Complain and You Shall Recieve

Okay, I was a little harsh on my internship in the last post. Yes, it was boring the first week, yes, I was basically on the same rung as a 16 year-old high school student, and yes I had horrible visions of an adult life of monotony after graduation. But things are getting enjoyable. All it took was a little bitching and the universe changed its ways. Let's hope I haven't just re-jinxed myself.

Yesterday I helped out with a film shoot for a BBC documentary on Raphael's tapestries. Raphael was made a series of huge paintings for the Vatican, all depicting biblical stories of St. Peter and St. Paul. The reason the cartoons were made was so the picture could be transferred to a tapestry. In the latest issue of V&A Magazine, Jan Dally wrote, "The cartoons (original paintings) were cut into strips about a meter wide and placed under the warp threads as a template for the weavers." How insane is that? One of the tapestries is placed in the museum directly across the cartoon it came from. In about three months, four tapestries will be shipped from the Vatican to the V&A and be reunited with one another for the first time in 500 years.

To even be a small part of producing this documentary was surreal. I've always dreamed of being on set during a shoot and Cultureshock gave me that opportunity. The director even asked me to be in some of the stills! Five seconds of fame well spent.

In addition to helping people document a historic event, I'm really enjoying my time in the office. The staff is very supportive, and my tasks are slowly evolving and expanding. I'm still doing the remedial stuff, but I've tasted productivity while doing it. If I were being paid it'd be near perfect (total perfection would require my friends and family to move here too) as perfect as an internship can be that is. After I left work today, my workaholic mind imagined them offering me a job. Then I thought of how people in the UK hate the American students coming over here and taking their sweet internships away.

England apparently is having trouble with employment, kind of like the US. Is that a, wow-how-long-have-you-been-under-that-rock, kind of thing to say? News is hard to keep up on when your main concerns involve your hair, clothes and different ways to make a ham sandwich. Vanity, thy name is Samuel.

I'm starting to catch an England bug. It's worrisome; I don't get allergies, gay men and women are allowed to marry, no one gets harassed for not wearing what everyone else is wearing, football is football, there's food from seven different countries on every street, and most importantly, the Imax theatres here are showing Twilight next weekend. Damnit family, stop being terrific. ;)

People aren't the same wherever you go. Even the English, who speak the same language as me, are significantly different from the people back home. This didn't shine through at first, but after a little time the differences became clear.

I have also decided that Australian accents are a combination of American and English ones. I came upon this revelation after I used one when answering the phone today at work. It was magical. England is moderately sized and close to many other countries; this means many accents, which means that I can get away with choosing a different one every time I talk to a stranger that will probably never see me again after this summer. This is extremely thrilling.

G'day and G'noight,

Sam