1st Solo Adventure

The last few days have been pretty incredible.  Two days ago I went on my internship dry run up to Farringdon.  I did go the wrong way on the streets a few times but I found my way nonetheless.  My internship seems to be in a pretty cool building.  Apparently that part of London is more artsy and lot of creative people live, work and play over there.

It was my first adventure on my own in the city and it was lots of fun.  I learned three things while doing it.  First, if I ever go on the tube alone again I am bringing reading material.  It can get really boring because no one talks to anyone and you can only look at a map of the tube so many times before you have memorized it completely (which I think I have got some lines memorized already).  The second thing I learned is that I don’t like where the street signs are located in London.  It’s not necessarily in the same place for each street.  I don’t know how driver get around cause it’s so hard to locate the darn street signs.  The third thing I have learned is that basically no map of London is correct.  Honestly I’ve never been more skeptical of maps in my life.  Only tube and buss maps seem to have everything in order.  Otherwise streets are missing, or alleyways connect you to a street instead of the street actually connecting.  It can be confusing at times but I still love it.

When I got back from doing my dry run (which took 40 minutes to and 30 from) I met up with my new friends Alex and Joe.  They were heading over to the Tate Modern so I tagged along with them.  The Tate Modern was really interesting.  There were some really famous people featured there whose work I had never hoped to see up close.  It was really awe-inspiring.  But there was also work there that I had to cock my head to the side and say to myself “I could do this” or “Is this really worthy of the Tate Modern?”  Hopefully my Art in London class will help me to be more appreciative of that sort of art.  There were also short film pieces featured in the TM.  Most of them involved weird nudity.  One video, for example, was two naked people, a man and a woman, playing with a large white balloon.  I didn’t quite get it.

Later that night our whole program went and saw the Lion King at the West End Theatre.  I had never seen the Lion King on stage before and I was really excited.  The set and costumes were amazing.  They are really elaborate.  The show itself was a little disappointing.  The kids weren’t the most talented and the men who played Mufasa and adult Simba sucked it up.  But Nala, Zazoo, Timone and Pumba were excellent.  Even our program director, Mark, said it wasn’t as good as it should have been.  There was no standing ovation at the end, which I thought was basically standard nowadays.

Since I have written so much for this day I will end it here.  My next post will be about our first real night out.

Pip Pip Cheerio!