yay livejournal...
To catch anyone up that may not have received my first few emails (namely, anyone that is not a parent of mine), I'll recap quickly. Maybe Top 5 important things to say thus far about London.
1) My roommate isn't here yet, and won't be for another 10 days or so. Room to myself! I am hoping that she decides not to come, as bad as that sounds.
My little room. (The bathroom is to the right of the wardrobes -- tiny little thing shoved into the corner, but at least I have my own!)
2) I live on the 9th floor of the IES Residence Hall in Chelsea, so I get a nice view of central London. I think I can see Westminster Abbey/Houses of Parliament, but I'm not quite sure.
Basic view from my window. The building that I think is Westminster/Parliament is off to the right, but I don't think you can see it in this picture. Facing east. (Note the mysterious flight of stairs that lead to nowhere in the center of the picture -- still haven't figured out what that is, haha.)
3) Prince Harry was seen at a night club called Raffles on Thursday night (according to the London Lite -- and everything in the London Lite is true, of course). Raffles is less than a block away from our Res Hall. Very exciting!
4) Everyone is really, really nice. The IES staff, the other IES students, almost every Brit I've run into. I love it; I rather expected some anti-American sentiment (from the locals, I mean), or at least some anti-tourist sentiment, but I haven't run into any. It's great.
5) Orientation has been so busy. There isn't even any time to feel jetlagged, really, because we've been in meetings and travel fairs and tours and everything basically since we got here. Insane.
That said, I will now recount my yesterday and today.
Yesterday, (Friday, by the way -- I'm having some trouble figuring out what day of the week it is, haha), we went on a bus tour in the afternoon of London. It was interesting, particularly because our bus driver was in a terrible mood. Apparently he hadn't had enough breaks that day, and he was worried he'd get his license taken away or something, so we kept having to stop for him to take short breaks. We saw Buckingham and Westminster and Tower Bridge, all of that. And we ended at the British Museum, where we had a "highlights tour" of the coolest things in there. Basically just the Lindow Man and the Rosetta Stone. Again, things I've seen before, but still cool.
Guess where I am. That's right, the lawn of Buckingham!
One nice thing about the tour, though, was that the guide gave a lot of the history of London, which I hadn't heard before (or maybe just hadn't paid attention to). She talked about the Great Fire, how the city developed over time, etc., etc.
And the British Museum is like... two blocks away from the IES Centre, where all our classes will be held. I am excited to be able to go to the Reading Room to study during lunch breaks.
After the tour, 4 or 5 of us headed back to South Ken to find some food. We searched for cheap Indian, but were unsuccessful, so we settled for a Chinese canteen that served Indian food. (???) It was a bit "dodgy," especially because it was only 3 pounds for a meal, haha, and there were like 4 tables total in the place, but it was an experience.
We then found some alcohol, headed back to the Res Hall, and hung out with some people in the 6th floor kitchen. It's amazing how many people you can fit into such a tiny little kitchen -- there must have been 18 people or so in a room about 10x15 feet. There was talk of heading to a club, which I did not want to be a part of (expensive cover charge + dancing = Gretchen says no), but we decided to go down to a pub on King's Road instead, called the Trafalgar Arms. As it turns out, you have to be 21 to be in the pub, even though you can drink at 18 over here, so we went to a different pub not far away called Henry J. Bean's. It was a cool place, really, really crowded (took like 15 minutes waiting at the bar just to order a drink), but fun. And it was a group of like 20 of us, haha, which I'm sure all the other people appreciated, particularly when they played "Born in the USA" (Springsteen, right?) and one rather... tipsy member of our group started singing along... raucously. It was quite amusing.
The pub closed at midnight, and a few of us were getting tired anyway, so we left at 11:30 or so and decided to ride a night bus just for the hell of it. Night buses are known to be rather shady, so we were excited to run into suspicious characters, but it was a bit of a disappointment (probably because we went at midnight instead of at like... 4am). Ah well, at least we learned how the bus system works (sort of -- still very confusing to me.)
Sidenote to my mom: Don't worry, I only had two drinks the entire night, over like 6 hours. And there were 7 of us on the bus, including a large, intimidating boy. We were perfectly safe.
So that was my Friday. Needless to say, I more than a little perturbed to wake up at 5am to people shouting and loud Spanish techno music from the room next door. (I called reception and she phoned them; thankfully they turned it off.) And I was exhausted when my alarm went off at 9 this morning.
Met downstairs at 10, took a ferry boat from Tower Hill to Greenwich. In Greenwich, we toured the Royal Naval Academy and the Royal Observatory, saw the Meridian line, and then were told that we would have to find our own way back to South Ken.
