Happy Chaos

London, and LSE, are happy chaos. There's the city itself, which to me feels gleefully out of control. To stand on the Thames and see the Funky Gerkin rising over the White Tower, to stand on Millenium bridge between the Tate Modern and St. Paul's Cathedral, to look out on the Parliament Buildings from aloft inside a steel and plastic bubble (I'm referring to the London Eye), how could you not feel some historical vertigo?

And though everything that needs to be done seems to be getting done, LSE has felt disordely. The "to-do" list for new arrivals neglects many important details (for example, that Americans can't open a local checking account until we have our loan checks in hand), that result in long city-wide scavenger hunts for paperwork. Courses seem to begin next week, but we don't have to finalize our course selections for a month, so it's not clear what I'll actually be studying. The courses require books that nobody has. And the people! When the Russian-speaking math-studying Romanian girl from Moldova who's been studying in Iowa suddenly starts speaking Spanish with the Columbian philosopher, it's hard not to feel that things are a little out of control.

The "fresher's fair", where you sign up for clubs, best embodied the chaos of this first week. Spread out over two buildings, many floors, and spilling out into the sidewalk, were hundreds of clubs ranging from the Hayek society to the Kazakhstan society (I joined) to the Capoeira club (Capoeira was the ones playing the African instruments on the sidewalk, but I only found that out later from their other booth in the basement). The booths were packed into the anarchic hallways and classrooms and basements of the St. Clements and the old building, whose floorplans are masterpieces of confusion, with barely enough room for the throngs of students pushing their way trying to find their particular hobby. It was a terrible fire hazard, but at the top of an empty staircase was a woman who refused to let me descend, because it was a "one-way" stair, for fire safety reasons. There was a map, but they ran out of copies early in the day, and were replaced by a nervous Indian student with a clipboard who would shout you a room number if you shouted him a club name.

But the miracle of the city, the LSE, and even the club fair, is despite their seeming confusion, they all seem to work just fine. You can imagine that I feel right at home.