Hi friends!

I've been up to a lot lately. But I am feeling incredibly lazy, so you can find the details here. I'll just leave you with this:

Lizzie and her fans

Hi Friends,

In an unsurprising sequence of events, the weekend passed much too quickly and the school week is in full swing. I'll fill you all in on my weekend while I wait for my next class to start. Wednesday was Sportsnite (Yes, I am starting with Wednesday because that is technically when my weekend starts due to the fact that I don't have class on Thursdays or Fridays. Be jealous.). Anyways, it was a really good time. The school pub was packed, and at one point the entire crowd broke out singing the unofficial, hilariously English and wildly inappropriate fight song (that Lizzie and I are perfectly willing to perform on demand). Everyone then made the trek to the club, which was one big dance party. On Thursday, I met up with some classmates to work on a group project, and that was pretty much the only productive thing I did all day. Well, productive is a relative term. I also caught up on Nashville, which is a feat that some might consider productive (Me being one of those people). That night, Lizzie, a few other friends and I went to Proud, an old horse hospital and stable that was converted into a club. This place was awesome. All of the stables were converted into individual drinking stalls, and the particular stall that we hijacked had both a "dancing" pole and karaoke station. The songs weren't that up-to-date, which was not a problem for us. We jammed to the classics, Sk8r Boi and Mr. Brightside, and the karaoke machine was pretty pointless because we all knew the words by heart.

Ailee, Alexa, Me, and Rachel outside Proud

Friday was a lazy day, and that night Lizzie and I made dinner in our flat kitchen. Well, Lizzie made the dinner. I supervised. Friday and Saturday were two more club nights, but in my opinion not as fun as Proud.

On Saturday during the day, though, we went to the Borough Market. It was a huge maze of stalls with every type of food you could dream of, from Thai to Italian to Exotic Meat (they were literally selling llama and camel burgers). Lizzie settled on pasta, and I had a grilled cheese. Actually, calling it just a grilled cheese is not fair to the perfection that was this sandwich. The stall melted a block of cheese under long metal strips spouting flames, and then scraped the melted cheese onto the toasted bread. It was poetry in food form. Nirvana. Ecstasy. 

The Ultimate Grilled Cheese

That's all for now. Wish me luck, I'm heading into an oral presentation on the theoretical perspective behind the British political system! (Hint: there's not a lot in there about baby George)

Hello friends, it's update time!

The first week of class is underway, and let me start this post with one of my characteristic overdramatic venting sessions. I don't know whether it is the higher education system of the UK, or just UCL in general, but everything seems to be unnecessarily complicated and confusing. I'm not kidding. There are three different websites I had to operate for registration, and the system tells you which classes are approved (because none of them are guaranteed) after the first week of school already starts. I didn't find out that a class I signed up for got rejected until after I had already missed the new class that I got placed in (attendance is mandatory, which is why that matters). After the registration debacle finally got sorted out, and I made it to the rest of my classes, I was presented with a new obstacle: textbooks. All of my professors gave their reading lists with the required textbooks on the first day of class, and by the second day of class all but one of the books I needed were sold out, and wouldn't be restocked until next week. Why were these books sold out, you ask? BECAUSE THE BOOKSTORE ONLY ORDERS AROUND 3 COPIES OF EACH AT A TIME. So now I am forced to duke it out with the 27 other students who also couldn't buy their copies from the store to check out the sole copy from the library. But other than that, school is great! That was only partially sarcastic. I really am excited about the classes I'm taking (which are Comparative Politics, British Politics, Politics of the European Union, and the Welfare State).

Okay. Enough school talk. The Sports Clubs here are the fun ways to get involved in the social scene at UCL. After some research, I discovered that the members of the Lacrosse Club here have the most fun. And so, last Sunday, I attended the Welcome Training Session. After an hour bus ride to the field, three hours of honest-to-God lacrosse playing in all of its humiliating glory, and an hour ride home, I have come to the incontrovertible decision that lacrosse is just not my sport. This means that I am the UCL Lacrosse Club's newest Social Member (you guessed it: all social events, no lacrosse).

The first and last time I will ever wield a lacrosse stick

Every Wednesday here is Sportsnite, where all of the sports clubs get together at the school pub to take advantage of the drink specials, and then later travel to Loop, a club that is rented out every week for UCL sports. I'm guessing my social membership isn't so hard to understand.

Now that school has started I'm definitely starting to get into a routine, and it really does feel like I live here, and not just like I'm on an extended vacation. That's all for now, have to get ready for Sportsnite! (theme is cops and robbers, so obviously I'm getting super creative and wearing all black).

P.S. Here is a selfie of me and Lizzie and our camel friends that we met on our run (in Regent Park which goes past the London zoo). For your amusement!