February 10th

A fair amount has happened since the last post I made. Classes have started and they are okay. I'm taking four modules as they call them over here. Organisation Design and Management is my first class, which is from 2:30 to 5:30 on Mondays. They split the modules into two section, a lecture and seminar portion. The lectures, at least so far, seem to be pretty dry and uninteresting, and as the name implies...there isn't much participation from the students. The seminars, on the other hand, are more interactive and interesting. I've taken away a lot more from the seminars than I have from the lectures. That being said, i'm pretty thankful that they split the classes into these two sections, because three hours is a long time for one class. They do three years of college over here, so there are first, second, and third year modules. Organisation Design and Management is a second year course, and there are two assignments that will make up my mark (grade). 70% of the grade is based off of a 2500 word paper on the organisation design of Facebook as a company. The research for this will be primarily based off of two youtube videos that the tutor (professor) found. The remaining 30% comes from a student workbook that we complete in 3 or 4 of the seminars throughout the semester. I have my first one today and will have a better idea of what exactly these are in a few hours.

My next class is Art in London, which is from 2 to 4 on Tuesdays. This class is alright because we get to go to different museums, so I enjoy the fact that it gets me out and about London. The teacher, interestingly enough, is from the east bay in San Francisco and attended the academy of art in S.F. Last week we went to the National Gallery, which is right by Trafalgar Square, and I saw several pieces by Da Vinci, which was pretty cool. The grade in this class consists of four components. First is an ongoing journal that we will be keeping as we visit different museums, and this is worth 40% of the mark. Second is a 1500 word paper that's worth 35% of the grade, and it involves examining two pieces of art of our choice. Third is a short presentation which is worth 15% of our grade...mines tomorrow and it's on themes in Rococo Art. The last portion of our grade is 10% and it's just based on participation.

My third module is Spanish, which is from 6 to 8:30 on Wednesday nights. Not too much to say about this one... it's a little different from the U.S. language classes that i've taken because the instructor really makes an effort to not speak english in the class. Most of the language classes i've taken in the U.S. have involved more english, but obviously that changes as you get into higher level courses.

The last module i'm taking is Personal Finance, and it's from 10am to 1pm on Thursdays. It's a third year module and it's probably the most practical, useful class i'm taking. There are three components that make up the grade, first of which is a 60 minute in class test that's worth 50%. The second part is a 2000 word paper that is worth 40%, and the last 10% is based off of participation.

I spent this past weekend in Cardiff, which is in Wales and is about 150 miles west of London. I took a bus there with two of my friends and stayed at a Holiday Inn near the city center. It's a city of about 350,000, and is known for its Rugby team. It was fun to go there and it a nice change of pace from London. Everything felt very laid back there, and we met some natives at a few of the pubs/clubs that we went to. Welsh is a pretty interesting language, it sounds completely foreign and pronunciation of words is completely different from English. We visited the Cardiff Castle, which was really cool. Here are a few pictures.

The weather in Cardiff was awful, the wind was blowing and it rained pretty heavily for most of the time that we were there. We watched a rugby match at one of the pubs called The Old Arcade, and it was so packed that we had to stand for the first half. We ended up leaving and going to a less crowded place for the second half. Wales lost to Ireland, but it was fun to watch and learn about Rugby, as I didn't really know anything about the sport before my time over there. Seems like a pretty brutal sport. That was pretty much all we did in wales, I wanted to go to Cardiff Bay, but didn't get a chance to do that unfortunately. The castle was by far my favorite part of the town, and it was nice to see another place in the UK.

I'm hoping to explore more of London in the next few weeks, and I'm planning on taking a few tours of places like St. Paul's Cathedral, the Churchill War Rooms, Westminster Abbey, and a bunch of different art museums for my class.

I think that's about it for now, I'm off to get some pizza with a friend at a pub near my campus. They offer two pizzas for the price of one, too good to pass up!