It’s been a while since I last wrote, but it’s been a busy time—soon to be even busier. You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t write as often in the next few weeks. I’ll be writing lots and lots of essays! Okay, three essays. But they’re 5,000 words each, and that’s a lot!
Since there’s a great deal to catch up on and it’d take hours upon hours to write about it all, I’ll give you the news in blurbs. Again. Here’s what’s been going on over here since the end of February.
My Birthday: It was a very low-key day. I went to St. Paul’s in the afternoon because I wanted to splurge on doing something touristy I’d been putting off for the expense. It cost £8.50 for a student ticket, but I made sure I got my money’s worth by combing every inch of that cathedral! Magnificent is really the only word for it. And the views from the dome are fantastic. I couldn’t take any pictures inside, but here are a few I took outside and from the dome.
After St. Paul’s I decided to go somewhere relatively close by that I’d never been before. So I went to Marylebone. I walked up and down the high street and I found this amazing book shop.
They sell mostly travel books, but it’s not just guides. It’s books about and from various places. The Lonely Planet’s Africa guide was right alongside H.M. Stanley’s
How I Found Livingstone and Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart. It was heaven I tell you. And the atmosphere was wonderful.
When I returned to Dean House, I learned that one of our flatmates had gone to the hospital the day before without telling any of us—and was still there. She didn’t want to make a big deal of it, which I completely understand, but it still worried us. I won’t disclose the details for the whole world to read, but suffice it to say she’s all right and it was nothing life threatening. Our plans to get curry in Lewisham were put on hold, but some of us did go get Thai food at a place down the street. It was no “Snail” (Hyde Park is still #1 for restaurants in my book), but it was cheap and good. What more could I ask for?
Kacey’s Visit: And finally—the main event! Kacey came to visit! I only wish our halfway breaks could have coincided because she was here the week before my 15-minute film was due and I couldn’t devote as much time to gallivanting around London as I would have liked.
First, I should note that Kacey arrived with lovely Christmas and birthday gifts: Nelson Mandela’s
Favorite African Folktales (how perfect?!) and a really cool mud cloth elephant from Mali/the Smithsonian. Thank you, Kacey!
Throughout the week, I did have to devote a fair amount of time to editing my film, but we did a lot of fun things as well. Here are the highlights.
One of the first things we did was take a night “flight” on the London Eye. The views were absolutely amazing. I took way too many pictures, but I’ll post a few below. After that, we had a little photo op on Westminster Bridge with Big Ben in the background, and then headed through Whitehall toward Trafalgar Square where we stopped at the Silver Cross Pub for a later dinner. Fish and chips for Kacey, falafel burger for me.
We also went to Greenwich, a trip which quickly became miserable when the weather turned on us. As you can see from this photo, it had already begun to rain by the time we got to the observatory to stand on both sides of the Prime Meridian. Just minutes later, there was hail, wind, and thunder that caught us as we tried to outrun the storm and catch a bus on Blackheath. We were soaked and freezing, so we headed back to New Cross in order to dry off and warm up with a spot of tea!
Another day we went to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. We went primarily to see the main hall, the dinosaur exhibit, and the special wildlife photography exhibition. All three were as fabulous as we’d hoped. Here are a few pictures.
This was my
favorite photo from the exhibition. There were many, many wonderful photos, but this one really struck me for some reason.
Kacey and I also wandered around Central London a bit here and there. One day we were looking for some lunch in Soho, but found more sex shops than restaurants! Perhaps we were just on the wrong streets? Who knows. We eventually settled on this place, where we were served curry by Hare Krishnas with weird little ponytails.
The biggest excursion we made was to Cambridge. We took a late-morning train from Liverpool Street Station and arrived just before noon. We didn’t really do anything. But Cambridge is good for just wandering around. We stopped for lunch at an Indian place, where, when we asked for water with our meal, were served a £6 bottle of water that was opened before we could protest. Upon leaving, Kacey filled her water bottle with the amount remaining we didn’t drink (we were determined to drink every last drop of that expensive water!). The wait staff tried to joke with us about paying to take the water with us, but we didn’t find it very funny. Of course, it’s funny now, in hindsight. Though I still would rather not have paid £6 just to laugh about it later! We also made sure to stop and get our University of Cambridge souvenir t-shirts. Now we can at least pretend we’re prestigious Oxbridge scholars! Here are a few photos from our adventures in Cambridge.
My Film Assignment: After Kacey left I was basically living in the editing suite of the anthropology building. I arrived in the morning around 8:30, a half hour after it opens, and left at 8pm, when it closed. I took a short break for lunch, but I was basically in there working on my film the whole time. That schedule lasted Sunday-Tuesday.
On Wednesday, I was pretty much done, so I burned a copy, and watched it on the big screen to check the colors, brightness and contrast, and sound levels. I went back to Final Cut Pro, made a few changes, then burned the final version.
It was screened a week ago Thursday, and I’m happy to say it was well received. Following the advice of Anthony Q. Artis, whose book
The Shut Up and Shoot Documentary Guide, I’m currently reading, I aim to have all my films “suck less” than the last. I definitely think I achieved my goal on this one.
It’s not perfect, but I’m still quite proud of it. I think it’s a big improvement from my last one, and it gives me hope that maybe I can get the hang of this film thing. Maybe I’m not as terrible at it as I think I am. It’s very heartening.
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival: This week the HRW International Film Festival was running in London. This was very exciting for me because that’s really what I’d like to do with my training in visual anthropology—make documentary films with a focus on human rights issues. Of course, I have lots of ideas for films that have nothing to do with human rights, but I’d like that to be my driving purpose as a filmmaker.
I wanted to see pretty much all the films in the series, but I settled on two for reasons of money and time. On Sunday, I saw
My Neighbor, My Killer, a film about the community genocide tribunals (Gacaca [ga-CHA-cha]) in Rwanda. It was good, but I thought it could have been more powerful for the subject matter and style. Honestly, it literally put me to sleep about 2/3 of the way through. It was an informal piece that used a lot of observation and interviews, which gave it an intimacy that should have made it really affecting. But somehow it didn’t quite achieve that. I still enjoyed it, though.
Oh, and it was at a cinema in Brixton. I was excited to go both for the film’s sake and because I’d never been to Brixton. It has a bad reputation, but I think it must have improved quite a bit over the last 10 years. It’s actually
nicer (and A LOT less grimy) than New Cross!
On Tuesday night I went to the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the Mall (off Trafalgar Square, overlooking St. James’s Park) to see
The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court. It was great stuff—very suspenseful. I didn’t want it to end.
This film was about the work of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and especially its chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. It was a lot more slick and formal than the first film I saw, but the style worked for the film’s purpose (as a tool of education and advocacy). Personally, I prefer the observational style, but I really enjoyed this one and thought it was more successful than the first. Regardless, both films really affirmed my desire to use my knowledge of anthropology and film to further the cause of human rights.
Spring Has Sprung in London: Finally, just a quick observation to share with you all—especially those of you in colder climates where spring is still just a dream. Many of the trees here in London are already in bloom—some with small, pink flowers, and others with bright yellow ones. This photo is from another blog,
Fresh Eyes on London, but it’s what I see every day now, and what I hope you all will see very soon.
Enjoy! Happy Spring!
Flat 9A, September 2008.
Flat 9A, March 2009.
Mmm...learning.
Mmm...learning.
The view from my window, September 2008.
The view from my window, March 2009.
