Some Updates on London Life

This post will be relatively brief but I wanted to touch on London since that is primarily where I'm based. In the midst of the events described here I also ventured to Dover and Canterbury last weekend but those experiences will be recounted separately. I also will be visiting Stourhead, its gardens, Bath, and Stonehenge this weekend, which will be a post in itself, as well.

I have been doing a lot of getting into my schedule recently. A lot of my time has been spent figuring out what to buy and where to buy it for food, taking care of things like resoling shoes and dry cleaning some clothes that got messed up during my Dover/Canterbury excursion. I've also been learning to balance my classes, the coursework they have, which is by no means crushing, my internship, and other activities exploring London.

Recently, exploring London has mostly involved going to 3 operas and also going to theatre shows for class. A link on this blog can be found to my review of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, and reviews of Strauss' Elektra and Beethoven's Fidelio should be coming soon. It was really interesting to see the difference between the Royal Opera House, which is gorgeous but slightly smaller and definitely simpler, and London Coliseum, where the English National Opera performs, which is very over the top but quite beautiful in its decor and slightly larger. In the same vein I finally had my first voice lesson, definitely a different direction but one that I think will be beneficial. Now it's just a question of finding space and time to practice and scheduling more sessions with the teacher.


For class I have had the opportunity to see both Tim Rice's new musical From Here to Eternity, based on the 1951 book on which the famous and acclaimed 1953 film is based, and Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. I will not go into great detail reviewing them as I will post the reviews I have written for class. Tim Rice's musical, however, was pretty much terrible with the exception of the choreography. This was disappointing for me as I love his collaborations with Elton John. It was very exciting, though, that both he and Andrew Lloyd Webber were sitting about five rows in front of me, off to the side. As I am a huge Phantom of the Opera fan and that was my gateway into the classical music and operatic world (which is, of course, a very different world from Phantom of the Opera), it was like seeing some kind of initial muse in the flesh. Our entire group was quite giddy about this. The Brecht play had some elements to it that I did not like but all in all was quite superb. The play, set in Chicago and Cicero, is a very thinly veiled allusion, involving gangsters and vegetable vendors, to the rise of Hitler. This production went particularly far in the Hitler connections, making the allusion very obvious, despite not showing signposts that link specific events in the play to events in Hitler's rise. What was excellent, however, was Henry Goodman's portrayal of Ui, which changed constantly throughout the show to demonstrate the slow development and rise of the character. What was remarkable, and almost too deep, was how I started out laughing and almost not "into" the play and then the end brought home how I had been played and how serious and horrible the events were. It really brought into perspective how Hitler could've risen in real life.

Learning about my internship has been a huge part of my time here, too, despite not being there that often. Alva Group offers reputation consulting to companies to help them understand their reputational risk and what the public, the media, and officials think of them. They use software to draw down a mass of data from all over the web that includes the whole gamut of media sources. The software also assigns various values and makes guesses about the information. Coders then go through this data manually. This is what I have been doing. The data is in a spreadsheet with thousands of rows. I check each headline/article text and determine whether the sentiment is positive or negative, come up with names for the major issues, and sort the information as pertaining to one of several "drivers," such as "corporate leadership," "financial performance," or "products, services, and execution." Once coders have done their work not only on the client but the client's competitors, analysts can then use the information, combined with the weighting and other values provided by the software, to draft reports that incorporate prose descriptions, graphs, and charts that detail the major issues, risks, successes, etc. for the timeframe and compare them against competitors. It's definitely painstaking, repetitive work. But that's expected in this kind of situation and it really is work that's vital to the company's success and efficiency. It is the sort of work where I must do my job well or the rest of the process and the client-facing product will not be of high quality. Thus I am excited to learn about the process and see the impressive results of the work I'm doing and the company for which I'm working.

That's recent events, more or less. I'll be working up the Dover & Canterbury photos soon and hopefully will have that up along with the other opera reviews. In the meantime, off to Stourhead, Bath, and Stonehenge!

Oh yeah, and I think I might've found the largest Aveda in the world...