Springtime in London Town

Spring has sprung! Thank God... we now have an extra hour of sunlight (for some reason the Brits delay it until the end of March), the warm(er) weather is upon us, and... I have to stay inside all day and revise for exams and write essays. Except that I haven't been. I HAVE been incredibly productive, which allows me to go out and do fun things, too.

Despite a forecast of rain all weekend, it only sort of spat at us a bit on Saturday afternoon (which was mostly lost to the gym and homework anyway so it didn't matter). Sunday after a trip to the library I met up with Andy for a walk through the parks, a game of catch and some paddle boating on the Serpentine in Hyde Park. There was a bit of a special needs moment when neither Andy and I were entirely sure if a baseball would float. SO, the genius I am, I just stepped into the Serpentine to give it a go... but, then, the entire bottom is covered in moss so I promptly slipped and nearly fell in. I think Andy, wherever he is, is still laughing at me about it. We went paddle boating for a bit which might be better if we added a bottle to the occasion. Next time!



On Sunday night I went out to Hugo's for Sherry's birthday with Sherry, Ryan, and 10 or so of their good friends. Ryan has a friend named James who is very much like Andy Richter in personality - but when he tried to banter with me, he wasn't prepared for someone who could actually handle it. Ryan got a kick out of watching us. Food at Hugo's was great - I had calamari and a burger. Mmm mmm good. If it wasn't so far away and expensive, I'd be keen to go there much more often!

Today I went bowling with Cait and Erin. We went to Bloomsbury Lanes, which is the same place we went for my birthday. It's a lot more chill but just as cool on a Monday evening. It was a good laugh, and I'm sure we'll go back soon. Tomorrow, a bunch of my coursemates and I are getting together for Cranium Part Deux. Looking forward to yet another study break (though tomorrow I anticipate having all of my essays finished and therefore will deserve a break!).

Finally! Some pictures of my latest shenaningans.

Allison, me and Kerstin at the AU Ball
Me at the Guiness Factory on St. Patty's Day
Erin, Cait and I in Dublin
The lakes at Glendalough in County Wicklow
Brazil vs. Sweden

Brazil v Sweden

My mother got me tickets to see Brazil v Sweden football at Emirates stadium. It was a friendly to commemorate the 50th anniversary of a World Cup final between the two countries. Well, the tickets were RIDICULOUS (2nd row, 2nd tier, a third of the way up the pitch), and we had a great time. Tim and Cait joined and Tim stuck with the southern hemisphere while Cait and I cheered on Sweden. It was good fun. Always enjoy going out for sports! Brazil ended up winning 1-0.

In other news, two essays down, one to go. Much revision left to do. Still in the process of unpacking and getting organized. Expect updates to be thin on the ground as I won't have a whole lot of fun things to report in the coming weeks...

America, FUCK YEAH

I heart America. Well, Bostonia anyway.

I've been home for a couple days and I've actually been fairly busy thus far. Jet lagged, I woke up at 4:45 yesterday morning - ARGH! But I managed to exercise in the morning. I went into Harvard to catch up with an old friend, then met Mom at the office for lunch and then we went shopping. New shoes, yay!

My friend Jenn from freshman year of college drove up and we hung out last night and this morning. I hadn't seen her in five years but it was really nice to catch up. We had had our differences back in the day but I'm glad we've moved past them. Last night we went to some Messican food with my parents, Andy and Robin. I had a burrito - couldn't finish it because of the sheer volume of chips consumed. Excellent. This morning we baked carrot cake (mmmm cream cheese frosting) and I had some BBQ pork. Thus far I am doing well at eating all the foods that are not available in the UK.

The best news of the day: NEW RUNNING SHOES. My old ones were 4 months old and the guy who works there (he's not the usual guy who sells me my shoes) was amazed - you must have had these for a year, 18 months? Noooo...four months. Winner.

Happy Easter!

St. Patrick's Day on the Emerald Isle

One of the beautiful things about living in Europe is being able to travel in Europe! So, on Saturday my friends Cait, Erin and I left to celebrate the greenest of holidays in the greenest of places, leaving many of our friends green with envy (we were just helping out those attempting to celebrate the holiday, you see).

We arrived at our hotel at about 10pm on Saturday evening and promptly went down the road to have a pint and celebrate being in Ireland. We loved the pub - it played awesome music, was homey and comfortable... and apparently was the regular for a very creepy old man who appeared to be there with two hired call girls - there is just no way they were there together. We attempted to take a couple pictures of the hilarious scene but were fairly unsuccessful. We saw the creepy guy again the next night on our way home from the pub, though this time sans questionable company.

Sunday morning we set off to explore Dublin. We basically walked around without a map for awhile but managed to stumble across some fun stuff. We walked into Merrion Square which is one of the four Georgian era squares in Dublin. This one is about half over-grown garden and half manicured lawn, with some random public art and statues (including one of Oscar Wilde). Around this area they were also setting up a fair and the parade for St Patty's Day. We wandered down to St. Stephen's Green ("the Green") which strongly reminds me of Boston Public Gardens - some man-made water features and manicured lawns, etc. I can see if I were a Dubliner having picnics and hanging out there on sunny days. Then we decided as we had not managed to procure a map (a persistent problem), we would take a bus tour to get the lay of the land a bit. Our main stop from the bus tour was Kilmainham Gaol (Jail), where many of the republican rebels were held in the 19teens and 1920's. I'll go ahead and admit that my Irish history is woefully poor but we really enjoyed it. That evening we went out in Temple Bar, had a few drinks, met some strange people and called it a night.

Happy St. Patty's Day! Well, in case you didn't guess, Dublin fills up for Ireland's big holiday. It was later reported that 670,000 people showed up to enjoy the festivities. We weren't all that keen on seeing the parade, so we pushed through the hordes and hordes of people to see where the magic happens - The Guiness Storehouse. Mmm mmm good. We learned a lot about beer making, had a mid-morning free half pint, and then another free pint (gotta love 'em). What I learned from the Guiness factory:

The word beer is thought to originate from the Anglo-Saxon word "baere" which means barley.
... and some other stuff. I just wrote that one down.

To stay in the spirit of St. Patrick, we followed Guiness up with a tour of the Jameson distillery. While I'm not a huge whisky drinker, I like Jameson and ginger so after the tour I got a free one. Awesome! Love the free drinks that come with the tours... the discount with the student rate basically means I'm basically paying less than I would for a drink in a bar for the tour+drink. Wicked.

We went out for dinner in Temple Bar to a "boxty" restaurant which is allegedly a traditional Irish dish centered around - no way - potatoes. It was quite yummy, I had lamb on mine and Erin had chicken. Then we went out in Temple Bar and ran into some Aussies. Up until that point, I wasn't really drinking...However, I was giving one guy (named Cieran) a hard time for drinking like a girl, and he challenged me to down the rest of his pint (which was about half full, and about 90% whisky). Well, I never turn down a challenge, and I finished it off no problem. The look on these guys' faces was absolutely priceless - who would have thought a girl could drink like that ;) I'm not entirely sure it's something to be that proud of. But the night was a success.

By the next morning we luckily woke up hangover free, but we were exhausted. We had done a ton of walking over the last couple of days. We also wanted to get out of Dublin a bit to see some "real Ireland". So we hopped on a bus tour that took us into County Wicklow which has beautiful "mountains" and some ancient settlements. Our first stop was Glendalough, which is an ancient Monastic City and the home to St. Kevin. It sat overlooking two beautiful lakes so we had about an hour to walk around and explore. Our second stop was Avoca, which was a small town near the coast, an hour south of Dublin. We had lunch and walked around a bit. I'm not going to lie, Erin, Cait and I slept almost every minute we were on that bus. So unfortunately i missed some of the scenery driving by, but I think I got the jist of it. I also found out that "rugby" in Gaelic is "rugbai" ... in case you cared. We went to bed about about 9 that evening. I cannot remember being so physically exhausted in recent memory.

Wednesday, our last day, we packed in everything we had failed to do up until that point. We started out in St. Patrick's Cathedral, followed by Christ Church. I've seen a lot of churches in my day, but they always seem important to visit. Also, having spent the morning watching the Tudors, I was pleased to know I had just been in the church where they filmed some of it (the church scenes are filmed in Christ Church)... mmmm... Jonathan Rhys Meyers. We also went to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. I'm not big into Modern Art but it was free, so we took a turn around it. They had some interesting exhibits. Lastly, we finally wound up at Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. What I liked even MORE was the giant library full of old first edition books. I was just disappointed I didn't get to flick through them!

We had a long, lazy lunch and wandered around a bit more before returning to London town at about midnight. After a mad dash and unsuccessful attempt at getting the last tube, we took the bus home, absolutely exhausted. It was a really fun long weekend. I don't think I would return to Dublin but I am definitely interested in seeing more of Ireland some day.

Banter!

Let's sum up the Tuns + team dinners + walkabout with the way I started my e-mail to the girls this morning:

oh. holy. jesus.

i wake up this morning to find my jar of peanut butter open with a spoon in it. that isn't a promising start to the day.

Yep. It was that kind of evening.

Mundane details of my life

In an effort to update more often, I find myself telling you a) about my political and social ramblings and b) about the mundane details of my life. As I have been told my stories are more fun to read than my ramblings, I'll do that.

Last night I met up with some of the rugby girls (Katy, Martin, Rachel, Laura, Ricki, Kerstin, Sophie, Kim, Tatiana and Nina) for some dinner and theater. That makes it sound a lot classier than it was. We all met up in the Tuns and headed over to the "classy" Wetherspoons for some dinner and drinks. Most of the others had steak, and it's always nice to see other girls polish off an 8 oz steak, chips, salad and a pint. I have clearly found my people. We headed down to see Lia as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Lia was great but the rest of it was, well, shit. The munchkins were essentially people with down syndrome. It was bad, very bad. Luckily we had brought alcohol in order to sustain us through the production. The best part was we had been told that Howard Davies was doing the voice over for the wizard, but would not actually be making an appearance. Well, he did come out as the Wizard and was AWESOME. He got a lot of cheers from the crowd. Lots of good times. There was some talk about going out after the show but everyone was tired and went home.

Today I had a lazy morning, did a bit of reading. I went to the gym and then met Chrissy for lunch. She works about 10 minutes from Bankside and doesn't always have a ton of work to do so we're going to get lunch more often. In a couple of hours I'm meeting Nadia and Karim for coffee, then 7pm the Tuns followed by team dinners.

Bring on the lash.

Busy again

So this week is shaping up to be wonderfully busy, which I love.

Today I met with my group for my presentation in my campaigning class. There are 6 of us, and 4 of them are really smart and interesting (one Aussie, two Canadians, one other American), and one is, well... whatever. It is our job to design successful campaigns for both HRC and Obama through to the general (in each case, assuming they win the nomination). It's a good thought process. I spent the afternoon research VP candidates for each, and I chose Jim Webb for Clinton and Bill Nelson (FL) for Obama. A few minutes later Tim (the Aussie and probably the smartest guy I know) sent around a silly online quiz to determine who our preferred VP candidates are. Remarkably, the two that matched my choices 100% were Webb and Nelson! Crazy - who would have thought it would be so accurate?

Anyway, the campaigns look promising. I know that if Obama makes it six months without making another mistake it's all locked up, but he's unraveling at the seams right now so I'm hoping a few more prods at his ego and we'll have another Howard Dean-esque fiasco on our hands! Anyone who hasn't seen it should watch the INCREDIBLY POMPOUS speech he made about the suggestion that he would be VP for HRC. Troubling, considering how open and welcoming and "yes we can" he was in February. Poor guy knows he's on his way out ;)

At 3 we had a dissertation symposium where Bart (my advisor) and his tutees went through what they have so far for their dissertations and we got some feedback. They thought I had it pretty well wrapped up (just now needs to be started!) and thought my paper was going to be very cool. I'm looking forward to getting it rolling. Amazing how I have basically become wedded to feminist discourse theory... it would certainly shock my GW professors... though I did a lot of ideological criticism back in the day and this is certainly in the same vein, just more focused, so maybe not! Either way, I 'm confident about where my work is going and am glad that people think it will be interesting and worthwhile. (For those who don't know I am analyzing the media's portrayal of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate and whether the coverage reflects or undermines the traditional cultural narrative of patriarchy.)

Sad news... Jonny is benched for the game vs Eire this weekend. Very unhappy I don't get to watch my love play.

Tonight I'm grabbing some food with the girls and then going to see my friend (and teammate) Lia play Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Should be a good night!

Week 10 ramblings

I still cannot believe that my class time here at the LSE is wrapping up. I have settled on a campaign strategy for George Washington 2008. If you think about it, it's really quite unlikely the people of the U.S. would take to him in this day and age so it makes the essay a little challenging, a little amusing and a little different. Which is exactly what an essay should be.

Anyway...

So I'm about 200 pages into Living History. Here's the thing. I already like Hillary Clinton. I think she's smart and hard and determined and unrelenting - all those things that you had to be to be a really successful woman of her generation. I also think that balancing the "progressive feminist" image with that of "woman as wife and mother" is a difficult balance for any woman to achieve who lives in the media spotlight (because the media likes to compartmentalize people, and cannot reconcile success with traditional femininity). Also, understanding that her memoirs (updated in 2004) are a political tool used for garnering support and sympathy, here's what I think: SHE IS TRYING TOO HARD. She writes in a conversational style. This, of course, is necessary to reach middle America, but I find it difficult because she's sort of dumbing herself down. She jumps around a fair amount and doesn't show her intelligence when presenting and analyzing issues from her past.

She attempts to demonstrate how she really is just like any other woman... My problem here is that she most certainly is not! She is one of those women who have broken barriers and lived and fought against the entrenched all-male professional workforce - and it just bothers me so much that in order to resonate with the American people, she felt the need to diminish those accomplishments.

Also, I recognize that she is a complex person (as we all are), but she doesn't write of herself in a way that reflects that complexity. She compartmentalizes herself: she speaks of herself in her role as a professional, as her role as First Lady, as her role as a lawyer, as her role as a policy maker in one way. But then reverts to a hyper pre-feminist movement perspective on her life with Bill and Chelsea. It's just too soppy to FEEL realistic - even if it is meant with sincerity (which I hope to believe much of it is).

I know I sound awfully feministic here but my problem is this: people are complex, and shouldn't be put into boxes. I find it frustrating when those women who have the capabilities of breaking those barriers down - to present themselves as WHOLLY integrated people, who exemplify the tensions of professional and personal success and professional and personal tragedy as all part of ONE being, rather than dramatically different facets of the same person. All of these things I know reflect an effort to appeal to her constituents and the people of America - I KNOW this is a campaign tool, but that almost makes it more frustrating. The system is so backwards. Do you really think that if she were to simply embrace the fact that she exemplifies these tensions , Americans would resent or ignore her? Although I don't know the answer to that question, I certainly hope that even if they did, it would at least begin chipping away at the compartmentalization that happens to women when they are represented in media and cultural pieces.

Anyway, that's it for now, but I will keep you updated. I'm looking forward to reading her thoughts on the Lewinsky scandal because i feel that will exemplify (or refute) these thoughts...

Also...

Because I have absolutely nothing positive to say about the rugby this weekend (seriously, England? what was that?), I will, yet again, provide you with lovely photos to hold you over until England wins... or France loses.

Though I'm not gonna lie, I have a soft spot for the Scots - they are so fit!!


And just in case you forgot... I heart Jonny. In a big BIG way. <3

Absolute rubbish, I know.

OKAY, it's come to my attention that I need to update my blog (as though I didn't know this already). I've just lacked motivation in about every corner of my life so you can imagine that the blog is lower on the list than say, the gym (always #1), papers (more to come on this), other school work, and general life functioning! But as of yesterday, my room is clean. I have already been to the gym today and done some school work. So I will give an abbreviated version of recent events.


Museums
I finally wandered into the Tate Modern and actually saw an exhibit on Dadaism that featured work from Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia. I reiterate the fact that I really don't get modern art. I can say I could have passed on a lot of the stuff in the exhibit, but I did enjoy some of the layered, photograph-esque paintings that were featured at one point. And I can say I've been to the museum that sits on my front door step so that was that.

I went back to the National Portrait Gallery for their exhibit of Vanity Fair portraits. Needless to say, the combination of celebrity and photography doesn't often get topped in my book and I LOVED it. It was quite busy when I went so it wasn't a relaxing museum trip, but I liked it so much I may even go back... the only thing that's standing in my way is the 8 quid entry fee. Argh.

Other random things
I went up to Hampstead Heath with Sherry last Sunday which I absolutely loved. As we know, I really enjoy walking around the parks in London in order to get the feeling of being outside of the city. Well, the others pale in comparison to the heath on this count - it's basically a forest! And it has swimming ponds so in the summer when/if it's warm, I can go up and sun myself. Or study/swim. So I really enjoyed that.

I've seen a couple of movies lately:
Definitely, Maybe: as expected, shit. But Ryan Reynolds is hot so it was totally worth it.
My Blueberry Nights: Really interesting. A non-Hollywood esque film with an interesting use of silence. You forget how much a difference music makes in a film until one really doesn't use it much. Also, Jude Law = lovely!

The AU Ball
We had the AU Colours Ball on Wednesday so all the ruggers got all dolled up and went out. SO much fun. Allison and I went over to Katy's beforehand to get ready there with her and Martin. It was nice to have other people around whilst getting ready - those things are always nerve wracking because you don't know what others are wearing, etc... so it was nice to have company. And lots of baaanter!

The ball itself was held at the Grange City Hotel right next to Tower Bridge, which was lovely. The food was mediocre. The wine was free (winner), so you can only imagine what ensued. One of the girls did a runner before dinner was even served. Martin went outside and threw up on his own shoes - puke and rally, puke and rally. My usual shenanigans went down, I received Half Colours (any masters or general course student who plays for a year on a 1st team receives half colours, whilst any 3rd year student who plays 3 years on a 1st team receives full colours). Photos suck right now so will add some at a later date. See Facebook for full albums!

We have the last team dinner of the year on Wednesday... there may or may not be stories from that... all depends on how the memory holds up ;)

Other news
I am about to enter Week 10 of Lent Term which means, well, my classes at the LSE are basically over. I am about to enter 6-10 weeks of revision and writing period - bizarre. I have finished one of my essays - it is about political spin and if it threatens democracy. Blah blah. It's interesting. More importantly, it's finished. The next essay I will write is going to be a campaign plan for a "candidate of your choice." I think I may choose a historical figure. Toying with Benji Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt... I dunno. Some pop stars are floating in there (Bono being one of note). Also, may try and get George Washington elected in the modern age of campaigning. Would enjoy that immensely. GDuuuub!

I head to Dublin in a week and then home! Very excited for both of those.

Hrm. Right now I am reading Living History by Hillary Clinton. I'll let you know how that pans out...

That's all for now. I promise I'll try to update more because I know you're all on the edge of your seats waiting to hear the juicy details of my thrilling life.