11 Jan

A lot of us Americans had a library tour of the Maughan library this morning so I woke up early, got dressed, and met them for breakfast around 8. We took the train into town because it’s a more direct and faster (like 20 minutes faster!) route than the bus and just requires one short trip on the Tube (which is free for us Oyster card holders so it’s fine). From the outside, the library is gorgeous. Nice white stone that’s carved all pretty and looks good despite its age. The inside is more modern and not unlike a mix of Davis and the UL in some respects. I’ll take pictures so you all can get a better idea. The first thing I did was take an audio tour which was hilarious because the people who recorded it were totally laughing at themselves and kind of the idea. They spiced it up with sound effects and little banter but it was still boring though certainly informative. The library is a bit of a maze and even current students say they sometimes have a hard time getting around. That’s comforting. It doesn’t look too difficult though; the floor plan repeats so that helps and the rooms are fairly well labeled. Thankfully, the whole place has wireless because I tried using one of the computers to surf the net and it was painfully slow. I can’t blame network overload either because there were hardly any students there. Oh well. The rest of the tour was boring and then we had to rush to our second War Studies department meeting at 12 which we were about 7 minutes late for. What a waste of time! Our “personal tutor” and JYA liaison seems like a nice guy and sounds like he’s absolutely crazy about what he’s researching/teaching, but as an administrator and go-to person for help, he’s useless. I saw the sun through the nice wall-length window and wanted nothing more than to leave the room and bask in the ever so precious sunlight. Manners, however, interfered and I forced myself to stay until the conclusion of his “presentation.” While a lot of the JYA kids filled out forms to change classes due to schedule conflicts, Katie and I worked out a place to eat. We were going to try the campus refectory (dining hall) again and see if they had anything good. They did have a vegetable curry which I had that was pretty decent, all considering. I also had this chocolate muffin which was labeled as such but tasted like a lovely cupcake (it even had a chocolate sauce filling). Yum. We split up at that point since Katie had class, Gregg wanted to visit the National Gallery, and I needed to head over to Piccadilly and Westminster to find a hotel for my folks. Piccadilly was a little chaotic but I did get to stop by a Fortnum & Mason store by Bond Street which was pretty fun. I wasn’t seeing any good hotels and so I wandered a bit until I saw a street named Shaftesbury Avenue which seemed strangely familiar. I followed it for a bit until I came upon a pub named the Devonshire Arms. Recognition clicked immediately and I knew it as the pub where Saket and Sachi tried their first beer, Guinness, last December. The street opposite was chock full of Indian restaurants and I knew I was really close to the Piccadilly Backpacker’s Inn, our former hostel. Sure enough, not a couple of minutes later I saw its distinctive yellow foyer. It made me happy, though I still didn’t find a good hotel. I then took the Tube over to Victoria and tried my luck there. After a bit of dumb wandering in the wrong direction (it’s funny, I always keep two maps with me but seldom ever consult them; I’m just stubborn, perhaps foolishly, like that) I finally made it to “hotel row” and checked at several places. I found a bed and breakfast where the guy offered me a room for £60 per night for nights. It sounded much better than a Quality Inn that quoted me £99-125 per night or even a Comfort Inn that was asking around £65 a night. I also stopped by this shadier looking place where the Indian man at reception sort of off-hand said, “I’ll give you a room for £50 a night.” The price was nice but the room was pretty cramped and the place didn’t’ feel as good as the B&B or the Best Western where Sach and I stayed New Year’s Eve. I thought of my parents hauling their luggage up those narrow stairs and trying to sleep with the noise from the street and just said no. It was a little past 5 when I finally left Victoria and headed back to the Strand campus to catch a bus back to the dorm. The wait felt like an eternity before a reasonably empty bus pulled in. I made it back to the dorm at 6:30, just in time to meet people for dinner but found out when I got to my room that they had already eaten. I was a little bummed but took the opportunity to try the frozen dinner I had bought a week ago which apparently expired on the 9^th. It was frozen and so I figured it would be fine. As I heated it up in the crappy kitchen, I met a British kid on my floor. His name is Robert and he’s a music major and an awfully nice guy. He had an exam the next day which he was studying for so I said goodbye and good luck after his milk had finished warming up. It’s fun meeting random people around the dorm…The frozen lasagna turned out to be decent (though not terribly flavorful) but this was no surprise; I had bought it for about 60p after all. After dinner I conned Gregg into playing snooker with me again. We read the rules again and apparently I made up the “cover rule” and so we played without that and included the fouls. Poor Gregg got nailed with fouls and I racked up points without even trying. To my credit, I also hit about twice as many balls in as he did and definitely bagged most of the high-point ones. I soundly beat him 94-47. Gregg then helped me set up a HTTP tunnel client that will let Trillian work on my computer. Finally I can connect to AIM again! We just kind of chilled out the rest of the night in our rooms and after finishing the Rule of Four, I went to bed at 1.