Laurie's light travel travel tips

Most days, I don't feel like a joke. I worked nine years to get here, to my M.A. course in eighteenth-century studies at King's College London . Yet, more often than not, I am reminded that I am an oddball, a blip, a one-off on the sphere of age-appropriate academics plying their talents in these corridors. Take, for example, this bar I'm sitting in. I am taking these nachos home, in no small part because there is no one my age here to socialize with. Ironically, we were told today in class that the eighteenth century was a remarkably social one. And yet, I have been forced to be less social than I was back in my home country. Try hanging out with people young enough to be your children and you look like Woody Allen in any of his movies after 1980. Today, although I look nothing like my convenor on the programme, the museum docent told my group that she'd found our teacher and pointed to me. I am 5'9 and have brown hair. My teacher is about 5'4 with grey hair...

Moving to London hasn't gone exactly as I had planned. After struggling to raise the funds to get here, I arrived with an indeterminate thyroid nodule (indeterminate for cancer), too little money, and a rude awakening when it came to finding a cat-friendly flat. Now, a few months later, I'm on the verge of finding a flat, still haven't determined the nature of the nodule (could not perform a biopsy after last ultrasound), and don't have enough cash. I had to hang on to my apartment in DC for three months due to terms of my lease, and it broke me. So happy to be out of my lease, I rented a small storage unit in Falls Church, Va. I had grave doubts about this: I already have a long-standing unit in Conn., my principal home for nearly two decades, and I didn't want to incur additional expense. I also doubted I'd be back to the DC area for any serious reason and it seemed like a hassle to pick up stuff from storage. Nevertheless, I had too much stuff the weekend I ...

Where DO I start? It's December 31, 2017, and I'm lying in my beautiful studio here in Falls Church, Virginia watching the sun rise. I'm about to get started or rather get finishing a 5,000-word essay for my World Novel module at King's College London. I know what you're thinking, don't waste your writing hands on this blog. But how can I not? For me, 2017 was the kind of year that comes once in a lifetime. For the girl who once thought she'd never leave San Francisco , whose friends were running off backpacking in Switzerland and whose brother took enchanting photos from the Seine, it's remarkable that I've become such an adventurous spirit. When I head back to London, it'll mark my fifth trip across the Atlantic this quarter. And while I keep telling people I won't be back to America for the whole of 2018, I doubt that's true. Here are the highlights from 2017: JANUARY: I rejoined a coloring group at the library in Alice, Texa...

I'm flying back to the U.S. Sunday because I have had a lease in the States that doesn't end til January. I had also flown out there in October during Reading Week, ostensibly to pick up my cat, but I think there was a deeper reason. I think I might have been having trouble Letting Go. When I got to King's College London, excited as I was, I was daunted. As I fumbled to find my way around the city -- somehow not as I remembered it from my last trip, in 2008 -- I dealt with harsh realities regarding the pound-versus-dollar (not as favourable as I'd thought!), lack of pet-friendly properties (bloody hell!), and exhausting trips to the doctor because I arrived with a thyroid condition (and dealt with frustration at having to start everything anew). Those first few weeks, too, were fraught with trying to catch up on reading, getting to know my classmates in my core class and related course on the Great Fire through Great Exhibition (it would have been too tricky in World ...

I want to tell these two little stories before I forget. About a month ago, when I was coming back to London from the U.S., I had a smart, sociable cabbie (Black Cab). He told me about how the cyclists were making it a living nightmare for drivers in the city, and sure enough, as we maneuvered our way from Waterloo to Ealing, more than a handful of cyclists were in our lane. They were trying to ride as fast as cars, but it forced the cars behind them, i.e. us, to slow down a bit to avoid killing them. "Really annoying," I said. "I'm all for environmentalism, but it's not sensible for people on bikes to think they are in cars." Somehow, the conversation turned to other topics, like film and television, and the driver told me he had picked up Carrie Fisher "when she was in town a few weeks ago." "Shortly before she died? Wow. I know she was here to film Graham Norton." "She told me three cabs had already passed her by when I picked...

I'm a proud graduate student at King's College London in the Eighteenth-Century Studies programme. I was first admitted clear back in 2009, deferred numerous times, reapplied, was readmitted, deferred again and again and now, am finally here. So of course I am thrilled, especially on days like last Wednesday. We joined one of our convenors, Emrys Jones, from King's at the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College grounds in Greenwich. About a third of the class made it out there on a very cool day and it was worth each shivering moment out on the grounds, a World Heritage Site in western London. The soaring eighteenth-century buildings were originally constructed for the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich, which was designed by Christopher Wren, and built between 1696 and 1712. Wren also designed dozens of churches peppered throughout London, most notably the rebuilt St. Paul's Cathedral. The hospital closed in the mid 1800's and was shortly thereafter conve...

..... ----------------------------------------------------Here I am at BFI, which I believe stands for British Film Institute . I'm on my second coke and rum with lime and am too knackered to look up the "I". The lighting is dim and low here in the bar, just as one would expect between suspenseful seminars on film. I've enjoyed two so far. The first was "Trust No One: Conspiracy and Paranoia in the Age of Fake News" , which was moderated by BBC presenter Samira Ahmed who introduced two journalists who gave their analyses of why one shouldn't trust anyone they meet in film. No that's not right. Shouldn't trust some people in film or some journalists? (I know they laughed about how journalists used to be the sign of who to trust in films but no more!) The movies in the first seminar did not include anything I have seen, I am embarrassed to say, but now very much want to see ("Coma" and especially "The Parallax View (19...