27 Jan

Ah, cleaning day! Fridays are the days on which the cleaning staff at KCH sweep my floor, clean my sink, and empty my trash. How sweet of them! The only problem is (for me) that they come around 10 (10:25 today, to be precise) and so even though I don’t have class until 1, I still have to wake up about an hour before I normally would. Boohoo. They don’t take long though, so I took a shower while they worked. Lainey, Gregg, and Katie also had class at 1 and Margaret was meeting Elicia (written as Aleesha in previous posts ‘cause I’m dumb) in town so we all caught the 12:24 train to Blackfriars. I talked with Katie on the way into town about what she’d been up to since we hadn’t spoken in a while and what her plans were for the day. She was going ice-skating at Somerset House with a friend and was asking a bunch of people if they wanted to come along. I said I’d think about it, but paying £12 just to skate seemed like a bit much to me.

Sociolinguistics was quite entertaining though the best part of class was talking with a Londoner named Karma (forgive the spelling, but her name is pronounced the same way). She speaks fluent Urdu, she’s never been to India, and seems like a really nice person. We started talking outside the seminar room and she asked me basic stuff on how I liked my studies here and when I would be leaving and such. I explained that I was only at King’s for a semester and that I’d be getting my degrees back at home. She thought it really nice that I was taking both English and War Studies classes here too. Study abroad is a relatively unknown thing at universities here, as is taking classes in multiple departments. If you’re an English major, you take only English classes for three years, and likewise for the other subjects (at least in humanities). That helps make sense of the fact that they can get college degrees in only three years. We also talked about life in London compared with the US and I said that I found London really amazing largely because I come from a relatively small town (Greater London has a population of over 12 million people, after all) and am not used to big cities. She’s lived in London all her life and said that I probably know more about the city than she does since I want to take it all in during the short time I’m here. When the transport system was bombed last July and was consequently shut down, she said she had to buy an A-Z (“A-Zed,” a really cheap and detailed map of every London street) to find her way to class. She’s also in my 1^st WW Lit class so that’s pretty nice too. Class was fun; the professor decided to do a “historical reconstruction” of language shifts including Grimm’s Law and the Great Vowel Shift of the 15^th century. It may not sound very exciting, but I got to see how the German “acht” for the number 8 became “eight” in English and why the English “mother” and “father” are “mater” and “pater,” respectively, in Latin (that was part of Grimm’s Law, and yes, the same Grimm as the brothers who were linguists before they were fairy-tale writers/transcribers). It was surprisingly entertaining.

After class I ate lunch at Trafalgar Square (I really love being able to say that; I already know that’s something I’m going to miss when I go back home) and then caught the Tube to the East End and Brick Lane. Well, I rode a bus for a while and got off a stop early before I finally made it to Brick Lane. Brick Lane is a street covered with Indian (specifically Bengali) restaurants and shops. The names of the streets are even written in Bengali as you can see:

I stopped by several Indian restaurants to check out the menus and compare prices. I could get a decent vegetable dish for £4.95 and paratha at £1.45 (I couldn’t find naan for less than £1.75!). I saw a store selling sweets that I briefly walked in to. The guy manning the counter asked me something that I made him repeat three times before he tried a different phrase: “Are you feeling well?” I answered in the affirmative and he told me he asked because I looked kind of down or sick because I had a worried look on my face. I explained that I was from America and this was my first time on Brick Lane so I was feeling a little lost. He told me that this place was where a lot of Bengalis live and opened shop and I told him that I came here because I heard just such a thing. The jaleebi looked really good, but when he said 50p each, I decided that I’d come back at some later time. He said goodbye with, of course, “Cheers!”

Walking further down the street, I spied a “Taj Market” grocery store that I absolutely had to stop at. I just wandered the cramped aisles a bit inhaling the smells. I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to walk through an Indian grocery store in my life. I didn’t buy anything, but just smelling those spices and familiar scents again made me happy. Soon after that I encountered a clothing shop with punjabis hanging in the store window and just had to check it out. Indian music was playing and I walked through it a bit, admiring the colors and checking the prices. The place even had one of those red carpet stands for sari displaying (you know what I’m talking about; where the guy sits and unfolds the sari for you?) which made me very happy. I was a little disconcerted by one of the employees who shadowed me around the store and didn’t say anything, but I soon left. £10 for a cotton/polyester punjabi. Is that reasonable?

It was getting near 4 and a little on the dark side so I hurried to the end of Brick Lane where I was glad to find a Tube station. I simply caught the Tube back to Temple and for once, I really mean the first time so far, I caught the first 68 bus at the Strand campus without having to wait or run or anything. It was amazing. I saw raindrops on the bus windows a little ways into the ride and felt glad that I had decided to head back to KCH a little earlier than planned.

Dinner was a veggie burger and peas that were quite good. After dinner I wanted to play pool and as usual the set was checked out. So instead of playing snooker like we would have done had someone not lost the key (which is rather hard, since you cannot get your room keys back from reception until you return the key to the game room…), Liane, Gregg, and I ended up talking and sharing pictures in my room for the next 6 hours. We covered lots of topics from politics to religion to travel and such. It was a really nice conversation (I’ve been lucky the last couple of nights, what?). Lainey came back from her night out around 1:30, right about the time that Liane left (she lives on the floor below us and at the complete opposite end), and Gregg went back to his room next door. Lainey briefed us on her night and Gregg summed ours up with, “We just sat around and talked.” Succinct and perfectly accurate and so very military.

I worked on my blog until about 2:30 before finally turning in for some very welcome sleep. Cheers!

P.S. Lainey gave us a fun fact about the Chinese military: they used to equip monkeys with firecrackers and send them aboard British vessels during naval battles. Now how funny is that? Lainey said it made her very proud to be Chinese. Also, the Chinese New Year is on Sunday so we’re all going out to a restaurant in Little China to celebrate. Should be interesting…