On Friday I went to Singin' in the Rain in the West End.  I ended up on the front row which was pretty cool. Before the play started, everyone around me started putting on ponchos, which they had been given when they walked in. I went to get one for myself and the two little British ladies sitting next to me.  You have to imagine a nice theater with a full house and the entire front row wearing plastic ponchos. It was a great image. The play was fantastic. But the best part was the big number where the main character dances in the rain. He kept kicking water at the audience who shrieked and laughed. I've never seen people so excited to get water kicked at them. The ladies next to me were so grateful for their ponchos they fed me sweets for the whole play.

Pretty great advertizing. When you walk down the street, the bright colors really catch your eye.

I also went to Temple Church which was built around 1185 by the Knight Templar as their headquarters in London.  It's been a large part of London ever since. The Inner Temple, and Middle Temple are part of a large legal system where lawyers have been gathering for nearly 1000 years. It was also in both the book and movie The Da Vinci Code. If you watch the film you'll see Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen standing in the same place I was taking pictures. It was heavily bombed in WWII, but they've done a great job restoring it.

 The round part was designed after the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

Two of the effigies of Knights. They were badly damaged in the war, but casts had been made and placed in the Victoria Albert museum before the war, so they are on display by the originals.

The famous Templar symbol: two knight on horseback. It showed their vow of poverty on taking their vows in the order. Their original name was: The poor fellow soldiers of Christ and of Solomon's Temple. It was understandably shortened to the Knights Templar.

People often ask me why I chose to study Medieval History in London. I'll tell you why: London has a ton of resources within a 2 mile radius like archives and libraries that contain the things that you normally just read about. We get to look at the actual documents and places where things happened. For example our first field trip is in a couple weeks. We're going to Normandy to see the Bayeux Tapestry and other cool places. That's why I'm here. Where else can you go on a field trip to France?

A little about my classes:
1. Palaeography: is basically learning how to read old scripts. Some are easier than others, but I like to think that my years as a teacher deciphering handwriting has prepared me. It also covers how books and manuscripts were made. It sounds a little boring, but it's actually my favorite class.

2. Latin: a more difficult language than I thought. There are 4 ways to conjugate a verb and each way has six different conjugations. That's just for one tense. Then you get into past tense imperfect verses past tense perfect and there's a total or 24 different ways to conjugate the verbs. I'm getting the hang of it, but have to study every day.

3. Materials and Methods: I have no idea what this class is about. Each week there is a different teacher and a different topic. So far we have talked about the Fine Rolls of Henry III (King John's son). They are rolls which document the money that people promised to pay the king. We've also talked about why archaeologists and historians don't like each other. Needless to say I don't much care for the class. This week we are talking about letters, which could be interesting. Then again it might not.

I thought I would show a picture of my first homework assignment for my palaeography class. After only one class, we got a packet of six documents to transcribe. Here are two of them.

Can you read them? Neither can I. The funny thing is my Latin class is right after the palaeography class.

This is one of Leonardo da Vinci's personal notebooks. The writing is his own. He used to write backwards so you could only read his notes if you held them up to a mirror and read the reflection.

I have only had one week of class, but so far they are going well.  The teachers here love to assign a lot of reading.