I graduamated!

I notice it's been a long time since my last post. I blame it on all the visitors I've had over the past month. Ryan came out for 10 days (16-25 Oct), overlapping with my flatmate's work friend Kathleen's visit for 6 days, and then my parents trounced over 3-9 Nov. Needless to say, I'm pretty much 'visitored-out'.

Aside from all the visitors, I have great news. I graduated on the 6th Nov from the University of Westminster with a Masters degree in International Journalism- Print. Yay! It was oddly anti-climactic. Still, it felt really amazing to walk across the stage with a rolled up scroll (albeit it wasn't my actual diploma). There was no rehearsal to this graduation, but there were no real screw ups (aside from some wrong names being pronounced).

The parents were in town to see it all go down. I'm not sure I would have gone otherwise (who schedules a graduation on a Tuesday, anyways?!). But since they were in town I took a few days off work to do that and hang out with them. They had a great time, especially my father who finally made it out of the country (I don't count Canada as 'leaving the country', since no passport was required up until 2007).

Well, they're gone now, and I'm trying to get back into the swing of things. I'm kicking a rubbish cold I developed last week while they were still here, I'm back at the gym, and I'm back to my early to sleep, early to rise, schedule.

Of course there's a lot more I could talk about. I enjoy discussing the differences I discover between the English and us Americans. It's also weird how the longer I'm here, the more I develop these English differences and completely confuse my American family and friends. It's not so much calling American 'soccer', 'football' - and then having my dad go off on a spiel about the New England Patriots. No, Dad, I wasn't talking about them. I'm pretty sure I would not willing bring them up in conversation.

Yesterday one of my work colleagues got a cake pan for Christmas delivered to the office. Then her and a few others began talking about marzipan and cake. I queried (see, what American says queried?!) what the H was marzipan and what was it doing in a cake. Anyways, everyone proceeded to tell me it was the layer between the cake and the icing in most wedding cakes. Well... no American wedding cakes I've ever come across have a layer of marzipan before the frosting (and it's certainly FROSTING not ICING). Just a little diff that seems to baffle my colleagues and myself. My, we are so different, just in all the little ways we tend to take for granted.