Rocks, Water...and MSN!

These have been quite a few interesting days. Yesterday, our British Life and Culture class took its Wednesday field trip to Stonehenge and Bath. We woke up really early and drove the 2 hours there with our very friendly tour guide, Tony. It was such a perfect day. Not too cold, with blue skies. It only started to rain as our day was ending and we made the voyage home.

We first stopped at Stonehenge, which I really loved. I was in a really good mood when we were at Stonehenge, which may have contributed to my love of it so I’m not sure how much I actually liked of it, but it was a beautiful place. We received a long lecture on the archeological significance of Stonehenge, but that did not at all do justice to how cool Stonehenge was. Yeah, you could look at it as being a bunch of rocks, but I thought it was so much more than that.

I cannot say the same about the Roman Baths however. We went to the town of Bath, which I am sad to say I did not have more than a half hour to explore. I wish we could have had more time in the town, which was a little commercial, but also had independent shops that were really cool. The main point of us going there was to get into the history of England, so we spent the majority of our afternoon there seeing the unnecessarily long museum leading us into the Roman Baths.

This may be naïve of me to say, and potentially insulting to religious people, but I did not see the point in the Baths. It was just a big pool of green, steaming water to me. I do not want to offend anyone, but I saw no importance to it whatsoever. Although, you could say the same about Stonehenge being just a bunch of rocks, but Bath to me was just a pool of water. I didn’t mind seeing the Baths, just very disappointed that I didn’t get enough time to explore the cute town and its surroundings.

Anyway, it was a pretty fun day. Today, however, I started my internship with MSN working in the Entertainment section, which was incredibly intimidating and nerve racking at the beginning of the day.

However, by the end of the day I was pretty comfortable with my surroundings and somewhat confident with what I was doing. I’m kind of just doing orientation stuff and learning all the programs right now, so it’ll take a few days to get adjusted, but MSN seems pretty awesome and I think I’m in for a good semester. All the people are really cool too, and I got to watch the Oscar nomination announcement with the team, as they put it, so that was definitely a highlight.

Of course, the best part of the day was when I got home (at about 6:20) and knew that the reality of my living situation was that I needed to do laundry...badly. I was not looking forward to it, despite the fact that there's a laundromat on the same street as my flat. It ended up being fine, but the machines are really different than the ones in the U.S. Not to mention much more expensive. Four pounds ($6) for ONE load of laundry in the smallest machine I'd ever seen and 20 pence (30 cents) for every 3 minutes in the dryer. Thankfully, I was able to figure out how everything worked, so I survived the experience, but it was quite interesting. 

Anyway, the last two days have been fun and I’m looking forward to learning more about MSN tomorrow and getting into a real routine for the next few months. Hope everyone has a good and relaxing weekend!