We had decided to celebrate Thanksgiving on Sunday, and we had originally planned to go to Kew Gardens in the morning before dinner, but it was raining pretty hard, and since going so far would be quite a trek and expensive, we decided to put it off till a day when we would be happier to go. So instead, we went to Tesco to do some Thanksgiving shopping - really only picking up a few last minute things. (Did you know that it’s damn near impossible to find a pre made pie crust in this country?! Home of the people who thought putting meat in a pie was a good idea?)
After a few feeble attempts at work, we got down to business with making Thanksgiving dinner. In principle, everyone was bringing something. We had made a sign up sheet earlier; I was making my signature leek pie, with added potatoes (for those keeping tabs it is now a potato leek pie) and Sienna made an array of bread and garlic treats. My pie was coming along very nicely, and I was admittedly nervous about it, because I had never made one like it before, and I was really talking it up, and when the time came for everyone to meet downstairs to eat, I was making anyone who would listen smell it. (Yes, it smelled very good!)
As more and more people arrived, I got more and more excited. We had homemade mashed potatoes, my potato leek pie, garlic bread, roasted garlic, homemade garlic butter, vegetarian stuffing, non-vegetarian stuffing, two different kinds of mac and cheese, sweet potato and marshmallow casserole (with beef marshmallows so I couldn’t have any), two cranberry sauces, a delicious carrot and broccoli thing, and of course KFC. (I didn’t have any of that either.) We had lots of wine and some adult hot chocolate (which means enhanced with vodka) and then for dessert, we had pumpkin cranberry cookies, pumpkin pies, homemade oreo and ice cream cake, chocolate cookies, homemade whipped cream… and I think that’s it. Practically everything vegetarian, I ate two servings of, though there were a few items that ran out before I could get seconds.
I can say with confidence that I had literally never eaten so much in my life. It was embarrassing, and I was in quite a lot of pain afterwards. I employed the oh-so-famous rule of eating as fast as possible so your stomach doesn’t know you’re full until it’s too late. And then even after my stomach managed to relay the message, I still had some pumpkin pie. Everything was so good, and my pie was a huge success! Geoff started teaching me how to juggle after I had recovered a little, and everyone hit the hay pretty early, too exhausted from eating to do anything.
Monday was a heavier day than normal; needless to say I ate very little. Classes were fine and not particularly eventful. It was long, though. Because after our usual and very long schedule, we had a masterclass with a guest artist from the Royal Ballet named David Drew. I think you can look him up online, apparently he’s a big deal. I wasn’t very interested, because I’m not really into dance and we hadn’t seen him in anything, but it was fine.
Tuesday, since we finished work with Shakespeare, after our Physical Theatre class, we started working on our end of the term project with Richard. We’re doing some kind of adaptation of the Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter. It would have been fine, but Richard shows a lot of not-unobvious favouritism towards the the boys in our group, which made me feel a bit expendable, but it’s too early to judge, I suppose. We had a brief masterclass with the guy who gave us our tour of the National Gallery, and he gave us a rundown on an exhibit we were going to go see at the Tate Britain that afternoon. It was mildly interesting, but we really had to fight to stay with him. Then we headed to the museum to see the exhibit, Turner and the Masters, which was basically a comparison of works of Turner’s with his contemporaries and predecessors. It was cool, but would have been more interesting if the guy had been there as we looked at the paintings rather than before we looked at them. The best part of that outing was that when we met Michael, he was wearing a black sweater vest and said it was in honour of our last cultural outing.
Oh god. Too close to the end.
That evening we were going to see the ballet. This guy named Carlos Acosta? Apparently he’s a crazy famous male dancer, and instead of a narrative thing, it was more of a recital, so there was a total of about four pieces that he danced with various partners. Again, I’m not much of a dance enthusiast, but I could appreciate the ridiculous skill and power it takes to do what they were all doing. Really makes me feel inadequate when I see things like that.
Wednesday morning, instead of meeting at school for Theatre History in the morning, we met Richard at the Royal Academy of Arts where there was an Anish Kapoor exhibit. This is also probably researchable, and I recommend it. Anish Kapoor is some artist man who … well, it’s hard to explain. The exhibit was overwhelming, though. The amount of materials that were used for it was a bit sickening at times, and while I enjoyed most of the pieces aesthetically, I did not like the reasons behind them. There was a giant canon that fired off twenty pound cylinders of wax every twenty minutes, and we saw that go off twice. That was epic, but the reasoning behind the “piece” was kind of barbaric. There was also a great moving … obelisk of wax that was just colossal that moved through three or four rooms and took ninety minutes to get from one end to another. It was so big, I can spend time talking about how big it is and you would believe me, but you wouldn’t understand until you saw it. There were some other things, too, but hard to describe and do justice to.
Then we headed to school for more work on the Tailor project then acting. Acting went fantastically well. Alison, our teacher, just loves my and Geoff’s scene. She’s openly saving it for last for our showing next week for Richard, and didn’t really have much feedback to give us. She said, “I don’t want to mess with it.” We then had very short private meetings with Tony of Theatre History. He just wanted to give us our papers back and talk to us about them. We all knew before that grades here were very different; then C actually is average, and that B is good, and that no one every gets As. Well, say hello to the girl who got an A- on her paper! (Just in case it wasn’t clear, no one got a higher grade than that… Mmm)
Thursday after our regularly scheduled classes, Sienna and I went to Brick Lane, which according to Sienna’s aunt has better Indian food than Bangladesh. It was pretty far, and we were accosted by lots of Indian Restaurant Owners offering us 25% off our food and the first drink free. The place we settled on was cute. I only stayed to taste the curry and then left Sienna and Susan to themselves and rushed back to meet Geoff to go see Les Mis. I was so hyper-excited I’m surprised he put up with me. We got great seats in the front row of the first balcony (paid not a small amount), and I was surprised by how big the actors were when they came onstage; because we were close, not because they were fat.
Of my two favourite characters, Eponine was fantastic and she made me cry during “A Heart Full of Love” of all things, and Javert left a lot to be desired. He had a good voice, but was pretty boring. Valjean on the other hand was phenomenal. Having never had seen the show before, I wasn’t familiar with the story. I only knew the soundtrack. I think the overall deal with that show is that the music is epic, but the fact that it’s based off of a dense book makes it basically impossible to reasonably fit all that story in, especially when everything is in song. And even though it does not take Phantom off its peg as best musical, I’m incredibly happy I saw it, and there were indeed moments that I got chills.
Friday was long. We had Speech (like we normally do), but we finished with Shakespeare a week ago, so the rest of our day was filled with Tailor. Richard is being helped in the direction of it by this actress named Sheila, and I like her a lot. It’s slow going, but it’s no Mr Polly if anyone remembers all that as well as I unfortunately do. Anyway, turning in very early for a heavy-duty weekend. It’s my last weekend here without worrying about packing… Jesus that’s depressing.
Tags: london
As usual, it was great to see a post in your blog although there are several things that I felt sorry about:
1. the fact that I did not get to see Les Miz with you last October. But am very happy that you got to see it in the end. Which theater was it in?
2. the fact that you are depressed about coming home although to be honest I so totally understand and so sincerely happy that you like it so much there.
3. the fact that you start telling us about fun and interesting episodes of your London’s adventures without giving us details, leaving us hanging and wishing. But I guess, you need to keep some stories to tell us about when you do get home
The Thanksgiving feast description is hilarious and it seems that you ate much more than I did. I did not gain any weight in spite of all the celebrations of that long week-end. Yeah!
We love you
I think you’ll really enjoy seeing the evolution of your posts over the course of this semester a few months or years down the road. It sure seems that you have gotten the most out of your time in London. It has gone quickly for us too, but we are so excited to see you soon.