Well, I just spent seventy-four pounds on books. I ordered most of them online, but I made an effort to scour the second hand booksellers first. There’s a decent selection of second hand books that are sold under Waterloo Bridge, and I made several trips up and down Charring Cross Lane, which is apparently the book capital of London, but in the end I resorted to Amazon.com UK. I love shopping for books, so I can’t say I didn’t enjoy myself, but the books are really expensive here.  It makes me mad because I actually have quite a few of the books at home, and certain books like “Waiting For Godot” and various individual Shakespeare plays are surprisingly expensive here. In the bookstores on Charring Cross I couldn’t find a copy of “Waiting for Godot” for under ₤8.99, which is about 18 dollars (the exchange rate is murderous), and I swear I could find it used for a dollar in the states. Cruelly, the cost of shipping it from home would be just as bad as buying it new, so I bit the bullet and took out my credit card. Sigh.

Other than the expense of buying books, my first week of classes concluded without further incident. I made it to the rest of my classes on time, and was relieved to find that there were no further room switches. I am really excited by my courses, though the reality of coursework has begun to set in. In vain I watched my flatmates go out to bars and clubs this week, while I sat at home with Fanny Burney and Daniel Defoe. I was impressed that my flatmates could go out on school nights, but then I remembered that they are all first years, and I’m taking second and third year classes.

The one night I managed to get away from the books was Thursday. I don’t have any classes on Friday, so I determined to treat Thursday as a day of liberty. I called my friend Katie, an American studying here from Kenyon, and we went for a walk Thursday night. We decided to try and go see Brokeback Mountain, but rather than check out times and theaters we just walked over to Leicester Square to see if we could find a showing. Unfortunately, Leicester Square is like Times Square. It’s very touristy, and seeing a movie there is about nine pounds, and that’s the student price. Instead of paying the ruinous prices, we decided to walk a little further to Piccadilly Circus where we had seen Match Point last week for a more reasonable price. We spent a lot of time wandering about, and by the time we found the movie theater the last showing of Brokeback Mountain had already begun.

Not to be discouraged we decided to go back to our dorm and watch the copy of Angels in America that I had brought with me from home. It was cheaper than Brokeback, but just as enjoyable. It’s a six part mini series and we had watched the first three hours earlier and decided that we would finish it that night.
It was unexpected, but I got my first bout of real homesickness when I was watching Angels. The movie takes place in New York City, and I recognized all of the locations and it got me thinking about how much I missed my school and all of my friends there. Oddly, what really caused the homesickness were the scenes of New York in the rain. New York rain has a very particular smell, and I realized that although I had been drenched six days out OF seven with London rain it just wasn’t the same. Watching Ben Shenkman and Jeffery Wright stand in Central Park in the pouring rain I could smell the City, and I missed it terribly.

The next morning I felt much better, however, and I’ve spent a very productive, but I’m afraid very prosaic weekend mailing letters, going to the gym and trying to get my reading done. On the one hand I feel badly, because I could just as easily have stayed home to do these things, but after last night the normalcy gave me a feeling of comfort. If I was at school in New York I would probably have spent Saturday at home trying to finish my reading too, but here I could read in a Library that had once housed the Doomsday Book, and sported the only two Zinc ceilings the Victorian period had to offer. The first time I watched Saturday Night Live in New York City I felt a tingle knowing that the show I was watching was occurring as I was watching it right down the street from me. Reading Evelina and Moll Flanders in London was a similar sensation. I was in the city that these authors described. If I wanted I could visit the same locations that these two, very different, heroines frequented. For this, I was willing to relinquish the smell of New York in the rain, if only for a semester.