A Few Observations from My First Week in London

1) I slide into a routine REALLY easily. By Thursday (my third day at my internship) I felt like I knew my route to work well enough that I could walk it blind. (I would have to be extra careful to mind the gap, of course, but I could do it.) I’ve always known that I establish routines quickly and stick to them, as evidenced by work habits at my summer job, methodology in mixing sound & photos for a slideshow, and my early mornings. I now have stronger proof of this fact, though, because I’ve been able to make and keep one in an otherwise foreign country.

2) British computer keyboards are different from American keyboards, and that’s gonna throw me off until the end of my internship. They don’t change the letters around, of course. (If they changed the QWERTY format, every computer maker would get a letter in the mail from me invoking the Geneva Conventions!) What HAVE changed, though, are the left shift key area and the quote marks. The left shift key is smaller, so when I’ve reached for the key with my pinky, I’ve often missed and clicked the next key over, leaving the screen with a backslash and the lowercase version of the letter I wanted. Just as annoying, the quote marks and the commercial “at” (@) have switched spots, so my quotes have turned into, @Thanks for all the work you do! \you’ve helped us so much!@ I can’t say this out loud because that would interrupt the work flow, but when that happens, I just have to go, @Gah!@

3) I owe a debt of gratitude to Kirstie. She let me borrow her Frigg album one time, and after listening to one of their songs on the way to the first day of work, “Jokijenkka (Riverdance)” has become my theme song for the trip.

4) The British papers are subjective. They don’t show overarching BIAS toward everything they cover, which I erroneously implied in a previous post, but there is some ideological coloring. I’m developing an argument in my head about whether it would be better for American papers to admit their subjectivity or keep up an air of disinterest. That will come later. Maybe MUCH later.

5) You could be walking randomly around London and run into a protest.

6) Beatles music sounds different over here. You walk to work, a Beatles song shuffles up on your iPod, and instantly you feel like you’re more in Britain than you’ve ever been before. I wasn’t even walking down Penny Lane, and that song felt special.

PROCEDURAL NOTE
I don't know if I'm annoying people yet or not, but in case I am I'll stop tagging people in each note on Facebook. I'll be keeping this blog up for the rest of the summer, but now that I've started it for those of you who were interested (and now that, hopefully, I've got you hooked!), I don't think I need to tag people anymore. (Let me know, of course, if you get a thrill from being notified that "Alex has tagged you in a note.")

Past and future posts will always be available on my Facebook page and at the original blog site. Make sure to comment in each place if you feel so inclined, because 1) I want to keep talking to all of you and 2) I get such a thrill from the acknowledgment!