Imperial March

Last night Peter and I made pesto pasta with garlic bread. The girls going on spring break were supposed to come over to book flights, but only one did. More leftovers for us! After dinner I went down to the City Pride to catch TJ for the second half of trivia. I arrived and assisted the team with a few answers. Alas, the British Historical Society (American Chapter) placed a respectable third, 3 points behind the winning team. Our plan is to invite professor O'Boyle in a few weeks as a ringer so we can win the 100 dollar bar tab.

After the Pride we took the bus down to Leicester Square to go to O'Neil's, the standard American tourist bar for Thursday nights. It is three floors of awesomeness with a cover band on the top floor. They play nothing but American pop. Either they were really good or we were all too drunk to notice, but I enjoyed it. Peter and I ordered snakebites at the bar. I had no idea what I was drinking, but it was really good. I looked it up earlier. A snakebite is a half pint of hard-cider and a half of lager or a darker beer. I think last night it was Guiness mixed with some sort of fruity grenadine like drink.

I woke up this morning a little late (which will probably be a Friday theme) and went down for Theater class. Class was pretty fun, as most of the group was at the pub last night. We talked about the 39 Steps, the play we saw. Our professor apparently thought one of the actresses was trying to hard. I couldn't tell the difference. He had us do an acting exercise where we were all radio stations and when he pointed to us we had to "broadcast" something. I broadcasted news about St. Louis and how the Rams suck and it isn't Spring Training yet. When he pointed to Kevin, he wittily broadcasted "In Intro to London Theater news, half the class is hungover from O'Neill's last night. Nevertheless we are all still excited to see Rope next Tuesday." Our prof and the entire class laughed pretty hard. The professor said it was one of the more interesting classes he had had and that he learned a lot about South Bend and our drinking habits.

After class I came back to the flats, took a quick nap, ate some leftovers, cleaned the common room, and tried to rustle up a crowd to go to the Imperial War Museum. TJ, Colin, Coleen, Lizzie, and I trekked down to East London, about a 40 minute walk. I crossed the Thames for the first time. The Museum is sort of tucked behind a main road near St. George's circle, but it is situated on a beautiful campus in an old stately looking building. The guns outside are ENORMOUS. They were taken off of a WWII battleship and fired 15 inch shells up to 16 miles. Lizzie joked about the gender differences between the two sights we went to. At Windsor, Lizzie and Coleen freaked out when they saw princesses and Queen Mary's Dollhouse and the collection of Royal China, while I sortof breezed through those rooms. At this museum the girls were kind of bored while TJ, Colin, and I were like kids in a candy shop.

Sooo many guns and tanks and history behind all of them. They had the tank that Montgomery, commander of the British forces in N. Africa, used to drive around the front lines and fight Rommel in (before the Americans came in and saved his ass -- they had the American tanks too). The gun that sank the first Nazi ship of the war was there too, as well as an atomic bomb, a polaris missile, and plundered German one-man submarines. This is just in the lobby area. We didn't get through nearly the entire museum, so I will still be able to take my Dad there to finish the WWI, WWII, and modern war exhibits. We also went through a much more moving exhibit about the German air raids on London and the children's evacuation. I didn't realize how scary it must have been to live in England, or anywhere in the world really, at that time until I saw the exhibits showing little kids being fitted with gas masks and entire chunks of London being bombed out by the Germans. Propaganda papers from the government urging mothers to keep their kids in the country-side while the city was being raided. It was pretty moving stuff. I think In America we have always had a sortof glorious view of WWII, since, besides Pearl Harbor, the war never came to our backyard. We were the sleeping giant that woke up to save the world. This museum obviously delivers the much darker British perspective. A small country barely holding off the Nazi beast, teetering on the brink of destruction while the US twiddles its thumbs and the UK severs child from parent to preserve its future generations. The exhibit helped me think about these wars from a non-American perspective. I will definitely be heading back there.

Tonight Peter's french girl that he met at The Rocket the first weekend is back in town. She and a friend are coming over to the flats for dinner, and I am cooking. This is the girl who could potentially let us stay in her apartment in Paris, so I have to perform well. I am using Mom's pepper steak and potatoes recipe, except it is supposed to use London Broil, which ironically is a completely American thing and does not exist in London. I am using some sort of flank steak instead. This will either be really good or a colossal failure.