Day Fourteen:

I have spent the past 45 minutes sitting in a circle in our bedroom with about 10 girls attempting in vain to understand what the heck Hobbes was trying to communicate in the Leviathan. My brain hurts. And I don't think I learned a thing. Really. It's like jibberish. You can read a whole paragraph and realize its all been one long sentence weaving back and forth and around with fancy words and lots of commas and no decisive meanings. YUCK! We finally closed our books and gave up.

But, today was not all Hobbes. No, slightly better... it was all rain. When I say it rained all day, I mean, it rained ALL DAY. After classes I was going to check off another walk, but we decided that would be 3+ hours getting lost in the rain, so instead we just went to see the body of a smart dead man at the University College of London.

A man named Jeremy Bentham was one of the biggest supporters and inspirations for the college, which differed from Cambridge and Oxford as it accepted all races and religions and eventually was the first to accept women. He came up with the concept of Utalitarianism - achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In his will, he demanded that his body be left for scientific uses - to be dissected by the Webb Street School of Anatomy. He then went on to create this idea of an auto-icon, or a statue of himself. His bones are preserved, wrapped with something, and dressed in his clothing. He wanted his head preserved and placed on top, but the preservation didn't work so well, plus students kept trying to steal the head and actually succeeded once. Now there's a wax head instead.



After dinner we wanted to go to this cool venue... a free dance performance by contemporary dancers, choreographed by one of London's best, on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral. It was raining, but we decided to go anyway. We had some trouble getting there and so were late anyway, but found out it had been canceled anyway due to rain. No worries - I'll try to make it to the one tomorrow afternoon.

Annie, Cami and Mallory feeling oh so sad that we couldn't see the performance.

The good news is that we just so happened down "Love Lane" on our adventure to find St. Paul's. How sweet.

We rounded off our disappointing, wet adventure with FINALLY finding some good dessert in London... The Waffle House. We will be back there very soon. It was Mallory's birthday, so this was our way of celebrating with her. We enjoyed ourselves so much! I got caramel cheesecake (shocker). Cheesecake always makes me happy.

Finally, Dessert! And shelter from the rain! Can you just feel the joy?

Thanks for having a birthday Mallory so we could have an excuse to eat this wonderful cake!

You're jealous. Admit it.

Well, the rest of the night has been painful homework. No need to comment any more on that. Hopefully I can get ahead on some homework this weekend and make next week a bit easier... we'll see.