London Callling!

This is just words....pictures will have to come later when I have more energy. I just got back about 2 hours ago from a weekend in London and I must say I LOVE THAT CITY. Absolutely incredible in every way shape and form. That being said, I now present, blow by blow, the weekend.

Friday: At 3 PM all the WashU kids (since this is a program that WashU sponsors) meet up at the Brighton train station with a representative from Accent International (the third party, abroad-student support thing that led us through this weekend). She bought us tickets to London as well as a Young Person's Rail Card which is hugely valuable since it gets at least 1/3 off of a normal fare on any train in the UK. So then we hop on the train to London! We had just missed the express train so it took a little over an hour but it was ok. We got off at the London Bridge station and hit the tube in order to get to the station by our hotel. I really enjoy public transportation. The train is a wonderful contraption and the tube is a whole lot of fun (although RIDICULOUSLY expensive. A one ride ticket costs 4 pounds. But a full day ticket cost 5.30. Insane). The only downside of the first public transportation experience in London was that it was in the middle of rush hour on a Friday afternoon. Not the best way to be introduced to a new mode of travel. But in the end, we made it out alive, not trampled by busy commuting London business people. We then walk a couple of blocks to get to our hotel. It was called the Thanet Hotel in Bloomsbury and was lovely. One thing that I love about England that is much harder to find in the US is how there are all these buildings, simple, nondescript buildings that have such a long history. This building that the hotel occupied was originally built in the 1660s and the current building was constructed in 1800 and was a house for a series of wealthy Englishmen and their families. Everything was very cute and English (although we had to go up a LOT of stairs to get to our rooms) and I enjoyed how the rooms had tea kettles instead of coffee pots. I was also pleased to realize that I would be sleeping on a bed without a rock hard mattress and that I would have real pillows. After settling into the hotel (and having some tea and watching some great BBC programming) we went to dinner at a Mediterranean restuarant down the street called Tas. It was quite good; there were appetizers that were just a bunch of different spreads for great bread and for an entree I had prawns with mushrooms and tomatoes. Yummy. After dinner we went back to the hotel and the rest of the group went out but my throat was hurting and I was afraid of getting sick so I declined in hope that sleeping for 8 hours instead of 3 or 4 that I would get if I went out would prevent sickness. Of course, because my throat hurt, I actually didn't end up getting a lot of sleep, but I later realized it was allgeries that arose from the dust and grime of the tube so I never actually got sick.

Saturday: The hotel had a free hot breakfast in the morning so Laura (whom I was sharing a room with) and I got up and went down. It was delicious...sometimes hotels don't do quality complimentary breakfasts, but this was good. There was a little bar that had fruit, yogurt, cereal, etc and then you could choose from 1 of 3 options for hot food. On Saturday I had scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and then on Sunday I had porridge and brown sugar; both good. We went over to the Accent International office at 9:45 and sat with this guy for a couple of hours who talked about British culture and stuff like that. It was kind of interesting, but I don't think I learned anything particularly shocking or new. We then had a lunch at this place called Malabar Junction which was Indian. I don't really eat Indian food at home or at school, but maybe I should because I liked what I had (whatever it was...I don't remember, chicken, rice, spciy stuff), and someone said that House of India in St. Louis was better in their opinion. We basically had a free afternoon and evening after lunch. Most of the kids went back and napped (stupid in my opinion. You can nap at school, you are in London. Enjoy it) but Laura and I headed out for some seeing of the sights. We went to the British Museum mostly because it was two blocks west of our hotel and we had already passed it about half a dozen times in the 24 hours we had been in London. First of all, the actual building is SO IMPRESSIVE. Apparently the Great Court (or whatever it's called) is the largest enclosed structure in all of Europe. And then the exhibits are incredible. We spent about 90-120 minutes in the musuem, but you could go there for days at a time. We hit up the Rosetta Stone (which I thought was as wonderful as you might think it would be), the Elgin marbles, the Nereid temple, etc. We also spent some time looking at early Roman England and European history. We were looking at some old gold jewelry and were joking that we would buy earrings like that if we saw them- the style was very similar to a lot of the big dangly earrings that are currently in vogue. I also decided that I was going to search the English countryside for hoardes (what caches of treasure are apparently called) of ancient treasure so I could display it at the British Museum and have my name forever there. After the British Musuem, we walked for about 20 minutes up to the British Library to check out the treasure room. As grand as the British Museum is and as small and singular this one treasure room was, it packed just as much (if not more) punch than the aforementioned museum. There was something incredibly powerful and moving about seeing the handwritten lyrics to "Yesterday", or the Guttenberg Bible, Shakespeare's first folio (I was especially interested in looking at that), Handel's "Messiah", Beethoven's tuning fork, the original writings of Lewis Carroll, and the Magna Carta. The room wasn't large or grand and all of the exhibits were small but the amount of influence these books or pieces of writing have is astounding and walking around the room you could feel all this history behind everything. It was, especially because the room was dimly lit to preserve the pages, really quite magical. After the British Library we went and got dinner. We were feeling for something kind of classically British, no more Indian or Mediterranean for us, so we just wandered into this place aptly called "The London Pub". I had fish and chips and a pint and it was amazing. Just what I wanted. A pub full of Londoners having some food, drinking some beer and watching some football. And I really enjoyed the fish and chips too. I'll have to have those more often. After dinner the group met up from different places and headed down across the Thames to the Old Vic to see Cinderella. It was a different sort of Cinderella- a muscial full of raunchy jokes and sexual innuendos that are subtle enough that all the children in the audience can't get them. There was also a lot of audience participation and yelling back and forth between the actors and the house. Basically it was a lot of fun. And luckily, only some of the topical jokes about British culture went over my head. After the theatre we went to a club on Tottenham Court Road which was really fun because they didn't just have a DJ spinning music but they actually had a bunch of new, upcoming bands play and the two that we stayed around to watch were really fun and good. We managed to navigate our way back to the hotel without a map (which I was pretty proud of- I can now find my away around about a 5 block square of London) and fell into bed at about 2:30.

Sunday: Woke up at 7:30, showered, went down and got breakfast and were ready to go by 9. Sunday was mostly a day long walking tour around the major sites. Following the same, somewhat irritating, vein, most of the WashU kids didn't want to wake up at 9 so they said they would meet us later when were were walking around. 3 of us and another girl from WashU but going to a different London university (she had missed doing this with her school, so she came with the Sussex kids) were ready to go in the beginning. Whatever, it was better for us since it was a small group. Our tour guide was this architect (she actually works at Westminster Abbey- she's been documenting this door that has been kind of hidden in the Abbey dating back to 1030ish. They think its the old door in England) who knew EVERYTHING about London (or it seemed). We all had a great time talking with her about anything and everything England. We got on the tube and our first stop was Parliament and Big Ben. We then continued on our way to Westminster Abbey, onto Downing Street to try to peek through the gates to Number 10, past the Horse Guards, onto the otherside of the Cavalry building to go down to St. James park and get to Buckingham palace in time for the changing of the guards. The changing of the guards was so much fun! We didn't go up to the gate since that part is really boring (according to the wonderful guide Angie) so we started at one end when the old soldiers came off duty, and when they started to march down the road towards Buckingham, the entire crowd of people follows them, quickly walking down the sidewalks in order to get to the other end to see the new guard come in in the same sort of manner. I would liken it to the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Crazy, but actually really fun. We then got on a bus at Hyde Park Corner and went down to Kensington Gardens and Kensington Palace where we had lunch. Well, lunch was actually tea at the Orangery at Kensington Palace and it was amazing. I like tea (especially with milk in it, great idea English) and the food was delicious. Especially the scones with cream and jam. Oh dear. So, so, so good. And the location was beautiful as well, which certainly adds to the charm. After tea we went to St. Paul's, which I think I have the most pictures of- it's magnificent and I can't wait to go insde, walked over the Millenium Bridge and popped into the Tate Modern, mostly just to look at this one exhibit. It's a temporary exhibit in which there is just this huge crack (a little kid apparently actually fell down it) running down the center of the stone floor of the main gallery. It just looks like the Tate has a great big crack in it. And they won't tell anyone how they did it. It was really cool though. And then we went past the Globe Theatre which, actually, I wasn't super excited to see. Probably because it's such a recent reconstruction. I would probably be more awed if it was the Shakespearean building, but it's not. So not that exciting. We then hopped on a bus across the Tower Bridge and stopped at the Tower of London. That was the end of the tour (ha...started at 9 AM. Ended at 5 PM. My feet are killing me!), so we went back to the hotel to collect our backpacks that we had left with reception and popped over to Victoria station to catch the train home. Apparently on the weekends the express trains don't run so it took a long time to get back to Brighton...about 2 hours.

It is now 1:25 in the morning and I am very tired, it has been a long weekend without a lot of sleep but extremely fun. London is an incredible city and I can't wait to go back up and do some more exploring (and shopping...I wish I had had the time to go to some of the markets), but luckily it's only a train ride away and I can go again sometime soon.

Pictures to post later!