catch-up london style, #2

i hopped across the pond just over a week ago, and finally have the interwebs at home again. meet the catch-up post, dated for your (my) convenience.

le 3 octobre 2012

today was our registration day, and it was both boring as can be and incredibly exciting. most of our class was there, and we all hung out for lunch afterwards. my laugh has already become infamous (the snort very quickly came out, unsurprisingly), and a classmate has commissioned a cowl. go me :) of course, i’m also extremely low on funds, so i may have to wait to pick up the yarn. sigh. meeting with the estate agent in a short while to finally sign the papers, and i have a student card, which is apparently good for all sorts of discounts.

one of the things i’m most excited about is the library. we have 40,000 books solely about performance right on campus, plus loads of digital material and journals. and another library with 2 million next door to the british museum (we have to go early in the morning to register with them). i picked up one of my reading requirements, but an even more exciting find was “exercises for rebel artists: radical performance pedagogy” by guillermo gomez-pena and roberto sifuentes. i’ll probably hunt down a used copy for myself at some point, but in the meantime, i have a month to get through it.

some interesting things about london that people back home might be interested to know:

-there’s a store called argos, and it’s basically a supply-and-demand design. you walk in, search through a catalogue for things you need (i.e. bedding, toys, furniture…think sears, but in catalogue form). you write down the numbers of items you want, pay for them, and then they’re delivered to you from the back warehouse. it’s bizarre, and kind of brilliant, because you’re less likely to pick up extra crap that you don’t need. on a side note, the flatmate and i are going to ikea on friday. i’m sure the extra crap there will more than make up for argos.

-you can’t get a phone contract without a uk-based bank card. you can’t get a bank card for 7-15 business days after signing up for an account. internet takes 5-7 work days to set up. everything in the uk seems to take ages to sort out, and the country is paranoid about identity theft. it’s all a bit absurd. luckily i have a home address, because otherwise everything would take even longer to sort out.