Law School

So, its been a crazy couple of days!

I had a big paper due in my Conduct of War class on Monday. I got it done with one of Tom's Patented All-Nighters and I think it turned out well, but I really don't want to think about it anymore, to be honest...I can't remember a time when I've been more frustrated with/annoyed by/generally really over it the whole thing about an assignment.

But the real craziness has all come on the law school front. I got my LSAT score back a couple of days ago and achieved a 170, which is obviously very good but I wasn't really all that thrilled about it. Like I said in my last post, I thought I had done slightly better than that. Still, a 97th percentile score is nothing to sneeze at, and I quickly came up with the list of schools I would apply to. Here is that list, sorted by my personal preference. The number to the left of the school name corresponds to that school's US News and World Report ranking.

-6. Berkeley

-12. Duke

-7. Penn

-16. UCLA

-9. Northwestern

-9. Michigan

-15. Vanderbilt

-18. USC

-14. Georgetown

-20. GWU

-19. Washington University in St. Louis

-22. Emory

-38. UC Hastings

-38. North Carolina

I was really comfortable with my list...I had a couple reaches into the top 10, some schools in the lower end of the T14 and in the top 20 that I thought I was pretty good for, and some safeties in the lower end of the range that I would be comfortable going to if I bricked everywhere. It was balanced, logical, and like I said, very comfortable.

There was just one problem: I was thinking like a white person.

I've since been told by multiple people that I trust that African-American students with an LSAT score like mine are an absurdly rare commodity - less than 100 of us with a 170+ per admissions cycle, apparently...in 2004, there were only 29 black students with a 170+ out of 10k black LSAT takers, against 1900 white students with a 170+ - and that as a result, the sky might literally be the limit for my prospects. They say that if I want to be, I should "expect" to be in at at least one from among Columbia/Chicago/NYU (ranked 4,5, and 6), expect to be in with money at Cal and every school ranked below them, and that though they're still a reach, I even have a chance at the top-3 schools - particularly at Harvard, which apparently is known for going out of its way to promote diversity.

So, basically, my head is spinning right now. There's a part of me that's jumping for joy because I haven't thought I had a Democrat's chance in November (sorry, sort of bitter about Election Day right now) at schools of that caliber since my sophomore year of college...even during my days of absurdly inflated self-image in high school I didn't think I was all that likely to wind up at a top-5 law school. There's another part of me that simply doesn't believe it and frankly doesn't want to believe it...it just seems absurd that my race could or should give me such an enormous bump, particularly when I haven't come from an economically-disadvantaged background or anything like that. There's another part of me that worries about my ability to compete with the true best of the best and wonders if maybe I shouldn't go to one of the top-top schools that I now apparently have a chance at. And there's another part of me that is sort of overwhelmed by the choices and wondering about the implications of those choices; could I really turn down Columbia/NYU/UChicago if I got in chief among them.

But mostly I'm just excited, and my excitement has been stoked even further by the unsolicited application fee waiver emails that are coming in. So far, I've gotten them from three schools that I'll actually apply to (Virginia, Georgetown, and UCLA) and several more that I have no plans of applying to (Minnesota, Temple, Penn State, St. Thomas, William & Mary).

I've also learned that 97% of Northwestern's student body has at least 1 year of work experience, so I'm scrubbing them from the list...bad weather + likely to get into better schools + much harder to fit in socially = 100% not gonna go, so its not worth bothering with an app.

So anyways, I think this is my new list of schools I'm applying to, again sorted by preference with US News and World Report rankings.

-3. Stanford

-2. Harvard

-1. Yale

-7. Cal

-11. Duke

-4. Columbia

-7. Penn

-9. Michigan

-15. UCLA

-5. Chicago

-14. Georgetown

-6. NYU

-10. Virginia

-17. Vanderbilt

-18. USC

-19. WashU

and maybe GWU and Emory...haven't decided about them yet.

This is all extremely fungible though. I'm not convinced that if it came down to a choice between Cal, Duke, and Columbia, for instance, that I'd be able to resist the Ivy League even though Cal and Duke are in locations that are infinitely more appealing to me than New York. Similarly, if it came down to being between UCLA and Columbia or Duke or Penn, I can't guarantee that the possibility of being in sunny Los Angeles with my friends (at least one of my best friends from high school will be in LA, and there's a distinct possibility that the whole gang may wind up there over the next two years) wouldn't overwhelm my desire to be at a top school in New York/Philly/North Carolina. It's very hard to say.

Exciting times, though!

On another note, I'm heading up to Scotland tomorrow to celebrate the 21st birthday of my lovely girlfriend Alex Cassanova. Even though its ABSURDLY cold up there (low 40s with wind chill are you kidding me?), I anticipate having a good time :)

Cheers,

Tom

Paris/LSAT

Hello there everyone! Went to Paris with Alex last weekend so figured I should probably tell you guys about it!

Alex arrived in London on Thursday night. We didn't do too much, just went to an Indian restaurant in Balham and hung out around my house. I got the Chicken Vindaloo, which was quite spicy and delicious, and Alex got some sort of creamy curry dish that was a little bit sweet and milky for my tastes, but she liked it and that's what matters I guess.

Friday was the day to head out to Paris. We shot this video on the way out to the train. I apologize for the camerawork, its not the greatest lol.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PjGlDE1v-o

It was a little bit hectic getting out the door to go as I (predictably) left my laundry until the last second and then also had to run into town to print my LSAT admissions ticket and buy pencils and take a passport photo. But it all worked out in the end and we got to St. Pancras station in plenty of time. The trip on the Eurostar itself was fun. This very nice woman sitting across the aisle from us lent me her travel adapter so i could use my computer on the way down. I hadn't realized how much of the trip was in France! For some reason I had always pictured Paris as being really pretty close to the coast, but apparently not.

Anyhow, it was past dark when we got into Paris. It was a little bit hairy when we first got out of the station because the signage was poor and we weren't sure which way to go, but eventually we figured it out (thanks in no small part to yours truly alertly grabbing a map back at St. Pancras) and got to our hotel room without too much trouble.

Here's a video of the hotel room.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ0sVnAyt_Y

Paris hotels are (perhaps like the rest of France?) apparently very committed to eco-friendliness and reducing energy consumption. Sometimes - as with the motion detector lights in the hallway - this is cool. Other times, however, this is not cool. Case in point, it took us several minutes to realize that the lights in our room could not be turned on unless we swiped the room key in this reader thing on the wall by the door. And then it took us another hour to realize that unless you left the room key in the reader thing, the lights would abruptly turn off on you every couple minutes. As you saw in the video, I was not quite used to this yet. We didn't see much of Paris Friday night, we simply walked back to the restaurant district by the train station in hopes of finding an English speaking restaurant (successfully, I might add), then visited a bakery for dessert, and then turned in for the night.

On Saturday, we headed out to the same bakery for breakfast and then to the supermarket (called "Monop" to our delight, inside joke tho) to grab a snack and drink for me to take with me to the LSAT.

Here's a video of the bakery in question.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yego9V8G9rg

Then I spent the rest of the morning doing last-minute prep with the Logic Games. I actually did not do particularly well in this morningtime prep session, so my confidence was a little bit shaken. I wound up just stopping about 30 minutes before I had planned to and just clear my mind.

I actually feel pretty good about how the test went. There were three sections of Logical Reasoning (only 2 of which will be scored, of course) and I feel like I was pretty much in beastmode for all of them...there was one that I finished with a full 11 minutes still on the clock. Really hope that one was scored lol. There were a couple questions scattered among them where I wasn't really sure or felt like there were two answers were right or no answers were right, but I think I made good decisions on those. Similarly, I felt pretty good about the reading comprehension section, although I only finished that with like 3 minutes to go or so. But obviously, that one's kind of hard to just Speedy Gonzalez through. And as for the Analytical Reasoning aka Logic Games section? Well, I feel like that went OK too. I didn't complete it, but I came close answering 21/24 questions and getting random guesses in for the other three. And I did feel good about the questions I answered. So, as far as scores go, I don't know how realistic my reach goal of 175 is...it's theoretically possible (particularly with how good I felt about the other sections), but I would've had to miss only one or maybe two questions that I answered and that's obviously not neccessarily the most likely thing ever. I do feel, however, that I'm in pretty good shape for my real goal of 170. I hope I'm right about that. If you made me commit to a guess of what I got, I'd say 172. So feel free to quote this and lol at me when I get my score in a couple weeks and its a 160.

I didn't get back from the test until about 8:30 or 9:00. Alex had spent the day with a friend of hers from GW who was studying abroad in Paris, but she was waiting for me in the hotel when I got back and we quickly headed out to find food and adventure in central Paris. By the way, the Paris metro is just awful...the seats are dirty and uncomfortable, the trains are LOUD, they don't have automatic doors, just not a particularly good travel experience at all heading downtown.

Alex had found this restaurant online that she wanted to go to, but either our directions were bad or we just suck at navigating and so we didn't wind up getting there. Instead, we just walked up the Champs Elysees and, after looking around in the various shops and such in the major tourist district there, we wound up getting into this Italian restaurant just off the main drag. Our waiter did not speak English, which was sort of rigged, but we had a good time anyway. Alex got a delicious Tres Fromages pizza with mozzarella, gorgonzola, and some other cheese that escapes my memory. I got a seafood pizza that didn't actually have cheese, I think. It was just a pizza crust puled high with a light tomato sauce, mussels, shrimp, calamari, and various other bits of seafood I didn't necessarily recognize lol.

Here's a video of something that was going on in an art museum we passed on our way up the Champs...maybe Mom can explain?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02LVzBrh8F8

Here's a video of the Arc d'Triomphe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKLXTKYAia8

We didn't finish dinner until like 11:00 I think, so we basically just walked back down the Champs, stopping in a couple stores and also at a crepe stand as Alex refused to not have at least one crepe while in Paris, and then headed back to the hotel.

On Sunday, we really didn't do anything in Paris beyond making one last trip to the bakery before heading to the train station to go back to London. Once back in the UK, I took Alex to Knightsbridge, where she was suitably impressed by Harrod's, and then we came back to Balham for dinner and a trip to the pub.

Then on Monday, I showed Alex the sights of Westminster from Trafalgar Square through the Admiralty Arch, around to the old Naval building and down Whitehall to 10 Downing Street and then down around the Treasury and over to Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster, where Parliament sits. This was a rehash of the walking tour GW took us on two weeks ago, and I'd like to say that I acquitted myself decently as a tour guide. After that, we headed across the Thames to check out Southbank and to show Alex the various campuses and libraries of King's College. I set up Alex in the cafeteria while I went to class and then we headed back to my place in Balham to have dinner and hang out until it was time for her to catch the train back to Scotland.

So, all in all, it was a pretty good weekend. Alex took heaps of photographs but blogger is really really withered and won't place photos right so if you want to see them and aren't facebook friends with her, then just leave a comment or shoot me an email or whatever and I'll hook you up.

Cheers!
Tom

WELP

Forgot that there was a tube strike in London today, which means I'm utterly stranded out in south London. Obviously, the one day they have a tube strike has to be the one day of the week I have 2 classes....sigh.

But, on the bright side, this does give me a chance to update my blog which I suppose I haven't done in a couple days now.

Last week was my first week of classes, which is obviously an exciting time for me. I'm taking 4 classes this semester: Elements of Ethics, Conduct of War, Public Law, and Worlds of the British Empire. I haven't had the last one yet...for whatever reason, it's not starting up until this Friday. As for the other classes, it seems as though I should enjoy them a fair amount.

Elements of Ethics is taught by this rather dashing young English guy that seems quite personable, quite intelligent, and overall as though he'll be an excellent lecturer. Apparently, we will be spend the semester studying Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Hegel and Nietzsche. I have no prior background at all with any but Aristotle (although I do know that Sieff is a massive Hegel fan) so I'm excited to get learning and drop some knowledge on fools when I get back to the USA lol

Conduct of War, strangely, seems like it will be the least interesting of my classes. My professor is this absurdly uptight young British guy who openly acknowledges that the course, though it rightfully should deal a lot with war as a sociological phenomenon, will be almost completely be grounded in history. I mean, as my AP scores can attest, I can do history pretty well but I'd frankly rather not. Oh well.

I don't know much about how Public Law is going to be yet...we've only had one hour of lecture on it and we're doing very base-level stuff. I can say that I expect to be very interested by it, however. The British legal system - like all of Britain, really - is very scattershot and strange and illogical (I'm sure someone will accuse me of ethnocentrism here, but I don't think that's a valid criticism...streets that go in straight lines are more logical than streets that seem designed by an acid-fueled 5 year old with a crayon), so it should be exciting to learn about the differences our British cousins have in their legal system and to lol at the parts that are dumb (not having a written Constitution, for example).

The weekend was a pretty good one. On Friday, I went to the GW England orientation event. The orientation itself was massively boring and pointless, but afterward GW treated us to a very nice dinner at this Turkish restaurant called TAS Bloomsbury. I had moussaka for the first time there and it was excellent. I must go back there at some point.

Saturday was a busy busy day. It was Day 2 of the GW England orientation thing, so as a group we took a very lovely walking tour of London, starting in Trafalgar Square and then proceeding through some of the parks in the Buckingham Palace complex, down Whitehall past 10 Downing Street, and eventually past Westminster Abbey and the House of Parliament. After the tour, we took a riverboat down the Thames to the Tower of London and since it (somehow) wasn't raining that morning, we got to sit on the top and get absolutely splendid views of Central London. I very much recommend that everyone take such a trip at some point if they're in London. After lunch in the Tower of London cafeteria (sort of a funny phrase to type, lol), we split off to individually check out the grounds. To be completely honest, the novelty of the Tower wore off pretty quickly but I did have a good time checking out the crown jewels which are stored there. The Imperial Crown in particular (this is what the Queen wears when she opens that year's session of Parliament) is simply fabulous.

I left the Tower after a few hours and headed up to Edgware Road, where the European Poker Tour was being held. Let me just say that for a poker fanboy such as myself, it was completely surreal to be there. In the very time I was there, I saw Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein, Daniel Negreanu, Chris Moneymaker, Vanessa Selbst, Roothlus, Boosted J, Vanessa Rousso, David Benyamine, Vicky Coren, someone I'm pretty sure was JP_OSU...I realize these names mean nothing to anyone that doesn't follow poker but it was pretty incredible. As I told my girlfriend that night, it's a very lucky thing that Tom Dwan had gone home after the WSOP Europe ended or I might have literally exploded upon coming across him. Yes, I realize that this paragraph makes me seem very cool.

Most of my time at the Hilton though was spent in the secondary poker room, where I went to go watch my friend Jon play the 120 pound charity event. This was the first time that I had actually met Jon in real life...despite the fact that we've been talking online for two years and went to the same school for the first of those years, we had somehow never come across each other. I had a good time hanging with him as he played...Jon plays a very impressive LAG style of poker that the players at his tables simply could not combat. Unfortunately, with LAGing frequently comes punting and he blew his stack pretty hard just short of the money. Oh well.

On Sunday, it was my turn to play the event, which had about a 50k pound overlay...just unheardof. I dominated my table for the first 3 hours of play or so, chipping up from the initial 6k starting stack to over 20k while seeing only one showdown. Unfortunately, I blew about a third of my chips in a meh-ish spot and couldn't regain traction after that as the blinds caught up with me and I lost a couple key flips. Eventually, I busted right before the end of the 300-600 level when I jammed my 7k stack from the cutoff with 73cc and couldn't suck out vs the SB who woke up with A7o. I actually still had 650 chips after that hand and got them in the next hand with A8o, but the guy on my left had AQ, and it was gg me. I'm pretty pleased with how I played generally, and its nice to know that the common refrain that live players are simply horrible isn't just the idle yammering of players much better than I. It's still frustrating that I couldn't go deep though...tournaments like that don't come around very often.

Cheers!
Tom

Videos!

I finally got my computer this week, and that means I can upload some videos! What you see below is most of the places I've been spending most of my time in, along with my commentary. Enjoy!

ugh for some reason it won't let me embed the videos from youtube so I guess it'll just be links

My house

Balham High Road

Waterloo 1

BFI IMAX Theater

London Eye and Big Ben

NBA Fan Zone

Waterloo 2

Royal Courts of Justice

Library 1

Library 2

I think it was Helen who was wondering why there aren't very many pictures of the King's campus up on their website. Others may be wondering why I have no videos of the King's campus. The answer for both is the same: there really isn't such a thing. King's College has three campuses scattered about London, each of which consists of one massive building in which everything is contained. So really, there's not too much to look at. Shame, really.

This has also been my first week of classes but I'm hungryyyyyy so I'll talk about those in a different blog post, later.

Cheers!
Tom

Rain...

Rain, Rain go away come again another day*

That is all.

*-after I've left this country

Knightsbridge

So I had quite the adventure trying to get my bank account set up today.

The company from which I'm renting my room, LondonUp!, was supposed to help me set up a bank account at Barclays - which would have been convenient, there's a Barclay's branch right outside my tube stop and obviously its a huge bank with branches just about everywhere. Unfortunately, however, their pace in doing this has been glacially slow and it got to the point at which I simply could not wait any longer. And by "I simply could not wait any longer" I don't mean that I was simply oi waiting this long (though I was), I mean that I physically ran out of cash and did not have any way of obtaining food or tube tickets without a bank account (Banks here require that you have an account before they will change traveler's checks into pounds and my US debit cards simply aren't working). Indeed, my dinner last night was half-stale snack mix that I had purchased just before getting on the airplane in San Francisco on Saturday.

So yeah, I needed a bank account.

I showed up at my local Barclay's at 10a.m. with a very clear, simple plan for the day: I would get an account at Barclays, then go to a store and buy an Oyster card, then go down to campus to have lunch someplace downtown and either study LSAT or just hang out in the computer room at the library (possibly both) and investigate train/airplane fares to Paris, then at 5:00 or so I would head over to the Empire Casino to watch the £10k HU event at the World Series of Poker Europe.

Things did not go so smoothly.

First, the teller at Barclay's told me that if I wanted to open an account, I would have to go to the Knightsbridge branch. Why? I have no idea. Given my money troubles this posed a serious problem for me, particularly after she informed me that they could not change a traveler's check unless I had an account (again, I have no idea why...they simply rape you on the exchange rate, seems like they'd want to change as much money as possible...). Thankfully, she did tell me that the post office a ways down the street would change traveler's checks and so, after a nice 5 minute walk and 20 minute wait in line, I had converted $50 into £29.24 and was on my way back to the tube and the Knightsbridge Barclays.

Side note: Any time anyone is yammering on about how government services should be privatized because the private sector is sooo much better and more efficient, please just point them to the UK Post Office and then tell them to stfu. The UK Post Office is a completely private organization (As far as I can tell...its possible that they receive subsidies of some sort, not that subsidies disqualify a business from calling itself "private" lol) and is apparently no more efficient than any USPS office I've been to, and on top of that they don't even pick up mail from each house (again, that's as far as I can tell. They definitely do not pick up mail from my house or any other in my neighborhood). So yeah, less service for a higher price. Well done, private sector.

I arrived in Knightsbridge after about 30 minutes in the tube system, at least 10 of which was spent walking between lines on transfers. I was immediately struck by the Burberry store directly across the street from the tube exit; first, by its sheer size (it was the size of the average Sears in the US) and second by the enourmous posters papering its windows...none of which featured Emma Watson!!! wtf kind of rigged bullshit is this? oi Burberry.

Anyhow, the Barclay's branch turned out to be a fair ways down the street just past Harrod's (more on Harrod's later). I walked into the office (ultramodern, very nice) and told the woman at the desk that I'd been told to come here to set up a student account and asked who I might speak to about that. In return, I received a long spiel in the most incomprehensible accent I have ever encountered. I believe she told me that they could not be able to accept any more accounts until November, but this makes no sense, so really who knows what she said? The general gist, though, was that I would not be able to open an account with them. Ugh.

I spent the next hour walking up and down the main drag of Knightsbridge looking for a big bank with which I could open an account. I got into a meeting with someone at HSBC and it seemed I might be able to open an account there, but when he discovered I would be leaving the UK in December, he said there was nothing he could do and sent me on my way. Eventually, around noon, I found a Lloyd's TBC and made an appointment to come back and talk to their account services guy at 2.

I spent the bulk of the intervening time in Harrod's. For anyone who has not heard of it or who hasn't been there, let me just say that this place is AMAZING. Absolutely positively the most fascinating store I've ever been to. In fact, I will say that everyone should put a visit to Harrod's on their bucket list. Do not die without having been there. It's that incredible. I'd describe everything I saw there, but I'd have to go on for pages. Its just phenomenal. Go sometime.

Unfortunately, the food at Harrod's - much like the clothing and electronics and furniture and everything else you could possibly need or want - is much too expensive for my budget, so I ducked out after an hour and a half or so and ran to the Starbuck's across the street for lunch and LSAT studying.

My appointment at Lloyd's did not start off particularly well. First, I wound up waiting around in the lobby for the guy I was supposed to be meeting for a solid half hour...I'm learning that punctuality isn't the most important thing in this country. Next, there was a moment of panic after the account services guy, Mohammed, discovered that I would be leaving the UK in December and, like his counterpart at HSBC, left the room to ask a superior if he could offer me an account. I was already devising plans to head back to Strand where I'd hopefully find a bank more used to short-term students when he came back and told me that everything was OK and I could open an account there. As it turned out, Mohammed was an excellent accounts rep, very knowledgeable, very thorough, very concerned with making sure that I was satisfied with what he was saying and informed about all of my options. Great customer service experience. Before too long, I had opened my account and was out of the office purchasing my new cell phone! The whole ordeal took several hours and untold more hours off the back end of my life from the stress of it all, but in the end I have an account, I have a phone and I am happy. Throw in my time at Harrod's and this has been quite a good day indeed.

And now, I'm off to the Empire! Hopefully they allow railers, that would suck really hard if they didn't. Actually, I think I'll see if I can check that online before I get there.

Cheers!
Tom

edit: ugh, it seems they do allow railers (or at least I don't see anything saying that they don't) but they do have a dress code which I don't think I quite meet right now and I don't really want to go back to my room, change, and then head back out. Oh well, I'll go watch when the Main Event starts up.

The UK: America with funny accents?

As far as I can tell, London is very similar to most large American cities and I think that at its core the statement "England is America with funny accents" is basically true. We're both advanced industrialized nations and share all the trappings that come with that, we both speak English of course, and (at least as far as London goes), we're both highly diverse multicultural societies whose citizens use a wide array of ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds to create a dynamic, heterogeneous national culture. More and more, however, I find myself obsessed with noticing the little details that do distinguish life in the UK from life in the US. I discussed the UK's lack of an ADA-equivalent in my last blog post...here are some others.

Money: Yes, obviously the US uses the dollar and the UK uses the pound, but that's not what I'm talking about here. First, the UK does not have (so far as I can tell) £1 notes. Instead, they have £1 and £2 pound coins, the former of which are for some reason smaller than the 50p coins (which, in another oddity, are septagonal). Also, the paper currency the UK does have is made of remarkably poor quality paper. In the US we're used to our greenbacks being printed on a heavy-duty paper that is actually something like 70% cotton...here, the pound notes are printed on some flimsy material that you might find making up the pages of a cheap magazine or newspaper. Very strange.

Water fountains: They're everywhere in the US but I still haven't seen one here. I'm not sure if this is merely cultural or if public buildings are mandated to have water fountains in the US but not in the UK. Upon reflection, it could be both.

Marketing: My first comment on this is that London must be heaven for environmentally-conscious US liberals. Everywhere you look, there is at least one business advertising how its been serving only organic food since the 1980s, or how their whole company is carbon-neutral or their building is solar powered...even the McDonald's near my tube stop brags about how all of its chicken is free-range. Next, its amusing how many products here are the same brands as you find in the US, but with different names. For example, Lay's chips are called "Walker's" here, Axe hygeine products are called "Lynx,"...there's lots of examples of this but they're skipping my mind right now

Keyboards: On the UK keyboard, the keystrokes for quotation marks and the @ sign are reversed from the way US keyboards have them. Also, the # sign and tilde are on a completely made up key that doesn't exist on US keyboards. I can't tell you how many times this has messed me up lol.

Gambling: If Las Vegas is the Mecca of gambling and Macau is Medina, London must be Jerusalem or something. In addition to being home to a number of enormous casinos, seemingly everywhere you turn in London there is a Betfair, Ladbrokes, or William Hill sports betting office, or else an "Amusement Hall" filled with various slot and video poker machines. It's really something else.

Note: No, I have not been inside any of these establishments yet. However, the World Series of Poker Europe is going on at the Empire casino right now and I may just swing by there tomorrow to watch/ogle some of my favorite players. No gambling for me though, def. can't afford to at the moment.

Foul Language: Literally everyone who has lectured us during orientation thus far has dropped at least one curse word, and none of them has had the slightest bit of hesitation or embarassment about it. This seems much healthier than the repressed American approach to such words.

That's all for now, I'll be sure to add more to this list (in separate posts obv) as I find them.

Cheers!
Tom

Arrival

It was Mom's idea that I start a blog for my time in London and since I have a couple of hours to kill, I think I'll do just that.



To be completely honest, my first day in London was one of the most stressful I've ever had. It started at the airport in San Francisco when I opened my laptop bag and discovered that in the rush to get out the door, I had left my laptop at home. As anyone who knows me can attest, my laptop is my single-most important possession...and I left it at home. Unbelievable. I had to call my parents to let them know what had happened and to ask them to email the company I was renting my room from to let them know what time I'd be arriving so there would actually be someone in the office to give me my keys and etc. More on this later.



The flight itself wasn't too bad. The seat was somewhat cramped, but not particularly more so than other airlines. If I can make heaps of money this semester tho, I'll def be looking to upgrade Alex and I to the business class seats, those look awesome. I was in a window seat next to this couple from some non-UK Euro country, they kept switching their conversation between English and whatever their native tongue was. I watched two movies on the flight, "Green Zone" and "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels." Quick review: Green Zone was OK but not great; LSTSB was very funny, but possibly only because I'm highly entertained by British accents. The food on the plane wasn't nearly so bad as I'd been led to believe airline food was; I actually greatly enjoyed the mango and passionfruit cheesecake I had for dessert. I had a really brilliant view of London on the approach, wish I had had a camera with me.



Once I had gotten through customs (wait in line for 1.5 hours, get past the agent in like 2 minutes max lol) and exchanged the cash I had on me for pounds ($107-->£57.75 lol airport money changers) I was off to the tube and on my way to the office.



Thoughts on the tube: First of all, it is expensive!! £4 for a one-way ticket! Absurd. I need to get my student Oyster card ASAP. Second, when you transfer lines on the tube you TRANSFER LINES. Like, on the DC Metro, all you have to do to switch from the Blue line to the Red line is get off your train, go up the escalator, and get on the next train. Pretty simple. Here, if you want to transfer from the Picadilly line to the Jubilee line, you get off your train, go up an elevator, walk down a lonnnnnnnngggggggg and bendy corridor, go back down an elevator, and then across another small corridor before you finally arrive at your platform. Also absurd. Thirdly, the ceiling on the tube is lolshort, maybe 6'7" tall if that. Fourthly, ADA advocates in the USA would absolutely freak out at how disabled/carrying 100+ pounds of bags unfriendly the London Underground is, there's frequently a large step and gap between the platform and the train, most of the stations don't have elevators down to platform level...some of them don't even have escalators! I would hate to be wheelchair-bound in this city. That said, the tube does feel faster than the DC metro and its seats, though narrower than American ones, are more comfortable. Also, there is a very helpful linear map of the line you're riding abpve the seats on both sides, along with a voice announcing what the next stop is and an electronic board that does the same. Very nice.



I got off the tube at the Bermondsey station and my trip to the London Up! offices was nothing short of disastrous. To begin with, the signage in this city is just terrible, half the streets aren't marked at all and the ones that are are marked on these very low signs in illogical places...ugh I'm sure I'm just being ethnocentric but come on people, putting the names of the roads on a high post above the intersection can't be hard. So my trip to the offices wasn't fun, it was a .8 mile journey (again, hauling heaps of stuff) that I spent half of convinced I was going in the wrong direction and the other half asking passers-by if I was headed in the right direction. Finally, I got to the right street that the offices were supposed to be on, but my Google walking directions sent me down this side alley, where I wandered about for a few minutes before determining that this couldn't be right and heading back to the road. From there, I wandered aimlessly, looking for the address 163 Bermondsey St but never seeing it. It was 4:50 now and I was going berserk with despair...I knew the office was supposed to close at 5:00 and had no idea how to find it. However, as if by divine providence, I heard a woman call out my name and lead me back to the correct office; apparently, she had been waiting for me behind the gate I was supposed to be looking for (good thing someone told me there was a gate, sigh) and had seen me walking past with all my luggage and made the correct assumption. Phew.



My journey to my room was less stressful given the lack of an imminent time component, but still long and tiring. Fearing getting lost, I took the simplest possible route from the Balham tube stop to my room, but this route is nearly twice as long as the correct way to go. Needless to say, I didn't know that at the time.



The neighborhood my house is in seems very nice. Though I can't say I'm particularly impressed by the architechture (I imagine this is cultural), the streets were lined with nice cars: new Volvos, Mini Coopers, Mercedes station wagons, BMW coupes, even the occasional Aston Martin. Judging from the few people I saw out and about, it seems that the neighborhood is geared toward well-to-do youngish families with small children. This suits me just fine.



My room is a bit smaller than my bedroom at home, but its got a decently sized bed that seems at least as comfortable as anything back at GW. I've got a desk and dresser and wardrobe and the ceilings, in stark contrast with all others in this country, are massive! At least 12-15 feet, I think. The drawback of this, of course, is that it gets rather cold in my room at night. My other complaint is that there is a slight odor to the room...you get used to it after a moment or two but its annoying for that while.



Anyhow, I arrived in my room yesterday around 5:30 and promptly passed out on the bed for a few hours. When I woke up again, it was already dark and my plans of going to the internet cafe to get in contact with people and of beginning to purchase the many things I'll need here were shot since I did not trust for a moment my ability to navigate in the dark. This was stressful too since I didn't know where I was supposed to go for orientation tomorrow, or at what time, or anything. I really don't know that I've been more overwhelmed for a longer period of time than I was yesterday. Since there wasn't much of anything to do and I was tired anyway, I decided to go to bed absurdly early for me (around 9:15) and wake up early to hit the internet cafe first thing in the morning.

I nearly forgot to talk about my housemates. So far, I've only met two of them and each for only the shortest of times. One, a large man who's name I didn't quite catch, I met as I was first coming in the door. I know that he lives in Room 1 on the first floor (the house has 3 floors) and that he smokes but that's it. The second was a young woman named Erin who has shockingly bright blonde hair - it must be bleached. I met her as I was coming out of the bathroom following my pass-out session yesterday evening; she was coming up the stairs wearing only a bathrobe and carrying a plate of pizza. She explained that she was having a nice hangover recovery day and that was the end of my interaction with her. I don't know much about any of the others... judging by the shoes in the entryway, I think that at least two of the others (there are 7 people living in the house, including me) must be female. Also, whoever it is that lives in the room directly adjacent mine has a fondness for American pop music audible through the walls...I'm not sure if its because she (I assume) plays it unreasonably loud or if the walls are merely thin and not well-insulated.

I woke up this morning around 4:30 still feeling decidedly overwhelmed by everything. But rather than allowing myself to basically give up the way I did yesterday, I tried to maintain composure and reassert control over the situation by making a list of the things I needed to do this morning and a plan for doing them. After doing that and a couple hours of LSAT studying, I headed out at 7am ready to hit the internet cafe and take on the world...

...only to discover that the internet cafe wasn't open until 9. WELP. It turned out that there was a McDonald's right around the corner though, so I ate breakfast and resolved to go exploring the main road while I waited for 9am to come around. Yes, I am aware of the irony involved in eating McDonald's for my first meal in the UK.

Shortly after I left McDonald's, I happened upon a Sainsbury's grocery store. Words cannot describe the sense of relief that flowed through me as I walked around the Sainsbury's. Here I was in a supermarket. It sounds really dumb, but that one bit of familiarity was enough to finally put me back in my comfort zone and give me the confidence to believe that I would make it through this semester alive. I still hadn't crossed anything off my list, but from that point forward to the present I have felt much much better about this whole thing; I feel well for the first time since directly after the Michigan game on Saturday.

I did a few other things between then and now, but this post is already massively tl;dr. Suffice it to say, then, that I never did go to the internet cafe (it was still shuttered and locked at 9:30, so much for punctuality I guess lol) and that I now have my KCL student ID card and have found the library, which is in this really really cool building that I'll post pics of as soon as I can get my camera charged (which means as soon as I get my computer, hint hint for swift delivery, parents? lol). Anyways, that's all for this blog post. Hopefully future ones won't be so long and boring.

Cheers!
Tom

PS: I know the title of this blog is pretty retarded...if anyone has a better idea plz let me know I was just sort of oi thinking haha