A Weekend in Photos

Who's a slacker when it comes to blogging? You're right, it's me!

Before I start apologizing about not blogging, I'm just going to skip past that and go straight to the recap.

Friday:

Allister and I met for lunch at Borough Market, a gourmet food hot spot that smells like cheese that's so fancy you're supposed to ignore the fact that it smells so bad. It also houses my all-time favorite dessert, banoffee pie, and a super cheap steak sandwich that made it the perfect way to start the weekend. We grabbed our market fare and ate it on the steps of a nearby cathedral that's probably several hundred years older than America. Standard. A few snapshots:

Steak sandwich smothered in (what else?) ketchup.



Allister waits for beefy goodness.



The British invented a lot of great things, but banoffee pie is probably the best.



Saturday may have only been October 30, but since hardworking graduate students can't really go out on a Sunday night, we did Halloween a bit early. One of my colleagues hosted a costume party, which was really fun, and I dressed as a flapper. I quickly found out that the term flapper does not exist here, so some people didn't even think I was dressed up! Either way, it was a good Halloween.

Sunday was recovery day. I slept and worked, not much to report.

****************************

Today was heavy on classes but also heavy on fun. Liz and I took a lovely walk down to St. Paul's Cathedral as the sun was setting, then we made our way over to Fleet Street, the former hub of the London press. Liz had to head back to class, so I wandered across Millenium Bridge to the Tate Modern, where I met up with another Rotary Scholar and we perused the third floor. Mary Dwyer, I really missed you during this trip--I needed your art expertise :) Along with some fantastic works from favorites like Matisse, Kandinsky, Pollock and Rothko, I really enjoyed seeing a few artists I'd never encountered. Here are a few that really struck me:

Dod Procter, Morning , 1926



Juliao Sarmento, Forget Me, 2005



******************************
St. Paul's and Millenium Bridge from the bank by the Tate



After the Tate we walked home through London at night, and it was beautiful. We crossed the Thames over Millenium Bridge, up through St. Paul's and Holborn, then I came home to my cozy dorm. All in all, a fairly perfect fall day.

Hope everyone had a happy Monday!

Love,
Jess