18 January - 22 January

On Monday morning, we received a tour of BBC's Bush House. This building is home to the internation radio portion of BBC. Quite impressive! It's not open to the public, so it was special to be able to go inside. It was neat to get to see how the radio station works from an insider's perspective. We saw a live studio, a work room, and recorded a but from a cell phone to see how they broadcast. On Monday evening my roommates and I cooked dinner together. We made a delicious chicken and pasta dish. Everything tastes that much better when you know that you cooked it yourself!

On Tuesday I went to a piano concert at Bishop Gates Hall on Liverpool Street for our music class and on Thursday I visited the Tate Modern. I could probably write a book on the Tate it is so large and impressive (actually, several people have already). The first thing that we did was go up to the very top floor and look at the view of the City of London. From the window we looked straight onto St. Paul's just across the Thames. Afterwards, we headed downstairs to the "Poetry and Dream - Surrealism and Beyond" exhibition. Modern art is not my favorite, but it was cool to get to see Picasso's "The Three Dancers" and later we got to see Andy Warhol's "Marilyn Diptych." We also saw a special temporary piece by Miroslaw Balka titled "How It Is." It is a GIANT industrial looking box that is totally black on the inside and when you walk in, it feels like it goes on forever! It is incredibly creepy. I told Prof Adler that it reminded me of the Holocaust Museaum and she said that Balka is Polish and this work was inspired by that bleak period of Poland's history. It was nice to get a question right! Coming from an entirely different education system, me and my classmates don't always have the information that would be common knowledge over here. We are all quickly getting into the swing of things though. Learned so much already!