I am now a week into my internship. I really am enjoying the experience so far. I wouldn't say that I enjoy every minute of being in the office but I guess such is the life of a 9 to 5er. I definitely was thrown in head first into the office environment. I have been in an some what of an office environment before but not ever totally immersed in it. I have a little desk along everyone else that I work with, with my own computer and phone and what not. Be it the UK or US version, I have learned that the show The Office is shockingly true to life, haha.
It is not all memos and desk phones, however. The work I am a part of is really exciting and worth while. The Citizenship Foundation, the organization I am interning with, has many separate projects that the organization facilitates simultaneously. Most of the people who work there are hired to work on one that the organization maintains. By being an intern, however, I'm getting to work with several of these projects and will work on several more before I leave London.
Right now I am primarily working with the group at the citizenship foundation that is in charge of the Giving Nation program. The Giving Nation, or g-nation, is a national wide program that gives British students an opportunity to do hands on charity and activism work. They give any secondary school that applies a grant to help fund a youth activism or charity society and the projects that such a group might take on. They also give all the schools involved a page on the g-nation website, www.g-nation.org.uk, so that they can showcase the charity or activism projects that they have undertaken. Then every year the Citizenship Foundation holds a big awards ceremony and celebration for eight schools that they feel did the best job of charity and activism work with the funds given to them. They fly the groups most associated with the charitable action from each school to London and put them up in a hotel so that they can come to this event.
The awards event is in less then a month so I have been doing a lot to help organize and plan the event. Not exactly my ideal job but I think that it is a worth while cause and good experience.
This week I will also start working with the group of people in the Citizenship Foundation that run the Youth Act program. This is a really cool program. It sets up groups of kids in state schools in underprivileged areas with a adult member of their community. The group then decided on an issue that they feel very passionately about. The Youth Act team then gives them all the support, guidance and resources they need to actively work to make a difference in whatever issue they are the most concerned with. Sometimes this involves them holding community-wide gatherings, petitioning, rallying, lobby or whatever it takes to tackle the issue they are dealing with and affirm in the young people the knowledge of their right and ability to make a difference in their community.
I am not sure what I will be doing yet with youth act but I will let everyone know when I know.
The people at the Citizenship Foundation are great. They are very passionate about what they do and very eager to get like-minded folk involved with their work.
I also had my first class last week. It seems like it will be good. There are only four other people in the class, which is really nice considering it is a discussion based literature course: 20th century British literature.
Well that is all from me for now. I have more to say but I have even more to do. I am leaving for Amsterdam on Thursday for the Long weekend that I get. I am really looking forward to that and will be writing about it soon.

A hell of a town

I had a very crazy morning. My roommate and I decided to go to Camden market this morning to get some produce and just have a look around. We really had no idea of what to expect. I wasn't expecting much but I should have been reminded of London's constant ability to surprise, amaze and amuse when on our way to the train station to go to the market we saw a giant eyeball, about 30 yards high, that had appeared in the middle of the little park two blocks down from our flat over night. I later found out it was a promotion for a new TV station but there was no indication of that at all, just a giant eye.
When we got off the tub at the Camden Town station, we saw only a few stands with nothing too interesting being sold from them. I was disappointed but we decided to keep looking around. After walking around for a few minutes we made a turn onto Camden High Street and I then realized I should never doubt London again. As far as the eye could see there were rows and rows of stands and thousands of people between and in them. We walked around in amazement for several hours and never made our way out of the market. The stands wound around, on top of and underneath buildings, bridge and water ways.
I have literally never seen anything like the Camden Town Market. It is like the largest and most diverse festival imaginable but it is a permanent fixture of Camden Town. One minute you can be in an open air square with farmers vending there fresh produce and the next minute you can turn down a narrow alley and end up surrounded by neon lights, house music, and "cyber goths". There are so many different types of people from the yeomen farmers and cyber goths to punks, hippies, rastas and hippsters all converging in the confines of this huge market to buy and sell an assortment of products as diverse as the people selling them.
On our way back from the market we exited the tube station and say a rally of about 50 strong outside the Scientology building that is positioned a few buildings down from our tube stop. It was complete with signs lambasting the "capitalistic and fraudulent" nature of Scientology being held by young and old people alike all wearing guy Fawkes masks.
And all this and I'm back in time to get ready for a coach tour of London scheduled for us for the afternoon and after that get everything squared way for starting my internship tomorrow...

I'M HERE

I traveled over 18 hours from Hattiesburg, MS to London by car and plan (and spent a pretty penny doing so) but the second that my plane dipped below the seemingly endless layers of England’s notorious cloud cover I knew it was extremely worth it. On my descent into Gatwick airport I was greeted by a picturesque view of the shrubbery partitioned fields and meadows of the English countryside. After passing threw immigration quit uneventfully, I found the driver that was sent to pick me up and bring me to my flat. He drove me past meadows, fields, cottages, manors and villages and then into central London. I got my key after he dropped me of on the street that will be my home for the next four months. It is a small peaceful, though well trafficked, street with all white painted apartments and hotels up and down it. The street, which is only like an 1/8 of a mile long, is flanked on either end by statues of a former duke of the area I am living in, Bedford, and a late statesmen of the Whig party. Just past both of these guardian like figures are beautiful little parks.
I got to the flat several hours before any of my flat mates arrived. This gave me time to wander around a bit and become even more taken by my amazing surroundings. Central London is like no place I have ever been. One street can be bustling, bright and loud enough to almost put Time Square to same and then the next street over can be as quaint and beautiful as the little villages I saw as I was being driven from the airport.
Finally my flat mates arrived. We got to know each other as we wandered around looking for a grocery store to buy some food and other essentials. They are very nice guys. One goes to school at Stonehill in Mass. and the other is from King’s College in PA. My third flat mate is from Clark but he has not arrived yet. He has been delayed in Amsterdam and should get in some time tonight.
We found a little grocery store several blocks down that was about twice the size of a regular bedroom but with very good and inexpensive products. After coming back from the store we all made ourselves something to eat. I made a sandwich with some cheese I bought at the store, which was perhaps the best cheese I have ever had. It was very sharp and very fresh.
As one could imagine I was very tired from my travels, so after eating I relaxed with a mini-bottle of French wine I had bought at the grocery store, that was very good and was only around a pound and a half, and planned what I would do the next day.
Despite my planning when I woke up today I decided I would just take a walk and see where I ended up. I ended up walking all over. I saw the Thames, the London eye, Big Ben, the changing of the guards and had a lovely late breakfast of sausage, eggs and tea at a café right in the middle of St. James park. I saw a lot more on my three and a half hour walk but I was not sure what a lot of it was but I intend to retrace my steps with a map and a guide book later on to find out.
I have my first meeting with my supervisor at the Citizen Foundation tomorrow where find out what I will be actually doing there.

Dodging Hurricanes

I am not in London yet. Currently, I'm still in tropical rain soaked Hattiesburg, MS. I'm trying to pack and get ready and get out of here before the next hurricane hits. Here in Hattiesburg we really dodged the bullet on this last hurricane, Gustav, it could have been a lot worse. Also, fortunately, my favorite city in the U.S., New Orleans, seems to have dodged the bullet on this one, too. I know they will still need help to get fixed up though since a lot of New Orleans is still damaged from Katrina. This hurricane was nowhere near as bad as Katrina for them but I know there was damage done. I'm really excited about going to London but part of me is torn because I wish I could help out a little in New Orleans before leaving.

Here are some links to a few sites to find out information on New Orleans' current state, as well as some sites to look into helping them out, if anyone is interested.

http://www.nola.com/

http://www.commongroundrelief.org/

http://www.rebuildgreen.org/

I don't want to neglect to mention that there are other areas of the gulf coast that have had just as much devastation, if not more, from recent hurricanes, including Gustav. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is another area battered by recent hurricanes, as well as hit by Gustav, that needs a lot of help and deserves some attention. For more information and news about the Mississippi Gulf Coast go the the Sun Herald web site.

http://sunherald.com/

The storm here in Hattiesburg was not bad at all but we did have a few days of pretty crazy weather. I'm going to try to put up a few pictures I took during the storm.

Luckily I had the foresight to not book my flight to London out of New Orleans but Jackson instead, so I should be taking off on Saturday and getting to London Sunday morning.

Next Week in London...