day 12

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while, I’ve been super busy. Thanks to everyone for your kind words on Monday. Everything is hopefully going to work out with Wicked. It turns out the tickets were actually there at the box office, but because they didn’t take two seconds to look under the right name, the tickets were left unused. It’s that a kick in the head? But everyone at Proscenium worked very had to resolve the problem and now I am told I will be given our four tickets, real, honest to God, hold in your hand tickets, this weekend when we go to Bath and Stonehenge with Proscenium for next Monday night. So keep your fingers crossed that everything works out as it should.

Tuesday morning means waking up and going to class. Today was a very nice lecture because we were told that our Wednesday lecture was canceled because our lecturer was sick (wishing a speedy recovery to her). So that meant that today we were going to do Wednesday and Tuesday’s lecture in one day. This didn’t sound good, until she told us she’d just be going over the gist of both lectures and then going over the test questions from both sections with us so we wouldn’t be at a disadvantage. So that was great. We did the lecture on Dreams, where we pretty much learned we still don’t know why we dream, but it’s important that we do. We learned that symbolic interpretation of dreams isn’t really all that accurate because people try to put blanket meanings to things in dream when everyone has had a different experience and things have different meanings for different individuals. Then we went through the lecture on the placebo effect, which is a neutral treatment that doesn’t really do anything and how if people think they are getting medicine, they will see actual results. It’s sort of like it’s all in your head, but it can actually make you better if you think you’re being cured of something. Then we went over the actually test questions from those two sections and, of course, I wrote them all down. So I’ll at least get 10% on this test.



After class I went with Lindsey and Bryan to Camden Street market, a really crazy and cool place. There are tons of tattoo parlors and people selling things. We walked up and down the rows of tiny shops, mostly selling tourist stuff, but there were a lot of people that sold tee shirts the designed or art they painted. It was a very eclectic and fun place.

After spending a lot of time there we waited at the dorm to go to our Jack the Ripper walk. This is a walk through the locations (or near the locations) of the murders of 5 prostitutes that Jack the Ripper did really horrible things to. This was done by Proscenium, as are all of the Westminster cultural events. It was a very interesting tour. There were a bunch of other groups there with different companies, so we had to complete for space sometimes. Jack the Ripper was, of course, never caught, and there are a lot of theories as to who he was. But who ever he was, he was a sick old freak. Each time he killed, the scene was more brutal and violent. He would cut the throat of the woman then go to town cutting her up and removing all sorts of things that are meant to be kept inside. It’s amazing what someone could get away with in Victorian London. At night it was practically pitch black in the tiny alleys, and there were drunk prostitutes all over the place because that’s the only job a woman could really do, so they were pretty easy targets. After the 5th woman he killed, Jack the Ripper disappeared off the face of the map, and no one really knows who did it today.

After the walk my friends and I decided we wanted to get something to eat, so we walked around for a while. We were on the South bank, so we went to a place called the Giraffe and got desserts. Allie and I again shared a waffle with ice cream, bananas, and chocolate sauce. It was very nice to sit outside and talk over dessert.



Then we walked along the south bank of looked at the Thames at night. You couldn’t se how brown it is, so it looked quite nice. Parliament and Big Ben were all lit up, so we took some pictures, then walked back to our dorm, which is actually pretty close to Parliament.

British word of the day: peckish = hungry