Thursday and Friday of this week mainly consisted of classes, and the realisation that I only have a week left in London. I love this place so much. Not even the people, or the culture, but the place itself. The cafes and shops and gardens and river. I'm so, so sad that I'll be here for only one more week.
After the midterm on Wednesday, my Financial Markets class switched professors: our dear and very fabulous Dr Pascal Frantz left for Dr Christian Julliard as planned, who is teaching the second half of the course. This next week (and the final exam) will be more theoretical and less quantitative than the first half of the course and the midterm, and I'm so grateful. I haven't gotten my midterm grade back yet, but it was purely memorising formulas and solving equations, which I
really don't enjoy. I'd prefer to explain these theories in words (rather than formulas) any day. Dr Julliard is young and energetic, and should be easy to learn from.
After class on Thursday, I went to Waterstones Piccadilly to read. I didn't have much homework to do, so I made progress in
A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in the
A Song of Ice and Fire series. I need to finish the series before I start my fall semester, or I'll have to wait until I graduate to finish it! And then immediately after class on Friday, my friend Fidan and I returned to our residence to get ready for the long-awaited Riverboat Disco. This very popular event is hosted by LSE each summer session and is open exclusively to students, and even so, only a portion of the students are able to get tickets (the boat accommodates 600, and there are thousands of LSE summer students). After the tickets had all been sold, some of the unlucky students were purchasing them from other students for ten times their face value. My friends and I (after a lot of stress) managed to get tickets on the first day they were sold.
The riverboat (shown above!) set off from Tower Pier, which is right next to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, and across the river from the Shard. The boat was quite lovely, with a grand staircase and two bars, dining rooms, and a dance floor. My friend and I spent most of the evening on the prow, watching the Thames pass by. Tower Bridge was opened for our boat to pass under, and the cruise went down the river to the east, past Greenwich, all the way to the O2 arena. Unfortunately, it didn't head west, to pass the London Eye and Houses of Parliament, which would have been really amazing to see at night: but it was too large to go under London Bridge and the others bridges in central London.
Many of the other students went off to various clubs in London after the cruise ended at midnight, but my friend and I returned to High Holborn to have a midnight snack and sleep. We plan on doing some more sightseeing on our last weekend here in London!
