Commies!

For reasons pertaining to his own amusement my British Culture professor likes to introduce the UK’s many newspapers by first describing the type of people who read them and then matching that description to members of the class.

This is how he described the readership of the radically conservative ‘Daily Mail.’

“You’re lying awake in the dark night. A tree branch scrapes against your window. You hear a scratching noise in the corner in the shadows. The scratching gets louder, then louder. Terrified you clutch your bedclothes and whisper ‘…Commies!’”

He’s my favorite.

Yesterday I worked in the morning and then had a field trip for European Government to the Imperial War Museums. Even the grunt work at Murad is actually pretty cool: I was updating all of the product line press releases with the new prices so basically just copying and pasting, but now I know what all the press releases are like and how the language works for that. Also I finished all of them in just a few hours which apparently no intern has done before, so, yes.

Imperial War Museum was not terribly interesting, and I actually probably have to go back for a different class anyway. I did do the Holocaust exhibit though, which is pretty heavy for a mid-afternoon jaunt, so now I’ve seen Holocaust museums on three continents. I don’t know what to say about that distinction.

Chloe and I are watching Viva UK 40 music videos right now -basically British mtv- and it’s remarkable how blended the cultures have become. Half the singers we’re debating if their American or not. We are double checking our answers on Wikipedia and we are usually wrong.

Brief exploration around Piccadilly Circus yields the conclusion ‘like Times Square but shorter buildings, less neon, and more likelihood of being pick-pocketed’.
The student council would appear to be comprised of studious action-minded individuals, with lots of pertinent questions and logical suggestions. So basically the polar opposite of any student body governing organization I’ve ever participated in.

Later we checked out the pub at Imperial College, the university CAPA is loosely affiliated with only in the sense that we can join their clubs if we so choose, and the International Students House known as ish. Where there was karaoke. Of Backstreet Boys. Which I did not participate in at all or even slightly, but felt disconcertingly like a contemptible drunken American just by witnessing.

I keep hoping to eventually catch up enough on documentation of current events and on-goings to have time for some reflection on what being here is like, but alas not yet.