3/18

Cheerio everybody!
If you can't tell, I'm in the best mood I've been in in quite awhile! It's nearly 2 p.m. Sunday afternoon, and the sun is shining brightly into my bedroom, there are no radios playing next door nor smoke wafting through the doorway, and I've gotten 22 hours of sleep in the past two nights! For the first time in a week I haven't felt like I'm going crazy or suffocating in my room! Life is good indeed!
Anyway, as you may have guessed from my previous note, I was under quite a bit of stress last week, with the majority of it being caused by completely rude flatmates. The final straw was when one of them walked up to me and completely yelled at me for everything she thought was wrong with me, including the fact that I never clean up! (anyone who knows me knows that that is about the last thing I'd ever do...I HATE MESSES!!) Thursday morning, I walked down to housing at 9 a.m. and requested to be moved to a new flat immediately...they had none available so they moved me to a room that was out for maintainence. Sure, the floor was a bit sticky, the room smelled, the toilet was brown, there was no doorknob nor knobs on my dresser, etc., but it was quiet and THERE WAS NO INCESSANT CIGARETTE SMOKE!! So I have moved in, and the cleaners have already shampoo-ed my carpet (although leaving the shampoo in the carpet so that when you walk across it, bubbles form around your feet...it's a new sensation). My flatmates are all post-graduate students (ie: graduate students), so they're older and quite quiet. I'm enjoying living here quite a lot so far, I've slept much better than I ever did in my old flat, and my room's bigger than my old suffocation-chamber in C-core. I'll save you'guys the rest of my griping, but if you want to see it, it's available at http://www.geocities.com/lemonaid_98/317.html!
On Wednesday my friend Jane flew in from NYC to Heathrow Airport...I picked her up in the morning after she had the excitement of having to walk outside the airplane via stairs onto the tarmac b/c there were no spaces at the terminal (and then ride a bus to the terminal!)...it was a bright sunny day, a great intro to London, and we took the tube home before crashing a little bit. Unfortunately, she's been witness to all of the ugliness that's gone on with room change, but I do appreciate her being a great sport!
Wednesday and Thursday Jane & I did some cross-cultural analysis, she enjoyed going to the grocery store quite a lot! We shopped in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, playing Air Hockey at a game room in Leicester Square Thursday night, before hitting a Singaporean buffet in Chinatown for dinner. That evening, we saw the great "Whodunnit?" play, Agatha Christie's Mousetrap at St. Martin's Theatre. It's a fantastic truly-British play that's been on for !49 years!, and I have to admit that it tricked me even!
On Friday we took a bus tour of London, hitting all the famous sites (Big Ben, Parliament, Tower of London, Fleet Street, St. Paul's Cathedral, Millennium Eye, the City of London, Green Park, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Marble Arch, Kensington Palace, Harrod's, Oxford St....)...including a nice river cruise along the Thames. It was a great way to see London, but I have to admit that I agree with Jane when she said that it was a little overwhelming...I had seen most of the places, but I still was a little confused by the number we were seeing! It was the first time for either of us going to Harrod's, though, and we enjoyed it quite a lot...the pet shop & food court there was cool...and I also really got a kcik out of seeing the City of London, since I never seem to get there! (London is divided into numerous cities, including Westminster (West End & Parliament), London, Camden (where I live), etc). Yesterday we took a train with my friend Holly to Colchester, the oldest city in Britain, so that we could see some authentic Roman ruins at the Colchester Museum. After a 3-pound pub dinner for St. Paddy's day, we hopped on a late train back to London.
Jane's off at an IMAX film today, so I'm studying and milling about the flat, trying to take care of things before I go to Europe next week. I start my three-week, backpacking-through-Europe adventure on Friday (Jane flies home Tuesday), so wish me luck on it! I'll hopefully write to you by next Monday, from somewhere in Belgium!
Love,
Kirsten