Academic Nomads

I've had the opportunity to see some pretty weird things in the week I've been in London: a chainsaw juggler in Covent Garden and a super space age hand dryer with blue lights in the King's Cross restroom.

In return, however, I have gotten to be a part of one of the greatest spectacles Bedford Street has ever seen: Two adults, three children under the age of seven, and twenty-two college students marking down the street to the tube station. Our professor, St. George, brought his wife and three (adorable) children with him to London for the first few weeks, and while they don't come to class they have accompanied us on most of the field trips. It's a great deal for everyone involved. St. George gets to have his family with him, they have twenty-two instant babysitters where ever we go (their children literally attach themselves to us), and we college students get our cuteness quota filled for a while.

But walking down the street together, we must look like a circus family.

And we are a little bit of an academic circus. We students are living in a hostel that is however many stars are between the Ritz and summer camp. The wireless is spotty (probably a good thing for all involved), but they vacuum our rooms once a week and the water pressure is good. Our light bulb emits light more as a hobby, but we have a window that makes up for it.

Our classroom is the library of the Swedenborg society. It's far more august than our usual digs in Laird, but it also feels a bit like having class in a museum dedicated to the "most important man in modern history." (According to the chalkboard outside the bookstore) We have to move chairs on the sly because we don't all fit around the table, but the Swedenborgians are very particular about the conditions of their floors. But being Carleton students we plunge ahead, cheerfully participating in class as if our lives depended on it.

It’s very cool, living with and taking classes with all the same people. We sit around the tables in the kitchen eating scrambled eggs and complaining about the footnotes in our edition of the York Mystery Plays, hashing out the plot of “The Fall of the Angels” and our critiques of Legally Blonde: The Musical (I kid you not, but we saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Macbeth to balance things out.) Or sit on benches in Regent’s Park acting like a weird procrastinator’s book club, because we are all reading the same book. It’s a lot of fun and a great support network.

St. George commented at the end of class on Wednesday, how impressed he was that we could trek across the Atlantic to read Medieval drama (which let me tell you is not written in any kind of English I speak) in the library of a wacky 19th century mystic, and still cheerfully participate in class while being slightly jet-lagged and constantly interrupted by police sirens. He said that he’d like to drag us to the Amazon and make us do problem sets, just to test the limits of the Carleton student. Seeing how we’ve done so far, I think we could take on the Amazon. Problem sets are a different beast entirely.

Love,
The Mouse