“So You’re Our American Import, Are You?” –Josh Buckingham

And we’re back! It’s like the second half to a really bad cliffhanger. I know you were just dying to know how the rest of my week went. But no fear! All your questions about what’s happened in the past four days are about to be answered!

I woke up Tuesday being able to breath and thanking the Chemists of Boots who make the miracle drug that’s ridiculously cheap! Seriously a box of 16 pills is less than £2! That would never happen in America, the capitalist scum. This health care is going to spoil me. But anyways, I woke up earlier than I really had to so that I could top off my phone before work, but ended up taking too long of a shower so I didn’t even have time to do that. When I got into work that day, my task was to come up with a list of five of my favorite movies made in the past three years and a list of movies that are coming out soon. As I’m sitting there imdbing, Josh, the guy in production who was running around on the phone and talking with Ben about some script on Monday, comes up to me and introduces himself:

JOSH: So you’re our American import, are you?

ME: Hahaha! Umm yeah, I guess I am, aren’t I?

BEN: Did he seriously not introduce himself to you yesterday? What a twat. I’m sorry Devon, he’s being sacked. That’s Josh, he was a part of our Production team.

JOSH: *snickers*

BEN: You think I’m joking? Go get your things mate.

Hahaha! Josh is hilarious. He was very interested to learn about Texas, wanting to know if we really do in fact have armadillos. When I said yes, but you usually only see dead ones, he wanted to know why we sought them out to be killed. I tried to explain, but I don’t think he truly gets the whole ‘road kill’ concept. Good thing I didn’t tell him about our deer issues. We spent an hour coming up with our ‘lists’ and then all met in the conference room to see if talking about these movies could spark an idea for a new TV show. It sounds a bit daft, but we actually came up with some pretty good ideas. We then had lunch, which is my favorite part of the day in the office. All these people come out of their little rooms and away from their desks and cram around in the tiny little kitchen to talk about anything and everything. Half the time I have no idea what they’re talking about but I love it.

I left at two again to come back to Marylebone for my internship toolkit class. This is the most BS class I’ve had to take in my college career. Seriously, this is even worse than Speech. In order for us to receive credit for our internship, we have a class where we do things like setting goals, giving presentations, reflective writing and working on our CV (résumé) skills. And to think I couldn’t take Contemporary British TV and Film because it was at the same time as this! Ugggh the nerve of the institution. The good news was that J, one of the guys from TCU and who I hadn’t seen in about a week, was in this class! Yay for having someone to sit next to. The lady who was giving the lecture was really big on the whole ‘I need to make eye contact with each and every one of you to show that I’m genuinely interested’ thing and it was really annoying. Especially since when I walked in, J was sitting in the front and she kept starring the two of us down the entire time. Lady lady lady, come on. My favorite was when we had to write down our expectations for this class and I wrote ‘none, this is pointless and a waste of my time’. I bet she won’t like that when she reads it, but oh well. It’s the TRUTH!

Jeni sent me a text in class but I couldn’t respond due to the fact that I still hadn’t topped off yet so first thing after class, I had to call the phone people to get my phone up and running again because I couldn’t remember where the actual phone place was and I didn’t really want to deal with the whole credit card issue again. The interesting and kind of annoying thing about London (and probably the majority of Europe) is that it’s a very cash driven place. America is a plastic society. Everyone has at least one credit card and I’d say at least half of sales (even if it’s like a $3 hamburger from McDonald’s) come from credit card purchases. Here if anyone even uses a credit card, they use a different kind of ‘chip’ system or something where they just stick their card into some machine and they don’t even have to sign for it! Needless to say, merchants really dislike it when a.) you hand them a credit card and b.) said card requires swiping. Some of the sales people don’t even know how to handle those transactions and they have to call their boss over and then everyone behind you in line hates you. It’s just awful. So after I got my phone working and called the Oyster people to get a new card sent to me, I call back Miss Bell who wants to go out for a ‘girls’ night. Yay, this pleases me. She said she knew of this place that had a cheap student’s night and I was all for that, specially since every time we’ve gone out before it’s always been with the boys.

I made dinner for the first time that night. Asparagus and rice and it was tasty. I wish I could have somehow grilled the asparagus though, because it’s just better when it’s got some carbon on it, you know? The weird thing about our kitchen is that Merrick and Adam, two of Nick’s Coloradian school mates, always seem to be there. I don’t know why they just can’t eat in their own kitchens, but I guess they need social interaction or something. So the three of us (four once Nick actually showed up) had our separate dinners together. I met up with Jeni and Laura for college night at this pub around Piccadilly. There was a football match on when we got there, so every single man in there was glued to the TV screen and it was nice to kinda have the place a bit to ourselves. I really wanted to go up to some one and ask what he thought about this ‘ludicrous display’ and say ‘the thing about Arsenal is, they’re always trying to walk it in’ but I restrained myself. I bet people here would actually understand that reference too! I shall try it out another time! Funny enough, the boys ended up calling us and coming over a few hours later. There goes girl’s night. By then, the place was hopping with college kids. This pub draws a lot of the American audience as well because it plays American football and ESPN and such. We ended up staying out past the tube closure so that meant it was time to figure out the bus system. No worries, we all got on the right buses and made it home safely with no problems.

Wednesday I didn’t have any classes so I was excited to finally spend a full day at work and not have to leave right after lunch. It was a very long day full of more research about the show they’re in the midst of developing. Not too exciting and I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing since I hadn’t read the script or anything. Two hours later, Ben ends up e-mailing me (by the way, I have a work e-mail, gahh!) the script and it helped a lot, but I found it funny how the other two interns, who had been doing this research much longer than I had, didn’t get sent the script. Haha, I love it! I’m not even Script Suping and I’m still the go-to script girl. I’ll take it! Around two or three, one of Eyework’s freelance production guys, who’s name is also Ben, show’s up and everyone starts gushing all over him. He immediately narrows in on me saying “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone from Texas before!” and has all these questions, including if everyone acts like they do in King of the Hill (shout out to Jess and Adri!). Umm no Ben, we don’t. It was then time for another meeting in the ‘Chips Room’ (I have no idea why they call it that, there are no chips of any sort in that place). For the most part it was rather uneventful, and then Boss Ben left the room. Freelance Ben started talking about how he didn’t want to go home for a wedding this weekend that was taking place in his ‘village’. I immediately got this huge goofy smile on my face, which Ben gave me a very quizzical look for:

ME: Did you just say your village? As in, you grew up in a village?

BEN: Yes. Everyone in England grows up in villages.

ME: Hahahahaha! What do you mean by ‘village’?

BEN: Well it’s just out of the city a bit. You have houses and a church and a store, just surrounded by a lot of land.

ME: Soo… it’s like a little town?

BEN: Well yeah. What do you call those? Farms?

ME: Noo… technically that’d be a very very small city. Or a town. But village? Hahaha, that’s so medieval sounding! Who uses the term ‘village’ anymore?

BEN: Well… we do!

That led into a whole other discussion about words/terms/pronunciation. Boss Ben came back and asked me what we called ‘cheese string’. “You mean string cheese?” He thought that was hilarious. I then got Freelance Ben to try and say the word y’all. Funniest thing in the world! It came out at like ‘yorn’. Hahahaha. But apparently he thought the way I said darling was 'quite cute'. We decided a tea brake was in order, and they thought it was crazy that I did not like milk in my tea, but preferred it ‘black’. I guess it’s like ordering black coffee, but no joke, all of them gave me this “are you mental?” look when I said ‘just sugar please’. The meeting continued onwards again, pausing only momentarily a few times when they said something I didn’t know. The word ‘status’ is pronounced so weirdly that it doesn’t even sound like status. Also, I had never ever heard the word ‘lorry’ to describe a truck. They thought I was bizarre when I asked what a lorry was and then had difficulty trying to describe it to me. And the letter ‘Z’ they do not say Z but ‘zed’. That’s how you say the letter z, zed! Freeland Ben also thought it was funny that my name is Devon. (Devon from Texas, is much funnier over here) I do love how everyone here knows how to pronounce my name! It’s so refreshing! But it’s also funny to me when their next question is “Your parents named you after the county then?” No you silly British people, they did not.

I then came home at six to make dinner (tomato, mushroom and pesto with pasta. Very a la café Martinez) and find Merrick and Adam hanging out in my kitchen again. Oh well, you just kind of accept it I guess. Anthony, the 45 year old man who’s name I previously thought was Richard, came in the kitchen and was trying to convince the boys to join this gym with him. The crazy middle-aged man refused to talk to me! He didn’t make eye-contact and only spoke to the boys, who don’t even live on our floor! It was ridiculous but whatever Anthony, I find you creepy anyways.

Thursday I woke up to SUN! The sun was out! It was like being in a completely different world! It had been rainy and cold and miserable outside for a week and then bam! Here comes the most perfect day! Fred, my basil plant, is dying due to lack of sun, and I can’t really do anything about that. I had two back to back classes that day both of which do absolutely nothing to my boost my credits back home but sounded like so much fun. Art and Society is my favorite class! We meet in a classroom for an hour discussion and then the second half of the class is a field trip! Do you know how wonderful it is to talk about a piece of art and then get on the tube and go look at that same piece of art? It’s crazy! On the way in the class, who did I find but Californian Chloe who I sat next to and tried to not cough all over during the lecture. We then got on the tube and met up again at the Tate. I love listening to people talk about pieces of art that I previously had no interest in or understood. I find art history fascinating, and our professor was wonderful. This, in combination with the sun, was really making it hard to hate Thursday. (For those of you who don’t know, Thursday’s are my least favorite day of the week. I hate them! They never ‘feel’ right. And I don’t really know how to describe it other than every day of the week has a different feeling and I’ve never liked the way Thursday’s feel.) Next week we’re going to visit St. Paul’s! This class is a little more expensive than your typical class due to the nature of the ‘field trips’ so there’s like a £30 charge per student.

Now in my other class that day, London Theatre & Performance, we all knew that there was around a £100 fee for the class. Hello, you’re going to see about 10 different plays. That’s not too bad if you think about it. But they did not handle this well at all. In the art class, they give you a form in which you give them your credit card (haha, yes!) info and all of the events have already been planned, set and paid for. You just have to show up. This is not the case with this Theatre class. Instead, they gave us a sheet full of a list of plays with dates that we need to see them by and it’s up to you to book. WHAT? I do not like this. I do not like this at all. How am I supposed to book 10 different plays at all these random places?! And there wasn’t even a musical on the list! I was hoping we’d get to see Wicked or something, but not even one?? This is a major bummer. The good thing about this class is that I know so many people in it. Jeni was there, along with Adam and Merrick again, and even Nicole, who’s from the same school as Nick, Adam and Merrick (University of Denver). So at least I know people to go see these shows with… if we can even get seats together!

Jeni wanted to go out again that night since no one really has class on Friday, so I convinced her to just come home with me. I’d cook dinner, she’d buy wine, and it’d be greatness. This turned into Devon cooking dinner for about seven people. We ended up all going to the grocery store (there’s one sooo much closer to me than I though, yay!) to buy ingredients for chicken parmesan. It was a good time with the rain outside and everyone inside huddled in the hot little kitchen on level 7. It was ridiculous. And it made me think of how much more amazing this would be if it was a Tex-mex dinner party. With rice and beans and enchiladas and tortillas and guacamole and SALSA. Mmmmm.

Today was rather uneventful and I kept thinking it was the weekend! Ben is going out of town for something or other, so I was told I didn’t need to come in to work and I still haven’t quite gotten over being sick! Boots meds do help, but I woke up this morning with my voice just sounding awful. I did manage to sound somewhat better and better as the day progressed though. I just hope this isn’t bronchitis, because I have been coughing a lot. I was supposed to go shopping with Nicole, but instead, I decided I wanted to do nothing more than lie around in bed all day and watch some American TV. So that’s exactly what I did! Jeni and I even tried to book a few shows for our theatre class proving to be a very stressful hour. I eventually had to go out to buy some more meds, stamps so I could finally mail these postcards, and a few other things, but that was like a 30 minute trip right around the corner. I have turned down every other invitation to leave the building! For those of you missing the picture part of the post, I decided to give you a little video. Cut to me, ranting about ridiculousness:

Tomorrow I’m going to the Globe to see Henry IV and I’m not really excited about it. I hope it doesn’t rain! It’s an outdoor theatre! Gahhhh the rainnnnn. I hate being sick in this weather. I think I’m sick because of this weather!

Love,

A-needs-to-invest-in-a-good-pair-of-rainboots-Devon