I should have written earlier but I didn't have time so I guess it's technically day 40. I can't believe that, it kind of blows my mind. My friend Sammie and I have recently been discussing how much has happened in the five and a half weeks we've been here. It's going so fast, I want it to slow down. I basically have every weekend from now until the end of the semester planned out. It's exciting because I'm doing so many awesome things, but I also wish I had more time and more weekends. I love it here.
Last night I went to bed fairly early, around 11:45. That ended up being a very smart idea because at 7:30 am I woke up to a piercing noise in my flat. Fire drill. We all had to go outside and wait outside in the freezing cold for everyone to get out of the building and then for the fire people to explain to us that we needed to get outside faster and they weren't going to take role this time, but next time they would. Also we had to be especially careful with fire and smoke because the London fire brigade is on strike or something. It seems like there are a lot of strikes in England/Europe. I read in the Evening Standard that the tube is supposed to go on strike again next Tuesday.
I was planning on getting up at 8 to do work, so I just stayed awake. I made myself a fantastic breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, it was so good. After that I worked on my Lit essay that's not due til November 30 but we can start handing in drafts on Thursday. At 10 I went to my Lit class and seminar at 11. The class is okay, it's kind of interesting because they tie in history and literature, but if it weren't for the seminar and my seminar leader I would probably despise the class all together.
After class Sammie and I went to the World Marche, an on campus cafe, for lunch. We reminisced about the fun things we've done so far and figured out what we're going to do for Halloween and Halloween costumes. At 2 I went to Poetry, which actually turned out to be a meaningful lecture. After class Matt and I tried to figure out our essays that are due tomorrow and then we went to seminar at 4.
I had dinner after seminar, it was spaghetti bolognese and garlic bread. Sammie and I both have history papers to write and since QM has a very limited library, we went into central to the Senate House Library to find books. We later found, after walking around in the rain for twenty minutes, that Senate House is basically on UCL's campus in Bloomsbury. Lucky. The library was actually really confusing and stuffy though. It had a big foyer and reception area, I guess that wasn't the library part though, and the actual library started on the fourth floor. We had to register and get ID cards, which we got for free since QM is part of the University of London. First we walked to the 7th floor to find books about the Renaissance for Sammie. After that it was a wild goose chase to figure out where the US history books were. The guy at the reception told us we had to walk to the other half of the library, the north block, and to the 7th floor. So we trekked back through the main foyer and this hallway that connected the north and south block, and asked someone how to get to the 7th floor. The guy told us that the history section was moved to the 7th floor in the south block and we had to go back. We told him we were just there, but we walked back anyway and asked the guy in the south block reception again. He was confused why we couldn't find the 3rd floor north block...Then we realized that he was confused and told us the 7th when he meant 3rd. So again we walked back to the south block and up to the third floor.
They really hide their US history in that library, but once we got there that was what I was expecting the library to be like. The shelves were probably 15 feet high and there were a ton of them. I was really excited because I had to walk up a ladder in order to reach my Thomas Jefferson books. I picked out four of them, we checked out, and took the tube back.
When we got back I meant to do work but I ended up playing spit for almost two hours in her flat with Vijay and Talhah. Caitlin will be proud to know that I dominated them for the most part. I'll be getting up bright and early tomorrow to finish and hand in my Poetry essay and work on my Lit essay.
I found out what happened to the person that was under the train yesterday. It was on the cover of the Evening Standard, which is a free newspaper that comes out everyday around 4 or 5. People are always standing outside of the tube stations handing them out. I haven't been able to tell its bias yet, but it has the basic news which is all I want. Apparently yesterday during rush hour, there were two women standing near the edge of the platform playing around and pushing each other. The one woman then fell onto the tracks, dragging some other person's stuff wit him, and got hit by the train. This all happened on the Piccadilly Line. Trains were stopped for 1.5-2 hours after that happened and some people even had to be led to emergency exits from the train because they needed to get off (they gave the example of a woman with diabetes). I guess the body was on the track for a good 30 minutes or so and the whole platform was a crime scene. The police are investigating the other woman that the person was with and possibly charging her with murder. Strange twist though, the woman that fell onto the tracks was actually a man dressed as a woman...
I also read that the District Line, which is what I usually take from Mile End to anywhere, transports about 600,000 people a day. That's a large number of people to inconvenience if they go on strike again on Tuesday.
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