Sunday, June 12, 2022

Recap

 Adventure is out there...



Each time something cool happens, I try to take note of it on my way to or from my experience. I find my solace on a bus, train, flight, river, or underground. This recap blog is a lazy composition of a few of my excerpts. Though it's hard to keep track of all this in a consistent and careful way, at least something is better than nothing.



5.27.2022

Trip to Cambridge, England. Saw the school.


5.28.2022

Trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. Had a cup of coffee, found a hostel, made friends in a pub, climbed many hills, cheered on marathon runners, got free drinks from Marta.



6.03.2022

Sooooo...I was on my way to afternoon tea, when I decided tea is not quite enough for lunch so I’ll get myself a pizza beforehand. When I got my pizza, I opened it up to find it was shaped as a heart. How sweet, I thought! They make heart shaped pizzas in England. Then, when I looked at the top part of the box I saw that THE ITALIAN BOY WHO MADE MY PIZZA HAD WRITTEN HIS NUMBER, NAME AND A HEART ON THE BOX. He made the heart-shaped pizza for me. Ohhh. The phone number he left was from Italy and I’m still hesitant to message.



After the pizza, I had my nice afternoon tea date with the girlies, and proceeded to spill more tea than I drank. If you know what I mean.


6.04.2022

Experienced a Mama Mia musical. SO CUTE. I am saying farewell to the session one students as they fly home tonight.


6.07.2022

I went to the Tate Modern Museum to see the 2001 Babel Sculpture, which I loved, but I took an interest in the Monument for the Living. The sculpture “Monument for the Living '' was made by Marwan Rechmaoui in the year 2000. This piece represents diversity as the intersecting of different identities and characteristics. The sculpture is made of concrete and wood, replicating the Burj El Murr building in Beirut, Lebanon. Burj El Murr was built in 1974 with the intention of becoming a large office building. The ravages of war left the building unfinished and the office plans were not carried out. During the Lebanese Civil War, it was instead used as a sniper post. The entire evolution of this eerily resilient building greatly represents its environment and people. 


First built to hold office space by a wealthy family in a time of plenty, then filled with ammunition and dead bodies, and later deemed useless and obstructing in the post-war era. Now that the unfinished building can’t be knocked down, it serves as a memorial for the unresolved conflict of the civil war. To me, the building is a great representation of the “elephant in the room”. It's a looming reminder of change that the city is unable to be rid of. 

This historic structure represents many things for the country. Money, strength, neglect, abandonment, unresolved conflict, and death. The prominent building is a display of wealth because it had grandiose expectations. There were constant renovations and a lot of money put into it in order to become a strong office building. Then of course, the war left it neglected and abandoned. The war also left a lingering unresolved conflict and death. In “Monument for the Living”, we see that diversity may be a vast range of experiences all happening at once. 


This was interesting to me as a viewer because I’ve never considered the relevance or depth a sculpture of a building could hold. When I first saw the tower, I noticed that it was tall, sturdy, and jarring. I scoped it out all around and couldn’t think of the beauty or meaning in a tall concrete building. Before I read the description, I didn’t understand it at all. The artist, Marwan Rechmaoui, is from Beirut, and chooses to express Lebanese history through his work. The Lebanese civil war and its interconnected complexities is far out of my world knowledge, yet Beirut’s story traveled all the way to London, and I met in the middle from Hawai’i. That is a diverse interaction in itself.


6.09.2022

Heads up, I wrote this on a train in present-tense speech. Today I am traveling along the sea-to-sea rail service from West Ham station to south end central, to see the sea. I am taking a round trip train for about 1.5 hours total. The ticket was £17.50. We are passing tall green foliage that sometimes let up to reveal a town or forest. The lavender fields have opened up at last, and I want to be in the country as much as possible to explore the fruiting terrain. The closer I get to Essex, the wider the fields get, as the blue sky opens up to accommodate fluffy white clouds. I first catch sight of the ocean at Chalkwell. To my right are beautiful white beach homes surrounded by trees. To my left, flat and glittering cold water. Its good to see the area where I’ll attend school in the Autumn.


6.12.2022

Traveled far south to the lavender fields today. Got lost, had fun. Loved every moment. I hope to buy a film camera soon and capture all this on 35mm so I can keep my phone turned off.


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