2/3/13

1/3

Today, we were fortunate enough to go on a boat trip to Greenwich. We decided to walk down to the pier, which was no longer than a 30 minute walk, so not bad at all. The only bad part of the boat ride was that it was quite chilly. We left from Westminster Pier, which is literally right next to Big Ben. 

See no joke.

It was a real nice boat trip. It took an hour to get to Greenwich, but it was quite chilly on the top deck. I stayed up there while we passed under Tower Bridge though.

So you know, it was quite cold there. I am surprised that I could open my eyes. They were tearing up like no other.

When we left the boat, we walked up a huge hill up to the Greenwich Observatory. It was there that a conference was held, led by the United States, that created the time zone. There, going through the middle of it, was the Prime Meridian. I actually got to straddle the Western and Eastern Hemispheres at the same time!

For some reason, I never take a picture of me doing things. Just my feet

After that, I walked through the museum which was quite interesting. It dealt a lot with clocks, time, instruments measuring time and distance, and astrology. 

Then, I visited the Royal Naval Museum. 

It was huge, but a lot of it was closed for the installation of new exhibitions. It was really nice to be in Greenwich though because it was quiet. There were a decent amount of people in town, but nothing like it is at home. I went to the market there, which it had a lot of cool things there, especially artwork. However, it was quite expensive. I am a little excited to get home and not spend $15 on anything that I purchase. But so be it. For now, c'est la vie. 

I broke off from the group to explore on my own. I walked under the Thames in a subway tunnel. It was the first time I really felt claustrophobic in my life. I am guessing the fact that I was under a river and if the subway broke, I would die. So you know, I did survive. 

I know you can't tell, but that is all a downhill gradient. It was about 200 yards
long once it was flat, then another hill to start climbing up.

It had a very New York City feel to it. It was all lines and corners. Not like the
rest of London. 

I started walking, and I ended up in Millwall. From there, I followed signs to Canary Wharf. What Canary Wharf is is the epicenter of the financial doings in London. There were buildings for HSBC, Citi Bank, and KPMG, along with many others that I didn't see. I rushed through there because I was getting tired. 

Finally, I made it home, exhausted. I ended up taking the tube for a little bit because I couldn't handle the walk home. I did make it a while though. I think I hoofed it about 5 or 6 miles before getting on the Tube.

That night, the place where we lived decided to buy us pizza. So we spent literally the rest of the night in the lounge either eating pizza or talking or both haha. I ended up getting to bed around 2, so I was happy with that.

2/3

I slept in today, so I felt bad about that. I gave it to myself as a little treat though for getting up so early the entire week. I met Matt, Leah, and some of Leah's friends and we went up to Camden Market. It was packed today. We mainly went for lunch. Matt and I decided to split everything we got. First, we got a chicken kebab (which was Turkish) with salad and some sort of sauce on it, wrapped in a tortilla. It is one of those things that I will make Mom try when she is here (only she gets lamb). It is so tasty and cannot be found at home. The second course we got was a Turkish wrap. That had sausage, spinach, and cheese in it. I swear to goodness, it tasted like a taco. There was also some chili yogurt in it. So tasty. For desert, I got a piece of banana bread. I really treated myself today. It was so delicious.

We went into the Stables after to look at some things. There were a lot of neat posters for a Pound (they were smaller, but still a good deal) that the girls bought. I looked at some shoes, I may purchase some by the time I leave. I am walking through my Converse here. We walked home and I ended up watching a movie just to relax.

Tonight, I am going shopping (in about 5 minutes) and then I am going with Joey to explore the East End. We are meeting Matt and Leah eventually and will explore that area tonight with her friends. It should be interesting and I will report back on that (maybe) tomorrow! Until then, I hope you enjoyed the photos!!

1/3/13

27/2

So my boss changed her schedule and now wants me to come in at 9:30 instead of 10:30, which isn't too bad. However, the bus to get to worked is packed for half of it. That means that I have to stand like right next to the bus driver for about 5 minutes. It is so stressful because it looks like we are going to hit everything, from cars to the sidewalk and especially bicyclists. Eventually, I do make my way back up to the top of the bus, where I just look out at the everything.

My boss brought me out to lunch. We went to this place to get some Vietnamese food. I had some sort of prawn rice roll and some Shanghai noodles with ham and shrimp. It was surprisingly good, but I had to use chop sticks. So that might be somewhere to avoid with mom (hahah I don't know if she can use them).

After work (I got out at 7:00), I went to ULU to watch a game. However, there was no game on, so we just got a drink and sat and talked for about two hours. We left and I wanted some dinner, so I broke off from the group and started looking for a place that sold kebabs. I walked around for an hour, and found not one place that sold a kebab. I made it home around 11:30, miserable and just had a sandwich instead. I am now on a hunt for a kebab, which I will get before the weekend is over.

28/2

Again, Thursdays are full of classes. We learned about sport this week, so that wasn't too bad. A lot of the conversation in seminar was comparing American and British views on sports, like national teams, who follows which sports, what specific sport fans are stereotyped as and things like that. It was quite interesting.

For religion we had to go to the Jewish Museum. It cost a fiver, which was terrible because most museums are free, but it had a very extensive collection. I learned a lot about the Jews from about the 1300s until the 1940s in Britain. Come to find out, they were expelled in 1295 and not re-allowed to enter until the 1650s. Also, I learned what professions they had in London, which usually were low-skilled ones because they were not allowed to join unions or guilds at the time.

Once I made it home, I worked on some more stuff for my internship. I had to make a new budget, which took about two and a half hours, but I finished at 7:30. Leah had some friends up from Spain, so we went out to dinner with them. We went to a pub and got pub food. I ended up getting a steak and ale pie with mashed potatoes. It was delicious and really filled me up. I am assuming one night that will be mom's dinner when she comes because it is literally steak and potatoes, which is her favorite and I expect she will be a little sick of trying food that she literally doesn't know what any of it is. After that we came home and watched half of a movie. We were all falling asleep so we decided not to watch it all and I was sleeping by 12:30.

26/2/13

25/2

Once I got out of bed around 9, I started doing work for my internship. I worked on apportioning costs between centers, and then made an outline for a web brief, which is basically tells a computer programmer how we want our website to be. It seemed to go well, but I didn't finish with it until 11:30, so a solid two and a half hours of work. After that, I decided to go for a walk because I was feeling pretty cramped up in my room.

I walked down to Fleet Street, which is a real nice street. It is busy, but it is also old and has a lot of interesting buildings on it. It is interesting because you can really tell who the Londoners are and who are just here for a holiday. Once I made it to St. Paul's, I looked on a map for something to do. I followed the arrow to the Tate Modern, which is a modern art museum. It is housed in an old electrical company factory and it had a pretty extensive collection. I was iffy about most of the art there because modern art is either a home run or absolutely terrible. There was one exception: Monet. I have decided that he is one of my favorite artists, and they had one of his Lily Pad paintings. Monet's Lily Pads are my favorite collection of works and it was very nice to see another version of the many that there are in Paris. I got tired though so I walked back to my room to rejuvenate before another expedition.

At 6, Matt and I left to go meet Joey in Zone 3. It was about a 50 minute tube ride. We were meeting him out there because he got us tickets to go see West Ham play Tottenham (Matt's favorite team). It was a completely different atmosphere than the Chelsea game was. The West Ham fans (home) were quite hostile towards the Tottenham fans. As we walked into the stadium, the players were just starting to walk out. What that means is that the entire stadium had to start singing their theme song: bubbles. It was wild. Here is a video of the fans singing!

Andy Carroll scored on this penalty kick

Taking the free kick was Gareth Bale, who has 1 goal less than Ronaldo
and 2 goals less than Messi in all competitions. He is spectacular.

The corner kick delivered by West Ham. 

When we left, the entire stadium was livid being that West Ham lost in the 89th minute. This one guy was yelling outside the stadium "I am so angry." It was honestly a little comical. But we couldn't laugh or talk because we would have gotten beat up. Matt couldn't even cheer for Tottenham. It was a much harder London than what we are used to. It was a great experience and I am so glad that we did it.

26/2

I took the bus to work today, and I realized that I really like the bus. When it is not busy, it is nice just to look out the window and seeing everything and places that I want to visit. When I got to work, I was sent to working on the reconciliations. I will talk about them more later in the week in my internship blog (Warning: it is quite boring). I did get some pizza for lunch today. The first bite burned my mouth. Yeah! However, after that, it was delicious, with oregano, ham, and onions. It was a huge pizza, so I took half of it home to eat for dinner. Now, I think I will read some and plan my adventures for tomorrow (basically work and ULU because we haven't seen Brian in a while). Hope you all keep warm at home!

Internship Blog Week 5

This week at my internship, I was not required to go into the Hoxton Trust. This is because Karina was sick, and we previously discussed that she was taking this week off due to the fact that her daughter had mid-term holiday and she did not want to get a sitter for the entire week. So I took advantage of the week off by going to Oxford on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, however, I woke up to a few texts from Karina. In the first text, she asked me to work on the budget a little more. She wanted me to fix the numbers and apportion expenses to LAS, Garden, and Premises accordingly: 3/5 of total costs, 1/5, 1/5. So I went through Wednesday night and fixed all the numbers and made sure that everything balanced everything else. It took about two hours. After that, she asked me to work on a web brief. This came to a little surprise, and I had to research what a web brief was. What it is is basically a snapshot of the business written for a web designer. Supplementing the information on the business is a brief description of what the business wants the website to be like. I sent her an email asking if this is what she wants me to do. However, she never got back to me.

We have been discussing ways to apportion costs out to different department. It has been a bit of a tedious task and we have yet to come up with a viable solution. She asked me to think about how to solve this problem. Over the weekend, I have developed a crude way of apportioning the costs between departments, but I am not sure it is what she wants. I will fine tune it before I go into work on Tuesday and present it to her, along with a completed rough draft outline for her to tell me if it is the correct thing to do and have her point me into the next step.

Being that I didn't go into the office this week, I couldn't really take in any British culture. What I did realize though is that I prefer working in an office setting as opposed to home. Maybe because my desk is dirty, but I felt like I could never really focus and get to work. I was always putting in a maximum 80% instead of 100%. Maybe it's the situation or something. Who knows?

24/2/13

Today was a wonderfully lazy day. I woke up decently early because I was super hot and thirsty. So I got a nice glass of water and watched an episode of Top Gear. Then, after making breakfast, we headed to Callaghan's to watch the Manchester City-Chelsea game. When we got there, only Matt got a drink. I was going to get something at half time. We were sitting on the stools though and this old, greasy Manchester City fan came over and told us to move. We were just stunned so since Joey and I didn't have drinks, we got off the stools and just stood next to them. Then, we gave him a dirty look as he took one of the chairs. During intermission, we left to go watch it in the lounge and decided that we are not going to go back there. The staff is foreign and that is annoying because they can't understand us and they're not British and the clientele who go there are hostel and basically are not the types of people we want to watch football with.

After that, I came home and took a little nap. Then did some work for my internship and planned some of my time in the future out. I got a flight to Jana's so that is taken care of. Mom got her hotel in London, so that is also taken care of. It is nice that things are getting into place. It will also be nice to stop spending money on things and actually do them. Which is what March and April are for.

Tomorrow, I will start work on one of my papers that are due. It is an open topic, but I want to get a jump on it before the weekend. Ok bye! 

23/2

20/2 Wednesday

I woke up on Wednesday had had to deal with some absolute nonsense. I have been forced to shave my beard for an interview. So I spent the first half an hour awake shaving, However, afterwards, I did have a Skype interview with PwC, and it went well I think, so that was very very nice. A little secret, I had my suit jacket, tie and button up on with jeans and Converse on. Perks of a Skype interview. After that, I went for a little walk and worked on some internship things for Tuesday.

I was very tired though today. I ended up taking it quite easy at night, even skipping ULU because I wanted to get some work done. I know disappointing, but I did make up for it Thursday. I was just tired from Oxford, shaving, and the interview. I took a short walk around 10 just to clear my head and must have been sleeping by midnight.

Also, sorry about the confusion, I wanted to talk more about this but I didn't want to combine it with my trip to Oxford.

21/2

Today turned out to be quite a surprise. I had classes all morning, which they were fun. We talked about the media and freedom of the press, which is different over here than home. I have begun to really enjoy Contemporary Britain because I have been exposed to a breadth of information, which gaining a more comprehensive understanding of everything was one of my goals about coming.

For lunch, I made a wonderful toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just delicious. Following a brief nap, Religion class beckoned. We learned about the Jews this class. It was quite interesting because the only real history of the Jews in England derives directly from the Christians. Mainly, it had to do with William the Conqueror, something I have been interested in since studying in France. We also got off on a tangent and learned a little bit about languages:

Germanic Language (Basically, old German)

Developed three languages:

1. English
1. A combination of French and German
2. Yiddish
1. A combination of German and Hebrew
3. Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish Talk)
1. Basically old German, with variations

 So that was quite the lesson. After though, I forgot that I said I was going to go with Joey and Matt to a football match. We ended up going across the city to Fulham, where Stamford Bridge (stadium) is. There, we got a chance to watch Chelsea Football Club play Sparta Prague, both of whom are in the top division in their respective leagues (England and Czechoslovakia). Chelsea was actually champions of Europe last year, so that was impressive.

It was an amazing atmosphere and an exciting game. It ended in a 1-1 draw, but Chelsea tied it in the 92 minute. Here are a few more photos of the game.

The start of the game, where Frank Lampard is exchanging the banners

That yellow orange area are the Sparta fans. 

So yea, I got extremely lucky with going to this and it was an absolutely great experience. Being that Chelsea made it to the next round, we may go back to see the Round of 16 leg. That will be decided on Friday though, so as to not worry about it this week.

23/2 Friday

I had to get up a little early today to get to Kings Cross. I had to put money on my Oyster Card. It was garbage though because it was so packed. The longer I spend in London, the more I dislike tourists and people who are loud. It is nice to be on a bus packed with Londoners because there is silence. But anyways, I got on the tube and headed west. I did that because I was to meet a man for coffee. I ended up meeting him on Portobello Road. Unbeknownst to me, that is the road of the famous Portobello Market. So we spent about an hour or so in a cafe talking, just about London, our lives, politics, and anything else. 

Once we left the cafe, we browsed the stalls of the market for about 45 minutes. Then he gave me a walking tour of that area of north Kensington, culminating at Holland Park, where there was a great zen garden, called Kyoto Gardens, made in cooperation with the city of Kyoto, which was the capital of Japan for about 1,000 years. I then went to a house which also was a museum. It was the house/studio of the royal artist during the Queen Victoria time. It was pretty nice and really interesting seeing all the styles of art this man created. He could paint in the classical sense, but he also had a lot of impressionistic work too. 

I then caught a bus from Kensington High Street home via Oxford Street. Oxford Street and Circus are terrible to go through by bus. In case anyone was curious. Once I got home, I worked on some more things for my internship and then basically hosted a party in my small room. Basically everyone started gathering around 8:30 or so, just sitting and talking, and I think at our max we had 9 or 10 people. My room is not big enough for that many people, but we acted like pros at Tetris, so it worked fine. We just sat and talked until about midnight, and I got to bed about one. It was nice because I have the room to myself this weekend because my roommate is taking a trip to Paris.

23/2

I went to bed so I could wake up at 9:15 at meet some people to head back to Portobello Market. I wanted to go back to actually look at things and stuff. So we took the 7 bus all the way there, which was about 45 minutes. But it was fine because we got top seats and got a great show there.

It was again a great market, but surprisingly, about a mile long. There were so many stalls and shops and awesome things to buy. At one point, we saw a man with a dog on his shoulder like a parrot. It was quite comical. There was a lot of stuff that I think Pa and Poppy would like. Just knickknacks and antiques and unique things. And hats. There were some real nice hats.

Now, as I finish this up, I am heading down to the Lounge to meet up with some people, then maybe we will go out and explore the city. Or not. Who knows? Anyways, please feel free to send me an email or something fun like that. Or if you have any suggestions for me to do, I take requests. Ok bye!

20/2/13 (Oxford)

Today, all I did was have a Skype interview and went grocery shopping. My entire bill came up to 6.07, so that made me happy. Other than that, nothing. BUT YESTERDAY....

I went to Oxford.

I woke up at 4:45 and got on the bus around 5:30 to go to Paddington Station. From there, I caught a train to Oxford for the price of.... 5.50! I was quite disappointed though, because the sun didn't rise until 7:25... around the same time my train arrived. So I didn't even get a chance to look at the scenery.

Once I got to town, I just started walking around. I couldn't find a place that served a full English breakfast, so I settled for a sandwich of egg, bacon, and brown sauce. Then I started walking again. I ended up walking up a huge hill (I did that in Bath too. I am going to have great legs after the trip) and into some forest. Then I decided I shouldn't be walking around some forest in the English country-side. So I went back into town to a museum. I spent a decent amount of time there, went to a bookstore and music store, and sneaked into a few colleges of the university. At 1:10, I found a chapel where a student had an organ recital, so I stayed and listened to that. It was above average. He still needed a lot of practice though; a few times he missed notes badly. 

After sneaking into a few more colleges, I found another museum (exciting no?), but this one had samurai, so that was cool. Then, I stopped in a pub and read the paper. After, I went to grab an early dinner because there was a football game on at 7:45. The place I went to was having steak Tuesday, so I got a mixed grill platter and a drink for 7.25. I got steak, pork, lamb, and a sausage. Very very tasty. I went to another pub for the match and got talking to these guys who actually went to the university. They were nice enough, but were rooting for Arsenal, who ended up losing.

My train departed at 11:09 and I got back to my dorm around 1:15. I was exhausted. However, let me say this. Oxford was a very nice place, with beautiful buildings and some nice shops. I am glad that I took the time to go and see it. So here are a few pictures (I didn't take many so as to stay inconspicuous)