Working hard at hardly working

An eventful couple of days. By my standards, at least.

First, Thursday morning, I was a teensy bit late for class (like, one minute), so I quickly walked in and found a seat. Almost immediately after settling in, I noticed the lecturer. Ohmygoshsogorgeous!!! The guy was seriously a dreamier version of Peter Petrelli from Heroes. I'm ashamed to admit that I actually had some trouble concentrating throughout the lecture. Normally, my eyes transfer between three different places: the slides onscreen, my notes, and the lecturer. In this lecture (on diarrheal diseases again), everytime my eyes focused on the lecturer, I lost all ability to concentrate. Wow, he is pretty, would course through my brain repeatedly. I wonder if he notices me over here. Maybe I should ask an insightful question. He's gorgeous, etc.

There are a little over 40 people in our class, and only 4 of them are men, so I knew someone would agree with me about his extreme hotness. When he was done, we took a break. A group of 6 of us made it all the way to the elevators before someone said, "Man, he was fit!" ("Fit" in England means "hot.") Before long, it was 20 of us gushing about him. But then someone had to ruin it. "Did you notice the wedding ring?" Sigh...all the gorgeous ones are taken, even when they study poop for a living.

Yesterday evening was the school's first pubquiz of the year. Four of us from my course formed a group, and we were pretty much awful, but we didn't get last place! Yay, us! It was jolly good fun! Afterwards, this guy from a different course was talking to us, and somehow we got on the subject of age. Scottish Laura is the same age as me, and she was saying how she felt kind of old. The guy we were talking to is studying to be a doctor (actually, he's the guy I was talking to a couple weeks ago about narcolepsy). At first, he said, "You're not old." But then he sort of changed his mind, and made some comment about how, unlike men, who have forever and ever to reproduce, women really need to stay on the ball and not let too much time pass, because they really shouldn't have kids past 40. Obviously, that did not sit well with us women, and we raised quite a stink. But he kept defending himself, saying it was his job as a doctor to warn us about significant health problems. Um, being 26 and not having children is now a significant health risk? He was such a moron. The debate went on for at least 45 minutes, I'm not even exaggerating. Laura and I would not let him get away with it. Finally, she told him he needed to apologize, which he did, then she told him he needed to buy us drinks. He wouldn't buy me a drink, though, because I wanted something other than beer, but whatever. The three of us stayed around for a while longer, but every topic of conversation devolved into an absurd debate. It was pretty funny.

Afterward, Laura and I went to a "chip shop" near our hall, but the fries were awful. I thought England was famous for their "chips," but I haven't had a good fry since I got here! What's up with that? Izzi, if you're reading, where can I get some decent chips?

Today being Friday, we all went to a bar after class. Well, when I say "all," I mean about 25% of us. I talked two classmates into going to the Tower of London with me tomorrow, but I feel a bit bad, because it's really freaking expensive! 14 pounds for students! What a ripoff. That's exactly why Jody and I didn't go in when we were here (though we did go into the gift shop). Ridiculous. Still, I have to go sometime, so even if no one will go with me, I'm going tomorrow. That's that.

At the second bar of the night, I was talking to some friends from another course, and they invited me to Ireland for a week during spring break and Amsterdam for four days during reading week. Sweet! I'm so there! Now I just have to figure out what to do during Christmas...