I've gotten a bit behind on my blog, and although I have a long to-do list and am insanely tired, I figured a post is in order. So here's a brief recap of my past few days, with just the highlights (...or the ones that I still remember):
Thursday: Class. Explored the Cambridge marketplace with one of the girls that afternoon. Had a nice dinner somewhere in city centre with the group, declined to go to the pub afterwards. Called my mom to complain that I missed my friends. She was just like, "Well, make new friends." Thought that was the dumbest statement ever...it's not like I'm on the kindergarten playground or something, right? I really liked my new classmates from Kansas/Mizzou and we'd been getting along great, but I still missed my Vandy girlfriends a lot and was constantly thinking, "So-and-so would love that scarf..." or "So-and-so probably would've had a great time there with me..." I wasn't quite ready to admit to homesickness, so I rationalized my pity party by reasoning that travelling with new "friends" just isn't the same as being with old buddies. So I went back to my room and played Bejeweled online until I fell asleep.
Friday: Law class. Instead of having our regular history class, we visited the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, which is affiliated with U of Cambridge. The Centre's deputy director gave us a wonderful presentation on what "international lawyers" do, some of the different roles lawyers play during the decision-making processes of states and nongovernmental organizations, the roles of international legal scholars, some various ways to prepare for a career in international law, and even to what extent international law even exists. This may be a boring way for most people to spend an evening, but my class was like a bunch of kids in a candy store. :-) We got to ask a lot of interesting questions, and the director had even prepared tea and biscuits for us!
That evening I decided to end my pity party and "put myself out there" a bit more. During dinner and post-dinner conversations, I discovered that although most of the others were from KU, they didn't know each other prior to the trip, either, so we were all pretty much in the same boat, at least as far as "making new friends" was concerned. So it's like we're all grade schoolers at summer camp all over again, except we travel the country together and share college stories over a round of ale and cider instead of camping and sharing marshmallows over a campfire. Lol. ...I never liked camping anyway. I'm always the one who gets bit by a million bugs. (Speaking of bugs, England supposedly has "nidges," whatever those are, instead of mosquitoes. So I've taken to referring to all bugs as "nidges" just because it sounds funny, even though I've yet to hear of a local refer to one.)
So anyway, I bonded with my fellow Americans and went to bed contented and filled with a sense of belonging and purpose.
Saturday: The plan was to visit the local Fitzwilliam Museum, which I'd been looking forward to all week, but I felt very ill that morning/early afternoon and stayed at the dorm instead. I was very disappointed, especially after my wonderful bonding experiences earlier, but everyone was really nice and over the course of the day, each person individually offered to go back and visit the museum with me another day, not knowing that other people had also offered the same thing. It just shows how thoughtful everyone is, and made me feel even happier to be here with this group.
The Tylenol was working by that evening, and those of us who'd stayed in town for the weekend had dinner at the Eagle with Professor Westerbeke. The Eagle's a popular pub with some history; some WWII pilots sketched their names and initials in the ceiling of one of the rooms.
Prof. Westerbeke teaches the law class; he specializes in torts, and we'd been discussing The Buffalo Creek Disaster by Gerald Stern. It's a great book, about a huge personal injury case that coal mining community members in West Virginia brought against a coal company after a large coal refuse dam broke, killing 125 people (mostly women and children) and destroying thousands of homes. The book reads like a play-by-play of how Stern progressed through the case, from learning of the case from a partner in his firm, agreeing to represent 400+ defendants pro bono, interviewing clients, filing the claim, countering a motion to dismiss and allegations of unethical solicitation of clients, engaging in discovery, doing depositions, playing the media, preparing for trial, settlement negotiations...the whole nine yards. It's a true story, of course -- an important case that raised some important issues -- but perhaps the most interesting part of class discussions was Prof. Westerbeke's commentary and digressions about his own cases. He practiced law in one of the big California law firms back in the day, defending corporations against personal injury cases like the one brought against Pittston, the company in Buffalo Creek. So whereas Stern, the author, was the class hero, the defender of the little guy, our professor was the big man's lawyer and represented clients like the big oil companies, who he'd successfully gotten a mere $500 settlement after causing a huge oil spill in Santa Barbara. We all love Prof. Westerbeke, who is very intelligent yet down to earth and a real joy to be around, so we had (and are still having) a bit of a problem wrapping our minds around the fact that he could represent such unsympathetic and arguably guilty clients. But that's what corporate law is, right? You represent corporations, which aren't exactly warm, fuzzy, benevolent institutions. And corporate law is where the money is, and an area where a lot of us plan on practicing at least for a few years. Food for thought...
In any event, at dinner, we put our moral and existential questions aside for another day and had a fabulous dinner. Prof. Westerbeke is just as personable outside of class and was the highlight of everyone's evening. This is the professor's last week in Cambridge, as he team-teaches his course with another professor who will teach the final two weeks.
Here we are at The Eagle with the Professor:
Sunday: London Day.
We took the train into the city for the afternoon and had an amazing time. I saw Kensington Palace, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, St. Paul's Cathedral (We saw several other impressive churches, too), Shakespeare's Globe Theater, the H.M.S. Belfast, the outside of the Tate Museum (lol), the Thames River and London Bridge. We went inside the cathedral but couldn't tour it or Westminster, as it was Sunday, so we decided to do those things and explore the Tate and Globe Theater during free time on our class visit to London this Thursday. This was our low-budget sightseeing day, but we did shell out 3.5 pounds to tour the Clink Prison Museum, which was a somewhat corny but informative little exhibit about medieval London prisons. The corny part was the life-sized paper mache dolls that were made up to look like prisoners. They were as realistic as possible but just didn't seem to have the desired effect. :-) But the artifacts were indeed interesting: I saw an actual iron chastity belt (quite painful-looking) and several torture devices: a boot (an iron boot that they stuck your foot in and then filled with wood chips, then put water in it to make the wood swell and effectively chop your foot off, leaving a nubby end that would become infected and kill you slowly and painfully), some stocks, a ball and chain, a thumb crusher, a whipping rack and a torture chair. They definitely took "cruel and unusual punishment" to a whole 'nother level.
We had dinner in a restaurant in Soho (didn't know London had a Soho, too, but apparently it does) that's made to look like a cinema. There's one in Cambridge, too, and I'd love to eat there; best prices I've seen over here so far, and great food.
Riding the underground (the tube) was an experience in itself. I didn't expect it to be a big deal, but thank goodness that Carody's friend, a native Briton, was with us! I found the NYC trains pretty simple and straightforward after a day or two, but I couldn't find any rhyme or rhythm to the London trains. The lines on the map squiggled in all sorts of directions, half the trains were closed (presumably because they do most of their repairs on Sundays), and my rail card randomly stopped working so I always had to go through the special gate (which seems like a fairly common problem). ...It didn't inspire fear or paranoia or anything like that, but I just hope that most cities' trains are more like New York's than London's. :-)
...Just looked out my dorm window, which overlooks the Trinity Hall courtyard, and there is a group of students with backpacks on the roof the building next door, which looks like a church (but of course everything looks like a church, here, so it could be a university building). ...That can't be normal. Or safe. Esp. since it's about to rain.
Maybe I can go up there tomorrow...
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