London: Hen Photography and Buckingham Palace

I met up with Adam (a current member of Shir Appeal) this afternoon. I had brought him the latest Shir Appeal CD from Boston. He's studying abroad for his entire junior year.

I got to check out his living situation. He's studying at UCL, but it seems like the on campus housing he's in is similar to what SOAS offers. He lives in a single room - it's pretty spacious and has its own bathroom - and a shared kitchen is down the hall. The kitchen was pretty big and nice too...later this week I'll be checking out the SOAS housing, but after seeing his situation, it definitely seems not bad for just a year.

After this, we walked through Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, and St. James's Park. There, we met a somewhat odd photographer, who tried to recruit Adam for his photography project, which involves photographing strangers. He also noticed me photographing some pigeons and hens, and told me I should get down to eye level instead of shooting the photo from above.

Here are the results.

Before

After

Next Adam and I walked toward Buckingham Palace, and then on through Green Park.

After this, Adam had to go hand in an assignment. We took the tube back to Kings Cross and then parted ways. I walked down to the Waitrose supermarket near Russell Square to check it out. It's not a bad supermarket - a bit on the upscale side, but not too expensive for some items, and some good variety. This market is relatively close to both my school and the area where I might live if I choose to live on campus, so I'm sure I'll shop there sometimes. I bought some cheese and crackers for dinner, and also got some steak flavored potato chips which weren't too good. Then I made it back to the Barker's for a lovely tea time out in the garden. 

Now it's time for bed - I don't feel too tired yet so I will listen to some Chinese lessons, which will either teach me something or put me right to sleep. More tomorrow! 

London: Russell Square Campus

This morning I went to visit SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies - see link.) I had a chance to walk around quite a bit, and I also met with two professors and took a tour of the main SOAS building. The professors seem great, so I am looking forward to next year already! We talked a bit more about the structure of the program, and also my research interests. One of them is doing research about the organic food industry in China, and he had recently been in Yunnan Province doing research - he had some nice Yunnan tea that we drank as we talked.

And the school and neighborhood are nice too - it helped that it was such a nice day.

Here are some pictures:

This is one of the streets that leads up to SOAS.

The square next to the SOAS building has grassy patches where people were eating and studying. The SOAS building is in the right of this photo.

The back side of the SOAS building.

Motorcycles outside of the school.

This is Russell Square, which is right next to the campus. There was a class being taught on the grass.

I went back later during lunch and there were lots of people picnicking.

Here's another picture in Russell Square.

Finally, I took this picture of taxis parked near Russell Square.

London: Risotto and Sticky Toffee Pudding

It's Wednesday evening now, but this blog post will focus on the rest of Tuesday. 

I took a 2.5 hour nap, which felt very nice - though it was hard to wake up. Anna and I went for a walk after that, up to Parliament Hill in Hampstead Heath, but once at the top it started to rain so we came back home. I helped Anna cook dinner - a risotto recipe from Jamie Oliver's cookbook.

Some of the ingredients out on the counter.

It is interesting to see where produce comes from in England. In the US, and especially California, most everything comes from California, Mexico, elsewhere in the Americas, and a bit of Asia. But for our dinner last night, the green beans came from Kenya, and the mint came from Israel. 

I took some pictures of the packaging.

Nancy and Chris came home and we all had dinner. 

My dinner looked lovely.

Since it was still light out when we were done, and the weather had cleared, we went for a walk in their neighborhood and into the park. We passed by the ponds in Hampstead Heath, which had mist rising up from them - it was dusk and the park looked lush and beautiful, with lots of flowers, green leaves and grass. I felt like Frodo walking through The Shire.

I didn't take pictures in the park because it was too dark, but I took this on the street just before we left the house for the walk.

On the way back, we stopped by the famous (to our family) Cafe Mozart - or perhaps it was the place next door (same owner), where we shared sticky toffee date pudding and a 'fruits of the forest' crumble. We had both with custard. I like custard more than ice cream. The sticky toffee pudding was really sweet - I preferred the crumble.

I managed to stay awake till 11 PM, which was a bit tricky, but paid off - I slept quite well and only woke up briefly during the night....and didn't get up until 8:30 this morning. After breakfast I headed out to explore SOAS and Central London.