The trip to England for my Dickens-Hardy class was really fun. We spent our first week in London. My roommate for the trip and I went to the British Museum, Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, and a lot of other places during our free time. The class did a lot of walking tours in London that were Charles Dickens-themed: we got to see the different places that Dickens lived and worked, as well as the places he wrote about. We also spent time wandering around London---we had unlimited-ride tube passes, so even if we got really far away from the hotel, we could get back without walking too far.
We then spent a week in Dorset learning more about Thomas Hardy. We saw the cottage where he grew up, the house in which he lived later in his life, and quite a lot of the landscape that he wrote about. We also got rained on quite a bit, which was part of the fun.
It's very strange being back in California. It's light out for much longer than it was in England, it's always above freezing, temperatures are in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius, it's not raining nearly as much, and I can't spend an hour walking in any direction and then catch a once-every-3-minutes tube to get back home.
This semester is looking to be substantially less brutal than last semester. My hardest two classes this time around are probably CS70 (a data structures / programming design course) and Algorithms. Algorithms is very fun so far---the professor is quite clearly excited about the course material, and his enthusiasm is contagious. My Economics class is looking like it won't be too hard. The Core Math course I'm in right now is enjoyable---it's another class taught by an enthusiastic professor. (I'll be changing courses at the half-semester mark to a new Core Math class with a new teacher.) I haven't been in Biology class more than once thusfar, and therefore can't really make a judgment on the course just yet.
I'm hoping this semester I'll have more free time than last semester, which I spent most of either doing homework or sleeping (but mostly doing homework). We'll see how that goes.
In closing, here is a picture of my tour group at Stonehenge.
