Hey everyone,

Ok, here's my second real post. Hopefully you guys can just bookmark this blog and then check back frequently - not sure if that's how it works, or if it sends an email when I post a new blog. Anyway, we'll see how it works. :)

Anyway, life in London has its ups and downs. I think I told some of you about my attempt to order nachos...I figured they'd come with melted cheese, maybe some sour cream, maybe some pico de gallo...you know, basic nachos. Ha! Yeah right - when they came out, the cheese was only partially melted, but being a trooper (and VERY hungry), I decided to just deal with that. I took a chip that had cheese and some sour cream on it, took a bite, only to realize that it wasn't sour cream, it was yogurt! Yep, they put yogurt on the nachos instead of sour cream; apparently they had run out of sour cream and figured that would be a good substitute. You know, one time when I was little we didn't have any milk so I put apple juice in my cereal, thinking that would be a good substitute. Let's just say that it didn't work for the cereal, and the yogurt idea didn't work for the nachos. :)

Oh! And then there was the businessman on the tube with the lobster sticking out of his pocket. That was an interesting one. And the cafe owner who sat down at my table and ate half of my french fries while talking to me, without asking! Never a dull moment, I tell ya... :)

But, I do love being here - London itself is an amazing city, and the countryside in the UK is unbelievably beautiful. There's so much history here, and I've been really lucky with the weather so far. I had almost a full month before classes started (they just started this week), so I had plenty of time to be a tourist. Now that classes have started, though, it looks like my touristing (is that a word? Hmm...I guess I just made it one, didn't I?) is going to have to be put on hiatus.

My classes this semester (keep in mind that the school picked these for me; I didn't have a choice) are:

1) The Business of Religion
2) Resources for Research
3) Sociability

Each class only meets once a week for 2 hours, and the rest of the time is my own. They also have a lot of "optional" seminars that we're strongly encouraged to go to. It actually feels like the whole business of Flair in Office Space - if you really really want me to go to all of these, make them mandatory. Calling them optional when they aren't? C'mon, people... :)

So anyway, I've already learned some interesting things in my classes. For example, my business of religion prof kept talking about The Civil War. Of course, this conjured up images of Abe Lincoln and the South in all their ridiculousness for me. About an hour into the class, however, I realized that, since we were talking about Methodists in Britain in the 1750s, talking about the American Civil War didn't make much sense. So wait a minute, did that mean that the English had a Civil War too? Turns out they did, the crazy nutters - and that I need to quickly brush up on my British history if I'm going to keep up. :)

Anyway, these people aren't messing around - I've been assigned on average about 200 pages of reading each night. I just picked up the book Evelina, which I have to have read by next Thursday for the Sociability class, and it's about 450 pages (not counting the secondary texts we have to read). Hmm - considering that, maybe I better start reading, but I'll write more later!

Cheerio!

Kristin