Copenhagen is the new black!

Us enjoying Nyhaven Street.

We asked the guy to get the beautiful building in the background...

He got the graffiti wall, same thing.

In Copenhagen the city provides bikes. They are free and not

locked up. You can just take one when needed.

Roasted chestnuts are everywhere.

Obama-mania, Danish Style

More pics of Bath & Bristol

Bath from above.

Simon & Karen

Simon & Karen's house in Bristol

Mmm pizza & beer, my favorite type of dessert.

Simon, Nick, Karen. On a bridge.

Bath & Bristol

Ahh, the joys of the 'audio tour'

We're not really models, we just play them on tv.

It was a beautiful day in Bath.

You can actually drink the water from Bath or bath-water as 

I like to call it. It's said to both cause and cure gastroenteritis.

Wait a minute, how does that work?

Kristin begged me to take this picture. I kept saying "Don't you

think it's kind of cheesy?" but I took it anyway, just for her.

This weekend we went to Bath and Bristol to visit some friends of ours. Simon and Karen were kind enough to let us stay at their house in Bristol and drive us all around town including neighboring Bath. We took the bus there which was an interesting journey in itself. The bus was fairly comfortable and took only 1/2 hour longer than the train. The people on the bus were another story all together. We knew it was going to be a long journey when the woman next to us pulled out a grocery bag and tied it to the seat in front of her. The purpose of this bag was to contain the massive amount of trash that she would be producing during the long and arduous 2 hour journey. She started with chips (Which everyone over here calls crisps), after wrestling with the bag for a good 7 minutes she proceeded to pull out each chip and bite it in half. After biting the chip in half she fervently chewed in a circular motion, similar to a camel, mouth wide open, again similar to a camel. If you can visualize the amount of rogue chip matter being violently tossed about the bus cabin, accompanied by the sound of her chewing which was reminiscent of one of those machines that grinds up old computers in order to extract the precious metals from the electronic components, you can only begin to scratch the surface of the first third of our journey. After the chips came an ominous yellow bag with a familiar shape, but larger than I remember. Oh yes, they could only be PEANUT M&M's! No, of course they couldn't be the smaller, quieter variety of nut-less m&m's. They had to be the inordinately large and crunchy peanut variety, and the family size bag to boot. Oh the journey was far from over my friends. After the m&m's this specimen of a woman magically produced an extra large portion of Burger King french fries (which everyone calls chips over here, and freedom fries in certain ignorant parts of middle America). Now with the first two items we covered the audio and visual misery that this woman imposed on the quiet and unsuspecting bus goers. This last item would bring an olfactory element into the mix, she had now touched on 3 of our 5 natural senses. Our bus left at 9am and by now it was about 10:30. This isn't the real problem though. Fries that are 1 &1/2 hours old don't smell particularly good, but they don't really smell that bad either. After glancing over and seeing that both the fries and the bag were translucent I have determined that they were probably from the night before. Now I can tell you that day-old fries do smell particularly bad. So she finished the fries and washed it all down with a liter of Fanta (I'm not kidding). After that she spent the last 10 minutes of the trip speaking to various friends on her cell phone. When I say speaking I mean yelling, and not in English, but in a particularly annoying tone of Welsh, coming to assault us once again in our audio sense. Other than that the trip was great. Enjoy the pictures.

And So It Begins...

Obligatory 1st day of school picture.

Kristin fervently studying the entertainment scandals of our day.

(Did you know Lindsey Lohan really is gay? I had no idea.)

Aaaahhhhh, the joys of postgraduate study.

I apologize that I haven't been able to update the blog in so long. I have been very busy settling in to school here at King's. Kristin is working away at The Gap and we recently had some guests, Simon and Karen, come up from Bristol to stay for the weekend. For those of you who have been expressing their envy of us having the opportunity of moving to London, let me remind you, as I was recently and brutally reminded, this is all for the benefit of me completing a Masters in modern history in the short period of a year. Last week was an introduction week for my program. We essentially took tours of the 3 main libraries that we use, met with the faculty and staff of the history department, and had a reception for all of the incoming and current students which was catered with plenty of wine and probably all of the tweed suits still in existence. That was all fun and games until I received the syllabi for my upcoming courses on Saturday morning. For the sake of efficiency I will spare you the peripheral readings and just briefly show you the required reading for this week.

Class: Advanced Studies for Historians

-Friedrich Neitzsche, 'On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life'

-Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession

-Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice

-John Tosh, Why History Matters

-David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now?

Class: A Second Confessional Age? Religion and Society in Modern Europe

-Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion

-Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century

-David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization

-Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults

-Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life

-Max Weber, Economy and Society

Class: Revolutions and Constitutions in Europe, c. 1790-1870

-Palgrave Macmillan, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848

-Eugene Anderson, Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century

-Lewis Namier, Basic Factors in c. 19 Europe

-Clive Church, Europe in 1830

-T.C.W. Blanning, The Nineteenth Century 1789-1914

Yes, those are all books (between 200-400 pages).

No, it is not possible to read them all.

Sound like a lot? Well I apparently wasn't pleased with the workload and masochistically signed up for a 'French for Graduate Students' class to supplement the boredom that can only come from reading the biographies of nineteenth century historians (books about people that write books). I have found that some of these writings are the best sort of sleep-aid known to man. Ambien, Lunesta, Valume, and even heroine certainly cannot compare to reading some of these books on a cold day with a hot cup of tea in hand. You will fall asleep so quickly that you might actually wonder if someone could have slipped some ruphies in your tea. No wonder people spend their entire lives studying history, if you fall asleep between every page it takes that long to finish reading.

In all seriousness I do enjoy reading a lot of this subject matter and discussing it with the people that literally wrote the book.

On a side note, when we were kids my mom always used to take pictures of us on the first day of school. So in keeping with the tradition Kristin took a picture of me for my mom. So, here you go mom, you can put this with the rest of them.

Thames Festival

Guy on stilts.

On the way home.

The parade.

In the field before lunch.

At the parade.

View of London from Waterloo Bridge on the way home.

Today we went to the Thames Festival. This is an end of summer festival put on by the mayor of London Mr. Boris Johnson. It was a lot of fun, full of food booths and cultural exhibits. Tonight there was a finale with a Carnival style parade. Here are some pics of what it was like.

Other Pics From Our Walk

Entry to our flat

A Bridge

Dali exhibit in London

Everyone else was doing this picture so we thought it was necessary

mmm...no comment

Big Green Couch

So we went for a walk the other day and encountered a very big green couch. I was telling Kristin that surely there is some way we could fit it into out flat. I have not been able to stop thinking about this couch...so big....so green. 

The couch that we have in our flat is something akin to the seating arrangements at the child social services office in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico (Just trust me, I've been there and it isn't even as nice as it sounds). So as we go through our day touring the city, trying to get acquainted with our new home, the only thing I can think of is the lack of lumbar support that little pink "couch" of ours has. I mean really, at what point in the design and furnishing of this building did the University of London decide that there were going to be an inordinate amount of pygmies attending postgraduate programs? You know how you feel after a long day on your feet? As you're finally on your way home all you can think about is turning on that episode of Desperate Housewives you tivo'd last week, and then, falling effortlessly onto that big (possibly even green) soft couch with soft cushions and endless amounts of lumbar support. When I head home all I can think about is the number of surgeries it will take to correct the damage done after a year of sitting on this couch. I think about sitting on this ridiculous piece of furniture, watching a four year old episode of  East Enders (a poor quality mix between Days of our Lives & Melrose Place). 

There are a lot of pubs in England, and now I know why. If this is any gauge of what the British call a couch then it is no wonder everyone gets fall-over drunk before returning home from work. It's the only way to be even somewhat comfortable while sitting through an episode of bad English tv. Come to think of it, maybe that's why the tv is so bad over here, when you're really drunk you'll watch anything. Last night alone I needed five pints of good British ale to coax me into going home to face my small pink nemesis. When I got here I turned on an episode of East Enders and fell comfortably asleep...dreaming of that big green couch.