Wings

There is always something happening on campus, but because of all the studies I can't get to do half of it. Yesterday it was chicken wing night at the bar on campus and I couldn't miss that, could I? In the beginning three of us bought 20 wings. Oh no, that wasn't enough. When another classmate came we bought 50 more. Lovely, greasy, chicken wings. We got it served in buckets. A bit later another two people came and we ordered another 50 more wings. The price was 10 pounds. The most craziest thing was that for the price of one bier at home we got a mug (4,5 pints = 2,556 liter) here. This is probably the healthiest dinner I have ever had...... 

Festival of Light

Friday evening Jatin, a classmate of mine, asked me if I wanted to come with him to a Hindi temple on Saturday. I love meeting new cultures, so I rescheduled everything els and went with him.

On 17th of October the Hindus celebrate the Festival of Light. It is just as our New Year celebration. This was the reason for us going to Europe's biggest Hindu temple. 

We came to the temple around 3 pm along with some other Indian friends of Jatin. It was a lot of security around the temple. High walls made it hard to take a good picture of it and it wasn't allowed with cameras inside. We had to leave our bags and cameras outside, in some kind of big wardrobe. Also we had to go through metal detectors when entering the temple. Before we could go further inside we also had to leave our shoes. Not allowed with shoes in the holiest part of the temple. 

The temple was an amazing view both from the outside and the inside. The whole thing is made of marble. Italian marble brought to India to get carved, and then brought to London and put together. Inside we walked around to the statues of all the different gods. Jatin told me about the different gods, but it was too hard to remember. Later on we also went to a big prayer session, held by on of the religion's great saints. It was in a really big room, more like a hall, where everyone were sitting on the floor (the oldest people had chairs). The session lasted fore about half an hour. Some of the saints went also around tossing rice and holly water at us (symbols of blessings). Even though I couldn't understand a thing of what had been spoken, and though my stiff feet were killing me, I felt kind of in peace sitting there. It was nice.     

From 9 pm to 9.30 pm the celebration finished of with a great laser and firework show. 4000 bombs made an amazing experience which just went on and on.

I am really glade I got to experience this. Thank you Jatin! 

Pictures: The Temple, The Fireworks and Some of the people I met.

"Green Men"

One thing that is not so great about London, are the way they are handling the traffic. They have both roundabouts and traffic lights. The roundabouts are okay, but one can really go crazy when it comes to their way of using traffic lights (look at the picture).

No, but really they have a lousy system. If you are going to cross the street, you usually have to do it in two operations. They have built up small Islands between each directions of the road, so you have to wait for the green man two times. On top of this the green man is not coming by a lot. You have wait for a while each time. 

 

British Museum

So on Saturday, me and Arne went to the British Museum. We didn't have any goal or any opinion of what we should see, so we just went going around looking on everything. I'll tell you, thats not a good idea. British Museum brags about having a 4 km big museum. I think, as a physicist, thats kind of a weird way to measure a display. The thing is, they are probably right, they can measure it like they want, because this place is huge. Of course it was interesting in some kind of way, but eventually we got kind of bored. It's just too much to see everything  in one day, or even in one week. Back in the days, Britain had colonies everywhere. So they have stolen a lot of stuff from these places and put it in their one personal museum. As a Londoner you don't have to travel anywhere you can just go to British Museum to experience the World.   

The picture to the left is of one of the statues from Eastern Islands. Kind of cool. Bee neat there is one picture from inside the Museum. This was just a small part of everything. So you get a understanding of how big it is. The two other pictures are of a sculpture looking like a tree. When we took a closer look we could see that it was made out of real weapons. To get rid of all the weapons lying around in some parts of Africa (after different wars), a company made an agreement with the village people. In exchange of bringing them weapons they'll give them tools, like f. exp a tractor. Then they'll get artist to use the weapons in their arts.  

Hitchcock

The Students' Union have over 180 different clubs and societies that one, as a student can join. I haven't gotten the time yet to check them out, but to day I went to the movie society with some classmates. For the small amount of 5 pound a year, they'll show you a movie a week. They have their own little movie theater (Hitchcock theater)  with good chairs. A good offer if you ask me.