After stretching, we did some bouldering (climbing shorter walls without harness or rope but very large pads on the floor) for a while. I was pretty surprised how much my out-of-shape body was able to do. I think the adrenaline from the excitement of climbing was enough to keep me going. There is a nice little café there, so we headed there for a break after bouldering.

We watched some people climb for a bit, and when we'd finished our food we headed out to rope climb. My friend showed me how to belay, and we did a bit of a test run with that, too. Quite exciting.

I've always loved climbing and have been meaning to go to a gym in Minneapolis called Vertical Endeavors for a while but haven't gotten to it. I must admit, it's a bit intimidating to go try to climb in front of a bunch of experienced climbers at first, but pretty much everyone is willing to help you out and encourage you.

There's a climbing club at ND, too, so I might check that out when I'm back on campus.

When we were done climbing (and absolutely exhausted) we stopped at a place called Tortilla on the way home – it's the British version of Chipotle, basically. And this is no small thing, since good Mexican food is nearly impossible to come by here. I'm incredibly glad I went... and I might even venture to say it was better than Chipotle!

Day 65: British Composers

(This is for Friday 31 October)

Halloween!!

Since it was our first week back from break, we had our first day in the next unit of the required Images of Britain Through the Arts class on Friday. While my previous unit had been Alternative Theatre, my new one is British Composers.

I wasn't really sure what to expect from this class, but I'm now incredibly excited about it. For the first class, we went over what concerts we are going to and then learned about Ralph Vaughan Williams, who drew a lot of his influence from traditional English folk music. For those who may not know, I am a huge fan of folk music. Probably more than I will admit. We learned about the history of how Vaughan Williams was involved in collecting folk songs in England and then examined the use of the modal scale in his works and analyzed them in general too. This is basically my dream class.

So after a nice first day to a new class, I decided to take the long way home after playing some piano at the London Centre (I was feeling a little musically inspired) and finally made it out to the Millenium Bridge. While wandering back to the flats, I also stumbled across a Braveheart memorial type thing.

St. Paul's Cathedral:

 

Cathedral from Millenium Bridge:

 

 

  

Later that night, almost everyone in the London Program went on a cruise on the Thames that some students had organized for Halloween. It was absolutely gorgeous, though I didn't bring my camera. I wish I had pictures from it though! We went under Tower Bridge and also down past Parliament and the London Eye. It's definitely different seeing the city from the river, and I'm glad I finally made it on a boat, especially at night.

Day 64: Bubble wrap, a walking trash can, and war.

(This is for Thursday 30 October)

Another nice day, and as I was walking to school listening to my new morning song (Elbow - "Ribcage" - the percussion makes this song) a piece of bubble wrap floated in front of me and landed right in my path. While stepping on that bubble wrap and savoring the 'popop pop!', I knew that Thursday would be a good day.

Not too much after this, I was in Picadilly Circus and saw a trash can kind of out in the open... and then I saw it look around and take a few steps. I slowed down my pace to see what would happen. It's not every day you see someone dressed up as a fake trash can. I'm not sure if this was part of it, but there was a somewhat eccentrically dressed woman who seemed to be what the trash can was creeping toward, and there was a man walking up behind the woman who also seemed to be following her. I'm pretty sure they were all in on this together, but sadly I had to run to the tube to get to work on time.

After work I headed to the London Centre to meet with the professor who oversees the internships for a midsemester debriefing, which was really nice. It was helpful to be forced to take time to put things into perspective.

As if I hadn't done enough on Thursday, I headed to the Barbican Centre for Late Night at the Barbican, where they stayed open later than usual and had live music. The main reason I went was to see the Robert Capa / Gerda Taro exhibit, "This is War!" The exhibit was nice, and it was pretty neat to see some of the early prints of well-known photos. However, I think that it was kind of missing some extra element. It was obviously captivating because of the subject matter and the importance of Capa's work in the public's view of the war and as flagship work in the development of photojournalism, but it just wasn't the most impactful presentation of his work.

Anyway, enough on that. I think I might try to go to the Barbican sometime again to see more exhibits and to study since they had some nice spaces and a library (and free Wi-fi). Very cool space.

Oh, and here's a photo I took on the way back from the Barbican. This is just a tunnel nearby the Centre.

Day 63: Vote is in.

(This is for Wednesday 29 October)

Okay, so it took me a while but I sent in my absentee ballott 6 days before the election. And I really feel like my vote counts... er, is going to be recounted.

It was a beautiful fall day though; I really think we've been lucky this fall and haven't gotten too much of the "London weather". Since I was running errands in the area, I figured I'd head over to the Waterloo bridge and take some pictures:

Later that night, our Honours Seminar headed to the British Library for a debate about the US Election with representatives from Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad. It was pretty disappointing, as neither representative really talked about any issues and both their arguments were quite weak. Still, it was good to discuss it afterwards with the seminar group, especially since our professor is British.

Day 62: Snow!

(This is for Tuesday 28 October)

So on Tuesday, which is my marathon class day, I actually ended up paying attention for all my classes, even the day after finishing a paper. It was interesting, because in Theology we ended up talking about the ontology of the Trinity (we had an organized class debate about Trinity from Christian and Muslim perspectives that day), and for the first time I finally understood what this meant. We'd covered ontological v. teleological reasoning in a class I had last year, but I never quite got the meanings.

Riding off that excitement (yes, I'm a dork), in Honours Seminar that night we had our final discussion about

where the subject of ontology came up. In essence, our professor had spent all the time leading up to this discussion supporting Dawkins' arguments within the book, and then showed us how the arguments broke down because of their initial ontological assumptions, which is basically what I thought as well, but with a lesser vocabulary.

It was quite an interesting read because of this; I found myself seeing the arguments as not incorrect, but as fundamentally wrong as they attempted to use the natural to argue against existence of the supernatural.

Anyway, this is probably not that exciting to read, but if anyone feels like discussing this book or anything related to it, please let me know!

When I finally got home from class, I ate and decided to take a nap at 8 pm and was awoken by screaming and shouts of "Snow!!!" I thought I was dreaming at first, but then when I realized it was real, I thought it was already morning. Probably not a good sign concerning my sleeping patterns. Anyway though, there was snow in London in October! I found out the next day in class that this was the first time it had snowed in central London since the 1930s.

Day 61: Muhammad's message

(This is for Monday 27 October)

Sorry all these posts are boring, catching up to now... I will make up for them once I get caught up, though! Really.

Monday was back to class (9.15 am, ugh) and work, and then back to finish my paper for Christianity and Islam. Everyone in the class was frustrated that we'd have a paper due the Tuesday after fall break and midterm papers from the week before it, but hey, at least I actually enjoyed writing this paper.

Day 60: Hello again, London

(This is for Sunday 26 October)

Although there was some schoolwork to catch up on, I spent much of Sunday editing photos. Final count: 1806. Gotta love digital...

Other than seeing other friends who'd gotten back from break, the highlight of my day was probably purchasing groceries with the weak pound. Amazing.