Ice Hockey!

On Saturday I went to my first ever ice hockey match. I went with - who else? - a couple of Canadians, my friend Jenny and her boyfriend Jackson. While I knew Oxford had an ice-skating rink, I didn't know ice hockey matches took place there. We were lucky this time, because it was the last (I think) match of the university ice hockey season, between the two best teams in the league: Oxford and London. Obviously I cheered for Oxford. ;)

And this match was, somewhat dramatically, advertised as the Battle of the Burghs.

Wait, that needs to be bigger.

The Battle of the Burghs!!!

That's better. 

Of course, I took photos, though they weren't great since the netting got in the way and my camera kept focusing on the netting rather than the hockey players! I got a few nice shots, however.

And a couple of us at the match.

Ugh, phone quality.

So I ended up enjoying it a lot! I'm not a sports fan and I don't go to matches, but this was really fun.

Oxford Christmas Lights Festival

...happened this weekend! Unfortunately I wasn't able to see a lot of it, because I went to London at midday Saturday, didn't get back until the wee hours, and today I was stuck inside writing an essay. However, Friday night I went out with my friend June and got to see the lights and such.

The light-up toys that are inevitably on sale at these things. I used to live in Canterbury which had a lot of these events and I loved these things!

The moon behind the Sheldonian. :)

A view up Broad Street.

Outside the Oxford Museum of Science.

The Cornmarket - now the Christmas lights have gone up!

The lantern and the moon. I tried so many times to take this photo!

In the Weston Library an "Impromptu Orchestra", which to my understanding means people turn up with their instruments and play, was performing Handel's Messiah.

Unfortunately it was a slightly avant-garde performance and an incredibly annoying woman made an old vinyl recording of the piece cut in and out of the actual music (it wasn't even in time! It was the kind of thing you do when you're a child and making music cut out was really clever) so in the end we left. We went to the Castle Quarter where there was supposed to be a performance involving light-up umbrellas, but we missed it. :(

Got a couple of photos with the lights, though.

June.

And me!

Oxford gets into the Christmas mood early because we have "Oxmas" on the 25th of November, which is the only reason I don't mind Christmas stuff happening before December. It's slightly ridiculous, but it gets me in the mood for Christmas so when I go home I'm really enthusiastic and all my family and friends are still in the "ugh, Christmas comes too early" stage.

Being a Tourist in My Own City

I turned 21 yesterday. As the cliché goes, I don't actually feel any different, but one thing that did happen is that my friend Elise, whom I've known since we were at sixth-form together, came to visit me! She wasn't here very long, but I took the opportunity to show her around Oxford and be a bit of a tourist myself.

Elise outside the Radcliffe Camera, the very distinctive library that mostly houses history and English books.

In Brasenose, which is not my college, but I took her to the nicest-looking ones.

Lovely view of the roof of the RadCam from Brasenose.

In Corpus Christi, that pint-sized college!

The dining hall at Christ Church. And yes, that is the Hogwarts dining hall!

Also in Christ Church: the Harry Potter stairs!

The last few days have been appalling weather in Oxford, with torrential rain, but the last couple of days have been even worse and added gale-force winds to the mix. On certain streets it was almost impossible to walk into the wind. These are the kind of days when you wonder what the point was in styling your hair...

Update

Good Lord, it's been a while. I blame univeristy. Meanwhile, here's a selection of what I've been up to:

• Saw a rowboat burned because my college did well in the boat race. There was white wine and a lot of smoke. 
• Messed around in Christ Church and took goofy photos with my friends. Christ Church is definitely the grandest Oxford college and is known colloquially as "the Harry Potter college", since a lot of HP scenes were filmed there for the series.
• Went to a 90's themed party. Since I am terrible at costumes and only had half an hour to make mine, I went as the dissolution of the USSR. I did this by making a sign that I stuck to my front with the hammer and sickle drawn on it, and "USSR" in big letter with a crossing-out. I also stuck red stars to my shoulders. Funnily enough (or maybe not so funnily, my college leans heavily left-wing) people loved my minimal-effort costume. After that I went clubbing (fun!) and after leaving at 4 a.m. we got burgers from a kebab van where the owner asked me if I was Pakistani... ???? (I mean, my grandfather is from Peshawar and that side of the family is Anglo-Indian so it's not a totally unfounded assumption, but I didn't think it really showed, at all.)
• Saw a friend who came back to Oxford for her graduation ceremony and ate delicious Lebanese food at Elham's Lebanese Deli, which I recommend for anyone ever visiting Oxford. Yummy, nice place, and you get a DIY plate for £5. 
• Watched the production of Pentecost that was running at the Oxford Playhouse. I really liked it - the cast was good and the set was fantastic - although I got severe genre whiplash when it changed from a discussion about the nature of art and history in society in the first half, to a hostage drama in the second half. Still a very enjoyable play, and OH MY GOD THE CLIMAX WHAT WHAT.
• Fallen in love with Oxford's second-hand bookshops. You can often tell what bookshops former students offload their old books to - at the Oxfam Bookshop on St Giles I found a Syriac primer in the Foreign Languages section which can only have come from a Byzantinist - but I love them so much. There's so much variety! From Oxford second-hand bookshops I have so far this term acquired: Persepolis, The Dumas Club, Mr Fox, An Instance of the Fingerpost, Select Letters of Cicero (for my course, not my own pleasure...), The Seville Communion, Penguin Lost, Turkish Gambit, Seeking Whom He May Devour. Also Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook and Virginia Woolf's Orlando from the discount store.
• Read so many books about Alexander the Great and his Successors and decided to root for Seleucus. I'm not sure why.

I would say I'll be back with regularity, but Oxford is nuts and I never have any time - and it's finals this year, which makes everything a million times worse. I do like Oxford and I'm glad I study here, but in a lot of ways I'll be glad when it is over. If nothing else, working my first 9 to 5 will be a piece of cake after this.

When Book-Hoarding Gets Out of Control

Today I packed most of the stuff I have to take to university with me. I also cleared out some of my bookshelves to make room for the books that I've bought and have been stacked on my desk for ages because there's nowhere to put them.

I have a fairly well-established arrangement for my bookshelves. They're arranged vaguely by genre, although a lot of disparate books end up next to each other because I put them there years ago and never got round to rearranging them. So I have a shelf of historical fiction... apart from The Black Magician trilogy, which is a high-fantasy series. I have a shelf of mostly urban fantasy, with some Latin-language books, Gabriel García Márquez, and a bunch of Balkan writers among them. And I have the shelf which until now was entirely filled with the contemporary YA I read in my YAhood, and is now a mix of my Scarlett Thomas collection, my few remaining YA light reads, and a bunch of disparate stuff that's been waiting for a new home (includes: Umberto Eco, the steampunk Burton & Swinburne series, José Saramago, and an Inspector Renko book). I have so many books in a stack on my floor, that's ready to be moved elsewhere: Skullduggery Pleasant, my Sarah Dessen books, the Truth Dare Kiss Promise series, Heist Society, books I got in proof copy from relatives who work in bookshops...

Most of it I haven't read in years. They're not great literature, and I probably won't miss them when they're gone. I needed more space on my bookshelves, and I needed to clear them out anyway. But there were a lot of books which even though I could probably have cleared them out - my Georgia Nicholson collection, Sara Manning's books, the children's historical fiction I devoured a decade ago - I can't bear to remove. I've already moved all my Diana Wynne Jones, the Abhorsen series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the Roman Mysteries to my sister's room (where she doesn't read them, because she's not really a reader). It's sad to search my bookshelves for them and remember that they aren't here. And in a little over a year I'll have graduated uni and be living somewhere that isn't my parents' house (nothing to do with not wanting to live with my family - there's just no jobs where I live) and there's no way I'll be able to take all these with me, and I'll probably have to do another culling.

Then there's all the books I've bought for my uni courses. A lot of them are big, and take up a lot of space, and are very specialised, and I could resell them for a decent amount of money. I probably will, bar a few books that are more readable and not specialised academic stuff (since I do have a sizeable number of nonfiction books). But as it is I can flick through them and see the progression of what I've been studying for the last four years, and I do feel strangely attached to them even though I probably will have to sell them on after I graduate.

This isn't a post with much of a point, other than that it's sad to have to get rid of the books you've owned for years but are no longer read and need to make way for new ones. I can absolutely understand why I'm doing it, but I wish I just had magically expanding bookshelves....

I've Been to London to Visit the Queen!

Well, actually I went to visit my friend. Lloyd and I have been friends since we met at sixth-form college in Exeter, but he's at UCL studying medicine and I'm at Oxford studying history so we don't see each other as often as we used to. This summer especially, since I was overseas for a lot of it, I only saw him once before I went down to visit him in London. I caught a fairly early train on the Friday and he wasn't actually in London at the time, so I went to the British Museum, because it's great and a nice way to spend an afternoon.

I saw the Assyrian palace statues, the Roman mosaics, and took photos of the building outside the museum. I also saw the Japan collection, which was fascinating - it was laid out in such a way that you got taken on a sweeping tour of Japanese history, interspersed with art and ceramics from contemporary Japanese artisans who promote traditional styles and techniques in Japan. I really loved it!

Then it was off to Lloyd's place - he lives in Camden - and after an enormous falafel wrap for dinner, it was time for the party he was hosting to mark the beginning of the year. Most people there were UCL medics whom I didn't know, but it was a fun night regardless, and we went out clubbing which was a good night.

The next day, Lloyd took me to the Natural History Museum, which was, since it was the weekend, horribly crowded and not much fun, but we walked there and it was a really nice walk through Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea via Hyde Park.

Unfortunately (or maybe not!), once Lloyd realised how flattering my camera was, we got caught up in a huge posing session throughout Hyde Park.

Lloyd!

His direction for this was, "Act like Queen Victoria!"

On our way back, we saw a strange structure near the Serpentine, and went over to investigate. It turned out to be some Fortnum & Mason promotion thing - you could take tea inside it - although originally I thought it was some sort of interactive art instalation.

It of course was a great opportunity for more photos.

I also drank tea and took photos of sunsets:

In the evening we went to another party, which I didn't enjoy so much because it was a stand-around-and-chat sort of party and I knew very few people there. But it was still an enjoyable experience. I have to say, though, the highlight of my visit was going to the Globe! I've never been, but Sunday evening we got £5 standing tickets for Richard II, which is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays!

Lloyd with Nicole, his uni friend who also came to see the play.

I look far less excited than I actually was here!

This post is ridiculously long so I won't go into too much detail about the play, but it was a good production and very enjoyable. I worried about my capacity for standing for nearly 3 hours straight, but in the end it wasn't bad at all! As I got more swept into the play I didn't notice so much how aching my feet were, and being so close to the stage made for a more immediate, almost interactive experience.

Then, on the last morning, before I caught my train home, we went to Camden Market.

We tried on hipster sunglasses, heh heh. And we also found a shop chock-full of Turkish lanterns, which are beautiful and if I had the money I would buy tons.

 So beautiful, so unobtainable...

And then it was time for me to catch the 2 o'clock train home. But this weekend away made me realise that I should really go to London more often. I have friends there, there's tons going on, and it's only a 90-minute coach ride from Oxford for a £15 period return. I'll try to do that more this year, despite it being my final year (argh!!!!).

Review | What We Do in the Shadows

It's always a risk watching a comedy film based on the trailer. However much you might laugh at the trailer, it's very possible that those clips were the only good parts of the film and the rest of it is an unfunny slog. So even though I was able to buy the DVD of this film for £4, which isn't much lost if it turned out to suck, I still had a feeling of trepidation when I sat down to watch it yesterday. What if it just wasn't that funny?

Fortunately, that wasn't the case. What We Do in the Shadows is hilarious. It's from the creators behind Flight of the Concords, and is a mockumentary detailing the daily lives of four vampires who share a house in Wellington, New Zealand. There's the 800+-year-old Vladislav, who looks disturbingly similar to Gary Oldman's Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola's film and possesses a truly medieval torture chamber and attitude; the Romantic-with-a-capital-R Viago, who has beautiful sideburns and very tight trousers; the "bad boy" of the group, Deacon, who looks more like a rock star than any of the others and fled to New Zealand because post-WWII it was bad news if you were a Nazi vampire; and Petyr, who is 8000 years old and practically mummified.

Let me introduce you to my crew.

Oh wait, I forgot one - Nick. If that doesn't sound much like a vampire name, it's because rather than being a pre-20th Century European bloodsucker, he's an ordinary twentysomething Kiwi bloke who's accidentally turned into a vampire by an encounter with Petyr. He takes it upon himself to introduce his new vampire friends to the wonders of modern life - including eBay, Skype, and karate. They take to them enthusiastically, on the whole, even though Deacon becomes jealous of Nick because he's stealing his spotlight and his fashion sense.

These vampires walk the line between old-fashioned blood-drinking creatures of the night and more modern, deconstructed portrayals. There's been some interesting, creative portrayals of vampires in TV and film over the last few years - Being Human, Let the Right One In, Only Lovers Left Alive, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Byzantium - and while the vampires of What We Do in the Shadows don't bring anything particularly new to the table, they're also tons of fun. A lot of the scenes in the trailer become even funnier in context, and there are plenty of side-splitting moments that didn't make it into the trailer. There is, I think, a time and a place for serious meditations on vampires as a symbol of death and immortality; sometimes you just want a fun fantasy about melodramatic immortal creatures who worry about what to wear to the Unholy Masquerade, and bemoan the fact that they can't eat fish and chips without spewing blood.

While vampires are the focus of the film, there's also a local werewolf gang which plays a small but substantial role in the plot. Mostly they're your typical werewolves, although their leader has some puritanical opinions regarding swearing which he imposes on the rest of the group - they have to be reminded a few times that they're "werewolves, not swearwolves".

The trailer is fairly accurate with regards to the tone and feel of the film, so I recommend you watch it:

If it seems to your taste, I promise the actual film is even better!

The Blessed Days of America

This summer I spent six weeks in America, which was both everything and nothing like I expected.

Like all the other foreigners I knew in DC, the city I spent five weeks in trying to live, work, and not sink into the swamp it's built on, I was enormously starstruck by being able to experience all the American brands I heard about in the flesh. Walmart, Taco Bell, Dunkin Donuts, Target, Twinkies, Barnes & Noble, all the rest I can't remember. I didn't really understand the full power of Walmart until I was standing in the one store in the whole of DC (Walmart is, as I understand it, more of a suburban thing) slack-jawed and wide-eyed because of the sheer volume and diversity of products. At the same store you can buy a bicycle, the week's groceries, a phone, cleaning supplies, a DSLR camera... Americans like to merge several speciality stores into one, because they believe in minimising the amount of places you have to go for everything. I wonder how long it will be before one store contains everything available in the country.

"The food is so good in America!" Lies, lies, lies. I had only two meals there that I will remember and cherish as very nice food - one was Ethiopian food at a restaurant four blocks from my house, and one was Mexican food in Columbia Heights. I don't think Americans ever learnt the art of portion control, because one day me and a friend went to a Thai restaurant for lunch and having ordered fried rice I received a mountainous pile of rice over which I could barely see my friend. When I think of all the food I ordered and wasn't able to finish, there's a lot of it. I don't know where it all goes. I hope they don't waste it but I suspect they do.

Americans are open and friendly in a superficial sort of way, and they really love telling you their life story. I once spent a mildly terrifying five minutes in the toilets of a Carrefour on the outskirts of Paris where people had written their life stories on the walls, but in America people aren't so anonymous or shy. They'll strike up a conversation with you anywhere. Shop assistants ask you how you're doing and I never worked out if they wanted an answer. I find a lot of my fellow Brits too repressed but I never quite stopped being a little freaked out by how Americans pounce on you. One woman told me to have a blessed day and I don't even think she was joking.

In DC, I noticed a lot of people reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is nowhere near as popular here, and I think that's probably because it's about America. One of the British people I was working with was reading it, and said the parts about being a foreigner in America are totally accurate. I also read a book about a Soviet-era detective who ends up in New York in a convoluted plot, and I definitely wasn't a stranger to the terror and awe he felt landing in America, the glorious home of rampant capitalism (the epitome of which, by the way, is Times Square. Wow).

America is way too big. It took us five hours by bus to get from DC to New York City and another five hours to get from NYC to Boston. My little island country began to feel smaller and smaller, and when I looked at a map to plot out our epic journey from the District of Columbia to Massachussetts it was only a tiny part of the East Coast. There is so much more out there.

Mini Book Reviews

I read a load of books while I was in the US! I was doing an internship for most of the time, so I couldn't read 24/7, but not having a smartphone with me (it wasn't unlocked; I had to take an old, non-internet-enabled phone) helped immensely with reading a lot. Rather than checking my email and Facebook on my bus ride to work, I read on my Kindle instead - and I got through a fair amount of books! I was there for nearly six weeks, and I wanted to do some book reviews but I thought since I read quite a few in a short space of time I'd just bundle them all together and do little reviews for each one.

A Madness of Angels, Kate Griffin

The first book in the Matthew Swift series, an urban fantasy series set in London. It takes a while to understand what's going on - the opening is very much in media res and you get very little explanation; you have to figure out what's going on as you read. Still, once the initial confusion wears off, it's a great book. Written in a very breathless, slightly overwhelming style that absolutely fits the feeling of London. I also appreciate that, unlike a lot of urban fantasy, this magic is really connected to the city and the urban experience - magic users get their power from things like Oyster cards and graffiti, the last train on the Underground on the Circle Line will take you to places you can't otherwise go...

The Midnight Mayor, Kate Griffin

So I liked the series so much I read the second one! This one features the truly chilling appearance of the "death of cities", whose role should be fairly obvious, and it much more of a mystery - why have the Ravens left the Tower of London? Why is "GIVE ME BACK MY HAT" seen in graffiti all over the city in different languages? Who or what summoned the death of cities? What I like is that in the climax, when they find out who's responsible for summoning the death of cities, it's solved not with fights as in the last book, but with understanding and human kindness, and it still manages to make sense and be a satisfying ending.


A Free Man of Color, Barbara Hambly

After a while of hearing good things about the Benjamin January series, I decided to pick up the first one. It's a mystery series set in 1830s New Orleans, and the titular character is a free black man who plays the piano, trained as a surgeon, and solves murders. Hambly clearly put a hell of a lot of research into these, because New Orleans at all levels of society - French Creoles, American incomers, the free colored community, and the black population both slaves and free - is vividly laid out. There's a very strong sense of place and time here. The book does go into serious issues like racism, sexism, etc. but it's also a lot of fun and very readable. I will definitely be picking up the next one.


Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith

My mum and granddad both love the Inspector Renko series, so I got the first one (as you can see, reading the first book of a series is a theme here!). Being hugely ignorant on Soviet Russia (it's set during the 1980s) I have no idea how accurate this is, but it's an enjoyable read. The narrative voice is fun and distinctive - the descriptions of the people Renko meets are always telling! - and for someone who has the typical detective novel clichés of a failing marriage and unsympathetic bosses, I found Renko himself a very interesting character. The central mystery is actually solved about two-thirds of the way through; what was, for me, the most interesting part of the book was the last quarter, which takes places in the USA. Renko and his friend/lover/case suspect Irina end up "guests" of the FBI in NYC for reasons, and it's really interesting to see the ways they adapt - or don't - to being in America. Irina is, and has been for a while as demonstrated throughout the book, strongly anti-Soviet and sees America as the promised land. Renko isn't the USSR's biggest fan but he doesn't like America much and would prefer to go home. There's some good stuff to ponder in that section about becoming American, and how it's done.

Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano

OK, this was probably my favourite book I read on this trip. It's a nonfiction account of "the pillage of a continent", as the subtitle says, taking us from the first conquistadors landing in the Caribbean to the neocolonialism and exploitation of Latin American countries in the early 1970s (when Galeano wrote this book). What this absolutely isn't is a dispassionate account - it's partisan and makes no shame of it, and Galeano passionately argues in favour of things like nationalised industry and protectionism, and against the neoliberal free market. I agree with Galeano most of the time, so I don't really mind! It's certainly a hell of a read. Bittersweet, certainly, considering it was published just before the assassination of Salvador Allende and the subsequent string of right-wing dictatorships across the continent. But it's an interesting read today considering the current trend of left-wing governments in Latin America, described by some as a "Pink Wave".

Typhoon, Joseph Conrad

This is a fairly short Conrad story, and I don't have much to say about it. It's well-written, like most Conrad I've read, it's full of boats... The descriptions of the typhoon are a lot of fun! My copy came with a preface in which Conrad complained about the literary critics that tried to find deep meaning and analysis in his character of Captain MacWhirr, and how he didn't intend him to be symbolic of anything much. This certainly made me feel more justified in finishing it and thinking, well, I'm not sure what the point of that was.


Persuasion, Jane Austen

I'm an Austen fan, but until now I hadn't read Persuasion. A lot of Austen fans I know absolutely love it, and now I can say I definitely agree with them! The incredibly vain Sir Walter Eliot and his daughter Elizabeth, intensely focused on social standing and external beauty, are hilarious, the whole cast of characters feels very developed and real, and I adore Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth. Anne's sense that despite being twenty-nine and plain she is still worth something, the long slow realisation by both parties that they can be together... It's one of the most satisfying romances in an Austen novel, in my opinion.


Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano

Well, there goes the last of my belief that manufacturing industries in Europe tend to be more humane and with fewer human rights violations. Ayup. Gomorrah takes you through the workings of the organised crime of Naples (and the surrounding suburbs and countryside), who are called the Camorra by antimafia activists in Italy but don't call themselves that. Parts of it are almost novelistic, especially when it comes to focus on the drama of individuals and clans, but this is most certainly nonfiction - to the point that Saviano has had several threats to his life by Camorristi. In general it's more dispassionate than Open Veins of Latin America, but later in the book Saviano goes on to talk about the ramifications for ordinary Neapolitan people, and people in southern Italy in general, and the injustice that continues to be perpetuated, and the enormous degree to which institutions in southern Italy are infected by criminal groups... He himself is from Casal di Principe, a commune infamous for being the birth of the Casalesi clan, which features prominantly in the book. It ends with a furious invective to do something about the state of affairs in Naples and in Calabria, and the powerlessness he feels - as do most antimafia organisations, because it's like fighting the hydra.


Royal Wedding, Meg Cabot

...Okay, massive genre whiplash! The Princess Diaries was one of my guilty pleasures as a young teen, and when I was in Barnes & Noble in DC and saw there was a book in the series I hadn't read, I sat down and read it right there in the store. Fun in a fluffy sort of way, fairly predictable, but I never read The Princess Diaries looking for great literature or unexpected plot twists, you know? The pop culture references - BuzzFeed, Snapchat, etc - felt like they'd date the book rather quickly, and I'm trying to remember the degree to which the earlier books did that. I'm not sure they did; the characters used IM, email, commented on popular movies, and so on, but I don't remember specific websites and brands and apps being mentioned quite so much. Overall, though, still a fun little read and made me think to dig up the series and have a reread, because I really did used to enjoy them a lot.


The Prisoner of Zenda, Anthony Hope

This book was the first in the genre of Ruritanian romance, which I haven't read much of, but I love fictional countries (the Syldavia albums always ranked high in my list of favourite Tintin comics) and nineteenth-century adventures, and it was free on Project Gutenberg, so I picked it up. What I liked most about this was that it's essentially about someone whom everyone thought was incompetent having to take on a huge amount of responsibility (impersonating the King of Ruritania...!) and turning out to actually be very competent! That character, who is the narrator, is fairy likeable in a dashing rogue sort of way, whacky hijinks take place, and it's overall a fun read. I've been recommended the Graustark novels for more Ruritanian romance, which are also available on PG, so we'll see where that takes me...


The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman

Not impressed with this one, to be honest. I generally like Neil Gaiman but this fell flat. The plot was stretched out and I absolutely wasn't surprised to find out it had started life as a novella, because it really didn't have enough substance for a novel. The main character was irritating, which can be a problem with a lot of Gaiman's books as he likes to write himself into them, but the main character of Ocean was infuriatingly drippy, and his friend Lettie was far more interesting. In general, I think this suffered from the problem that it had some very interesting ideas and intriguing mythology, but we saw very little of them. They were tantalisingly out of reach throughout the novel, and as it is I wish Gaiman had written a different book to the one he did.

The Tigers of Mompracem, Emilio Salgari

Okay, now this was tons of fun. Typical nineteenth century swashbuckling adventure, except it stars an exiled Malaysian prince who has sworn revenge on the European colonisers who destroyed his home, and his Portuguese sidekick who's devoted to him (I'm pretty sure they're in love, and Marianna the love interest is just a decoy). I started reading this on the day I flew back home, and I tore through it during my time in the airport and on the plane. It definitely encourages devouring all at once!

Well, there you go. Phew. I love getting back into serious reading habits!

We're All Living in Amerika

Haha oh god, right after I promised to be less slow next time I go for nearly a month without posting... In my defence, I came to the US (to be precise, Washington DC) a few days after that for an internship, and since then it's been incredibly hectic and I haven't had the time to post. To post a full recap of what I've been up to would be crazy, and I'm thinking of making a post after I get back to the UK about my experiences in this country, so for now, I'll just post a few photos I've taken that I like.

 I like the colours in this photo, the starkness of the flags against the sky, and just the fact that there are three American flags in a row! I took this one evening outside Union Station.

This is the US Navy Memorial. I often find that with things like these it's hard to fit everything you want into one photo, but I like this one.


My street in DC. I massively lucked out on my house, it's lovely. (And not in this photo!!)

 My friend Margherita and her enormous torta! We went out for Mexican food and after a little confusion at the fact that there was a "torta de jamón" on the menu (because I knew torta as meaning cake in Spnaish...) we ordered and hers came with... that. It was magnificent! Also a nice antidote to all the depressing, unimaginative sandwiches we've seen in our time here. Americans don't seem to do proper sandwiches, unless they're Mexican.

 I went bowling with some friends! Here you see Rory in a blur of activity. I'm usually crap at action shots so I liked that, although it was a blur, it looks like an intentional one rather than just me being incompetent.

A fountain by the waterfront in Georgetown. The lights actually kept changing from red to white to blue... very patriotic.

I have a friend arriving from the UK later today, and from then on I'll be even busier than usual, so this is probably my only post in America; I probably won't have the time until I get back to the UK.