You've forced me into it. I currently have about 20 messages in my inbox that I haven't answered because I've been avoiding answering the same resounding question: "So how's your internship going?" Uhhhhhh.......????? Ask and thou shalt receive (or something like that).

I work in Brixton, the subject of a story in London's Evening Standard about the "Most Dangerous Square Mile In London." This means that I theoretically take a leisurely stroll through heart of the ghetto every day on my way to work.

But really, I've learned to love Brixton. It's an African/Jamaican/Indian/and-everywhere-inbetween market... I have an amazing cultural experience just walking to work in the morning! I walk past a line of butcher shops.. DANG -- dead fish really REEK. And I still shudder looking at the chickens hanging by their legs from the ceilings and the rows of entire beef and lamb carcasses lining the walls. It's not just everywhere that you can see African yams 8-10 inches in diameter being sold at every fruit stand and African men wearing huge puffy balloon-shaped rainbow-striped hats and parachute pants selling buckets of smoking incense outside of the tube stop.

ON TO THE REAL TOPIC AT HAND, the internship:

As far as I'm concerned, Photofusion's biggest drawing point is their toilets. I think they should advertise: "Photofusion -- we've got the best smelling toilets in all of London". Below Photofusion, in the ground-floor market strip, there is a pizza place called ECO. So, the sumptuous odors of hot pizza waft from the pizza ovens below directly up into the toilet in Photofusion. It's amazing. A joy every time I walk in the toilet. Not to mention the fact that there is a sink there that has a combined hot and cold water faucet --a rarity in Central London it seems.

The down side is that I'm the world's worst secretary. It didn't help that I couldn't understand a word anyone said to me on the phone for the first 3 weeks. My conversations consisted of "WHAT?" and "Could you spell that for me?" It was a nightmare. I went home every night exhausted.

In exchange for this no-so-fun work, I get to take Photofusion courses at night and over the weekends for free. Right now, I'm learning to print color and in April, I'll have a studio course. I'm pretty happy with the setup actually because at least I'm learning something in the courses, I could wear pajamas to work and no one would care, and I get to hang out with a bunch of rowdy photographers all the time.

Example: The darkroom coordinator got a new fluorescent light tube in the post yesterday... he pulled it out of the box in front of my desk and started swinging it around claiming that he was Luke Skywalker fighting off the Dark Side. Adam also set up the studio to shoot self portraits of himself posed like EMINEM. Need I say more?

Anyway, so that's my dissertation into my internship. I think I have adequetly answered the question, so now I can go through and clean out my inbox. Whew, I'm glad I got this over with.

:) Cheers,

Jennifa (because, of course, my name ends with an A and not an ER in "the Queen's English")