How much school can you take in a day?

The past few days have seen the advent of a whole lot of nothing. Ryan Harvey, my roommate from last year, who is currently studying with the Pepperdine Heidelberg program, came to visit London this weekend. We did the obligatory run around seeing Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abby, etc. Other than that though, we didn’t do a whole lot. Late Sunday night/early Monday morning ended with me watching “Gidget Goes Hawaiian,” a 1961 romantic comedy, with four of the girls in the house. Since relations with Carolyn have been a little tense as of late, watching a movie about a manipulative little redhead was an interesting experience for me, but old movies are always fun. Today turned into an excruciatingly long day. Typically my schedule for Mondays and Wednesdays look like this: 8.45-10.45, Shakespeare; 11.00-12.30, Art and Architecture; 1.15-3.15, Astronomy; and 3.30-5.30, Humanities. As if that day isn’t long enough already, we had a pop quiz in Humanities and then the Astronomy lab from Hades. Normally, if we’re having astronomy lab for the week, we will cancel class on Monday and have the lab at 9pm on Tuesday. Today, however, we had class as usual and then were to meet at 6.00pm for lab. I had still not eaten any more than an apple for the day at this point, and when at 7.30 we had still not arrived at this place we were going, I was extremely hungry. We finally got to the observatory around 7.45 and since it was cloudy we got to learn all about the different types of telescopes they had there, plus a 30 min video with horrid animations about the simplest elements of the class, which have been mulled over way too much already. We finally got out of there a little after 9.30 and headed back to the house, which took another hour and a half. 8.30a, to 11.00pm is just too much learning for one day. One high spot from the trip though, walking back to the train Dap and myself stumbled upon the only restaurant still open in the town, which just happened to be a Chinese take away place. I got chicken curry and sweet and sour king prawn balls for under 8 pounds and it was extremely decent. I’m learning to appreciate things that can be qualified as decent and satisfactory, especially when it comes to food over here. That was one topic of the conversation I had tonight with a few of my best girl friends in London. One of the girls is having a hard time and the original attempt was just to cheer her up, but the conversation (over homemade milkshakes for them, and pop corn for me) quickly turned into funny stories and interesting reminiscence. I got to tell stories about getting Papa John’s pickup stuck in a ditch and having the county precinct chain gang van stop and pick it up, various dates that I was proud to have orchestrated, and an instance where a lasting friendship developed from a single summertime conversation, thank you Mindy. It was one of the best conversations I have had in a long time. I attribute it to my falling back on two questions, which have started many a good conversation, and I’ll pose them for you now:
1) What is something that you have never told anyone else?
2) What can you tell me that will change my life?
Cheers ya’ll!
(I liken that phrase to listening to Randy Travis and Jerry Jeff Walker on an iPod, there’s something wrong with it, but it’s a perfect microcosm of my life.)