Five Days Down

I've recovered from jet lag and spent an amazing five days in London. I feel as if I am on vacation, so it's a bit strange to have to start classes tomorrow morning. I would have updated earlier, but the internet has been down in the flats all weekend, and we just got it fixed tonight.

Thursday morning we had to be downstairs by 8:45 so the coaches could pick us up at nine for our bus tour of London. We were split into two groups and led by a Blue Badge guide. These guides know just about everything there is to know about London. They have to study for years in order to achieve Blue Badge status. Our guide was a wonderful British woman named Diana and she was almost like a real life version of Mary Poppins. When she took us on our walking tour, she used a pink umbrella so that we wouldn't loose sight of her and be lost in London. However, she did end up taking us to Piccadilly Circus and left us there to find our own way home. My flatmates and I decided to hang out in the touristy areas of London for a while before heading back to the flat. I kind of remembered how to get to Covent Garden from my last visit to London, so I led us there to look around for a while. It started raining, but I was the only one with an umbrella, so we walked past Trafalgar Square to Piccadilly Circus for some cheap umbrellas that ended up breaking later. By this time it was starting to get dark, so we bought an Oyster Card to use on the Underground and took the tube back to Earl's Court, which is only a short walk from our flat.

There was supposed to be a pub crawl that night, but for some reason it had been pushed back to Friday night. Some of the other kids in the program decided to do their own pub crawl, so the flatmates and I decided to go out too. We went to one pub that was VERY crowded, probably because there were about twenty American college students crammed inside of it. My flatmate Elisabeth and I had our first half pint (we're still working our way up to a pint) of a tasty cider called Strongbow. After that, we went down to the Irish pub and had diner, but no more cider for me! Half of a pint was more than enough.

Friday we were in orientation meetings at the college all day. The campus is beautiful. The main campus is very new and state of the art, but the Union is very 19th Century looking, with ivy and brick and everything. After orientation, my flatmates and I went to the grocery store closest to us called Sainsburys. It was an adventure trying to find everyday items like toilet paper and dish soap without any familiar brands in sight. And the food selection is like stepping in to a completely different universe! I can already tell I am going to have many adventurous culinary experiences while I am here.

I will have to update about my Friday night and weekend experiences tomorrow. It's 1:00am here, so I'm heading off to bed. Toodles, kids!