This past week :)

Hi everyone!
This Sunday we watched the BAFTA awards. It's basically the Oscars for England! It was held at the Royal Opera house and there were a ton of stars there, British, American, and other foreign actors, directors, producers, etc. Orlando Bloom sat in the second row of the ground level, right in front of Keira Knightley who was with her bf Rupert Friend, and James MacAvoy sat behind her! Orlando just presented an award but the show was quite interesting! They played parts of the movies that were up for nominations and explained what they were about. The winners weren't timed at all, but made their thank yous as quickly as possible. It was interesting to watch this awards show because it was a lot different than watching the Oscars.
On Monday and Tuesday Erin, Megan and I worked on our presentation for our British Lit. class. We had to discuss & explain some of the characters of King Lear. how the children of King Lear and Gloucester from the play King Lear displayed their sibling rivlary and jealousy, and what factors made them do their evil crimes that they committed.
We made a power point of some pictures from the King Lear plays. Then we told the class our views on why we thought the siblings would be jealous & compete against one another. I had to talk about the characters of Goneril and Regan, who were basically the evil step sisters in King Lear.
On Wednesday we also had our Modern Britain class. We discussed whether America or GB was more politically correct and also the culture wars within our own cultures. It was interesting and I found out that GB doesn’t have “Britain’s best cup of coffee” like America does. I also found out in discussion that America seems to be in our own little bubble, and when certain only affect us do we hear about it in the news. In GB & Europe, they are worldlier and care about other things that are going on in the world. These were just some things we discussed in our discussion group.
For dinner we ate at Jim’s house and had pizza! It was good and afterwards we went next door to the Missouri chaperone’s home to watch 40 year-old virgin, because Megan and Erin had never seen the movie! Loved it lol :D
On Thursday I watched Near Dark in my American cinema class. It was soo cheesy and a horrible vampire movie. But since we’re discussing the portrayal of the “family” in this term, we had to pay attention to this family of the vampire’s and the human family. But I guess watching a movie is better than having a lecture :D
During my break between classes, Erin and I had lunch at school and then went to the computer lab to figure out what we wanted to do for Paris. We booked our hostel and also bought our bus tickets! It’s an 8 hour bus ride from Canterbury to Paris!! We’ll be soo tired but hopefully we can sleep on the bus at some point :D
A student named Chris is in our Ethics class and I sat next to him. He invited Erin and me to join him for his birthday party on Friday night at a lounge bar called Bramley's. Erin was really excited because she has a crush on him. So he told me that he’d give us his number so that we can meet up with him and go to the pub.
In Ethics we had to read these articles and then discuss them in groups in class. I had an article about Self-love and how it doesn’t relate to being a selfish person. That people can be happy through other people’s happiness. Then we discussed our term papers, which are coming up in early March! Yikes!
After class was done, Erin and I ate dinner at Witherspoons and split a chocolate cake with ice cream since it was Valentine’s Day! I then went to Tesco’s and bought my host family a bouquet of flowers from the Helms family lol. They loved it and thought it was very pretty! I picked one out that had red and pink roses and red and pink carnations.
Then I ate some chocolates with Katerina and Sonia and we watched Penny Serenade with Carrey Grant and Irene Dunne. It was cute, but very sad too!
Then I went to bed :D
Erin and I met up with Chris on Friday and went to Bramley's and met some new British people. The pub was a little more loungey and we had this one room where there were books and 2 sewing machines for bookends on it lol! Then there wer all kinds of games to play if we wished. I made friends with a guy named James, 3 Alex’s, some girls named Emma, Ellie, Laura, and Caroline. So it was a nice party and we played games like Jenga, which of course I am the Jenga master lol, or I was on our church retreats haha! Although the games must be just a Canterbury thing because Caroline says that there are usually no games in any other pubs that she's been to in England :D Huh. Interesting :)
So now Erin and I are in the library looking for ethics research for our term papers and stuff like that lol. I will hopefully get it done before I leave for Paris and then have a good birthday weekend. I can’t believe the time is creeping by so quickly! I want more time to travel, meet more people and hang out here! 3 months seemed like such a long time, but now it’s going by too fast!
Tonight we are invited to hang out at the Parham road dorms with some of the ISU girls who didn't go to Barcelona this weekend. It should be fun, and there is a theme "Preppy Night" but I'll probably just wear jeans & a nice sweater since I didn't bring my school girl skirts & legging socks lol.
More later! Love ya all! XOXO