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