School and Shakespeare

Wow! It's hard to believe it has already been two weeks since I've been in London! This week began with scheduling some of our first trips to visit a few of the other lovely cities that Europe has to offer! So up first comes a trip to Paris next weekend! I could not be more excited, but first lets get to what happened this week here, in London!!
This week also began the first full week of classes. For my English class I must read a book for every class, which results in my reading of two books per week for the next few weeks. Although it will be quite a bit of reading I am excited to have an inside glance into contemporary British literature and what titles have been popular over the last few years on this side of the pond. One of the best parts of the class is getting to meet the authors of each of the books we read. So far we have only met the first author, Stephen Brown, of the first work we read, which was a play titled Future Me. In my Journalism class we have mainly focused on learning about the political system in the UK and how Parliament functions. We have also discussed the wide variety of print media that the city of London reads every day. Did you know that in one day you could pick from 10 different newspapers when choosing to buy your paper in the morning?
On Tuesday Leah and I got to see the show Richard II at the Barbican Theatre. Naturally being the newbies that we are to London, we left for the theatre probably later than we should have and once the tube that we were riding got delayed a few minutes we ended up arriving late to the show. After running around the Barbican Center for a good five minutes we finally located the correct theatre and made our way to find our seats. Since the show had already started we had to wait until a quick scene change to open the door to our row and find our seats. Well, when the time came of course we opened the door to complete and utter darkness with little aisle room to locate our exact two seats... long story short there was only one seat open in our row and Leah and I shared a seat for the first act of the show, which of course ended up being two hours long! Yes TWO hours long people! Basically I got a really good workout for about two hours where I was half sitting on the arm of the seat and half sitting on Leah, so it was a good time. Once intermission came we felt a huge sigh of relief when the British lady sitting next to us voiced her concern over my uncomfortable situation (the whole time I thought she was going to attack us once the lights went up) and we eventually made our way to our actual seats. Anyhow, the second act was great once I had my tush in my own seat... this evening will certainly be one for the books!
This week I also discovered a small street, which has become my favorite street in all of Kensington. The street is Stanhope Mews East. It is barely a street in fact. There are hardly any cars on its tiny roadway. But around half past noon when I take Stanhope Mews on my way to class everything in the world becomes right for a few minutes as I make my way to the end of the street where on the corner sits a small schoolyard for the Glendower Preparatory School. Everyday when I walk by the little school girls are playing in the yard and it is absolutely the cutest thing I have seen in London so far... they have uniforms that remind me of Madeline and everything.
Anyways, the rest of the school week finished up well and now onto a great weekend of checking out the local markets and exploring more of downtown London!