Bus tour, noodles bar, tourist theater(re)

As of now I've met the students, done our bus tour, had our welcome dinner, and had our first class; this evening we had our night at a West End theatre, seeing The 39 Steps, included as part of our fee to FIE. Don't even want to think about the kickback possibilities, as the show seemed to me to have a bit of a worn-around-the-edges feel to it.

We had some adventures getting started, with a couple of folks coming late to the orientation after airplane adventures (including missing luggage, and cancelled connections), and this whole phase was made slight more complicated by the coordination by FIE itself: they take care of a lot of things, including a little walking tour, and their own little orientation, and of course there's some overlap / miscommunication possibilities at every turn (e.g., they switched the orientation at the residence from 7 PM to 6 PM, and though each student was told the new time as they checked in, what do you know, a couple of students showed up at 6:45 for the old time. Nothing tragic, and the Kensington / Queens Gate Terrace location is hard to beat, even if the place is a bit of a warren.

The bus tour yesterday was pretty good, with the usual stops at Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and St Paul's, and the Sunday traffic was a little heavy on our way home; luckily Ian the driver showed surgical skill and awareness of just how wide the coach was, and Angie the guide mostly calibrated her spiel correctly so that none of the jetlagged ducklings fell asleep.



After that it was off to Wagamama, an ear-piercingly loud noodle bar / fusion restaurant in South Ken, certainly less touristic than last year's Olde Englishy trap in Covent Garden, and more edible as well (salmon teriyaki beats steak-and-mushroom pie in my book, and in 95% of my students' books as well). I'd actually consider going back there, which is more than I could say for anywhere I ate last year.

I spent the rest of my evening trying to tie up loose ends (doing accounting stuff) and getting ready for class in the morning. Despite being a grizzled veteran, I still get butterflies before the first class, more so when as many things can go wrong as in Summer Abroad, a little to the surprise of my onsite coordinator Tiffany. And there were a few glitches, I must confess: the 28 of us burst the seams of our classroom--the Freddie Mercury Room (all of FIE's classrooms are named for Famous People Who Lived In Kensington)--and the air conditioning was so stunningly efficient that people were getting goosebumps (and whining). Actually the draft was pretty obnoxious, and it took some time to figure out the remote for it after Katie H gave her half-hour briefing and left the class to me.

The other thing that was a little laughable (the joke being on me) was a high-tech white-boardish contraption that projects the laptop but can also be "written on" using different colored pen-like stylus thingies. Inexplicably the laptop refused to wake up properly for me after Katie's powerpoint, stumping Amit the IT guy who had to bring in another one, and the device itself has a hair-raisingly impenetrable user interface. Definitely brings out the Luddite in me, longing for a simple dry-erase board or even the flip-charts I used in Paris and Les Houches last year. This device is persnickety--if you write at normal speed, it only picks up abut half your touches, leaving a disconcerting set of glyphs behind.

That said, I managed to demystify 1 Henry IV a little (we will see it Thursday night at the Globe), orient them to the Tour, go over academic expectations, and even get them writing a little, on a couple of early essays about travel, by Bacon and Johnson. The group seems nice and somewhat cooperative, though some of the people who want to talk might not be the best people to be talking, and from the results of my afternoon hours of blue-book-marking (I brought over books for them to do their in-class journaling in). I am not sensing the same energy-sinks as last year, though it's too early to tell.

After my hours in a café and a welcome Skype call to Amelie and Alex, now ensconced at Lake Tahoe with one set of cousins, I did a couple of enjoyable laps around Holland Park,

showered, and headed by Tube to the Criterion Theater, where I bemusedly watched the four actors power through the tourist-pleasing fare. The only real downside was that my seat was crunched next to my 6'9" student who had to fold himself into his seat in such a way that I might need a chiropractor tomorrow if my stretching just now didn't do the trick.

As usual, it's a bit surprising to get out of the theater at 10 PM and have it be just dusk, but that is life in Northern Europe. So I am pretty much caught up here…. Lather, rinse, repeat until July 31, with scary transfers and foreign languages tossed in on the subsequent legs.

Now to sleep and do it all again.