More class and Covent Garden

In the morning, we had a talk about grammatical morphemes in children with SLI, Autism, and Williams Syndrome. Then, our afternoon involved a visit to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery where we listened to three separate presentations by SLPs. Our fist talk was by an SLP who works in the theatre (British term for the operating room) while patients get brain surgery while they are awake. She is responsible for making sure that the surgeon does not remove any parts of the brain that are associated with language function. Our second speaker at the hospital talked about tracheostomies and the importance of paying attention to the patient’s emotions and attitudes to the whole ordeal. Finally, the third speaker of the evening talked about how spinal surgeries that are carried out from the front of the neck can often lead to swallowing difficulties post-surgery.
After class, we went to Regent’s College to get some dinner and from there we headed to Covent Garden. We had heard that it was a good spot to go in the evening, so we thought we’d try it out before we ran out of time. With “garden” in the name, we expected to find a garden in a park with a little market and small street performers, but it was actually much different. It was a fairly big complex with permanent shops, smaller booths set up around the streets, and areas for elaborate street performances as well as smaller musicians, yo-yo experts, and magicians. Even though it wasn’t exactly what we expect, it was a really cool experience! I am constantly in awe of how you can be in London for such a long time and do new things every day and still find endless attractions, shopping areas, and other spots that you never even knew existed. It is such a huge and diverse city! So we spent about an hour or so doing some shopping and watching street performances including a terrible juggling act, a couple of traditional Chinese musicians, and an eccentric comedian with a mullet wig haha. We headed to Covent Garden a little earlier than we had planned, but that ended up being perfect because the shops all started closing up right around 7 when we were thinking about heading home.
We then took the tube home to our flat for the night so that we could have some time to relax and hope to get a little more sleep than we have been since we have all been struggling to stay awake during our afternoon lectures haha. Hopefully our plan works out and we are all rested up for the remainder of the week! We’re going to Paris for Friday and Saturday, so we only have three more full days left in London; it’s so hard to believe that our time here is almost over already!