Long blog- to tired to spell check....

Backtrack to Weds. Afternoon. Since all my friends were coming from Scotland and Greece I decided to spend the day by myself. I went to St Pauls, the second largest church in world, (only second to St Pauls in Italy). It was amazing, you can not take pictures inside, but I did take some of the outside. Sadly my little digital camera does not give it justice. I climed all the way to the top! 543 steep steps. I had a wonderful view of London. I found it very odd that on Holy ground, I had the best view of a city that has a very high crime rate. The day was quite foggy, so it almost hid all of its imperfection. I also went to the whispering gallery and the crypt. I saw Sir Christopher Wrens tomb (St Pauls is his masterpiece) I also thought it would be a good beginning to my trip to Rome on the 8th of April. Because of this I have to bring up the recent news of the Pope. While most of my classmates do not realize what will happen to Rome when the Pope dies, I do. I have already talked with my tutors and they said that if we can not go to more than 80% of our actitives in Rome, (seeing the sightings chapel, the David, etc) then we will stay in Slovenia and Kasbah. While this is a kick in the teeth, I like the idea of more eastern European countries a lot better. Rome is great, but I will have the chance to go myself one day, how often do people go to Slovenia for goodness sake? That is just my opinion. But I am glad that it is off season for tourists. Even though I am a semi tourist in London. But London attracts different tourists than Rome does. Personally,I hope the Pope dies before we get to Rome, not while we are there. Not only to ease his suffering but to ease my tutors. They are trying to plan this field trip amongst many things.
A huge issue that I have been involved in, and it is weird to speak to the outside world about is the closing of the London center. There will no longer be a campus in London, they are rudely firing everyone, and splitting the building starting May 10th. So this is the last semester. This is the third center the current dean has closed because of "financial reasons". Now when I was going to ACI, shit was going down majorerly and I wanted to get out and go to a more stable school. One of the problems was financial because the dean made stupid decions. He understood this and took a HUGE pay cut to help the school. Huge as in half. Now Friends World is a Quaker based school, which runs using community meeting and global communities. Why can our dean, who is so supposely so close to us (because we are a community not a school) take a pay cut. We just found out today that our teachers have been taking pay cuts every single month for 2 years. They have worked harder and harder for less money, to teach us. While our dean who has been a Friends World tutor before flies everywhere and moves the main campus to Brooklyn because of "financial reasons". (It used to be in Southampton) With all these huge changes because of "financial reasons" who is really paying attention to the students. We or our parents are paying 30 grand a year to get ignored in favor of huge issues like this. I understand it, but don't like it. Take for example my wonderful advisor. She has helped me fill out scholarship applications, advised me on essays etc. Now she has to fill out her own job applications. She is not being selfish, and I don't blame her. But is just not me, its every student at the London center. We are all taking very little of our advisors time to let them do other things.
We had a community meeting today to address the closing. Even though we have known for about a week, we were still stunned and amazed. Some of us were aiming to try and convince the dean to reconsider, while other were more apathic. I am... Well I don't know. I just want the school to manage their money correctly. I am tired of hearing things like "budget constraint" and "financial problems". I know running a school is hard, but can it be that difficult that we are constantly in trouble. At World conference it was said that our student numbers we low, we one of the reasons is because centers keep closing and it doesn't acutely bolster confidence well enough confidence to fork over 90 grand at least. I could go on but I won't because I am more than likely boring most of you. But this is an issue effecting my life