Working for the Weekend

Okay, that's a total lie.  This is mostly going to be a working weekend for me, as all of a sudden the work has piled up.  (I have a presentation on Thursday on the monarchy in medieval England, reading for my Cloisters to Classroom class, background research on both my dissertation and my Identity and Power paper, and Latin exercises.  Whew!)  The week definitely was worth having to be a studybunny this weekend - and, as you'll see, I do have a few fun plans anyway.

The exploratory meeting of the American Girls' Dinner Club met this week; Katie, Claire Menagus (a friend from high school), Claire's flatmate, and Jess (the lone Brit) and I all had a lovely dinner at my house.  We're going to do it again next week, and make it an official sort-of-weekly thing for the American girls in town to catch up and gab.  (Anna and Christine, my other two Americans, weren't there, but they will be!)

The lecture I went to on Wednesday was pretty interesting, although by the end I was looking at my watch more than listening to the esteemed guy.  It was basically about how archeologists and historians look at sources in completely different ways and therefore often extract completely different conclusions from the same sources.  I thought of it sort of as a Venn diagram, where you have two circles that overlap slightly; one circle for the historians, one for the archeologists, and a bit in the middle where they discover the same things.  After the lecture, the usual crowd of class kids went out for drinks.  It's so great to have class friends - and we're more than class friends now, I think; we're actually friends friends.  A few of us girls went shopping on Friday - that makes us real friends, right?

The date, by the way, went very well.  His name is Jon, and I'm seeing him again tonight.  And tomorrow.  (Tomorrow is the annual Apple Fair at Borough Market - we're double dating with Amy and her boyfriend Harry, who is Jon's flatmate.  Pretty cute, huh?)

On the agenda for today is cleaning - it's my week to do the flat - grocery shopping, coffee with Christine, and reading till my eyes fall out.

Londoner

I've well and truly settled into my life here; I've got a routine and I love it.  Seven hours of class a week, twelve of babysitting, and about fifteen of homework.  I've even figured out the rabbit warren that is the Senate House library (no mean feat!) and checked books out from both it and the UCL library.  (I'm still not a fan of this system, in which all books are expected to be read from the library, but I've finally resigned myself to it.)

I've started thinking about subjects for the two papers I have to write, too.  I think I'm going to look at the myth of Charlemagne in the centuries after his death for my Identity and Power class; the writers who postdated Charlemagne's reign saw him as a new David and a second Constantine, and I'd like to examine how and why.  For Cloisters to Classroom I think I'll be treating medieval interpretations of the Song of Songs.  If you haven't read it, you absolutely should - it's beautifully written.  The thing is, though, it's pretty risqué, and medieval scholars had some trouble turning it into a nice, clean, Christian allegory.  I also went to David, the head of the Medieval Studies course, to discuss preliminary dissertation topics.  He was totally into my idea of exploring how eleventh- and twelfth-century theologians read and interpreted the Pauline Epistles, so I felt like an academic rockstar.  That feeling lasted about five minutes, though; he gave me a few books for "background reading" and told me to come back in a week, so now I'm a little overwhelmed.

I've been getting to know London well enough over the past few weeks that it's really starting to feel like home.  I walk to and from babysitting, so I'm familiarizing myself with west London, and I carry my A-Z (the map book that even true Londoners use) with me everywhere.  We've mostly been going out in the east side, so I've been broadening my knowledge of London geography that way, too.  Went to Katie's for dinner on Tuesday - she lives near Barbican - and to Anna's on Thursday - she's in Fulham.  Did a bit of clubbing on Thursday night with Amy and two of her friends in Kensington, and travelled to London Bridge today for coffee with Harry.  I feel like such an adventurer!

It's strange: even when I was happy living in Paris, I never wanted to live there for the rest of my life.  I can absolutely imagine staying in London forever and being perfectly happy.  Harry suggested it was a language thing, which it might be, but I think I fit better with the culture here than I did in Paris.  Everyone's friendly and open here; it's louder and more in-your-face than Paris but less stressed than New York, and it has the same sort of dual community that Washington, DC does in that some people here consider themselves absolutely Londoners while others will always say they're from elsewhere.  I love it.

Gopnik Revisited

Those of you who read my previous blog, B is for Betsy, will remember the passionate affair I had with Adam Gopnik's writing.  Long dormant, it has awoken again, inspired by a piece on Babar that he wrote for the September 22 issue of The New Yorker called "Freeing the Elephants".  My interest was especially piqued by this comment about how literature reflects the temperament of three cultures and their corresponding great cities, cities I have come to consider my own.

He writes:

In London, in children's books, life is too orderly and one longs for the vitality of the wild; in Paris, order is an achievement, hard won against the natural chaos and cruelty of adult life; in New York, we begin most stories in an indifferent city and the child has to create a kind of order within it.

The rest of the article can be found here; I highly recommend it.

Take Two

When I was in middle school, the theme - or inspiration, if you will - of one of NCS' Writer's Day cathedral services was "Take One."  Curled up in piles around the cathedral, our skirts tucked around our knees and our bare feet pressed against the relieving coolness of the marble floors, floppy bluebooks and number two pencils in hand, we girls wrote stories and poems and scribbles about Take One.  Most entries, I believe, touched on movies or the theater.  One memorable finalist story had to do with the sign over a bowl of Halloween candy.  I can't remember what I submitted; it's likely that, as I'd done before and would sheepishly do again, I didn't turn in my bluebook and, instead, crumpled my scratchings in my hand, embarrassed by what I had committed to the page.

Many of you read my Parisian blog - the account of my exultant, breathtaking, whirlwind seven months in Paris as a student and explorer.  (For the curious or nostalgic, here it is: B is for Betsy.)  That, my friends, was Take One.  This is Take Two.

For those of you who haven't been in the loop, welcome; let me catch you up.  In late January 2008 I decided to begin looking into graduate programs in England.  It was contrary enough to everything I had said I wanted that it took me nearly a month to tell family and friends that I had, in fact, applied to four Master's courses at various universities in the United Kingdom.  Four months - and one very frustrating application complication - later, I was admitted as a MA student to University College London in Medieval Studies.

I don't know much about the program; I haven't received information beyond what is listed online.  I do know, though, that I am thrilled to go back to school to study what has always interested me most.  Obviously, I'm also over the moon about being in London for a year.

My accommodations are still up in the air, though I know I'll be living with two other girls, Emilia and Jess.  Emilia and  I did several choir exchanges ten years ago, and reconnected via Facebook.  She responded to the desperate "Help!" message I emailed out a few weeks ago; it turns out that she and her friend Jessica were looking for a third for their new apartment - sorry, flat.  We're hunting in northwest London, relatively close to UCL's campus, and we're trying to be close to Paddington.  I'll let you know what we - well, they - find!

So.  Take Two.  A second European city, a second degree, a second amazing experience.  Wish me luck!