London - Summer 2007

My second Monday morning at work started with me doing actual things. I created an ad for the newspaper and learned how to use HTML. I designed the Web site for Carousel Children's centre, which is a day care centre that 4Children own, the first of nine planned. There was a basic template, but it took forever because HTML is so tedious. It took all afternoon to design about seven pages, but then little things kept popping up and I would go back through and rework the whole page. It doesn't sound like fun, but it was satisfying to have work to show and it required a lot of attention.

That night after our Monday meeting, all of us plus the Dean of some university went to Brick Lane in East London and ate Indian food at Standard Balti House, Bangladeshi Cuisine. I was nervous because it is not a great area, even though there was 23 of us, and I have always heard how spicy Indian food is. But inside the restaurant it was very nice and first they brought out poppadoms, which are round and you break them up like tortilla chips and dip them in different sauces. Our next course was these fried onion balls that normally I would never eat, but they tasted like onion rings and were even better with the sauce. I am finally growing up and trying new food! Then we had Chicken Korma and this lamb dish served over rice with the best bread ever to go with it. None of it was very spicy, but I didn't like the texture of the chicken. However, the lamb was very good and I don't believe I have had it before. We got to the restaurant around 8:30 and didn't leave until about 10 because there were so many of us.

Tuesday at work I finished the Web site, then sorted through Carousel’s policies and procedures in order to write the content for the page. I then uploaded it to the Web site and fixed some more minor problems to other pages and loaded pictures. After work I came home and I am assuming I cooked something, but can’t really remember because I should have kept up with my blog better! But, that Friday we had out internship journals due then Monday morning our personal journal was due, so hopefully I was journaling. Most likely I was reading and making random trips to the grocery store just to walk around and hang out.

Wednesday at work I started another on-going project of sorting through the publications archives. They were horribly unorganised, with stacks and stacks of publications dating back to 1993. I spent a while just devising a system and then waded though boxes that had exploded all around me. That afternoon I also started another week-and-a-half project on the Make Space Youth Review. It is a 100-page document that gives the result of a year-long study of 16,000 British teenagers and their live. Mainly it says that if the government gives them a place to hang out they will not hang out on street corners.

People here depend on the government for everything. I would not expect to have a centre to hang out at home, I would stay at home with my friends and expect to find my own entertainment or have my parents provide it, but here if the government doesn't have an after-school program they freak out. So, the report has all these facts and figures in it that were not sourced properly and so, to me, the whole thing is pretty much plagiarised. My job was to go through the bad job they did in the footnoting and try to make it consistent and correct. The interns that were supposed to be doing it didn't use a consistent style, and where we said a situation needed to be so we aren’t liars, they made up a source.

Over all it ended being a solid week of correcting footnotes, proof-reading and more copyediting. So I went home on Wednesday with a headache from staring at the computer and more chapters to look forward to on Thursday. I also did more laundry in preparation for my weekend in Dublin and packed my backpack full of stuff. Thursday I covered chapters 4-9 and also learned how to lay it out as the graphic designer is going to Spain to run with the bulls for a week. I then took off work about an hour early to make sure I got a chance to change money before we left. Next, a 10-hour train-bus-ferry trip to Dublin, Ireland!