Buon Viaggio!

I've been a terrible blogger this month and for that I've very sorry. I'm going to try and do better in November. This past month just really got away on me. School papers and presentations where due and I was have a lot of trouble with homesickness. I found myself moping in my flat for weeks at a time, when my time would have been better spent reading and writing. My days where spent much like this: wake up, go to class, get a coffee, wander around Kensington or catch the tube out to Camden Town, SoHo or Piccadilly Square and wander around there, coming home around 7 or so, then I would reddit my little brains out or otherwise waste time and not read which is very important in grad school. Since I was so miserable I couldn't work up enough give-a-shit to blog, much less act like everything was sunshine and rainbows. Because honestly, who wants to read a depressing blog? No one! And I don't want to make everyone back home worry about me, just not my style.

I'm hoping that I've learned something about myself and I can better deal with homesickness and come back from fall "reading" week and really focus on school. I'm headed to Italy for reading week.(I think the name 'reading week' is wishful thinking. I might get some reading done, but I'm going to be in Italy. Which means my focus will be everywhere but school.) The first three days I'll be in Venice with most of the people in my MA program and one of our professors, Charlotte, then after we're done at La Biennale, Kate, Katie and I are off to see some more of Italy. Since we'll already be there, so we decided to see Rome and the Vatican City, Pompeii and Naples. Then at the end of the week we fly back to London. We're taking trains through Italy, which should be a great way to see the country side. I'm so excited! I've got my camera packed and my iphone too, so there will be pictures. I'll try not to delay sharing them as much as possible. 

Have an incredible week and be kind to yourselves. ♥monica 

Guilty Pleasures

We all have them. I took a break from cleaning my flat and thought I'd type up a quick post sharing a few of my guilty pleasures. Here they are:

source

I really love Blink 182's last album. I didn't listen to it immediately when it came out, but a friend of mine got me to listen to it and it just sounds soooo good! I don't know that much about audio, just what I've learned from boyfriends, but this is a damn good sounding album. It sounds so analog and that is a beautiful thing!  

source

Weheartit is an image sharing web site that you can have your own 'heart' and you store images that you like, from their feed or you can add images from other webpages. Unfortunately the images are exactly cited, so that isn't so cool, but it's great to just keep a heart to look through and get inspiration from. I have a link to my heart if you guys want to click the link in the link love column and see what I've found that I like.

Since I first tried digestive biscuits I really loved them, but I found Hobnobs at Sainsbury a few days ago and I just freaking love these things. They're oat biscuits dipped in dark chocolate and they are perfect dunked in chamomile or peppermint tea! I can't get enough of them. 

Groupon

I get daily emails from Groupon and the give you details and day long windows to cash in on highly discounted items. I just made my first purchase this evening. I bought a 1 hour aromatherapy facial, 30 minute choice massage and a manicure at Hair Divine Beauty, winners of 2007 and 2008 Customer Excellence awards for, (get this!) £33! I saved £98! I can't wait to tell you guys how it goes. : )

source

I've been doing my best to not be a tourist because I'm living in London, but I'm just dying to go on a Double-Decker Bus Tour. It's so quintessentially London, that I feel like I have to! It's such an iconic thing that I can't not do it and I'm not the only one who wants to, so hopefully one day soon I'll do all the touristy stuff and get it out of my system.

My last guilty pleasure that I'm sharing is imgur. Imgur is essentially the image page of Reddit. I like to just browse though for good laughs and it's a lot less dense that Reddit and not nearly as scary as 4Chan. If you don't know what 4chan is, I recommend not finding out. Imgur is also an extremely effective way to entertain yourself if you're an insomniac and to procrastinate that big paper or presentation that you should probably be working on.

Well now that you know a few of my guilty pleasures I plan to share some of my not-so-guilty pleasures in about a week. In the meantime I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and that the coming week is fantastic for you! I have my first assignment due wednesday and I'm in very nervous about it. It's from the class that my program director teaches, so it's very important to me to turn in something really great. I just need to focus on it and do my best. : )
Take care and be kind to yourselves. ♥monica