Hello!!
I'm officially in Europe! I arrived in London at to our hotel at about 7:30AM Monday morning (or 2:30AM ET) along with 6 other students who were on my flight in as well. We're staying in the Kensington area at a hotel called the Copthorne Terra. It's actually pretty nice.. there's lower seeded Wimbledon players staying there as well.. to put it into perspective. The first day was kind of a blur. A lot of walking around Kensington and figuring out the area. The hotel is 1 block from the closest tube station, 2 blocks from High Street which has a ton of shops and supermarkets, etc., and 4 blocks from the Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park (perfect for running!). After a welcome dinner a bunch of people and I went to a local grocery store, bought a bottle of wine and some Stella and hung out for a while before heading to a "University" pub. That's right, Imperial University is a different small University about a mile down the main road and their union has a bar in it. Hilarious and awesome. It was all college students and drinks were cheap. The bartenders kept making fun of our American accents.. but I suppose it's something I just need to get used to.
Yesterday (Tuesday) we had a guided bus/walking tour that took us all over London. We ventured past Harrods, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Natural History, Buckingham Palace (where we got out and were able to walk around for a bit), and down into the West End - which is beautiful. We drove through (then later walked through) Picadilly Circus, SoHo (unbelievably gay you can't even begin to imagine..), Covent Gardens, and Oxford Square. The bus tour also stopped at the Tower of London where we were given admission tickets to the Tower and visited the crown jewels amongst other things. Interesting fact: all the spiral staircases inside the Tower are built backwards so that if someone was trying to besiege the castle it was virtually impossible to fight with a right-handed sword.
Today we had our first lecture on Art and are headed here in about an hour to the National Gallery then to a showing of Wiked downtown in the West End.
I'm out of time, so that's all for now, hopefully I'll be able to post more tomorrow or Friday!
Miss you all!!
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Sounds wonderful. About that running in Hyde Park, just remember what you learned in scouts...always take a buddy. Please don't go running alone. Or anywhere alone. What day are you going to Wimbeldon?
ReplyDeleteOther things I forgot to mention about Tuesday: I had my first and last fish and chips experience at a pub downtown. I suppose I didn't realize they served you an ENTIRE fish.. eep. Also, upon leaving the pub we ran into this lovely gay couple, one of which claimed to be best friends with Dave Chappelle. It's hilarious how creative a drunk Londoner can be.
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