Wednesday (March 23)

Today we went to the Globe Theatre instead of class. We took a quick tour, I got to touch the stage and get a few pictures, before we went downstairs and got a bit of a lecture from an actor about the history of the place. 

During the lecture the actor asked us to volunteer the person that was most cynical to listen to him tell the history of the theatre and call him out on any bullshit he might say (his words, not mine). Of course, I was volunteered. I also successfully caught him in every lie he told. It's good to know people agree that i'm cynical isn't it?

Thursday (March 24)

I had my internship and we were filming at the Barbican again. Quite a mess of a day. I slept through my alarm, showed up just barely on time. Liam forgot the tripods, just barely made it back before we needed to start filming. Speakers didn't show up, delegates left because they were bored, and all around it was a very boring, slightly stressful day. (That being said, I would never give this internship up for anything else, I love it so much)

Friday (March 25)

Internship again, today at Earls Court 2. We spent the day at this health and nutrition trade show. There was a lot of filming various workouts and talks about what vitamins you need to take/what ones are just people trying to rip you off. There were a few good talks and I did actually take some stuff away from being there, but it was yet again a mess. Thankfully it was the end of my week and the next day I was going to do some fun things. 

Saturday (March 26)

When we woke up today the plan was to start out at Portobello Market. I frankly don't have the patience to shop with these girls anymore (<3 you all), so I ended up bailing at that part and cleaning my room like a madman. All of my laundry is done, I vacuumed under my bed, on my bed, my floor and my closet, and almost organised all of my homework. Around 5 me and Sasha headed out the door to go to the Sherlock Holmes Museum, which I'll post pictures from sometime later. There's a link to their website here (or, there will be soon) if you want to check out. After that we went to the Sherlock Holmes Resturaunt and Public House for dinner. Jess joined us for this part, and we had a fantastic time. Except for that bit where I had to scare that old dude away from Sasha, but even that was *kind of* entertaining….   

Sunday/Monday (march 27/28)

Visiting Tom! I've been looking forward to this for a while, and I was very happy to finally get to Reading and see him. I once again was late, because the time change and someone forgot to tell me and my phone that we needed to get up an hour earlier than we thought. We went to Shake Away (which was amazing, link in the links page), and saw Rango before heading back to his house to just chill out for a while. I was introduced to some very good stand up comics while we were watching TV. They also have the most adorable puppy ever, and I played with her for a while.

Monday morning when I got back I went to a "Life After London" program to learn about some ways to come back here and get a visa, and then went to lunch with our professor from Temple at My Old Dutch Pancake House. It was delicious, but I was glad when I finally made it home and could take a nap. 

Now I have to go to bed so that tomorrow I can start the mess of work that is due next week. We've all just realised that we have almost no time left here, and that we have papers/presentations due in every single class next week. Should be a good time!

Goodnight, and sorry for the double post tonight. I wanted to get all of these things up here though. 

Enjoy your week

Tasarion

I've just realised I never posted this. So it was never a double post! So. I'm gonna post it now, adding on the past few days. 

Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday (March 29/30/31) were relatively boring, though on Thursday I did get to go into the BBC newsroom, which was actually kind of cool. We've been stressing out about work a lot this week, so I've been doing a lot of reading and emailing (which means I've been thinking ahead and doing work before the night before it's due. I'm quite proud of myself)

Friday (April 1) I left with Liam for Wales. This is something I'm trying to actually write up into a proper story so you'll be able to read it in an interesting format. 

Today is Sunday (April 3) and I'm heading out to the football match in about an hour then spending the rest of the day writing my 4 papers that are due this week. 

Have a good rest of the weekend everyone, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRENDAN BEGGS!  I'm going to try to call you today just to say hi and happy birthday. Since you're..ya know…old. 1/4 of a century this year is it? <3

Alright, that was a really long post. I'm done now, I swear. 

On Saturday, March 29th  I got up bright and early (10am) and got ready to head out the door. I had a change of clothes, 6 sandwiches, and my computer and cameras with me when I left, and I was travelling alone to North Wales. I honestly knew very little about the place I was going. I had found it on a travel site, liked the name, and heard it had some Alice in Wonderland ties, so I figured it was a good spot to go.  

Around 5pm I made it to Liverpool, where I had about 30 minutes to wander around before I had to get on the bus again. I had seen this radio tower from the stop and decided that I would see how close I could get to it before I had to run back to the station. I didn't make it terribly far, but there are some pictures included in the Llandudno photo album (I'll link you at the end). 

Finally at 8pm (about an hour early actually) I was in Llandudno. The bus station was just a stop on the road, and the streets were already abandoned. Llandudno is a very small beach town, you can walk from one side to the other in about 20 minutes, and when it's not peak season for tourists it's very very quiet. I found my hostel in about 30 minutes, it turned out to be right around the corner from the bus stop but of course I had gone the wrong way, and then decided to take a quick walk to get my bearings. I found my way to the beach, walked along it to the pier, and then started a climb up the mountain. I have a bad habit of scaring myself when I'm in creepy places though, and about halfway up the path I was on I had to run back down because I had convinced myself there were angry ghosts following me. Yeah, I'm an adult, can you tell? I decided to call it a night so that I could wake up early. 

In the morning I started my trek to the Great Orme and the old copper mines that were in it. I had been planning on taking the tram, but it turned out to be closed. So was the cable car, and the buses weren't running frequently, so I decided to give up and just explore the area at the bottom of the mountain. This turned into climbing every single path on the mountain. I finally found the mines sometime around 2, and made it to the summit around 4. It was beautiful, but 15 miles of walking had started to wear me out. 

The Great Orme has a few quarries on it, and near one of them people seem to have a tradition of writing things out of the loose stones. The first evidence I saw of this was this on my way to the summit:

Once I got to the summit and looked back down towards the quarry I noticed that the entire hill was covered in words and shapes. It was interesting to see what was spelt, though most of the time it was just peoples names. 

I only had 1 run in with the goats, and 1 run in with some horses. Dogs were a bit more of a problem though, and I had several decide that they didn't like me wearing a hat and that they were going to get it off of my head. I was successful in not showing that it terrified me when they jumped on me though, so I'm quite proud. It's easier to not be afraid of dogs here since most of them are so well trained that if they're jumping on you, it's likely they just want to play. I haven't seen one dog try and attack someone since I've been here. 

The next morning I played proper tourist. I took a bus tour through Llandudno and the next town over, Conwy. It was just me and about 6 old people from Scotland, which was an interesting experience in itself. When the tour got to Conwy I hopped off and headed for the castle. This is the first castle I'd been to since I've been here, so I was extremely excited. It was amazing to explore, and I had so much fun looking at the landscape from the top of the towers. 

When I got out of the castle I headed down to the docks, and as I was walking there was a man just chilling out holding a hawk on one hand and petting another that was sitting on a bench. I went over and kept a good distance for a bit before he asked me to come over closer and meet the birds. That's when this picture occurred (Brace yourself, I'm not wearing a hat, and I'm smiling. I know it's overwhelming):

The man was incredibly sweet, and the birds were as well. They loved to have you pet their bellies. Just down the road from him was the smallest house in the UK. I can't remember the dimensions but I'll put a link to the houses website in the links page. 

That day when I got back I went to the beach, and then back to the pier. The arcade games successfully stole a couple of pounds from me, but it gave me a few hours of entertainment. I ended the day with another walk along the beach, this time at low tide, and I found my sisters name written in stones where the water usually was. I think it may have been the last thing I expected to see.  

Llandudno is a fantastic town with excellent people in it. The Llandudno Youth Hostel is a wonderful place to stay, no matter what age you are. The first 2 nights it was me and a couple of older people as well as my roommate that was probably in her 30's. The last night it was just me, which was a bit creepy, but the people that work there are fantastic and the rooms are amazingly clean. The only problem I had was at the Town House, so if you're there and looking for a drink, don't go there. They tried to tell me that my license and passport were both fake and that I wasn't old enough to drink. I finally got my drink, but I was well angry by the time I did. There are plenty of other places to go that are much friendlier though. 

If you want to look at pictures they are here, here, and here and if you want some links to the things that I did you can check out the links page here. 

Spring break has been an interesting trip for me. It started out with a 12 hour bus ride to Aberdeen to meet up with Mark. I've been talking to Mark for about 9 years now. We met on a Lord of the Rings website for the actor Billy Boyd, and have been talking on and off ever since. It was a rather nervous bus ride since I had never met him before, and I ended up getting about 1 hour of sleep total. 

Once I got there and found Mark and amazing weekend immediately started. We went to an Aberdeen football match, I was given lots of gifts from the team including a keychain, a bottle stopper, a clock, and a roster that was signed by the entire team. Mark also had arranged for an announcement at half time welcoming me to the game all the way from Philly. After that we went to meet his family, and I was somehow tricked into holding his baby nephew (I think there's a picture of this somewhere but I dunno where). Later that night we went to a pub to listen to some live music before heading to my hostel for the night. 

The next day we got up early, I walked around on my own for a bit, and then Mark and his girlfriend Dani took me up to the farm to meet Dani's horses. I had never really been close to a horse before so I was a bit nervous for the first hour or so and spent most of it hiding behind Mark. Finally one of the horses decided it was sick of me hiding form it and came up to me and pushed me over. We cleaned up the stables, brushed the horses, and then Dani set up Leila to ride her. I helped a bit, and was excited to actually see her ride when she handed me the helmet and said "So the fun part is that I'm not riding. You are". I think there might be a picture out there of the look on my face when she said this too. 

It was an amazing experience. You can see pictures here, there's not many because I got so caught up in being there and hanging out with Mark and Dani that I kept forgetting to take pictures of things. I'll have to ask Mark if he has any so I can have a few more. 

The next day I left for Nottingham. This part of the trip isn't nearly as exciting, infect it's kind of boring. I got here, we went out to a pub for some live music (it's a trend of my break I think), and that was really cool. I got to talk to the lead singer about The Damned and meet some cool people. The next day I slept, literally all day. Nothing happened. Thursday Simon had work and I was stuck in the house with nothing to do. Really, nothing. No internet, I didn't bring a book (lesson learned, again), and I spent the day laying around wishing I could be anywhere else. The same kind of happened again today. 

I just got a message asking if I wanted to go and film something at Abbey Road tomorrow with Liam for my internship. I could say no and stay here, but I'm not so sure that there's anything for me to actually do. If I don't leave now I'm here until Sunday night. I'm kind of over being here…I haven't seen anything and I don't believe that Simon's gonna actually take me to see anything except maybe the castle, which would be cool but it's not worth 2 full days of being bored to see one thing when i could go home and work on something really cool. 

I've turned into that really lame person that finds work more interesting than spending time with friends. I feel like personally it's a better decision to just go home…I don't want to disappoint Simon by leaving but I'm also not feeling so well being here and being trapped inside all day. 

School starts up again next week. Only 6 weeks left…I can't believe it's going by so fast. 

Until next

Tasarion

I had my internship today, and the first thing we were filming was for BBC Breakfast. We showed up at what is becoming known as "The Rock Hotel" in London and went up to the beautiful lounge on the roof. 3 hours later these men showed up:

If you don't recognize them or cant really tell from the picture that's ok, it is kind of far away. When they are together they're known as The Foo Fighters. The easiest to recognize will probably be the lead singer, Dave Grohl, who has the dark hair and is leaning forward. The interview was very interested and I'm excited to see what the final product looks like. 

After this we went on to film something else for BBC Breakfast, but that's for a film that I'm not gonna tell you about :P 

Now I have to go and back because my bus for Aberdeen (a 12 hour ride) leaves in 3 hours. Must get ready and get out of here! I'll be back in a few days with hopefully lots of pretty pictures. 

Have a good weekend folks!

Tasarion

This video is some my favorite bits from the exhibit I went to this morning called "The Doctor Who Experience". Sorry for the lack of quality, I was partially sneaking video, and my camera is seriously dying. The exhibit was amazing though, and it was definitely a different look into the culture that I'm currently surrounded by. 

In the US Doctor Who tends to be a more adult thing for some reason. Teenagers may get into it, but most parents wouldn't show it to their children. Here in the UK it's a completely different story. When I walked in I found myself surrounded by little kids dressed up as The Doctor, including several carrying mops and wearing fezzes. I wish I had some pictures of them to show you guys, but I didn't take any of the kids. Trust me though, it was adorable. 

It was interesting to see so many families at the show. Moms, dads, children, and even grandparents were there. The beginning of the exhibit started with a walk through adventure type thing. You're brought in and you're told you have to help The Doctor escape from the Pandorica 2 (yeah, they actually built an extra just incase he escaped the first. "It's not even a different color! Boring!") This was my favorite part of the whole thing. You get to go inside the TARDIS, you get attacked by Cybermen, Daleks, and Weeping Angels, and you get to see some really cool props from the show up close. The best part was probably the end when all of the villains are shown on a 3D screen (yes, I like 3D like this. It's how it's meant to be used). When the Weeping Angels and Daleks came out and reached towards us I could see all of the parents grabbing their children that were too scared to watch but somehow couldn't look away and couldn't stop grinning. Some of the adults genuinely looked a bit frightened as well. Part of this is showed towards the end of the video, try to imagine it actually popping out at you if you watch back.

The second part of the exhibit included things like all of The Doctor's costumes, all of the companions costumes (It was hard to not steal Jack's and the 9th/10th Doctor's. I behaved though). It showed the Daleks through the years, and models of so many creatures. There was also an area that you could walk through a bit of the TARDIS control room on your own. I spent a good amount of time there looking at all the buttons I wasn't actually allowed to press.

Overall my day was spectacular. After the exhibit I went out for a walking trip of the city with my friend Kayleigh, we got lost, found cool stuff, and overall, I at least, had a lot of fun. 

If you want to see pictures from the exhibit you can click here, and if you want to see some pictures from my walk around the city you can go here and scroll to the bottom. 

If you've never seen Doctor Who you should check it out. It's really an amazing show, and worth putting the time into getting to know. 

I hope you all have an amazing night

Tasarion

Over a week ago! Middle of semesters here really suck don't they? Up until now we've had almost no homework, and all of a sudden every class has at least one paper due in a week. Anyway.

Last Saturday we woke up bright and early at 4am, and started our travelling to the airport. Somehow we made it just in time despite going to 3 wrong bus stations and by 10am we were in Scotland! We went to Glasgow. This trip started out being planned because I mentioned I was going, and then everyone else wanted to join in. Here's a brief recap of everything that happened.

Saturday:
10am arrive in Glasgow
1045am get to hostel, told we can't check in til noon
11am get to place to eat breakfast (at this point only 4/6 of us are here)
12 Finally find everyone else we're in the city with, go back to hostel
1pm wander around Merchant City, go to the GoMA, take lots and lots of pictures
530pm go to dinner and have amazing sushi
9pm go to DRAM, a local pub.

Sunday:
9am wake up, get told off trying to everyone else up, and go downstairs for breakfast
945am Toya wakes up, yells at me for not trying to wake her up (remember, she just told me off 45 minutes ago), go downstairs for breakfast again :D
1030am go for a walk along the river and take lots of pictures
130pm meet up with Rachel (our RA who is from Glasgow), go to lunch, have lots of cool things pointed out to us
300pm go to the University, find the orchestr rehearsing, record the through the keyhole in the door, walk home
5pm go out on my own, walk to some museum and then down one street as far as it went. Found flatmates in Cold Stone
930pm go to tea shop, order "fairies blood" tea (it was a beautiful red)
11pm go to sports bar across from hostel
1am go to a church that's been converted into a bar
3am flatmates go to hostel, I go to hang out with people I met at the bar
445am run back to hostel
5am get in cab to go to airport
6am at airport, falling asleep on a chair because the amount I've had to drink is finally hitting me (that's something I should admit on a blog my grandmother and mother read huh?)
10am home and going to bed

Want some pictures? Check out here, here, and here.

Since this has all happened I've had classes, gone to m internship, had two days of doing nothing except setting up a booth at the national wedding show and spending 8 hours teaching myself to use a sound mixer and one of the cameras at work. Oh, and Friday night we had a nice trip to the hospital with one of our flatmates. Everything's ok now, and I'm glad it's over, but it made for a very long night. 

Today is homework, editing the website a bit (hopefully including some videos for you), and more homework. Tomorrow I go to the Doctor Who Experience! 

Links are being added here for all the places I've been that have websites

Take care!

Tasarion

I haven't been doing too much updating of anything but twitter lately and I'm sorry for that. I've had so much I wanted to update you guys on too. I went out one night and got horribly horribly lost, ended up in the red light district on my own, made it out alive and took awesome pictures. I was even gonna talk about these 3:

I don't really remember what I was gonna say anymore, but there's a folder labelled "Photos for Blog" on my desktop, which means I did have a story. I assume the first two are because I ended up in St Giles Square, and saw Rupert Street which reminded me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you don't know why, you are not a whedonite and you have homework to do. Go watch Buffy. I was so excited when I saw these signs. The third though I just remember thinking was pretty. Maybe that's why I wanted to specifically show you?

Then of course there was my Beatles fieldtrip I went on last weekend. I have pictures from it here and they're actually labelled so you can know what they are if you click through the slideshow. We also went out one night and for class we were told to draw all over the city with crayons. Scroll down to see the pictures of that. Anything vulgar was not written by me, and is gonna be taken off my website prolly tonight. 

My internship the past two days has been amazing, I got to set up lighting today, and we got free food for lunch each day. I love the car rides involved with my internship. It's the best time to get to know the people I work with and the people that live here in general. 

I'm leaving now to print my tickets out for everything I'm doing this month. Doctor Who Experience, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Nottingham. I feel like I'm successfully packing quite a bit in. I also have to go to bed soon...I'm getting everyone up at 4 so we can leave by 5. 

I promise a proper blog soon. Probably after this weekend since I'll (hopefully) have lots of stories to tell you all. 

Goodnight,

Tasarion

I wrote this last night, but fell asleep before I got a chance to post it, so read it as if it was written yesterday :P

The past few days have been a bit wild. Wednesday I went to Westminster Abbey and walked on and saw the graves of people like TS Eliot, Lewis Carrol, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, and Geoffrey Chaucer. There are pictures of the outside and hallways here (You're not allowed pictures inside the church):

Westminster

Thursday I had my internship. We went to a motorbike show to film promos for "I, Superbiker" but I think the most exciting bit was when I found an orange Triumph that was actually small enough for me. It was so beautiful..I didn't have my camera with me, but I'm trying to find a picture so I can show you all. When we got back I was sat down with some broken lights and told to fix them. It took a bit to figure out some of them but I feel very good that I was able to get them all repaired. 

Today at work was the big day. We were shooting a music video for the band Man Raze. If you haven't heard of them they consist of Simon Laffy, the guitarist from Girl, Phil Collen, the guitarist from Girl and Def Leppard, and Paul Cook, the drummer from The Sex Pistols. We started the day by cleaning the entire studio (the entire office is friends with these guys, but they always want to impress them). I now know that every light works, where it is, where its stand is, and where every cord we could ever need is. Once we finished wrapping cords and organizing lenses it was time to set up the studio to shoot. Paul had called ahead and asked Nick and Liam to set up his drumkit, but neither knew how, and everyone else is just a frontman for their bands and didn't know either. The task fell to me. 

As they were bringing the drums down I was already nervous. This was Paul Cook's drumset and I was going to set it up? They brought all the cases down and left me with them. I nearly died when I opened a case and saw which set it was.

Yeah. It was his Union Jack Sex Pistols drum kit. After calming down and double checking that I was actually allowed to touch it I built him the set almost perfectly (one cymbal out of place). While we waited for him to show up I played with the camera using the drumset as my subject. I'm finally becoming more comfortable with cameras. 

When Paul finally showed up we were introduced and he told Nick that he did a wonderful job setting up his drums. Nick was kind enough to give me my credit and Paul complimented me on my ability to put a kit together. I got a compliment from a Sex Pistol! (None of my roommates understand why this is so exciting to me, so I'm gonna brag about it here). He and I talked about music for a bit and about why I was there before we started shooting. Getting to watch him play so close up was incredible. 

When we were done Christian and Paul were talking and I heard my name come up so I walked over and they were talking about getting me a signed pair of Paul's drumsticks as 'payment' for my internship. Paul says I'll have them sometime before April, which will be so incredible. 

The other guys were cool as well, the whole shoot only took about an hour though so it was very short. I love The Sex Pistols, and I love Def Leppard so today was very exciting for me. When the music video's done I'll post a link to it so you can all see. 

Time to head out for the day!

Tasarion

PIctures of Westmister Abbey

Pictures of Paul's drumset

Pictures of my first proper night out

"Before Stonehenge they built Woodhenge and Strawhenge. But a big bad wolf came along and blew them down, and 3 little piggies had to be relocated to the projects. ...Whatever that means"

~Eddie Izzard

Yesterday we went to Stonehenge. I've taken a day to try and decide what to write about it, and I'm still not quite positive what to tell you. 

Getting out of the city was fantastic. The openness there is amazing and something that I'd definitely needed. Once we were close the guide started to tell us the history of Stonehenge, but I zoned out after about 10 minutes. I'm a fan of believing in the magic of things and so I wasn't really interested in hearing about my beliefs being crazy and how the whole thing is really "not that remarkable". We were told that many people go to Stonehenge and find themselves very underwhelmed. I'm not sure if the intent of being told that was some kind of reverse psychology but the overall opinion seems to agree with it. I found it to be extremely amazing and moving though. There's a lot of pictures here:

Stonehenge Pictures

I wish that I could give more detail on what it was like but I don't know how to put it in words. It may sound silly but I felt an intense power come from being there, and since I left I've wanted to go back. Maybe I'm crazy? When we were done at Stonehenge we went to Bath to tour the old Roman Baths. It was really awesome and so much warmer than standing out in an open field. There's pictures of the baths and the city here:

Bath Pictures

and here:

Bath Pictures 2

It was an amazing day, even with all of the people I had to put up with. I made a video that shows some of the landscape and talks about why the people I was with are rough sometimes. Link is here:

Video

I'm off now to do this week's homework.

Goodnight,

Tasarion

Today was interesting. I got to work early so I could help set up the shoot that we were doing for the York Dungeons. I was given the task of setting up the lighting, which is really exciting since it was only my second day actually in the studio. It was green screen though so it just meant getting lighting that was even and bright enough until the actor showed up to stand in one place and read off a teleprompter. Easy job right? If only. When the actor showed up, he told us he couldn't read without his glasses, and didn't own contacts. The next 4 hours were spent finding a place he could get some. Once he finally was set it took him 5 hours to get through 3.5 minutes of dialogue. Read off the prompter. Standing in one place. Film and television would be so perfect if it didn't involve working with actors. Seriously, if you are an actor learn to take direction. It will make your life, and our lives so much easier. 

While he was out for 4 hours getting the contacts me and Nick spent some time playing with the camera set up. We ended up setting it up on 6 building blocks, a tripod, a c-stand, a box, a scaffolding, two "magic arms" and a strip of camera tape. This is what some of it looked like:

Once I finally was able to leave I was feeling very confident in my ability to make the most of this internship and impress the people I'm working for. 

2 hours later I got home, and when I walked in everyone gave me a very strange welcome home, so I left the room to put my stuff away. When I got back to the kitchen there was pizza for us all from Toya and it was amazingly delicious. Once everyone was sitting down again I was told that it was my belated birthday party. I got a card that was signed by everyone, and then two of the most delicious cupcakes ever (each of which with a candle). It was amazing, and I really appreciated that everyone was there and did that for me. I'm so lucky I got put in the flat with the people that I did. 

Links to updated pictures:

Field Trip

Internship

Birthday Party

Tomorrow we have a field trip, I'm not telling you where, I'll just post pictures and maybe some stories tomorrow. For now I need to go to bed. 

Goodnight,

Tasarion