On May 7, I woke up to the sounds of the city in London (and my alarm going off a lot earlier than I wanted it to.) I managed to get ready with enough time to grab some hotel breakfast. I tried some baked beans on toast, which is something that is popular here but that I’ve never tried, and I actually really enjoyed it! It might become a breakfast staple of mine when I go home. Then we took the tube to Regents University.
At Regents, we had a lecture with Jason Mackenzie about the current landscape of media in the United Kingdom. It was very interesting to hear about the situation of media in another country as compared to my experience with US media. It really showed me that I have a lot to learn about media, because I really didn’t know anything about media in the United Kingdom. We talked about platforms becoming publishers, the difference between stories and content, and consumption of media across different platforms. We ended the visit with an activity where each table analyzed different London newspapers and attempted to find the audience, political leaning, content type, and a story that we found particularly British. This activity was really useful at critically analyzing the content of papers that we don’t have a lot of experience with.
After our lecture, we had free time for the rest of the day. My roommate Maddy King and I went back to the hotel to regroup and reorganize. Then, we went across the street to a place called Wasabi, where we got lunch. I had vegan sushi and soup, and it was delicious, although the soup had a little too much seaweed for my liking. We took the tube to the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum was my favorite of the two, even though natural history museums are my favorite kind of museum. I’ve recently been getting very interested in fashion and fashion history, and the Mary Quant exhibition was really interesting and full of lots of fun facts about why styles in the UK changed the way that they did throughout the decades.
Next, we did some window shopping in Piccadilly Circus. We stopped into T. K. Maxx, which is known as T. J. Maxx in the US, so I could get some inexpensive boxers to wear as shorts to bed because I forgot to pack any and the hotel was warm. I know, innovation at its finest. We stopped into Pret a Manger to grab some coffee and free WiFi because we had to figure out if we were heading in the right direction towards the hotel. We were not, but it was a nice little detour.
We went back to our hotel and then decided that we wanted some dinner, so we went to Shake Shack and got mushroom burgers. We talked while we found our way home, which took a lot longer than anticipated because we somehow got lost yet again. Finally, we made it back to the hotel and did some work before heading to sleep. Overall, this was a very nice first full day in London.