Cheer for Queen Mary- the Underdog!

Mar. 29th, 2009 at 11:26 pm

I met up with Liz and Mike yesterday to get crepes at CrepeAffaire (I've found locations all over the place, it's so exciting!) after returning my massive pile of books to Senate House. It was delicious, and hanging out with them was really fun and weird. They are leaving tomorrow to go to Paris, but Mike should be back in Scotland by the time I get there.

Later that evening, I met up with Caitlin, Vanessa, Kevin, Hilary, Damien and Paul (last two are Londoners) and headed in to Leceister Square. We were going to split up and see Lion King and Avenue Q, but both were sold out, so the Americans got tickets for Spring Awakening and the Brits figured they'd go see a movie. We grabbed dinner at a sort of pricey Mexican place, that ended up forgetting Hilary's order then tried double charging her for it as she had to wolf it down so we wouldn't be late, since it was so tardy arriving at our table.

Spring Awakening was fantastic. It was hilarious and tragic, and the songs were catchy and extremely well-sung, and the set was really interesting and cool looking. I think it's one of the better shows I've seen since being here.

On our walk home, we got a little lost trying to find a different train station, and ended up wandering past the Old Bailey, St Bride's Church, and St Paul's, which was cool.

Today, the same group minus Paul met up earlyish and headed in to the city to watch The Boat Race. That would be the gigantically famous row-off between the crew teams of Oxford and Cambridge. There was a huge party atmosphere across the river from where we ended up watching- completely with bouncy slide and hot air balloon- and plenty of drunken, debaucherous fans to entertain. We originally were going to watch near Hammersmith Bridge, but accidentally wandered two miles downstream to a different bridge, which actually had an excellent view and was closer to the finish. The scenic, woody walk was nice, and Hilary bought a program that had some past tidbits in it. It was fun to speculate about how boats sank rather than finished in several of the past 154 races (answer: one year, Cambridge hit a stationary boat during warmups and sank. FAIL.). Thank you Wikipedia. (The Wiki article is actually really interesting.) Oxford ended up winning- we'd been cheering for them, so huzzah! Then we walked two miles back to the tube, and all fell asleep on top of each other on the hour ride back to campus.

Caitlin and I made brownies and watched Damn Yankees, and now I'm doing some housekeeping- like trying to figure out more seriously my course schedule.

War is Hell: Combat Film taught by Michalczyk. Any thoughts on that??