Hello ! Hello! Hello!
First and foremost: I want to express how grateful I am for the comments, advice, and messages I received as a product of my last blog. Having people in your life who are willing to dispense their knowledge of the world is truly one of the biggest blessings someone can ask for. Thank you guys. It means a lot (not to mention has a considerable impact on wandering, impressionable ball of naivety like me).

Second. The whole plan to write smaller, more frequent entries has proven to be an epic fail. Time just slips through my finger tips here. It is a serious problem actually. I realized the other day I only have 3 more weeks in Brighton. My gut hurts just thinking about it. Looking at things in a terminal way, i.e. ending soon, makes me really realize how happy I am here. On an authentic level. This kind of total contentment, with friends, school, lifestyle is something rare, and it scares me to lose it. It is basically unbearable to imagine living without some of the friends I’ve made here, which is unique, because a lot of the time I find my numbness to leaving to be a practical, yet cold, norm. Of course I am usually sad to say goodbye, but it something that I’ve (to throw psychological jargon at you) become desensitized to. So these tickling nerve endings with the thought of leaving, makes the lack of time seem even less. BUT! *Buddha chime* all is ephemeral. All is changing. So I can accept my happiness here with grace and just be glad for what was. I think there is light on the horizon still to be discovered. :)

So…as far as a quick update: Halloween came and passed without much to be said. People here dress up in costumes 7 days a week to go out dancing, so having pirates, and nurses, and zombies walking about felt pretty normal. It was nice though to carve some pumpkins, decorate the halls and devirginize many of my friends to the beauties of hot apple cider with a homemade concoction I conjured up.

Guy Hawkes, however, was an entirely different story….and probably the scariest experience of my life. Actually, no, I am going to make the bold assertion and say it WAS the most frightening experience of my life. This award was previously given to an elephant festival (which on surface value might sound tame, but trust me, it was INSANE. Fireworks, crazy drunk groping men, gold dressed elephants, and millions, literally, of people) in India when I was 16. This surpassed it. I cannot, and will not try to encapsulate it is words, so I will post some pictures/videos of the trip. But essentially, we stepped off the train in Lewes, a village near Brighton, and into an anti-Pope, cross burning, WWII war zone. Parades of howling, cannon ball toting men dressed in old fashioned clothes, trampling crowds, fireworks being thrown into the trampling crowds (we actually were standing next to someone who got blinded by one, and his friend had his entire shirt burned off. Luckily my friend Inaki only lost his hearing for a little bit and the rest of us were fine), and bonfires with flames 3 stories high. I kid not.

Besides that, I feel like I should mention something to make my Mom’s blood pressure go down. Last week we went to London to see Chicago the musical with all of my girl friends for a fancy night in the big city. It was great. We took the train for 3 pounds in the morning and walked around the Museum of Natural History before the show. It’s funny, because I’ve never realized how totally nerdy I am where it comes to learning new things. Haha. I definitely deserved the amount of ridicule my friends gave me, standing awestruck inside a massive model of a human womb screaming “THIS IS SO COOL!”, or forcing everyone to sit in a conference on carnivorous plants so we could pet them at the end. It was fun though. The musical was marvelous of course, and we ended up walking around SoHo, a very alternative, artsy region in London afterward to find one of the trendiest pubs to have a cocktail. It was interesting inserting myself into some kind of make believe, ritzy Londener life for a bit to see what it was like. People live in totally different dimensions, it blows my mind. :) Afterward we ended up jamming on a street corner in a Stomp session. Beautiful.

Life is good.
I am just chugging away at school work, trying to tie up assignments in time. I have an 8,000 word essay to write (24-ish pages) before the end of the term, so it is going to be hectic. But we are currently planning a road trip to Scotland next week, where we’ll drive through the entirety of England and up to Edinburgh with Silvana, my friend from Brazil and my friend from Spain. It is going to be a nice last hurrah before the end of the term.
Anyways. Love to you all and as always, thanks for reading.