London

The last stop on my little vacation is London, where I am now. It's been a hectic few days here. I'm staying with my friend Charlotte who went to harvard- Westlake but we met at Tufts. She's studying here for the year. On Friday I took a nice little walk around the neighborhood and then went to the British Museum which has tons of classics stuff, including the Rosetta Stone and a bunch of the marble friezes from the Parthenon, which are controversial because the Greeks think this British guy named Elgin stole them way back when and that they should be returned to Athens. Regardless, they're pretty damn cool. I spent a couple hours looking in the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian rooms so didn't make it to any other exhibits.

Saturday was Charlotte's birthday so we went to her favorite Saturday market, Borough Market, which is in an old train station type place and is filled with food stalls and vendors. It was very cool. We walked all around trying the free samples of jams, salami, bread, olive oils, and cheeses, had lunch and desert, then took a long walk around the city back to her flat. Our stroll took us past the Eye of London, Parliament and Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and Trafalgar Square. It was a nice quick tour of the sights. We then went to dinner at Wagamamas with her brother William who is doing his junior year abroad here. Use spent the night our with a whole bunch of Charlotte's friends here at a club, bit it's the adventure afterwards that is most funny (but maybe you just had to be there). The club closed at 3, but we hung around for about 40 more minutes because Charlotte's friend Hayley had lost her camera, credit card, and ID. We caught a bus around 345 hoping to head for home. The bus stopped running for what had to be around 20 minutes while too many people were trying to get on. When if finallllllly got going, I looked out the window and said "oh look, there's that cool bridge" meaning the Tower Bridge. Turns out we were definitely not supposed to cross the river to the south side of London. We had gotten an a bus going the completely wrong way. We quickly hopped off the bus at the London Bridge and waited until about 440 am for another one going back to exactly where we had started an hour or so earlier. After that bus and a long walk in the cold, we finally reached Charlottes flat around 530 am. After some laughs and some snacks I was determined to go to sleep before the sun came up, so we finally went to bed at 6 am, by far the latest I have been up in years. It was a pretty funny late night adventure.

Sunday was spent walking around in the rain and relaxing until the Academy Awards. Charlotte and I loooooove the Oscars, all of our movie going and discussing culminate in this ceremony. And I had seen 9 out of the 10 Best Pic nominees this year (Chatlotte had seen all 10) so we were nice and opinionated. We had a few Americans over to watch the red carpet which started at 11pm. The show started at 1 am London time, but our link to the streaming show want working. Just as everyone gave up and went home, one of Charlotte's friends on Facebook sent her a good link, thank god. And thank you Facebook. so once again we were up until 5 am. Ugh. I was pretty pleased with the Oscars. The acceptance speeches were all pretty good and entertaining, aside from Natalie Portman's which I felt just rambled on thanking too many people. I really wanted The Social Network to win best Picture and the fact that it did not put a damper in our whole morning. At the very least it should have split the director and picture prizes, giving one of those to David Fincher. I also very much enjoyed James Franco an Anne Hathaway as hosts, although I felt that Anne did much more than James did. He's a weird guy so I didn't mind too much his blank stares sometimes, but I think his role was to be the straight man and let Anne crack the jokes. Apparently he was also simultaneously filming parts of the show on his iPhone in his pocket. The autotuned songs from Harry potter, the social network, and Eclipse were great. Charlotte and I have watched that video montage quite a few times now. I think they were pretty successful in making the show appeal to a younger audience. I also beat everyone here in regards to our personal ballots with 16 correct guesses, obviously I fell short with the Kings Speech's late night (undeserved) wins. Of course, my top 3 favorite movies of the year were The Social Network, Inception, and 127 Hours, in no particular order. I was also pleasantly pleased that most people wore beautiful dresses, with my best dressed award going to Mila Kunis from Black Swan.
Okay, enough about that.

Monday I hung out with Lydia, an English girl I worked with last year in Argentina. It was super fun to see her again and to talk monkeys. Today has been spent re-packing (hopefully I'll fall underweight!) and eating. Which reminds me, it's time to go get some lunch. I'm off to South Africa this evening (I reapply hope they have good movies on the plane! And that I can sleep) and hopefully I will be able to update this again soon! I can't wait to get back to (playing with, feeding, raising, and yes getting pooped on by) some baboons!!