8 days and counting

Most of you have probably heard by now that I aquired Swine Flu this past week. It's super funny if you think about: what are the odds of a person coming to study in London for 6 weeks actually getting to partake of a pandemic. I am living history, ladies and gents.

The weekend was absolutely lovely in London. No rain. Warm. Sunny. So today I reached into the depth of my being and mustered up energy to go outside on a walk. I ended up finding a new park with pretty flowers and a quaint Catholic church. Quaint, but still painted fire-engine red. I don't really understand it all.

I'm planning on using my last 8 days to a) catch up on the tons of studying I need to do.
b) visit everything I either haven't or wanted to again
and
c) enjoy every moment.

What have I learned? What have I discovered? Well I figured out that I really can only write in unlined, leather journals. Snobbish? perhaps, but I bought a travel journal for this trip and I sit down to write and there is nothing. There are probably 12 or 13 journals sitting around my room, stuffed in boxes under the bed, hidden on the bookshelf, that I have only partly filled. The only two complete journals are leather bound, simple, and have no lines. So I've discovered that I can really only write my thoughts on one medium.

London has the coolest trees. Big trees. Trees with large tumors. Trees with high branches and trees that have leaves proportioned in such a way that they appear to be weeping.

I don't really plan on having a wedding. I never really pictured myself living past the age of 18, and now that I'm here I'm sort of lost. It's like that with weddings. I never really pictured myself as the married sort of girl. But if I were to have a London wedding, I have discovered that I have the whole thing planned out. Place: Wilmington Garden Dress: Jacqueline Byrne Flowers: Nic's Flowers near Angel. Cake from the cake shop on Theobalds Road.
See, London Wedding. The end.

I've also learned a lot about money. Economists who make jokes about sex are probably more popular than you'd think. When you have the ability to plot how much money someone else has on a little graph, it makes you more money (or less money if you are really bad at it). But if you can both plot how much money people have on a graph, have a sense of humor, and have compassion: then you might just be able to change the world.

I've also learned that I think becoming the senior editor for the Economist would be way cooler than working for the UN.

Moreover, the city is not for me. I need woods and lakes and fields. I need to climb cliffs and jump off of them into waterfalls and kayak down rivers (even if they are yellow) and sleep in hammocks. I love the smell of horse and farm. I am a 3rd world sort of girl. I believe my next adventure will take me there.

That is the randomness of the moment.
Signing off,
Lizziey Brown

Mornings

I may like to sleep but there is something about mornings, especially in foreign nation, which draw me in. London is sunnier in the mornings. If the sun isn’t greeting you by 7 am, I’ve discovered, then the day is probably going to be pretty blah. I stare out my window and a jet makes a rapid line in the direction of Ireland. His jet stream is beautiful against the spring blue sky, a sort of blue that I’d expect to see on a “calming” tea package. This dorm is a square of brick of different layers of brick. As I breathe in deeply, I expect to smell the exquisite scent of Mexico or the salty aroma of the Costa Rican sea side. London’s aroma is one of mist; the absence of this smell leaves me completely disoriented. Mornings are empowering. Today it is cold. Cold is a temperature that is pretty normal to my mother and the rest of the world. Those outside walk around in shorts and t-shirts; I sit here with my window wide open in a sweatshirt and jeans. A green tree peaks its unpruned head over the corner of the lowest point of my dormitory. The brown of the building with the blue of the sky and the little blotch of green, give me an outdoorsy feelings. Mornings give me the momentum to believe that I am capable of anything. Today I want to jump out of an airplane. I’d love to raft down a river with the water splashing against my skin, or climb a tree in a dress and hang out of it like a monkey. But alas, I shut my window. My morning dreams cease to my morning reality. I open a book about the Solow Model and Neoclassical methods of European Integration. My mind must focus, but my heart desperately wants to meet, to know rather, the souls impacted by the graphs that will direct, and have been captaining for decades, their very lives.