Life In Modern Babylon

I realize that I have mostly posted about our field trips and very little about every day life in London. I am still a bit astonished that everyday life manages to happen in a city like this, but here I am after three whole astonishing weeks of everyday life.

Here's what it looks like:

Roommates
I live in a quad with three other girls: my roommate the chem major from the last two terms, and close friend of ours and a close friend of hers. Although we each only knew some of each other at the start of the term, we have found that we are all of pretty much the same mind and get along great. We more in a pack, which we didn't realize was noticeable until our professor approached us outside the National Theater and asked us, since we were always together, if we had a nickname. I think he was a little surprised to discover that we did: D.E.L.K.I.E - Our initials + In England. Here is a picture of us, in our natural environment, eating dinner while only using Spock hands, a pretty typical meal:
Grocery Shopping
One of our greatest adventures has been grocery shopping. Most of us have, thanks to parents and dining halls, never had to feed ourselves. Fortunately we are given a very generous stipend (I can feed myself for a week on what they give us for a day, even when buying such exciting things as houmous and short bread cookies) and we are a block from a grocery store--so there is plenty of room for error. The greatest challenge has been navigating expiration dates, which none of us are used to worrying about. On top of that, there are way less preservatives in British food and we are each cooking and buying for one. We've been doing pretty well, but we still sometimes have meals like yesterday's dinner at which among the four of us we had two bags of carrots and some miscellaneous meat that was all within about a day of expiring.

Street Crossing
Almost as exciting as grocery shopping has been street crossing. We are used to our quiet little Minnesota college down where you can walk down the middle of the street during rush hour. As a result the drive-in-traffic-at-break-neck-speed-turn-signals-and-lanes-are-optional atmosphere of London traffic has been a bit of a shock. Add to this the black-taxis-of-doom, double decker buses, and the fact that the traffic drives on the other side of the road, and you can see that every day life stays pretty interesting. D and I made a sign commemorating days since last lost traffic standoff to track our progress. Here is a picture from Thursday at a record number of three days.
Unfortunately, we had to reset this morning when we nearly got run over by a bus while going grocery shopping.

Love,
The Mouse