Classwork...

This past week felt as if I had been here for a whole month. The days just went by so slowly.
My first official day of work was supposed to be last Tuesday. However, I have been getting emails from my site supervisor telling me not to come to work because she will not be there. She is apparently very sick. It is very unfortunate that she is sick because I was greatly looking forward to starting my internship. At the same time though, it has been nice to have a few days off where I can just focus on catching up with school work.

On Monday evening all of us Rice students met up to have a Skype meeting with some of our professors from Rice. It was really nice seeing Rice, our professors, and some of our classmates! Our meeting was to discuss the topics for the poster presentations that we will be completing for Istanbul. We will be in groups of 3 or 4 students. Each group has members who are here in London and members who are taking the Global Urban Lab class at Rice. Together, we will research different policy topics but we will be including information that is relevant to Houston, Istanbul, and London. In essence, the project is to comparative research on a policy topic across global cities. Topics range from immigration, to public health, to urban renewal. My group will be working on education. We have not narrowed down our research topic yet, so we will be having a Skype meeting sometime in the next couple of days. It is rather difficult to set up meetings because we not only have different schedules, but are in very different time zones.

After our meeting on Monday I felt that everyone was upset about our workload. Everyone started to complain about the 4 page paper we have due soon (for which we need to read 100+ pages of urban theory) and about our first blog post that is also due. The complaints were not so much about the work but about the lack of consideration we are getting from certain people at Rice. They don't realize that we have enough classwork, plus 20 hours of internship, plus extra education activities through CAPA, plus the global research project......plus long commutes on the underground daily. It takes us almost an hour just to get to CAPA. Some of my classmates have a daily commute of 2 hours each way to get to their internship sites. With all of this going on, it is difficult to find time to dedicate to our research. A second complaint was the fact that we are doing 20 hours of internship a week, plus a 3 hour "internship class" at CAPA, that also requires homework and assignments. Yet for all of that we only get 3 hours of academic credit. The problem is that we found out most of our CAPA classmates are getting 6 or more hours of credit for the same work. We want more credit too!
One of my colleagues decided to write a detailed email to explain the situation to Rice.

Today, just a few minutes ago, I received an email saying the 4 page paper and hundred pages of reading were optional! Though I was glad I was also a little annoyed because I of course am almost done with the paper. Yet I will still finish it and turn it in even though it is optional.
The email also said we don't have to take the internship class. Relief! Yet I will probably still attend as much as possible because some of the lecture topics were very interesting :)

So.....

Without internship for the past three days....I have been finishing those readings and working on my paper. I have also cooked some good meals, relaxed, and gone out for two dinners.

On Thursday I went out to dinner on a CAPA event. We went to a curry restaurant (called Sheraz Lounge) on Brick Lane. The area seems really interesting and I definitely want to go back. It is a neighborhood...or a few streets rather...were the majority of people are South Asian. It has become the center of curry and South Asian cuisine. The restaurant we went to was very nice and I really liked the food even though I don't completely love all South Asian food. But it was definitely an enjoyable outing.

Then tonight I went to SoHo with some of my friends. I had already had dinner but I decided to accompany them. We ended up at a very nice pizza place with delicious food. I only had a dessert though. I had a rich chocolate muffin (with a strawberry on top) and a delicious Bailey's latte. On Sunday we will be going back to SoHo and Trafalgar Square for the Chinese New Year celebration. I'm looking forward to it! The area was already very nicely decorated.

Well that is it for now. I hope my site supervisor feels better soon so I can finally start my internship next week. Meanwhile though, I'm considering going to see a play or exploring some more museums this weekend.