2+2=4. You can do maths too! And other such shenanigans.

2+2= 4. You can do maths too! Yes, it's true. Here is Britain, people don't do math, they do maths. As I was riding the Tube one fair afternoon, I espied a subway sign. "Be a teacher!" It touted. "Imagine all the creative ways you can teach maths." Maths. It's good and all when you can add, but it's also great to learn grammar. Someone is in the wrong here be it the US or the UK. Math or Maths? You take your choice and duel it out.

It has been quite the busy week here in London. I've just spent two days doing catering work at a New Zealand and South African music festival. By catering I mean running a til and giving people beer. Here, a beer, don't fear, come near, drink beer. Catering work, although I imagined I'd be walking around with a tray of pigs in a blanket (and hurriedly sneaking spares into my work pants pockets until they bulged with a wad of grease. mmmmm. Well, maybe I'd only do that with eggplant napoleons.) is a good deal. Get paid decently, choose your hours - just what a person like me needs. Oh flexibility - if I can't have you perfectly in the physical sense, I'll just have to accost you in other ways.

Back at my internship, you, my dearest readers, have missed many an exciting event. We had an auction, tea, little silver gavels, bidding, silver spoons and all. I was the faithful email bid checker and online bid approver. So, keep this in mind: if ever you plan to bid online with Kerry Taylor Auctions, you better send me flower, chocolates, sapphires, plantains, a collection of glass sheep, and a lavender scented rosewater if ever you want to be approved as a bidder. Without such gifts, DECLINE DECLINE DECLINE. No bids for you! Well, it auction was a neat event to see. As it was a smaller auction, it was held at the warehouse/office. I've been picking up the aftermath of the auction for the past week, putting it into gargantuan plastic bags and tagging them for shipping. One to America. One to Spain. One to Timbuktu!

I do enjoy the internship, same as before. I like the material that passes through my hands, literally and figuratively. I like the ladies I work with. What I don't like, and this really has nothing to do with the internship, is the monotony that my life has fallen slave to like Britney Spears for you. (Recall: I'm a slaaavvvve for yoooou). Monday through Friday, I wake up at 7:30, catch the bus at 8:30, arrive at 9:15, work til 5:30. Take the bus home. Make dinner. Go to the gym (a good few days of the week). Shower. Go to bed. Wake up and do it again. Lather, rinse, repeat... repeat... reapeat.... True, the weekends are open to my whims, but I feel like the majority of my life has become cookie cut into the figure-eight of infinity. I guess that's what real life is like. So, some may call it real life, but I call it boring. Guess I'll have to get used to it.

With all, oooooh 4 friends that I have here, I've been doing not so badly. Friday was a smashing night out with my cohabitants Rebecca and Noellia and Rebecca's friends. We ran around town, singing, cavorting and throwing glitter that sparkled into a hazy oblivion of joy. It took us about one hour to finally reach a bar during which Rebecca stopped to talk to a homeless man for 10 minutes and I in my boredom stood on top of an electrical box and held out my hand at people shouting "Halt! Who goes there!?" Everyone passing by found it hysterical (as did I) including the policemen and the driver who rolled down his window to ask my what I was doing. It was the highlight of my evening despite the fact that noone answered with the correct response which would have been: "It is I, King Arthur!" Come on Brits, it your own bloody Monty Python.

Best thing of last weekend was a skate. A huge skate. A 200-some-people big skate through the rocky streets of London. One bright and sunshine-y Sunday in a land not so far away, amid the fresh green lawns of Hyde Park, my American friend Christy and I, along with the enlisted help of some very kind but slightly awkward Brits, found ourselves waiting for Godot. Godot? By that I mean waiting to rollerskate like fiends. We'd rented some skates, ready to join the hundreds that show up weekly for a skate through London. It was glorious. There were speakers blaring music and we set off stopping traffic like Jim Carey in the Mask as we rolled along bumpy streets on a 10 mile roller skate. It's like all my dreams coming true! A similar event happens weekly in Paris and I never got to go during my year abroad despite my aching desire to do so.

In other forms of excercize, I see people running here, often under the burden of a backpack. "Why?" you ask. Well I asked the same thing too, but I think I've got it figured out. There is a huge, say wooly mamoth huge, event that takes place every spring in London. The Quasimoto race. For this race, people have hunchbacks surgically installed and grovel along a 300 mile loop around Britain. Everyone has to quote Victor Hugo novels along the way and they can only eat large drumsticks of fire-roasted turkey a la Renaissance festivals. The first to win gets free chocolate for life. So these people I see running with backpacks are, in earnest, training for this race.

There are so many bars in Britain named the "such and such arms". The Founder's Arms. The Greenwich Arms. The Southwark Arms. The Fire Arms. The I'm up in Arms. The Surrender your Arms. The Hold me in your Arms. I don't get it. Why all the arms? What's the big idea with naming your pub the blah blah blah Arms? Why not legs? Or Pancreases?

I forgot to mention last time that I live in Mawdley House (and yes, I will give you my address if you so desire, but that's besides the point). On my street there is Dauncey House and Overy House (where I hear plenty of fertile women live) and so forth. It's like I never left my summer housing at Harvard. Or like I'm in Harry Potter. I'm still waiting to hear about the inter-house intramural games however.

Well kiddos, I hope you've had your fix of Hannah now. If not, please wait another two weeks or so until the next dosage. There is no need to turn to more drastic meausres. I will be posting some pictures on shutterfly soon if anyone cares to take a gander. Feel free to ask for the site address. Feel free to sing "Did you ever know that your my hero" to me. Feel free to let out a deep sih of relief now - this here update is over.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Hannah