The Magical World of Kristin: Classes!

So today we spent a lot of the day in our classes that we will have hear while in London. For breakfast we keep having these wonderful yogurt cup things that have like coco flake things to the side that you can dump into your yogurt. I had one with banana yogurt this morning and it was delicious. So our first class is Humanities and the Environment which I admit I was at first hesitant about because I am not really much of a nature person but this was a really great in the first class today and I feel like it will be a great class. We first talked about what natural places are of importance to us we discussed that they have value to us either because of past meaning on narrative that we have in regards to the place or we just have an unexpected and unpredictable reaction to the place. I think I had an experience with this last time when I went to the British Museum. I was super tired from jetlag and I really wasn't really too enthused about the idea of going to a museum but once I entered the British Museum and started looking around I was completely thrilled with it and I couldn't get enough of it. My teacher pointed out that these unexpected reactions cannot be fabricated either. It's like when you listen to that great song that totally pumped you up when unexpectedly heard it for the first time. You can go back and listen to it again but you can't force it to have the same meaning as it did in that unexpected reaction. My teacher also pointed out that while we often view it as such, nature is not something going on around us be we are a part of nature constantly. Also in our age of information he points out that we can't really oh I didn't know about my relationship with nature because we have so many sources of the information available to us. After this talk about nature we discussed the play The Tempest which we had previously read. We discussed the meaning and purpose of the characters in the story and had some entertaining readings by members of my class. I am really excited to see how the play will be interpreted when we see it at the globe theater on Tuesday. I amazed that there are so many wonderful opportunities around me and I wonder how I will be able to take advantage of all of the opportunities that I would like to. We had a brief break in between our humanities class and art class where we all ran off to grab something for lunch. Some people ate sandwiches and I had some leftovers of the chicken curry and rice that we had lunch. I have realized that I actually really don't mind living here with all these people so close to each other, I actually am quite enjoying the communal environment. Also all of the people on the study abroad are very high caliber people so I guess that makes it easier to live with them too. In my art class we did our first sketch. The teacher stacked some chairs in an interesting arrangement in the center of the room and then he instructed us to use an open format (where it is just section of the objects, the objects continue off the page) to draw a section of the arrangement. We had to use only straight lines and we had to make sure we were understanding proportions. It was hard for me but we have an assignment to practice this type of sketching three more times before Tuesday so hopefully I will get better. After that we went on one of the walks for our London walks class just exploring the general area around the London center where I have already been quite a bit. We found out where portabello road is and we have plans to go there tomorrow morning. After this walk we sat around working on assignments for classes and looking up tickets for plays and musical. There are so many available and I am really excited to see some like Singing in the Rain. We just had a wonderful dinner of sheperds pie and now in a little bit here a guy from the Church is coming and telling us what wards we will be assigned to while we are here in London. I already feel like I have been here for a while and I am really enjoying London!