To Nice, France! I'm starting to plan my December travels (we have the 9th of December to the 9th of January off of school) and I just bought my ticket to my starting point. I'm currently planning to buy a ticket back from Athens and then just make my way there from Nice via Monaco, Rome, Naples, Dubrovnik, Athens/the Greek Isles, but I have to be back in London by the 21st for a friend's visit so I'm checking to see how much time exactly it will take me to do this things and how much time I want to spend in each place. It seems like it's going to be quite a whirlwind trip but I'm itching to start my travels. Luckily, my parents gave me both a guide to London and Europe on a Shoestring for my birthday so I'm not going about it completely blind.
Speaking of whirlwinds, this week has been one as well. Although I look back on it and I can't exactly figure out how I managed to feel like every second was spent rushing from one place to another since I only had three classes this week and was done with those by Tuesday afternoon. I don't mean to sound ungrateful but thanks God, I've had fun these past three weeks now ENOUGH WITH THE HOLIDAYS. I think part of the reason that I've felt so busy/overwhelmed/overbooked is because my free days Thursday and Friday, for like the last four weeks, are always spent in synagogue or at some festive meal or traveling to one or the other of those things. It's exhausting! Also my work-life balance remains firmly stuck on the side of social. Which is not a necessarily a bad thing, but I'm determined to be more disciplined in the upcoming weeks as I have big plans for the next four or five weekends and can't afford to fall too far behind in my classes.This weekend I get to celebrate Halloween in London (as a pirate? costume suggestions are welcome), the weekend after my friend Anna comes to visit, then it's off to Brussels and the next weekend to Barcelona. So it might be a wise idea to buckle down NOW.
In that spirit, you get a quick rundown of my weekly activities and then it's back to facebooking like a champ while avoiding looking at the pile of reading sitting next to my computer.
This week I kept training, though not as much as I would have liked to, I was too exhausted from all the sleep-lite nights (side-effect of the whole socializing thing) to make it to the gym as often as I probably would have otherwise. I also attended a variety of Jewish-student or community focused event, including the JSOC WEJ Wasted Bar Crawl, which was an event I attended with an LLM friend of mine, Jardena - as part of the preparation for the bar crawl we were all given matching t-shirts and tied together into pairs, Jardena and I were one of the few pairs that made it to the first pub before ditching the tape
The group rented out a double decker bus for the "crawl" so we actually made it to pubs literally across the city from each other, starting in Covent Garden, moving on to Shoreditch, Camden and finally finishing up in Leciester Square. It was mostly (like, actually 99.99%) undergraduates, 20% of whom attend University of Maryland (you do the math), but the bars were cool and the drinks were plentiful. I ended up staying out dancing quite late before finally catching a unmarked cab home. Which means some dude in a Honda was sitting outside the bar and said he would drive me home for 15 pounds. That part was kind of a lie though, because my street was closed for construction work and I had to walk the last two or three blocks home in a conveniently timed downpour.
I spent Shmini Atzeret back at Marble Arch, enjoying the last dinner in the Sukkah, chatting with a newly-minted UK lawyer and a newly arrived Israeli girl on her gap year. The company was great but the meal was, as usual, extremely long. So long that I ended up skipping shul and the meal entirely the next day when I failed to get out of bed before 12:30pm. That night I rallied and went back to Marble Arch for the Simchat Torah festivities, but due to a misunderstanding about the timing, arrived during dinner to find that they had done all the dancing and Hakafot before I even got there! I wasn't the only one to make that mistake though (in the US and I guess at other shuls the dancing can go quite late into the night), and so the Chabad Rabbi stayed around with the student-types to drink, celebrate and have our own dancing session. I finished the night with Valerie and Jardena exploring the Marble Arch area after everyone else went home. Having survived the last of the holiday meals I celebrated with my first ever Ministry of Sound experience. MOS is a warehouse like club that specializes in electronic dance music. It's an icon (though one that has seen better days) and is conveniently located in my neighborhood. It was SO MUCH FUN. I went with some girls from my LLM program, a couple of my flatmates and a group of boys from California. I forgot my camera but the inside of the club looks something like this
and this warning really is necessary
I had a blast and got home around 5am. The club was still crowded when we left.
My weekend was lazy, even with five days in a row of not actually having any responsibilities I didn't manage to accomplish much, I slept a lot, finally finished Buffy the Vampire season 7, went shopping at Borough Market (something I forgot to do last weekend that should definitely improve my food outlook for the week now that free Chabad food for the holidays is a thing of the past), got lunch with my roommates while church bells rang right next to us for over 40 minutes, and did a minor amount of studying. I also spent last night confidently leading a group of people to the wrong "Cow Pub" (apparently there are multiple pubs in London that go by that name) and finally (after much travails - is that the correct use of the word? Or many travails?) and two or three buses we ended up at a hipster bar on entirely the opposite side of London, where they hang plants in planters upside down from the ceiling. To my deep regret I do not have a picture of that.
Now then, it's 10pm and I should probably do a couple of hours of studying before bed, a place I'd like to find myself in before midnight for the first time this past week. Hope all of you are doing well, I'm super jealous of those of you in CA right now (DAD!) and just thinking of it makes me miss the beach quite a lot. Luckily I believe this Wednesday the London Surf Club has its monthly meeting!
Much love,
Speaking of whirlwinds, this week has been one as well. Although I look back on it and I can't exactly figure out how I managed to feel like every second was spent rushing from one place to another since I only had three classes this week and was done with those by Tuesday afternoon. I don't mean to sound ungrateful but thanks God, I've had fun these past three weeks now ENOUGH WITH THE HOLIDAYS. I think part of the reason that I've felt so busy/overwhelmed/overbooked is because my free days Thursday and Friday, for like the last four weeks, are always spent in synagogue or at some festive meal or traveling to one or the other of those things. It's exhausting! Also my work-life balance remains firmly stuck on the side of social. Which is not a necessarily a bad thing, but I'm determined to be more disciplined in the upcoming weeks as I have big plans for the next four or five weekends and can't afford to fall too far behind in my classes.This weekend I get to celebrate Halloween in London (as a pirate? costume suggestions are welcome), the weekend after my friend Anna comes to visit, then it's off to Brussels and the next weekend to Barcelona. So it might be a wise idea to buckle down NOW.
In that spirit, you get a quick rundown of my weekly activities and then it's back to facebooking like a champ while avoiding looking at the pile of reading sitting next to my computer.
This week I kept training, though not as much as I would have liked to, I was too exhausted from all the sleep-lite nights (side-effect of the whole socializing thing) to make it to the gym as often as I probably would have otherwise. I also attended a variety of Jewish-student or community focused event, including the JSOC WEJ Wasted Bar Crawl, which was an event I attended with an LLM friend of mine, Jardena - as part of the preparation for the bar crawl we were all given matching t-shirts and tied together into pairs, Jardena and I were one of the few pairs that made it to the first pub before ditching the tape
The group rented out a double decker bus for the "crawl" so we actually made it to pubs literally across the city from each other, starting in Covent Garden, moving on to Shoreditch, Camden and finally finishing up in Leciester Square. It was mostly (like, actually 99.99%) undergraduates, 20% of whom attend University of Maryland (you do the math), but the bars were cool and the drinks were plentiful. I ended up staying out dancing quite late before finally catching a unmarked cab home. Which means some dude in a Honda was sitting outside the bar and said he would drive me home for 15 pounds. That part was kind of a lie though, because my street was closed for construction work and I had to walk the last two or three blocks home in a conveniently timed downpour.
I spent Shmini Atzeret back at Marble Arch, enjoying the last dinner in the Sukkah, chatting with a newly-minted UK lawyer and a newly arrived Israeli girl on her gap year. The company was great but the meal was, as usual, extremely long. So long that I ended up skipping shul and the meal entirely the next day when I failed to get out of bed before 12:30pm. That night I rallied and went back to Marble Arch for the Simchat Torah festivities, but due to a misunderstanding about the timing, arrived during dinner to find that they had done all the dancing and Hakafot before I even got there! I wasn't the only one to make that mistake though (in the US and I guess at other shuls the dancing can go quite late into the night), and so the Chabad Rabbi stayed around with the student-types to drink, celebrate and have our own dancing session. I finished the night with Valerie and Jardena exploring the Marble Arch area after everyone else went home. Having survived the last of the holiday meals I celebrated with my first ever Ministry of Sound experience. MOS is a warehouse like club that specializes in electronic dance music. It's an icon (though one that has seen better days) and is conveniently located in my neighborhood. It was SO MUCH FUN. I went with some girls from my LLM program, a couple of my flatmates and a group of boys from California. I forgot my camera but the inside of the club looks something like this
and this warning really is necessary
My weekend was lazy, even with five days in a row of not actually having any responsibilities I didn't manage to accomplish much, I slept a lot, finally finished Buffy the Vampire season 7, went shopping at Borough Market (something I forgot to do last weekend that should definitely improve my food outlook for the week now that free Chabad food for the holidays is a thing of the past), got lunch with my roommates while church bells rang right next to us for over 40 minutes, and did a minor amount of studying. I also spent last night confidently leading a group of people to the wrong "Cow Pub" (apparently there are multiple pubs in London that go by that name) and finally (after much travails - is that the correct use of the word? Or many travails?) and two or three buses we ended up at a hipster bar on entirely the opposite side of London, where they hang plants in planters upside down from the ceiling. To my deep regret I do not have a picture of that.
Now then, it's 10pm and I should probably do a couple of hours of studying before bed, a place I'd like to find myself in before midnight for the first time this past week. Hope all of you are doing well, I'm super jealous of those of you in CA right now (DAD!) and just thinking of it makes me miss the beach quite a lot. Luckily I believe this Wednesday the London Surf Club has its monthly meeting!
Much love,
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