Day 4: First Day of School

1/19 First day of school is precisely what this day was like. Everyone was very afraid of sleeping through their alarms, or missing the tube, or getting off at the wrong stop (since due to construction none of us had actually traveled our route to school). For most of us the going was easier than expected. Our TA’s, like our dutiful mothers, guided us in two groups to our final destination. However, there were a few unlucky ducklings that fell out of line, or missed the line all together. One girl got off at the wrong stop, and the rest of us were horrified at the prospect of considering ourselves lost in London. Two boys-roommates—though that we were leaving an hour later than reality. Regardless, eventually we all made it safely to the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity for class.
We’re studying History, Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. Lectures are Mondays and Fridays and discussions are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Lectures are ROUGHLY 3 hours said our professors, though they told us to expect to be there as long as they talked (I hear the record is 5 hours). We went for 3.5 hours. However, as long as that seems to be the lecture was fascinating and when Dr. Stewart suggested a break I looked at my watch and did not believe it could have possibly been an hour and a half since we’d begun. We started yesterday with Greco-Roman civilizations, and were introduced to philosophers, wars, art, ect.
After class we trucked outside through the rain to an electronic store to purchase telephones. I have no idea how to work mine yet. Finally, we’d had enough of the duck-like parading and four of us ducked out of the building towards the nearest tube station. We booked it down to the Victoria-Albert museum and navigated our way to the cast-room. The next two hours consisted of careful examinations of Trajan’s Column. If you have no idea what it is, look it up. I was blown away by the huge proportions of this column (cut in two to fit in the 4 story building), yet the detailed art winding around the entirety of it was crazy. We also looked at the famous Michelangelo’s David and Raphael’s “School of Athens”.
We navigated our way back to the Highbury for a dinner of fish and chips, and loads and loads of reading. Yesterday I read 2 poems by Sappho, Sophocles’ play “Antigone”, and 34 dense pages by Thucydides, “The History of the Peloponnesian War”. Since the boys were further ahead in reading than Katie and me, they sacrificed greatly to take up grocery duties. However, upon their return from Sainsbury’s they triumphantly burst into our room to show us all of their great sales prices. We got 2 loaves of bread, 2 PB jars, 2 jam jars, and a bottle of shampoo for 4.5 pounds. That’s pretty incredible. So yeah, it was a typical, busy day in London. And alas, I must go return to Plato’s republic…