back to work...

Today I ran my first workshop at the museum, it was our "Slavery; interpreting the evidence" workshop where students handle different artifacts like chains, manillas, african art, whips, sugar, tobacco, and other objects associated with the slave trade and investigate, through those objects, the experiences of slaves and the story of the slave trade.

It was really nerve racking, but I am really happy to have done the workshop, as it was the one that I was most interested in running, but hadn't had a chance to try it out since observing other deliver it in the past few weeks. There are a number of the same workshop next week, so hopefully I'll get to jump right in and deliver a few more.

Things are going really well at work and my boss is encouraging me to do some work with the archives department and their digital collection project - I'm going to meet with the head of that department next week, and work out some sort of project which I can take on in that department for about 8 days spaced out over the next few months (depending on the project might be one day a week, or might be in a string). I'm really excited because I've done a bit of work like that before, and I think it will be a good opportunity to see what goes on in another department of the museum...

I'm really happy with what I'm doing, and feel really lucky that my boss is so interested in what I want to get out of the internship that she is letting me work in another department - It seems that in the past and in other internships, the interns haven't had as much say in what they want to work on and what they want to do.

Today I got to do a bit of training in the radio room in the museum as well! The museum broadcasts to a local radio station a few months a year, out of a radio studio that was built in the galleries - we also use in workshops to record debates or improvisational drama activites with students when teaching certain subjects. Today we were editing the "ums" and giggles out of a debate that some school children had in the studio last week about settlers and natives trading tobacco... I'm really excited to learn more about using it and think that training in a real radio and sound studio could come in really handy for a lot of things that I'm interested in.

All in all it feels good to be back to work after my three day holiday... although I will be off for a couple days next week while my mom visits on her way back from Bangladesh.

I think that's about all I can think of. I am making a cake tonight for Liz's birthday at work - about to go get started.

- Chris

random british fact #4 - well this is more of an occurence than a fact, but I thought it was funny so I figured I'd include it here. Today while I was walking home from work I noticed that in the city centre there were unusually long queues for the buses - it seemed that people in line were looking a bit restless and confused as well so it seemed to me that something was terribly wrong. When I walked up around Debenham's (a department store), I realized that all of St. James circle was in a bit of a traffic jam - there might have been an accident but I couldn't quite make out the source of the problem - traffic had stopped on one of the streets leaving the circle, and everything was backed up. What was most remarkable about the traffic, was that just around the corner from the impatient queues of people, were 11 buses which were also all lined up single file in their own queue as they waited to enter the bus lane to come pick up the hoards of people.
11 double decker buses waiting in an orderly queue so that they can in turn pick up the hundreds of people who were also queued up and waiting for their ride home... I'm not sure anything could be more british. Sadly I was without my camera... so I'll never have real proof of this peculiar occurence.