London

I'll start from the beginning and move along.

JFK is terrible. We sat on the plane for 3 hours, taxiing along, unsure of where we were headed or if the plane was wandering of its own accord. However, this provided me with the opportunity to get acquainted with the women sitting in my row, who were from Cardiff and had spent the last 10 days shopping in NYC. I had the window seat, so it was my job to keep the row informaed as to whether we were moving. We laughed, we whined, we traded magazines and crisps (which are chips. chips are fries. Learning happens all the time.) and gum. Many hours later, over an anonymous portion of the atlantic, I remembered that Cardiff was the capital of wales. Thanks, 6th grade geography and Mrs. Egan!

Behind us were a row of guys who might have been speaking gaelic or might have had such crazy accents that I just couldn't figure it out.

I watched the sun rise. It was cloudy below us all the way across, just this whipped up mountain of froth from horizon to horizon. So then all of a sudden, you look and there's the slighest demarcation between sky and cloud-line, just a little icy blueness peeking over. Then you nap for a minute and look again because the layer of marshmallow fluff has been stained grapefriut orange-pink and gold and purple and some altogether surprising combinations. But, then it's the sun and you can see a coastline (ireland? wales? I'll never know.)and have to give up all pretense of sleep.

Yeah, so no sleep 'til london, so by the time they were serving breakfast I was in that sort of dreamy random mood. They passed out blueberry muffins. Blueberries are not my favorite things, and upon picking them out of the muffin I had a weird freudian flashback to being five years old after my little sister was hot off the press, and my mom finding dried-up, fallen-off umbilical cord remnant on the floor. I bet you a hundred pounds no one expected this paragraph to go in that direction! But, that solves the mystery of Why Corinne Doesn't Like Blueberries.


In my head the past couple of days, I've already ended up using 'a bit of...' and 'yeah' or 'innit?' at the end of sentences...I will come back sounding like madonna.

I had a very good time navigating from heathrow through the underground to my place dragging 2 enormous bags. Please send Karmic goodwill to the guys who helped me drag them up the stairs at paddington (sadly, no lost bears) and oxford circus (sadly no fire eaters). In sum: if you can handle the subway, you can do the underground.

The other people in my flat are good; one other cornell guy, a girl from manchester and a guy from newcastle, and a guy from spain who I haven't really talked to yet.

it's been rainy but warm. Grey like ithaca.

They make it hard to sign up for classes. You actually have to go talk to a body, half the time just to find out you're supposed to do it online. And classes are in hour blocks--so if you have an 11-12, you're screwed for your 12-1.

Food shopping was a revelation. orange juice comes in two incarnations: smooth or 'with juicy bits.' And I think I understand America's obesity problem. Everything is too big. If you sell things in smaller packages but charge as much (or more) as Americans usually pay, then portion sized are kept in check. Ingenious.

I've been doing this from a public computer room and now I don't want to sit here any more, so I'm leaving it for now. Later!