And give some evening music to her ear

Okay, so I'm rolling Thursday and Friday all into one post because they weren't particularly eventful.  I had class Thursday morning and after class there was only an hour until dinner, so we stayed at the center and did homework.  But after dinner we went to this really neat concert at St. Martins-in-the-fields, which is a church on the edge of Trafalgar Square.  It's an Anglican church, and it was a candlelight Baroque concert.  I enjoyed it so much more than I thought I would.

We sat in these little wooden box pews on the side of the church with a window that had lit candles in the sill as we listened to some absolutely beautiful string music.  If I was really educated I'm sure I would've been able to tell you what the names of all the different pieces were, but I settled for merely recognizing the pieces and enjoying them.  It was just very peaceful and a great way to release stress.  All of this listening to good classical music this week is reminding me of how much it calms me down.  One of those by-products of doing years of ballet right after school every day and practicing piano for hours each week.  It was nice to just sit, listen to absolutely gorgeous live music, and let my mind wander around the church from candle to candle.  I think there's something to be said for artistic expression without words, as much as I love singing and writing.

Okay, well, enough of the musings of a tired mind.  We got gelato halfway through the concert and it was delicious.  I got dark chocolate and black cherry, which made a really excellent combination.

On Friday I was absolutely exhausted and slept straight in to 9:30.  It was a very slow morning, which I was perfectly alright with.  I'd stayed up very late Wednesday night because of some confusion with what the professor's sign up sheet said and what the syllabus said.  I was planning by the syllabus, but the professor had a different schedule, which led to a very stressful night and morning.  So it was nice to take Friday to recover and just wake up late, take a leisurely shower and take a really nice walk in the absolutely perfect weather to Tesco's or whatever the local store is.

Seriously, I think Friday was defined by the perfect weather.  I wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt all day, and walking out of the house felt like walking from one room to another.  Around twelve thirty a group of us went to the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) to do our Fine Arts homework.  I did sketching and we took two tours.

First we took the Theater tour, which was pretty neat mainly because our tour guide was the person in charge of the whole theater section.  He kept casually mentioning working with the guy who had the Globe Theater rebuilt and he showed us their copy of the First Folio (For those of you who are not Shakespeare-savy, the First Folio is the first real printed collection of Shakespeare's work and at least half of his plays were printed for the first time in it.  Yeah, I was quietly freaking out, and Amy and I went back and just stared at it for at least five minutes.) and all of these really cool costumes.

Then a couple of us hung around for a while so that we could take the general Intro tour.  We didn't technically need to, as only one tour was the requirement, but we thought it would be a really good idea because there was a lot of the museum that we hadn't explored.  I'm really glad we stayed to take it because there were some really rather neat things in the museum, and there was another Shakespeare reference!  It was actually an object referred to in Shakespeare, but still fairly cool.  I liked it a whole lot better than the audio tour in the National Gallery.

Anyway, after dinner a group of us were going to go on a walk.  The initial plan was to do the Westminister walk, and that was the plan all the way up until five minutes before we were supposed to leave, when everyone else decided to do the St. Paul's walk.  Well, I'd already done that walk, but as it beat sitting at home and doing homework I went along.  We got lost at different points in the walk this time, so it was nice to get all of the walk experience and also to see different detours.  We did it in the opposite direction this time, which made it a little difficult to keep things straight in my head, but no matter.  It was fun, and the weather was perfect, and it was just so pleasant.  I think I actually miss walking home from campus in the evenings, because every time I go on an evening walk I get really excited.

I did get a better picture of me with St. Paul's though.

And I'm standing just beyond Ye Olde Chesire Cheese in this picture, which is a pub that was frequented by Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson, which was pretty cool.  We missed that on my previous walk because we'd gotten lost.  I'm pretty sure that I'm on Fleet Street though, which some of you may have heard of before.