A Real Entry

Since there hasn't exactly been an updated real entry other than the random and sporadic posts that I've put up the past couple of times I've been on, I thought it might be nice to write about things that are actually going on in London.

Right now, I'm sitting in the flat in my bed after finishing a nice cup of tea with my breakfast. Wednesdays are my lazier days, since I get to sleep in past 8:15. Class doesn't start until 2:00 for me today, so I've got a little while to sit down and catch my breath before starting another great day of running around the city (literally) and discussing another play. I'm only taking two classroom classes this semester. The first, European Mass Media, meets on Mondays at 10:30 for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Bevin Jones, the professor, is a classically ridiculous British man from the top of his balding white-haired head rimmed with round glasses down to the bottoms of his corduroy trousers. He laughs quite a bit at his own jokes, but is deceptively knowledgable about European history, especially Belgium. I have learned a lot about European history and European communincation systems there and will soon be writing a paper on how to create an effective communications system in a remote mountain region that has 17 dialects of a language. Yay. The second class is Drama and the London Theatre and is probably my favourite class of the two I'm taking. Dr. Jinnie Schiele teaches the class on Wednesdays at 2:00 for 2 1/2 hours and is AWESOME. My favourite part of class is when she does attendance in the morning. When she calls your name, it's like mixing a warm summer breeze with chocolate syrup. I swear I got chills the first time I heard her! We talk about various plays we go to see (the class goes to see one per week at different theatres around London) and discuss characters, aesthetics, lines, themes, etc.

On Monday, we went to see Speed The Plow, a dramedy starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum. Although it was hard at first to get Jeff out of my mind as a character from Jurassic Park, he eventually convinced me of his role and ended up putting on (with Kevin's help) one of the best performances I've seen here to date. Afterward, we all sprinted to the stage door and managed to catch glimpses of both of them. Aaaaand...I got the autograph of KEVIN SPACEY. YEAH.

As for the internship, it's constantly in flux. I've grown to feel like more of an employee there now that my time there has exceeded a month, but there are still moments where I wish that I was a little more involved. Maybe that's just the Park Scholar in me speaking, but the work varies from typing up shipping orders to writing articles for the quarterly newsletter. I work with another intern, Dan, who is from UMass and loves everything Boston-related, as well as with several full-time employees. Since ESPN Classic works in tandem with our company, we have a lot of overlap with people from that company. Jamie, Danieli (a guy), Lisa, Cecile and Klara all work for Classic, but we talk a lot and eat lunch with each other. There's a great vibe there and a lack of overbearing intensity in the workplace that can only be explained as European, I guess.

We all just finished putting together the quarterly newsletter for NASN (North American Sports Network, recently bought by ESPN) and ESPN Classic, so there just might be something published online that you can take a look at, proving that we actually work here; we don't just go to clubs, pubs and run through parks all day. That's about it for now. I'm heading down to Sevilla this weekend to visit Norah (it takes a lot of self-control not to follow that up with a bunch of exclamation points), so there will be some updating about that once I get back. For now, I'm going to go and shower and shave because my face is really really scruffy. Nice.