March 24: Brick Lane and Curry!

Got no sleep last night, no surprise. My roommate has decided that if she shuts the blinds at night she'll get seasonal affective disorder. So I'm just stuck with sleep deprivation till April. Woo. The worst part is, the little birds start singing every morning at 4am. Normally, I love little birds' singing. However, these guys are just belting it and the sun isn't even properly out yet at 4! They are seriously jumping the gun! Hopefully it'll get a little better on the 27th when we change our clocks. Otherwise, I'm going to be a walking zombie for the rest of my stay.

For History class, the professor took us on a walking tour of Brick Lane. Now it's a little miniature version of Bangladesh, but before it was the Jewish immigrant section. The street side smelled amazingly from all the little curry restaurants. We walked along and the professor pointed out bits of interest, like an old soup kitchen for the "Jewish Poor" and the street's main mosque. As we were standing outside the mosque and the professor was telling us how this was such a safe area, and there hadn't been any racially-related issues in many years and it was just so much better than it had been, we heard yelling. An Indian man must have bumped a cranky white English guy and the white guy freaked out. He screamed nasty racial slurs at the man, who just kept walking, yelling "Learn to speak English you ****ing pig!" and other things that were even worse. The professor looked as shocked as we were. Apparently things aren't so rosy as he'd thought.

He took us to a place called "Tyyabs," which is apparently a super-famous curry restaurant in near Aldgate Station. We were served raw veggies, fried veggies, and some sort of spicy vegetable mix in like a thin pasty crust that was very tasty for our first courses. Then, they brought out chunks of spicy chicken and lamb sausages. They also gave us a milk-shake like drink in a pitcher that was like creamy orange juice. It was perfect to dull the spice. Next was curry made from lamb, chicken, vegetables, or lentils, with rice flavored with veggies and lots of cloves (which was kind of weird). There was also naan with several different dipping sauces. It was a great meal, but wow was it spicy. I came home and started work on my physical "Travel Journal" for class, cutting up maps and tickets and such to glue into a blank book. Tonight, I think I'll skype home and whine to Mom and Dad about my mean, stupid, ugly, nasty roommate. Bed time will have to be moved waaay up to 10:30, 11 at the latest, because from now on, I wake up at 4am with the birds and the sun. Shoot.