Still Awake

For some reason, although I've been in England for nearly three weeks now, my circadian rhythms still think that I live in California. I woke up at 3pm yesterday, and have laid awake in bed until 5am the last two nights. I'm pretty tired, but here I am once again awake... listening to the occasional sounds of police sirens and the hourly chimes of Big Ben. Fortunately I don't have class until 1pm tomorrow, but I'd like to break out of this. I'm going to have to force myself to wake up early I guess.

Embarking on my second week of classes, it's becoming clear that I'm going to actually have to do work in order to live and have fun here. I'm taking five classes this term -- Research methods, Statistics, Democracy and the Media, Communication Theory and Politics and Policy in Britain. It kind of seems like a lot, but each only meets for 1-2 hours per week. Next term I'm only going to be taking 2 classes and working on my dissertation. The cool thing is that everyone in my program is taking at least four of the above classes with me right now, so I spend a lot of my time before and after class hanging out and talking with them.

Yesterday I spent some time exploring the LSE library -- or the British Library of Political and Economic Science, as it's technically named. It's the largest social science library in the world and takes up a whole small block or so on the LSE campus. Here is a photo from Wikipedia:


Although LSE is about a quarter of the size of UCLA, the library seems about 10 times as busy and frantic. Almost nobody I've met here has actually purchased books for their courses, and a large part of the bottom floor is reserved only for "course books." They have about 10 copies of each book that professors assign, which can be checked out for 24 hours, three days or one week. So, every day before or after class, people rush in to try to get a copy to take home and read before someone else gets it. I've never had to wait in a line 40 deep of students to check out a library book before! But overall, I think it's a pretty efficient system. Now if I could only bring myself to read...

In other semi-uneventful news, I've discovered the best hot chocolate I've ever tasted available at a coffee chain called Costa. Too bad it costs the equivalent of 6 US dollars a glass. I've introduced it to three other people I know here and they're all addicted now too.

Anyway, I'm going to try and get some sleep now.