Hey Everyone! My name is Ethan, and I am a rising Junior. I plan on majoring in CS and minoring in Cognitive Science, and I love running, climbing, and being outdoors!

This last weekend was our last weekend in London, and we had relative freedom to explore the city for most of the weekend. The only scheduled activity that we had was a play on Saturday night, which was the Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing at the Lyttelton theater. We met as a group at the theater (which I always think is more fun than trying to all pack into the same subway train), which also gave us a nice opportunity to walk across the Waterloo bridge. It was pretty crowded, as it was around 7 pm, and we got to see several street (or should I say bridge?) performers during the walk. One of the most interesting things about this was watching the performers doing the ball in the cup game, where they move cups upside down with a ball underneath one, and people have to guess which one it was under while betting money on their choice. My roommate Alistair and I stopped to watch for a few minutes and saw as they planted people in the crowd to bet and win large sums of money in order to persuade others to play, and it was fun to try to catch all the other tactics they were using to try to make money.

Once we got to the theater, we waited outside for a few minutes among food trucks and outdoor bars, before going into the large theater to watch the play. Admittedly, I was a little skeptical about it at first, since I sometimes find Shakespeare plays a little boring and hard to understand, but the play definitely exceeded my expectations by a lot. The costumes and the set were beautifully designed, and the actors all fit their roles perfectly; what I liked the most is that they were able to make the play very funny, to the point where the audience was frequently laughing out loud. One of the main actors (who I thought reminded me of a slightly older and less attractive Ryan Reynolds, but nobody else really agreed with my comparison) had some amazing scenes where he ended up getting actual ice cream and sprinkles poured over his head by another character, and he fit the role of the ditzy romantic cynic who ends up falling in love perfectly. 

After the play, we walked back over the bridge, which was even more beautiful at night, and took the tube back to the hotel.

Then, in a truly British fashion, five or six of us met up to watch the new episode of Love Island that was released that night together, though due to our time in England, the British accents of all of the characters were starting to sound pretty normal to us. The next day I got up later on in the morning and went out to the local Pret to get a coffee and a hot sandwich, and started working on the problem set for the cryptology class we are taking with my assigned partner. After a couple of hours, I went back to the hotel to change and go out on a run. Our hotel is conveniently only about half a mile away from Hyde Park, which is one of the biggest parks in London and I had been taking the opportunity to explore the entire park via running. For the first 5 miles, my roommate joined me, and I was able to show him some of the nice paths and trails that I had found, and it was nice to have some company. After that, since it was my long run day, I took the opportunity to pretty much loop around all of the main trails in the park and was able to connect all the paths that I had previously explored. It was actually quite hot (about 86 degrees out), so a lot of the city was out in the park picnicking, playing soccer, volleyball, frisbee, or just going out on a walk. Luckily, there were enough trails that it wasn’t too hard to get off the beaten path and not have to worry about getting around all of the people. 

I got to bed a little earlier that night after getting dinner at a local Indian restaurant, so that I would be able to get up for an early morning class the next day. The next morning, I got breakfast at the hotel like I usually did, and then rushed over to class in one of the hotel conference centers. That Monday morning we had both our cryptology and history of computing class, though we mainly focused on the history section. I was excited for that afternoon when we would be visiting the science museum!