Happy One Month Aniversary London!

Ah, another Yom Kippur come and gone. Another stomachache from eating my body weight in pasta (#whitewhine.com)

To explain this "meeting" I had Thursday night, I had been contacted by a Londoner on Shabbat.com (which also conveniently has a shidduch section) offering to show me around London. I agreed, even though I don't usually meet strangers from the internet. I figured that any of the people I met in the past 29 days have been total strangers so what's one more?

He was a lovely boy, but more importantly, I've found out that I come off as a total psychopath upon meeting new people.
It had been going well enough, getting Starbucks, walking around Golders Green, checking out the local youths smoking cigarettes off the highways, the usual. I got a text from my roommate, who I had asked to call to make sure I hadn't been killed. But I hadn't so I wrote back that I was very much still alive.

Him: Is everything OK?
Me: Yeah, sorry, I had put my friend on serial killer watch.
Him: For me?? I wouldn't kill you! I'm English! I'd just give you some tea!
Me: Actually that's why they never caught Jack the Ripper, because they assumed that no British man would kill other Brits, so they only focused on foreigners.

Once I started in on Jack, that led to my visit to the Clink Prison museum, then to the creepy exhibits at the museum of Childhood, then inevitably to my addiction to Criminal Minds. I think I even pointed out "So even if you were a serial killer, you'd have picked the wrong girl to take out.." Normal ("Have you considered visiting, I dunno, a history or science museum?")

Anyways, making suspicious friends aside, I've been busy with Autobiography class (a whole post in itself), breaking more things at work and Yom Kippur. I went to the Great Synagogue, off Euston. It was OK...they had a choir which was nice at first, but got old quicky when it took them 9 hours to do ashrei. Have your choir every day of the year but not when you're unnecessarily stretching out this long enough davening. But that might have been the lack of food talking.

Hmm...that took less room than I thought so I'll just touch on this Autobiography class. There are about 8 people in my class, one African, one Irish dude, two Brits, one American (me) and the rest didn't talk so I don't know where they're from. And the teacher's from New Zealand. I like this whole multi-national classes thing they have going on here.

We talked about autobiographies and memoirs for a bit, which is totally my deal since all I seem to read are memoirs (except I'm actually in the middle of Super Freakonomics right now which is pretty awesome too). I was thinking hey, this creative writing class is going to be pretty super.
Until my kiwi teacher told us to write down the 10 best moments of our lives along with the 10 worst...then to pick one memory, write about it and read it out loud...then I realized, uh oh, this class might be a little personal.

Well duh, Aviva you're in a class about YOU. So this might get interesting as well....