This past weekend was just work, work, and more work. I was working at the London Center Friday and Saturday afternoon, and then I just went home and powered through my essays due this weeks. All three days, I was cooped up in my room, trying to get as much done as possible, and I'm happy to report that it paid off. I have two essays done, and another I have my teachers comments on, and I'm going to fix it for tomorrow. I hope the one for Euro mass media is what he was looking for. We had to use the European media systems we've been learning about and apply them to create a media system for "Utopia," which he gave certain constraints and challenges to the development of a media system for us to overcome. I did my best with it, but at some points I just picked aspects of the media I liked...we'll see how that goes. My theatre essay is good; it's on The Heretic. My fiction essay about British repression is coming along well. My teacher gave me a lot of positive feedback, and some more things he wants me to focus on. Hopefully tomorrow I'll also be able to get to the library to take out some books for my history paper that is due after break. We'll see.

It was a good day though. I went on my first production shoot with Prospect working on The One Show doing a segment about hygiene in the Victorian period. We went to three different locations to get some material for it. First, we went to the Old Operating Theatre Museum. It was once a part of St. Thomas's hospital, and it is now the oldest remaining operating theatre of that kind in the world. Patients would just lie on a table in the middle while medical students looked on. At that time doctors did not wash their hands (mom, you'd be horrified), also medicine wasn't advanced enough to go internally into patients as a part of surgery. Instead, it consisted mostly of amputations. Grostesque, I know, but Mom would love it because the museum also had tons of old medical devices and historical things from the hospital. Might have to have her check it out when she comes to visit. The second place we went was an old public bath house. The Victorian era was when it was becoming clear that water, and cleaning dirt off your skin, actually prevented disease, but people did not have their own bathrooms in their homes, so public bath houses were very common. It was interesting to see the evolution from bath houses to swimming pools once bathrooms became so important to have in one's own house. The last place we went was one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen. It was the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel. It will be open in March, and it adjoins the St. Pancras rail and tube station. It is an old hotel that closed for a long period of time and is now being refurbished once more. The architecture is stunning, all the detailed stone work and fixtures. It was breathtakingly large with a grand staircase and everything. It was also one of the first hotels to get interior plumbing, but for the 300 rooms there were only 5 bathrooms and none of them were actually inside the rooms themselves! It was a wonderful building with cool history. It was a long day with a lot of carrying heavy things and waiting, but I learned a lot just from what I saw, and I got to go to some places I never would have otherwise. It was great. I'm just sorry I didn't have my camera. Maybe I'll get a copy of the segment to show some stuff from.

This week was pretty busy. I have three essays as well as my normal reading due next week because its mid-term. Lots to do before Kaitlin and I leave for Italy next Thursday night.
A new intern started at Prospect with me. His name is Jack, and he is going to BU this semester for study abroad, but he goes to school normally in San Francisco. So my internship has been going pretty well, developing my own ideas recently and stuff.
On Wednesday, I went to see Our Private Lives about a Mexican family and community. It was a really interesting play where the family addresses the audience or "thinks out loud," which the other characters can actually hear. It revolves around the father's apparent sexual abuse of a one of the son of a farm hand. It also discusses issues pertaining to being gay. It was a really great show. On top of that, when I went to see it, I had no idea that Colin Morgan was in it. If you don't know, he is Merlin in the BBC show Merlin, and he is wonderful. He walked out on stage, and I about died! It was an amazing surprise. He was wonderful in it, and we stage doored after the show. I got his autograph for me, Gage, and Amber, making them both very happy I do believe, and a group of us got a picture with him. I was thrilled!!! He's been to Boston, and we talked a bit about Quincy Market. It was really funny.
That's all to report for now I believe. Sorry about the delay in posting the Liverpool pictures. Flickr is becoming my worst enemy because uploading photos takes forever, and you can't mass delete pictures. You have to do it all one by one. But that being said, most of the pictures are on the photos page, although I still have more to add. Check those out those, and read the descriptions.

       We spent this past Friday and Saturday visiting Katilin’s mecca, Liverpool, home of the Beatles. It like about a 5 hour drive, so a lot further than Bath was, but well worth it. We watched a movie called Back Beat about the Beatles on the drive. It was a drama that stuck closely to the real story of the band’s early career, specifically focusing on the perspective of John’s best friend and a once Beatles bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe. It was interesting, and I had never really known about Stuart or Pete Best, the first Beatles drummer, before, so I got to learn something new even before the trip started.

This week, we went to see two plays. Tuesday it was Greenland and Wednesday was Clybourne Park. Greenland, like Heretic, was about environmentalism. Visually, it was nice, but the overall message was completely unclear. There were like 5 different stories, but they never connected, and it was never made clear what points of environmentalism they were each supposed to represent. Also, the characters were annoyingly preachy about things. The play seemed to tell you to stop killing the planet, but never suggested what we were supposed to do. It was pretty much just saying that we are all screwed. No one in the class really liked it. Clybourne Park on the other hand was MUCH better. It was a really funny play with very fast dialogue. One act took place a house in the 1950s, with no scene changes or anything, and the second act took place in the same house in the modern day, again with no scene changes. It was a really interesting play about race as well as WWII and the effect it had on one family. I enjoyed it a lot.

At my internship, I've primarily been developing the ideas I pulled from newspaper articles, learning what being on the development team at a company really means. It's good practice and experience.

Kaitlin, Talia, Rachel, and I just got back from our two day trip to Dublin.
We had to get up 3:00am on Friday to catch the bus (at 4:15am) that would drive us an hour outside of London to Luton airport four our 6:40am flight with Ryanair (the cheapest flights in Europe!). It was a crazy morning, and very tiring, but we made it to the airport. As Kaitlin, Rachel, and I were waiting in the line on the tarmac to board the plane, we realized Talia was missing. We tried to go back to see where she was, but they wouldn't allow us to go back inside. As we waited anxiously on the plane, Rachel was paged to come to the front. We found out Talia hadn't gotten her boarding pass stamped at check-in like the rest of us. The pilot was giving her, and the really nice airport attendant, 15 minutes to run all the way back through the airport, get it stamped, and run all the way back through security and all. Incredibly, she made it! It was not a nice start to the trip, very stressful, but we got to Dublin safely. I swear the plane went up, stayed in the air for 10 minutes and landed. It was the shortest trip of my life!
We landed at Dublin International Airport and took the 16A bus to the hostel, following the instructions they gave us. Camden Hall hostel is actually a really nice place to stay. The people working there were really helpful, giving us maps and instructions. We shared our 6 person room with one man. We never had the chance to speak to him. The room was comfortably sized, sheets were provided, and, I'm happy to report, no bed bugs! We were provided breakfast, and the people were nice enough to let us have breakfast the morning we arrived as well, even though we weren't actually allowed to check in yet. From there, Rachel and I had to meet our private tour guide for a walking tour, and Talia and Kaitlin got on a bus for their bus tour. Our tour guide, Ronan, is a tall, red haired Irish man. I was a bit skeptical at first, because he's pretty young, but he really knew his stuff. We asked him to tailor it to the history side of things, and without reading from any books, he gave us all the history we could have asked for, including funny anecdotes about people and events. I would definitely recommend him to anyone who wanted a walking tour of the city.
We met him at the Spire on O'Connell St, which actually has no significance artistically. It's just a large pointed metal spike in the middle of the street. It costs a ton to have it cleaned each year, despite the fact that when it was built they were told it was self cleaning. O'Connell St. itself is one of the widest streets in Europe, and the GPO on the street was the site of the Easter Uprising of 1916. The Irish revolutionaries seized the GPO as it was one of the site of English power in Ireland. In the fight between the Irish and the British, the whole half of the street was destroyed. The other half was later destroyed in the Irish Civil War (1922-23). The Civil War occurred, I believe, between the Irish who sympathized with the British and those who did not. From O'Connell st., we went to Trinity College (the premier college in Ireland where the Book of Kells is kept) and Dublin Castle (which has a modern looking section and a Gothic section that was only rebuilt to look that way). On the way, we learned about different sites of uprisings. We also saw some of the previous and current government buildings, statues of literary figures, including James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, and the hearing aid shop, Bonavox, where Bono got his nickname.

After the tour, we met up with the others and got lunch at a pub and did a bit of shopping on Graffton St. (I got my latest charm: the outline of a 4 leaf clover with a shamrock in the middle). Talia and Kaitlin went back to the hostel for a quick nap while Rachel and I decided to go to St. Patrick's Cathedral for a look around. It was really beautiful, and we got to see more of the city in the process of finding it. We made our way to the Temple Bar area, the major pub and music section of the city, where we were going to meet the others and go on a traditional Irish music pub crawl. It was a really cool cobblestone street with a pub every 10 feet. Rachel and I looked around a little and then we got dinner. I had traditional Irish stew and couldn't finish it all because it was so heavy, but really good.

We met Talia and Kaitlin at the Oliver St. John Gogarty pub for the pub crawl. The musicians, Larry and Antony, were amazing! Antony played guitar, and Larry played the fiddle and bodhrán. We went to two different pubs with private rooms upstairs, Ha'penny Bridge Inn and Brannigan's. There were only 6 people on the tour, which apparently is really unusual for them, but there was a 6 nations rugby match going on between Ireland and France that night, so people were preoccupied with that. It was like getting a private concert. Here's one of the songs. They were fabulous.

In between songs, they talked about Irish instruments, the history of Irish music, and real sessions are like for musicians playing at pubs. Irish music began in the courts of the Celtic kings. The court musicians were really highly praised because the only way information about the king's greatness could be spread and remembered was through music. They told us to note that most Irish songs are not drinking song, they are songs about drinking and the problems that can come of it. There are three traditional Irish instruments that we talked about:
Bodhrán: a goat-skin drum that can be stretched out different ways to change the pitch. It's small so you play it on your lap, held vertically, and beat it with both sides of a stick, which I can't remember the name of
Clàrsach: Irish harp, also the Guinness logo
Uilleann pipes: Irish bagpipes, very different than the Scottish variety. The Scottish ones were designed for marching into battle, so they were meant to be loud. The Irish ones were designed to be played sitting down in concert, so they have a full range of octaves. Also, they are typically handed down by generations. They said the pipes are not something people casually decide to take up because of the skill involved in playing them, and often the people who play they are quite bitter about doing so, but they had it passed down to them, and it's a really important part of the culture to play them so they do it.
They also taught us about what a session is like for Irish musicians at a pub. They do not play for an audience. Often they just sit in the corner and play for a while. There are no set lists, and some of the time, the people either have never played before or are not actually a formed band. They communicate during songs as to what key they are going to change to just by shouting a letter out. Also, the music is meant to be played to the beat of the dancer's feet. The dancers do not conform to the music, the music conforms to the dance. Irish songs are passed down completely orally. Musicians don't read sheet music (horrifying right Gage?). No let me show off my extensive new found knowledge of music. Antony says the a jig is in 6:4 time and a reel is in 4:4 time. A teacher would never say that to his student though because it would mean he'd have to explain fractions, which is not what Irish music is about. He would use a phrase with the proper number of syllables to demonstrate the timing instead. Lastly, we talked about how going to a pub to listen to Irish music is like entering another world. Everyone can spot the tourists, but if you really want the experience, you have to talk to an Irish person/musician. At some point, you might be asked to tell a funny story, poem, or sing a song. If you do it, you are accepted into a group, and sometimes you're invited to stay at a pub longer than it is legally allowed to be open. Doing something like that proves you are willing to work to be a part of the culture. Marty, a musician and friend of the guys who were guiding our tour, also came on the tour with us. He was a really nice guy, telling us about his experience with the music as well. He told us that it's sad because globalization of culture, and the spread of US television and stuff to Ireland, has caused the traditional culture of Ireland to wane in some ways, so preserving the culture is really of great importance to Irish people right now, especially the musicians.
 After the main part of the tour, Antony then invited us to a real session that he was playing after the tour at a pub. There were only 6 of us, so he could have us all come. It was really great to get to see what they had been talking to us about all night. We crashed at the hostel sometime around 11 I think so we would be refreshed for the next morning. 

Yesterday, we had breakfast at the hostel again. Then Talia and Kaitlin got on the tour bus again because their passes are flexible for both days. It was really a good deal. Rachel and I then walked to meet them at the Guinness factory, but we stopped on the way at Christ Church Cathedral. It was a really beautiful, huge cathedral, and it was great to see it. We also went next door to Dublinia, a museum detailing Dublin's history during the Viking age and the Medieval period. It was a really interactive museum, small but actually kind of fascinating. Dubh Linn is the viking word for black pool because the Vikings originally built their castle by a large tidal pool formed by the river. So after learning a little history, we walked down the street to the Guinness storehouse to take a tour. I may not like beer particularly, but the process is making it is amazing! The tour was really set up well. It was engaging and the process of making beer was very clearly explained. I was worried I was going to be lost, but I wasn't. The displays were also really impressive. My camera died at the church, but I used Rachel's, so I'll get those pictures up soon when I get them from here. There was a whole section at the factory also about transportation of Guinness through the years and one about advertising of Guinness. There were some great commercials in the 50s with animal cartoons that were adorable, and they used "My Goodness" as a slogan. It was really interesting to see the evolution of the slogan over the decades.
 
After the factory we hopped back on the bus to go to the airport, and we were back in London by 8pm. It may have been a whirlwind few days, but I felt like I saw what I wanted to see of the city. We fit it all in, and I don't think we missed anything. I had a great time. Now I need to see the Irish countryside!

Hi All,
I realize it's been a while since I posted (like 4 days), so I'll do a bit of an update.

Monday: I was at my internship. I didn't have a whole lot to do because the person who typically gives me stuff to do was out, but I copied some DVDs and worked on stuff for The One Show on BBC. Prospect makes something like 50 segments for them per year, and they are all around 5 minutes. Really interesting short documentary pieces. It makes them really accessible to a lot of people presenting them in small chuncks.

Tuesday: Classes as usual.

Wednesday: I had my first class, and instead of having a full meeting of my second, because we didn't have a new play to discuss, the whole class went to one of the top independent cinemas in London (Soho Curzon) to see Blue Valentine. It was a fantastic film, so true to reality, about the breakup of a marriage. Then, we went just across the street to New World Chinese Restuarant beacuse our professor says it has the best Dim Sum. It was really good. I got vegetarian spring rolls, pork dumplings, rice, and peanut and chicken dumplings. I am extremely disappointed to announce that the woman at the chinese food restaurant had no idea what I was talking about when I asked for scallion pancakes, so I don't think they have them in England, which is terribly unfortunate for them to be missing out on. We then went to see The Heretic at the Royal Court Theatre. It was a really funny play about environmentalism. I really enjoyed it.

Thursday: Well it currently is Thursday, so I'm at my internship again. Rachel and Talia are coming over tonight to sleep at our flat because we all have to get up ridiculously early tomorrow to catch a bus to get to the airport to go to Dublin. We'll be there until Saturday night, and we have two jam packed days full of fun stuff to do. As of now, I'm going on a traditional Irish music pub crawl at Bill's suggestion. I'm sure the music is going to be incredible, and I can't wait. I think Rachel and I might also go on a Revolutionary Dublin walking tour, talking about the Irish Revolution, the IRA, and the Easter Uprising. I love history, so it should be a really interesting walk. My first excursion out of England and without school!

Today, Bill took us on a pre-Liverpool trip to see a lot of relevant things to the Beatles in London. They were in London starting in about 1962, trying to make it big. We started at Piccadilly Circus, which is an area where they would have frequented because it is home to many radio stations, recording studios, and theatres. The building that is now the Ripley's Museum was once the place where A Hard Day's Night and Help! premiered. The Prince of Wales theatre is where the Beatles played concerts when the Royals were in attendance. We went through two areas: Carnaby St. (the lower end of things) and Mayfair (the higher end). Both areas are home to recording studios, so the Beatles would have been in both locations. We got to go the site of a lot of photographs of the Beatles, alleyways around the area. Bill showed us the real photos as we went. We also saw a few clubs and bars that the Beatles and many other famous bands would have played at during their early careers; for one, the Beatles played at the Marquee Club, but it is best associated with The Who. Another pub we saw was the place where Paul first met his wife, Linda. We got to see the offices of Paul McCartney's current music publishing company, MPL. The home of Apple Records is number 3 Savile Row. This is where the Beatles had their final live performance. Lastly, we took a double-decker bus (!!!) to Abbey Road. We all signed the wall (Kaitlin in a much more profound way than me, but I was just trying to be funny), and took a stroll across, trying to recreate the album cover without getting hit by cars. It was a really busy intersection, and the cars are not pleased with tourists taking pictures. Oh well, I think we got something.

There was a Beatles shop by the tube station, Kaitlin literally bought all the stickers and all the postcards. She's obsessed, but I can learn a thing or two about the Beatles because I must confess I really don't know a lot. Also, Uncle Richie and Catherine, let me know soon what you want from Liverpool/from the Beatles store. I don't know what you have or don't have, but there was some cool stuff today.

I've added a few more pictures that are from Kaitlin, and I used a lot of her descriptions as well because she understood the relevance of some of the places I didn't, her being so knowledgeable about Beatles trivia.

All in all, it was a really fun day. I can't wait for Liverpool.

I was thrilled to find a website the other day for a store in London that sold a ton of inexpensive, silver charms for the bracelet I want to make of all the places I go this semester. The store is called Charms of London, and it was all the way in zone 4 by the Southgate tube station. I went out there yesterday and bought 4 London charms and 1 for Bath (I cheated a little because I forgot to look when I was in Bath last weekend). I know I got a lot of charms, but they were really cute, and I figured I needed to get more for London because this is where I am studying. I got a double-decker bus, a telephone booth, an English flag, and wait for it.....HENRY VIII!!! I couldn't believe they had a charm of Henry, and most people know how interesting I find him to be. I was not going to let that opportunity pass me by. I also got a bath tub for Bath, which I just thought was adorable. So my bracelet is coming along just fine. I'm excited to keep this going.

After going to Charms of London, I took at stop at the British Museum on the way home. It came highly recommended by Gage and the Hackfords, and it's open until 8:30 on Fridays, so I decided just to go. I spent a few hours walking around, getting oriented to the place. IT'S HUGE!!! I'm definitely going to have to go back to look at things more in depth, and to take some pictures because I didn't have my camera with me (I know, story of my life, right Gianni?). But I walked all around the Egyptian wing, saw the Rosetta Stone (which was really cool), Grecian wing, Roman wing, Indian and Chinese wing, and European wing. The area that would include Tudor history was closed for the night already, so I'm going to have to go back to see that anyway. I didn't really want to look at things too in-depth, but I got a general idea, and I know where to go next time. It was still really cool.

Today, I went with Kaitlin and her aunt and cousin to Portabello Market. It's actually really not far from where we live. As compared to the markets we saw with Bill, it was REALLY expensive. Also, because tourists know of it, it gets really crowded. Dad, you would NOT have liked it. Still, it was an experience to see it. I had a good time just browsing. Plus the food there looked INCREDIBLE!!! Crepes, breads, cheeses, and the biggest muffins and donuts I've ever seen. I could buy it all.

Kaitlin and I are currently making her wonderful white wine chicken that I've had before. It's to die for. Dinner is almost ready!

Monday night, we went to see Vernon God Little with Drama and the London Theatre. It was not a bad play, but it did not make me emotional like War Horse had. It was a play about a boy whose best friend murders 17 people at his high school before killing himself. Vernon gets absorbed into the mess and is suspected of accessory to the crime. It was a dark comedy, but a lot of it was a satire on the South in the US. I don't know. I just felt that it was sort of funny in parts, but not funny enough, and sort of serious in parts, but not serious enough. It didn't really know what it wanted to be. Anyway, it was alright. You can't like every show.

Meanwhile, the homework is piling up. Not that I have a lot, but it's hard to get myself into the mode of being in school because I'm in London. The work will get done though, sooner or later.