The room’s almost completely packed now, two very heavy suitcases almost full although I’m pretty sure the blue one is on top of my phone. We’re going to the Hard Rock Café tonight, possibly with some other people from our seminar. James has been going on an on about it since we got here. Then tomorrow morning bright and early, we’re off on our week of travel: Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen in one week. In theory, the hostels we’re staying at have computers but we’ll see how that goes. See you in a week!

We’re pretty much done now, Michelle went today, presented on Michael Faraday (I keep thinking his name’s John or Thomas). I started to do a little packing today, I packed the backpack I’m bringing with me on our week off. We’re going to Paris, Berlin, and Copenhagen in eight days. I love London but I’m really looking forward to the week. It’s not completely packed but it’s definitely shaping up to be one very compact bag. As our last seminar activity, we went to go see the Mousetrap tonight which is a play based of an Agatha Christie short story and has been running for more than fifty years. The theater was tiny too, smaller than Fords Theater. It was okay, not really a mystery fan but the actors were good. Tomorrow’s going to be interesting; we might try and go to Hampton Court Palace, are probably going to the Hard Rock Café and definitely have to pack up our whole room. Yikes!

We’re almost done! I am absolutely dreading packing though, at least there’s no maximum weight. Andrew and Doug went today, Thomas Huxley and James Cook. Still did nothing, thought about the packing job ahead of me. We had a pub walk which was interesting but kind of expensive. Had chocolate-y stout, I think that’s what it was, at the first pub but not really anything else at the rest. About the second pub in, I really started to want some chips and it wasn’t just me. So after the pub walk, instead of staying at the third pub, we tubed back to IES and then walked over to Tesco and bough bake-able chips. Popped them in and watched How I Met Your Mother on someone’s computer for the rest of the night.

We had presentations today from lovelies Alice on Francis Galton and Cheryl on Charles Dickens. I personally loved Cheryl’s presentation; she is going to make a fantastic professor. Then in the afternoon we went to Westminster Abbey to play “find the grave” and there were a lot of them. There are also a lot of memorials to people who aren’t actually in the floor so it was a little confusing as to who exactly is buried there. I said hi to grandpappy Chaucer who I’m supposedly related to through both of my parents and then had to explain why I did so since I kind of said it out loud. For dinner we had a giant seminar potluck where everyone grouped up by room and cooked something. Amanda and I made a pudding cake thing that had a real name but I forget. Whatever it was, it was good. Everything was good, well done us.

So today we had presentations from Chris who used the word ingenious a lot to describe Joseph Paxton and Dale who, according to him, had the best person ever, James Watt. But the big story today was the arrival of Servo cookies. Now, for those who do not know, a week ago or so, we jokingly started plotting to have servo cookies sent to us from Gettysburg not expecting it to actually work. Well, it did and today they arrived, they also billed the seminar, we were hoping for free but oh well. As for the rest of the day, nothing, we’ve kind of hit tourist overload at this point and do not really feel like doing all that much. So, watched TV wrote this, nothing really. We’re going out for Indian tonight though so that should be fun.

So, pretty much all week we had been saying that yesterday, Saturday, we would travel to Wales and go visit Cardiff. We have discovered our week spot in small to medium-sized planning ahead while in London. We can plan a week-long excursion through Europe but when it came to Wales we were all talk and no ticket-buying. However, after a brain storming session on the way to Bath between Amanda and I, we decided to buy tickets to Cardiff upon our return from Bath. So, bright and early Saturday morning we were on a two hour train to Cardiff. Every time we’ve been on these trains, there have been reserved seats, seats with tickets sticking out basically saying reserved for people who bought tickets for this particular train. For one, we had reserved seats and didn’t have to wander around looking for an empty seat. When we got there, we played the “don’t know how public transport works here, lets just walk” game which worked until later. We walked down to Cardiff Bay, the main purpose being the locating of the Doctor Who exhibition and melting into sublime geek-hood. We wandered around the bay; found the travel centre which looked liked a submarine blimp. They had a bunch of maps, which pointed the way to the exhibition. We walked over, paid £5 to walk through and see all the costumes and props they had. Upon exiting, there was a shop, as always, and I got something for my dad for Christmas, I can’t tell you though, he reads this. We walked all the way back, through the town, past the rail station, to Cardiff Castle, which was utterly fantastic. There’s an outer wall, with a Victorian tack-tastic Medieval-inspired castle. Then in the middle, was the keep, the Norman castle which we climbed to the top of on some very steep stairs. At this point, we decided that we wanted to visit St. Fagans History Museum. On Amanda’s map, it had an arrow that said “this way to St. Fagans”. We walked for a mile, stopped, accidentally, outside of a sex shop, and stopped in at a subway for some water before giving up. Eventually, we discovered the reason that we never found St. Fagans was that it was five miles away. Go figure. At this point, it was about 4:45 and we began to think about dinner. We stopped into a Wetherspoon’s pub where they had a burger and drink special. After our tasty, tasty dinner, I bought expensive batteries and some starburst twists before boarding out train and heading home.

Our first adventure on Sunday turned out to be attempts at pancakes. Tired of toast and cereal everyday, some mix was bought as well as some extremely expensive syrup from Tesco. However, as they were being cooked, it became readily apparent that these did not look like your average pancake; they were too light in color. Upon eating them, it turned out that the English idea of pancake mix makes little, thick, crepes. After that misadventure we scooted on over to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard. We knew we’d be late and there would be a crowd but it was pretty much the only day we could do it. Needless to say there was a decent sized crowd that we navigated pretty well, a lot of the pictures I got were from holding my camera over my head but I got some decent ones. After sitting in what was probably St. James’ park for a while trying to come up with something to do we decided to pop back over to Covent Garden which we had kind of seen when we went to the British Museum and investigate the Jubilee Market which is an enclosed outdoor market? They had lots of interesting stuff and I bought a scarf for myself and Christmas presents for some other people. However, because I had such tremendous foresight to not bring any money with me I had to take out money from an ATM for the first time since I got here. I think it was the whole weekend there had been the Thames Festival, I’m not quite sure what it entailed except that tonight they were doing fireworks. We got out at the tube stop between the two the flyer had suggested getting off at and parked ourselves beside the Thames. We were there pretty much an hour before the fireworks were set to begin so most played cards while the rest of us tried to take up as much space as possible. Eventually, what we guess correctly as being the fireworks barges began to move and everyone got up. The barge moved, and then kept moving, and then stopped right in front of where we were standing. So, we essentially front row for the fireworks show. It was fantastic, almost made up for missing the 4th of July because of work.

There had been talk all week about today’s trip to Bath, mainly the fact that there was a Jane Austen Museum there. We had to get up really early in order to catch the 8:30 train. When we got there, it turned out that if we took the 9:30 train, it would save £1,000. We all shuffled off, annoyed, to get coffee and/or tea. I found some fantastic chai in Paddington Station (there was a statue of the bear) and we hung out in front of a Krispy Kreme and played cards for a while. We hoped on the train and rode that for 1 1/2 hours, amusing ourselves along the way. When we got there, we walked around, marveled at all of the architecture, and then marveled some more. Bath is like the eternal resort town, so the town is very Georgian, rich and beautiful. Our first stop was the abbey, one of the oldest in England. It was lovely inside but so many people had been buried inside the church that it was near impossible to walk around without stepping on someone’s grave. A little before this though, I discovered something that would forever shape my trip to bath. They have a legend in Bath about King Bladud and because I’m lazy right now, I’m going to copy and paste from the King Bladud’s Pigs website. The year is 863BC. Bladud, King of the Britons and father of the unfortunate King Lear who was immortalised by Shakespeare, had spent much of his youth studying in Athens where he contracted leprosy. Returning home and realising that an imperfect prince could not inherit the throne, he left the royal palace in disguise to take a job as a swineherd in an "untravell'd part of the country". This was certainly the Avon Valley, and may well have been the area we know today as Keynsham - remembering that this was more than 1,000 years before the Romans built villas in Keynsham and a full 1,500 years before the Saxons founded our town. As Bladud drove his pigs in search of acorns he crossed the River Avon at shallows north of Saltford - at a place which subsequently took its name from the legend - Swineford. The rest of the story is famous. Bladud's pigs also contracted his disease but were cured when they rolled in the hot mud around Bath's springs. Observing the miracle, Bladud also bathed in the hot murky water and he too was cured. Returning home in triumph he went on to become King. In gratitude for his cure, Bladud founded a city at Bath and dedicated its curative powers to the Celtic goddess Sul and 900 years later the Romans called the city Aquae Sulis - the Waters of Sul. So, because it’s fun, they have these decorated pigs everywhere like they do in Chicago, Baltimore, and other big cities. There are one hundred pigs all over Bath and I wanted to take pictures of as many of them as I could. I ended up catching over twenty. My seminar group helped, any time someone saw a pig they would point it out to me. After the abbey we went into the Roman Baths. They were pretty nifty (there was a pig in the museum) but the audio tour took far too long. The water in the baths was also kind of creepy, through no fault of it’s own, the water is green and has a film over it. The green is from algae (the baths used to be enclosed) and the film made it kind of look like ramen and was probably there because no one’s been swimming around in it lately. Also, when you bought a ticket to see the baths you were given the option of strolling into the Pump Room, a posh restaurant, and sampling some of the bath water (filtered a couple of times) which we did. Honestly, it smelled like eggs and tasted like fish, not to mention it was warm. After the baths we settled on pasties, which are basically stews in pastry form and very good, for lunch. James got a giant steak and potato pasty that was so thick that it wouldn’t cool down. We walked around Bath for a while before heading over to the Hershel Museum. William and Caroline Hershel were Amanda’s ingenious people, hence our visit. The museum was pretty little and we were shown a movie that was pretty bad but the house itself was nice. At this point, we were given leave to split up and go our separate ways. Cheryl, Nicole, Alice, Meghan, Amanda, Ryan, and I all headed over to the Jane Austen Centre, not sure what we would find but excited none the less. It turned out to be the bastard step-child to the Jane Austen Museum in Hampshire. There was a woman who gave a quick talk on Jane Austen’s life, who was very good, and then a selection of dresses and props from the BBC movie “Miss. Austen Regrets,” although the museum did have a very nice shop. The best part of the whole museum had to be the tea room upstairs. Nicole left us after the exhibit so, the rest of our party headed up to the tea room and got two tables. The tea was expensive but totally worth it. Amanda and I got “Tea with the Austens” which was a pot of tea (I got Miss Austen’s tea, it’s a mix of black teas popular during the regency) three cheese and cucumber sandwiches, and a slice of cake (lemon drizzle for me) while Cheryl and Meghan shared a “Mr. Darcy’s tea” which was a whole lot of food. We took pictures and had lots of fun. It was all so good it made me want to go back to the tea house in Annapolis. Panda and I wanted to go look at some street vendors who were selling purses but by the time we left the Centre it was after five and beginning to drizzle so they were all breaking down. As we waited for our group to assemble, Panda and I popped in to a travel shop and bought postcards before we all walked back to the train station where I was granted two final hurrahs, pigs on either side of the platforms.

Our lovely presenters for today were Megan and Elena. Megan presented on Hans Sloane who invented milk chocolate, among other things but really, what is more important than chocolate? She also included “Happy Birthday Ryan” and “Happy Birthday Amanda” slides in her presentation. Elena presented on Alfred Lord Wallace, a man who also came up with Natural Selection but was beaten to the publishing punch by Darwin. Our afternoon expedition to a fellow named John Soanne’s House. Soanne was an architect; a fairly wealthy one by the end of his life so during it he bought three townhouses in a fancy neighborhood, connected them all and made it one giant house. He also piled all sorts of random stuff into his house. There were busts everywhere, a room dedicated to Holborn paintings, the Sarcophagus of Seti I, vases, statues and over 6,000 books. Now, when he connected the three houses together, for the most part, he did not knock down walls to make rooms bigger and with all the stuff in his house, It was incredibly hard to walk through and was very cramped. You also weren’t allowed to take pictures, but I got a postcard! Now for many days previous, since I went to go buy chocolate cake mix for Panda, I was bent on making Ryan a Dora the Explorer cake. When we went to get it, we discovered that they were Dora the Explorer cupcakes but got them anyways. We also got him a £4 Dalek water bottle. Once again, we made our cake thing with no measuring cups to speak of. It all turned out for the tastiest. People from other kitchens came over and sang Happy Birthday and ate cupcakes, was a good time. James’ friend Joe also made the treck over to visit while Ryan indulged in his twenty-one-ness

So after a bit of reasonably frantic picture searches I finally finished my presentation last night and had everything all printed and lovely. When I got to class, my professor handed me his copy of Mountains of the Moon, a movie about Richard Burton (my presentation) and John Speke’s quest to find the source of the Nile. There was a part in the movie where a beetle crawls into Speke’s ear that I really wanted to show so I spent the beginning of class cueing that up. Jess went and her presentation was pretty short, she presented on Robert Hooke. I liked the short time, with a lot of the presentations, even if you’re doing really well, 40 min+ tends to get really boring no matter the topic. My presentation was very long first of all, I was really struggling with how to skim Burton’s life since he did so much but I definitely could have lessened up on information about his early life. I rushed the end of my presentation because my battery was dying and I didn’t feel much like talking with a dead computer and without my PowerPoint. Amanda said I talked for about an hour and ten minutes but after that I was done and so didn’t care all that much. Except for my journals and creating a twenty-page paper out of my PowerPoint due in November, I’m completely done. Our class outing was scheduled for the evening so we were basically free to do our own thing, we decided to finally do the Eye for it was the middle of the week and that plan was pulled off fabulously. There was virtually no line although the tickets burned holes in all of our pockets at £15 each. The Eye wasn’t anything to rave about, it did what it promised, be a giant ferris wheel and the views were nice. It only took thirty minutes, so when we were done after some conversation and ice cream squeezed out of a plastic container into a cup, we decided to go visit Harrods. Harrods is beyond a giant department store. Harrods is five or six stories of designer brand everything you could think of. We found £139 beach towels. They had a bookstore named Waterstones on one level (in the same way a Borders has a Starbucks) where Panda and I both got student cookbooks for £10 each, she got a normal book and I got a vegetarian one. After walking around trying to find the tube, we finally found it and headed back to IES and bummed around/ate dinner until 7:30 when we assembled for our travel up to the Globe Theater. When we got off the tube, there was a bit of wandering before we got to cross the Millennium foot bridge (the only pedestrian-only bridge over the Thames). Right after we got off the bridge, there were people with telescopes looking at hawks nesting on the tower of the Tate Modern. The one I looked at was all fuzzy and sleepy but you could see hawks flying to the tower. After that, we waited around in the courtyard of the Globe until they opened the doors. We had groundling tickets (i.e. standing in the center for three hours), and we had a very good view of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was really good, very colorful and we had an excellent Puck for our show. We all stumbled back to our dorm and collapsed with tired feet.

Today was the second day of presentations, Ryan and Amanda went, presenting on Mary Shelley and William and Caroline Hershel respectively, all knowledgeable and what not. Ryan tried to play teacher and call on people as well as play favorites a bit. They averaged out at around and hour each and after lunch we were off on our excursion for the afternoon, science museums. First we went to The Science Museum and scuttled around in the 18th century and computer sections, kind of interested but mostly wanting to check out this thing they had called launchpad. Then we headed over to the Natural History Museum where we were greeted by a giant dinosaur in the front lobby. We saw a bunch of fossils, some collected by Mary Anning (a Victorian fond of fossil hunting), and a giant sloth skeleton. Eager to get back over and find out what this launchpad thing was and yet intrigued by a picture of a giant baby we saw somewhere advertising other sections of the museum. We found it in a section called “the Wonders of Life”, after sifting through the bit on actual conception. Lo and behold, it was a giant baby, a fetus to be precise, at 7 months gestation I believe. Since has been a joke of James and Ryan’s to call Amanda a baby, they made her take a picture with the giant baby and she threatened them with bodily harm the entire time. After that we ran back over to the Science Museum and up to launchpad which turned out to be an interactive science thing, like the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, for kids but that didn’t stop us. We spent a good hour in there playing with everything. My favorite part was this machine had a metal rod sticking out of it. You slid a straw onto the rod (for hygiene), bit down onto the straw, put your fingers in your ears and tada! you could hear music. Kids always get the fun stuff to do in these museums.

We started presentations today. Nicole went first and talked about Christopher Wren, which was pretty interesting though she did kind of just read from a paper but I’m not really one to talk since that’s pretty much what I’m going to do. The second was James who presented on Charles Babbage but his was kind of boring and a bit scattered, and long. We ran upstairs, some literally since for the past couple of days only one elevator has been working, ate lunch and then assembled back downstairs for our trip to the Royal Society. The Royal Society was kind of interesting. We got a bit of a tour from the archivist there and he pulled different things on each person’s ingenious person except for the three of us who had people not belonging to the Royal Society. It was kind of cool to look at the handwriting of William Hershel (who had fantastic handwriting by the way), Charles Babbage, James Cook, and others along with and instrument of Christopher Wren’s and some other things. The tour did not take that long and since the Royal Society could offer me nothing in the way of research, I did not really feel like bothering them by becoming a reader there. That’s really all that’s happened, James presented today, Amanda and Ryan present tomorrow and I present on Wednesday so it’s basically been presentation crackdown time. We do have a list though, of things we want to do after presentations are over. I still haven’t had time to investigate the TV yet, although on the 2nd while walking back to the Tube, I passed a poster for Secret Diary of a Call Girl which is a TV show I watched last semester. Today I looked it up on the internet and through some clicking came across another show on the same network called Lost in Austen. Basically, it’s about a modern girl who switches places with Elizabeth Bennett and the plotline chaos that ensues. I’ve been watching it all day because it’s a streaming video and the internet here does not like streaming videos.

We started off our weekend with the idea that we would visit Stonehenge on Saturday after the market. So, we decided to go to the Portobello Street market. It’s a giant flea/farmers/random stuff market that stretches for a good ½ mile to a mile. There was so much stuff everywhere. James, Ryan, and I got £10 pocket watches and Panda and I were on the lookout for purses (which we still do not have). There was a guy selling old cameras, so many different scarves, glassware, random crafts; it was all so colorful and crowded and gigantic, it was wonderful. The second half of the market had a lot of food and we all got some very cheap vegetables (including some okra). Once we were all done there, we headed over to the Duke of York market (the one near us) and bought a few things including pies and dried mangos. While we were at the Portobello market, we decided that while we probably could make it there and back to Stonehenge, we could also go Sunday. So the rest of Saturday was spent working on presentations and watching internet TV. Sunday, we got up early-ish but did not get moving for quite awhile due to our very slow guys friends. Putting it lightly, Amanda almost killed them. We made it to the train station, bought tickets, rode a little train to Channing Cross, waited for a half hour, indulged in smoothies, and hot drinks before our real train arrived and we were off. The train takes you to Salisbury and Stonehenge is about six miles away. Luckily for us, we found a Stonehenge tour bus. It drove you through Salisbury and up to Stonehenge. It was quite a fabulous tour, the only real problem was a group of Portuguese (Amanda said it wasn’t Spanish, I knew it wasn’t Italian, so we settled on Portuguese) who, I’m guessing, couldn’t understand the English tour and just talked through it very loudly. We passed by Old Sarum which was the old town of Salisbury when it was on a hill (it moved because there was no water source in the town. We also passed by Amesbury which is a town that has grown up within a Stonehenge like site. Eventually we got to Stonehenge, walked around, listened to a complementary audio tour, passed a grinning pagan woman with a head on a staff. We snooped around in the shop, bought some trinkets and waited around for the bus to come pick us up. While we were waiting, we went down to an archeological dig that was going on and one of the diggers gave us a little tour. He told us about the possible use for Stonehenge. How there used to be a wood henge farther up the Avon which could have represented the land of the living. During the winter solstice, they would bring the remains of those who had died by boat up to where Stonehenge was, and then carry them over land and up the hill to Stonehenge, the land of the dead. It was extremely interesting and well worth while.

Our second day trip was only a boat-ride down the Thames to Greenwich. The seats were really wet since it had been raining before we went and would rain later, so eventually we went to the lower level of the boat, napped, and made up a to-do list for the rest of our time in London. Once there, we wandered around looking for the National Maritime Museum and saw a very intricate and decorated church in what used to be the Naval Hospital. Eventually we found the museum and headed almost immediately into the Queen’s House, which is only technically part of the museum. It was a house built by the wives of Charles I and Charles II and the only problem I had with it was that they had essentially turned it into an art museum and I really wanted to know what the uses for each room had been. I found out later where the Queen’s bedroom would have been but there were a lot of rooms in that building. After we were done there, we were left alone to eat lunch and explore the museum. The only thing I really felt like seeing was the coat Horatio Nelson was shot in and it took a good long while to find. The bullet hole is also really difficult to find too, it’s up on the shoulder but really just blends in. There’s also a lot of blood on the uniform but apparently it isn’t Nelson’s blood, it’s the blood of Nelson’s secretary who was shot an hour before. While we were up there, who should we hear, but a familiar voice from our first walking tour of London. We peer around the corner and lo and behold, it’s Simon! The fantastic tour guide we had our first real day in London is here with us in the museum. We tried to follow him and hear some of his tour but they headed into a movie where he didn’t have to speak. We started to walk away, we had to go meet up with our group, when Simon came up to us and told us not to wander too far away from the tour. We tried to explain that we weren’t on the tour but he must have recognized us from our tour last week and reminded us again not to stray. We had a good laugh over this and went to go meet our group. It was then we walked up to the former Royal Observatory (it’s in Edinburg now) and boy was that a walk. It wasn’t far, it’s just that the Observatory is on a hill, the path to get to that his is incredibly steep and any picture I took could never do it justice. Once we got home, birthday celebrating commenced. Today is Amanda’s birthday so I decided to make her a chocolate cake from a box. I quickly discovered that, not only did we not have a cake pan; we didn’t have measuring spoons or cups at all. So, I approximated and used the baking pan that we use for everything else. It worked out fine for the most part, I cut it in half, realized I didn’t have a spatula either, and the cake didn’t really come out all in one piece. I slathered it with icing and it was good. There was half a cake left too so, desert tomorrow! Now we get to the adventure portion of the evening. Ryan has a friend who goes to the Imperial College of London who he wanted us to go hang out with. We rode the Victoria line to the end, got on a bus eventually, and at the end of the line was assured that her house wasn’t that far away, lets just walk. He lied. We walked a good 1 ½ - 2 miles for about thirty-five minutes. Eventually we made it, cursing Ryan the entire time. What we had been told would be a party, ended up being her, two of her friends and us. The boys indulged in the drinks she had provided, and James seems to have found love with a certain whiskey he met but did not get the name of. Alice, Amanda, and I just had water, being as dehydrated as we were. We did not stay too long since Alice is going somewhere early tomorrow. Needless to say, we caught a bus back.

There is not too much to say about what we did today. We went to the British Museum which was all kinds of amazing. It’s absolutely gigantic and we definitely didn’t see it all but we had a valiant effort and took many, many pictures. On our way back to the underground, we stopped in on a tourist shop and bought a few twenty pence postcards then Amanda and I amused ourselves for a few minutes while James and Ryan went into a gamming shop. I pointed us toward the tube and that was the end of that adventure.

Virtually all the excursions this week are during the afternoon, today was the Tate British, an art museum. We had a tour but it was pretty boring for me since I really do not like to walk slowly through art museums. I like to look, marvel and move on. The tour guide was wonderful and very knowledgeable but it was just not what I wanted to be doing. I did find one painting I really liked called “Head III” in the modern art section. They also had about five or six people running down the hall as an art fixture. To get to the museum we had to get off at a station kind of far away and walked, to get back we were determined to find a closer station but ended up failing in that and made our way after getting a little lost back to the station we came from.

Our excursion today was a scientific walking tour of London. When our tour guide showed up, she was this little old woman; I spent a good while wishing that when she spoke, she would sound like a Monty Python “lady”. She did not disappoint. The tour itself was ok; it was heavy on the walking but not so much with the tour. We did get to see Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle’s house where he wrote some of his Sherlock Holmes but overall the tour was so-so. After the tour finished we headed off on the tube for Abbey Road. One in our company has much love for the Beatles. When we got there, we took lots of pictures and the wall part of the gate had the writing of various visitors on it. I drew my nurse chicken on the wall of Abbey Road and took a picture of it. Next, some decided they wanted to recreate the album cover to Abbey Road. This took forever. The road is quite busy and cars kept stopping to let them cross the road that they had to wave on. I was one of the photographers along with Andrew and while it took a long time, it was very fun. We also walked over to Paul McCartney’s house for Cheryl and teased her about being a stalker which caused her to keep shushing us while we were outside his house.

So, our first day of real class, not counting the introduction to history we had Friday and it went reasonably uneventfully. A few people fell asleep, not used to having to wake up at 8 in the morning. We broke for lunch and then reassembled for our excursion to the British Library. Quite interesting in theory, it was suggested to us to become readers at the British Library but when we got there found out that we needed bibliographies of what we wanted to use and our passports. We were denied amazing old books but there were public sections to the Library, which we partook in. The main public room was sort of a greatest hits of what the British Library had. They had letters and books written by Jane Austen, Elizabeth, Edward, and Mary Tudor, Blake’s journal where he started jotting down verses to Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, things by the Beatles, the Magna Carta and so many other things. Then we went to the back, into a lonely building not actually connected to the rest of the Library, which was the center for conservation. They had some hands on activities and a couple of chairs where you could sit, put on headphones, and listen to recordings of Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Alfred Lord Tennyson speaking among others. Everyone found someone different to listen to wide-eyed. After milling around out there, we decided to sit outside in this little courtyard where we were soon joined by various members of our seminar group. Someone, I think it was Cheryl, suggested going to this Caribbean street festival thing down in Notting Hill. With nothing else to do and a desire to expand from just the four-person clique we had developed, we joined in. It didn’t take that long to discover we had the wrong day for the festival, there was a curious lack of people. We decided instead to walk around a bit and look for someplace to eat. I kind of want to go back at some point just to look through all the shops they have. There are so many different shops closing down and new ones taking up the empty space all over London so there are constantly “Going out of Business” and “75% off sales”. Plus after the near-fatal death of my green bag, I kind of need a new bag. We found a pub, whose name escapes me and settled down in the beer garden to look and menus. Basically, the way a pub works is, you come in, sit wherever you feel like, look at a menu and when you decide, you walk up to the bar, order, pay and wait for them to bring you food. We had to split into two tables and upon noticing that they served Tikka Masala, was completely sold. I confused the Bartender by ordering a screwdriver. I ordered it, he turned to go make it, then turned back with a big “a What?” the older guys at the bar thought that was very funny. The food was good and some of our company ordered desert including an apple pie for Alice and spotted dick for Andrew. After we were done, all walked back to the tube and rode home to sleep eventually.

Our first weekend in London was kind of awesome. First, we went down to an open-air market that I think was called the Duke of York market, I could be wrong though. It was really nice, they had some reasonably priced vegetables and fruit along with bread, tea, dried fruit and nuts, sausage, and pie stands. Amanda, James, Ryan and I all got pies to heat up for lunch which were extremely tasty. They also got some sausage for dinner while I got a bunch of veggies to make my awesome soup, which I should really name because it is awesome. When we got back, pies were heated up and eaten with great enthusiasm and then we started out on our great Saturday adventure, a journey to the London Eye and the Tower of London. We decided to try out the buses and so, hoped on one near our residence hall and rode it for a while, a good long while. We rode to the Westminster, which happened to be near the Eye. Tired of riding the bus, we walked over to the Eye and looked in to the building where they sold the tickets and saw before us, an extremely long line. We mulled it over and decided that we should probably put off the number one tourist destination until the middle of the week. There was much head nodding and we set off for the Waterloo station, not wanting to brave the bus anymore. Our next stop was the Tower of London. We bought tickets one by one, James bought a normal ticket, Ryan and Amanda showed him up by getting a student discount but I, not having my student ID with me, was forced to buy a normal priced ticket as well. Right before we went in, we watched a catapult-like-thing-that-probably-wasn’t-a-catapult demonstration where they were launching a water balloon. We went on through the main gate and were met with the formation of a tour, which we joined. The tours there are led by the Yeoman Warders who, we found out, must rise to the rank of lieutenant sergeant after twenty-two years of spotless military service in any branch of the military (except for the navy because of their practice of kidnapping some unsavory fellows from bars) before they apply for the limited job openings. He also said though that once you work there, the warders and their families get to live in the Tower complex, they even have their own pub. The tour was all kinds of fantastic and our tour guide was quite fond of bad puns. After our tour, we walked over to the royal jewels, which had a fuzzy-headed guard outside of it. There were so many maces owned by William and Mary! Something like half of the maces at least. When we got to the really important bits, you had to enter into this humongous vault, I would have taken a picture had photography been allowed. It wasn’t that immensely interesting but now I can say I’ve done it. After that, we walked a little before deciding we wanted to go into the White Tower and proceeded to go in a complete circle looking for the entrance but we did get to see the Raven houses. The White Tower is basically a weapons and armaments museum, there were suits of amour belonging to the different kings and a Norman bathroom. On one of the top floors there was this interactive section, mainly for kids but there were a lot of adults there too. It was here, at two different stations, that I was cut in front of by two different children, one more blatant than the other. There was one station where you could pull the string of a bow and try to pull it far enough to “hit” a target. I was standing in line, at the ADULT-SIZED bow, about to step up when this, I’m going to guess ten or twelve-year old girl ran up in front of me (I was reaching out to grip the bow string, and started pulling it. I just stood there, kind of shocked and confused, looked around and saw her mother just standing there, watching her. This happened again, same girl, to I think Ryan, at another station. We decided after the White Tower that it was time to leave even though we hadn’t seen everything but it was still incredible and totally worth the price.

Sunday we got up for a brunch of Dim Sum in London’s Chinatown with our Professor. We split up into two tables however, the first table ended up being at the beginning of the carts’ route while we at the second table was at the end. It really good as always. I used my previous dim sum experience to start things off with some sesame balls and also got my meat-eating table mates some of the taro root things. I got, among other things, some vegetables wrapped in noodles, sooooo good, I kept wanting some during the day. They also had this desert that I think was alternating layers of jell-o and agar agar in different flavors. You should try that mom. After that we were kind of left to wander away on our own. We chose to try going to the National Gallery but ended up going into the National Portrait Gallery instead, apparently the National Gallery is only a door over. They had a great array of different portraits from all sorts of different times periods. The best part was definitely finding a portrait of Catherine Douglas, Duchess of Queensberry who bears quite the resemblance to Alice, a girl in our seminar. It’s definitely smaller than the National Gallery in Washington but it was nice and I played “Name that Tudor” in the Tudor gallery.

For our first day trip, we went over to Cambridge. We had to get up early and tubed over to King’s Cross Station, we lost half our group in the tube (they got on a tube before the rest of us could) and so we had to wait around at King’s Cross until everyone was found. We passed by 9 ¾ on our way to our platform, took a picture and then continued on to the train. I tried to stay awake and watch the countryside but I very quickly fell asleep and did not wake up until we were practically there. We walked what seemed like a very long way up to the heart of Cambridge. One of the Colleges, Pembrook was open to the public so we walked around it, explored, got some water, and took some pictures. We stopped in at this center market which had apparently been there, in various incarnations, for hundreds of years, I bought some cranberries and some Thai veggie curry, it was so good. We then went down to the Cam. The Cam is a river that runs through the University, hence Cam-bridge, there were quite a few bridges though. One thing you can do on the Cam is something called punting. Punting is basically what the guys in Venice do on gondolas. You can get on a boat and punt yourself or you can take a tour with someone who punts for you. Two groups from our seminar decided to try punting for themselves, which was very amusing for those of us who went on the guided tour. We passed by Queens, Kings, St. Johns and some other College I think. After our long walk to the University, being able to lounge was very nice. When we finished, those of us on the tour had to walk back to the center and keep our tour guided busy until the self-punters made it back. Three of us really wanted ice cream so we got some of that, mine was a medium and instead of being two scoops on top of each other it was two scoops beside each other. We joked that it was kind of like London, expanding out instead of up like New York. Our tour guide was really nice and we started our walking tour of scientific Cambridge. Sadly, for me it was very boring; also, they never put scientists in pretty buildings so we spent most of our time around buildings built in the 60s. After that was done we decided to have dinner at a pub called the Eagle which is where either Watson or Crick announced that they had discovered the structure of DNA. We all (except for James) got fish and chips. The fish was huge! It was like they gave us all a whole fish to eat. Some of us also got some drinks. Two people got this thing called Pimms, which is a gin-based drink and with lemonade was extremely tasty. After dinner, we walked back to the train station, bummed around until our train got there and then rode back. That night we decided that we wanted to find a pub near us and make good on the lower drinking age. However, we discovered that places near us get either very full or close around ten or eleven, thus ended our quest, in defeat.

Thursday was our first day of class. It was pretty quick, it was basically going through basic British History. It was also here that we learned that our professor (a physics professor) is a bit fast and loose with historical facts. It was in this class that we learned that not St. Augustine, but St. Petersburg was the first permanent settlement in North America. The historian in me also twitched a bit every time he spoke about the “Dark Ages”. I hate that term. Grrrr. Anyways, after that we bummed around a little. We went to Victoria Station to get railcards, had French bagette lunches, exchanged the £25 into £24.67 and then ate standing up due to lack of benches.

So, we’d been here a couple of days but still had no internet. Desperate for email checking and not wanting to park in the common room (where there is a communal internet plug), we went in search, backpacks and laptops in tow, of free WiFi. Most of the places we passed by with free WiFi were restaurant-type places and even the Starbucks did not have WiFi. On our second pass, we passed a place called Coffee Republic; we all got something to eat/drink and parked. The WiFi they offered you had to buy food for minutes but we were able to find another WiFi that was unprotected and used that. Apparently, the British don’t have the same park and surf mentality that we do. After dinner, we went to our first play, Spamalot. Everyone was very good and the play was very funny. I was very proud of myself; most of the cultural jokes did not go over my head. Walking there was fun too; we had to walk past Chinatown.

Back to August 25, the plane ride was pretty uneventful, there was virtually no legroom which made me very sad but there were little screens in the back of the seats in front of us that everyone thought would just show us the in-flight movie Be Kind Rewind, which I had already seen. However, it ended up being far better, they were giant touch screens where you could pick a movie (there were twenty), pick a TV show to watch, play a game, listen to music, or watch the plane travel. I ended up watching an episode of Pushing Daisies, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, playing solitaire, sudoku, and mahjong. The flight itself was ok, there was the occasional bump and the only real turbulence we experienced was when we got caught in the stream of a plane in front of us which was scary because we bounced around, we didn’t drop though. It was completely dark out while we were crossing the Atlantic so I have nothing really to compare it to but once the sun rose, we were close to Ireland, there was a huge blanket of clouds, and you could see the multiple layers of clouds. Once we started, to descend those clouds went from nice and fluffy to grey and gloomy the farther down we got. And lo, we were in England. We flew into Gatwick and walking to Customs was certainly an adventure, it is almost as if they built that airport piece by piece so we had to walk through so many hallways and around so many turns before we got there. It took a while to get through the line in customs but once we were there, it did not take too long. We walked out, found our professor, found our coach, piled all our luggage on and boy did we have a lot, and were off. I tried to stay awake and watch the scenery but eventually I fell asleep. By the time I woke up, we were in Chelsea and we all piled into the dorm hall, IES, which is essentially a hostel for students. We got our keys, were given information packets, stuff to fill out in exchange for passports, and sent up to our rooms. Unpacking went fine, except my blue suitcase was too big to fit in any of the nooks provided. It is currently in front of my closet and I have to move it to get into my closet, I need to fix that. We had to come down for orientation, which was reasonably self-explanatory, but we were given some maps and £100 for food. And set loose to further unpack and buy cell phones. I noticed there was a T-mobile shop on a small tour of the area our professor gave us and proceeded over to see is UK T-mobile was more helpful than US T-mobile and it was. I wanted to see if I could unlock my phone so as to not have to buy a new one. I could, but it would cost £30 as opposed to £20 to buy a phone and put £10 on it. Buying it proved to be more difficult but by hard much more hilarious. I didn’t bring my food money with me so all I had was the £25 Grandpa gave me, I handed the £20 to the guy helping us, warning him that it was old. He took it, stared at it for a second, and said “Wow, I haven’t seen this since I was a kid!” he proceeded to show it off to his co-worker, continually exclaiming that he hadn’t seen this pound note for a while. It ended up that they couldn’t take it because when they change notes, the bank recalls all the old money. I borrowed £20 from my friend James and got my phone, it has sudoku. We bummed around for the rest of the day, went food shopping, until our professor took us our to dinner. Keep in mind now that from when we woke up Monday morning until this time, Tuesday evening, virtually none of us had slept. Everyone was loopy and out of it and virtually fell into bed at 8pm.

So, after being awake for so many hours and then sleeping for a few, we had to get up again at 7:30 for our walking tour of London. All very drowsy, we boarded the tube and rode over to Tower Hill to start our tour. Our guide was totally sketchy-looking, like a guy who would cause you to clutch your purse harder when you saw him, he even had a microphone. However, he ended up being amazing, very funny and very knowledgably. We started out at the Tower, saw Tower Bridge, and then took a boat down the Thames, passing places like St. Paul’s, the London Eye, the Tate Modern, and London Bridge among others. We got off by Parliament and walked around there, by Westminster Abbey, St. James’ Park, the Queen’s Horse Guards, and Trafalgar’s Square. Thus ended our fabulous tour and we went to get some tour bus tickets that were good for 24 hours. We got lunch at this Arabian restaurant named Souk, which was extremely tasty. Since we were close by, we decided to walk over to Piccadilly Circus, which was not as big as I thought it was going to be, I thought the street was wider for one. Then we had a fun time trying to find the Big Bus stop where we could get on and start our tour. We finally found one and got on, the tour guide asked us where we were from and upon hearing that we were American, he asked us the question “what did John Quincy Adams do that no other U.S. President has?” Kind of vague, I said he wrote the Monroe Doctrine, which was true but not what he was looking for. He kept giving us time to think about it and a good twenty minutes later, we were given the answer, he married a foreign wife. He said he is always surprised no American can answer this question. So we traveled all around on this bus listening to his commentary, some of it interesting, some of it not so much. Near the end, he started to warn us to be careful getting off because we are easy targets for pickpockets (because we are getting off a tour bus), he proceeded to inspect our bags, see if our bags were thief safe. He did not like my bag and tried to show how a thief would grab my bag except I was holding my bag in my lap and he did not really come close to even touching it, I was left very confused. There were two lines on this bus, a red line and a blue line. The red line stayed around the main city and the blue line went all over the place and went closer to where we live. Sadly, though, they do not have a talking guide so we rode in silence to a tube station and took the tube home.

It is currently 5:48 here but I’ve been up for about an hour and I might lie down soon before I have to wake up again at 7:30.

So, on Monday, we drove down to Red Bank, NJ to visit Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash and ogle. I bought The Watchmen and a SModcast bumper sticker. We bummed around Red Bank for a bit but not too long. My mom wanted to visit a Sanrio store but the number had been disconnected so instead we drove to the Quick Stop in Leonardo, NJ. I didn’t go in but they were doing some work outside of it and my dad said it looks exactly like it does in Clerks. Then we drove to the airport where I braved the automatic ticket machine which decided about half way through that I spoke German but it all worked. I met up with my friends and we all went through security together, waving to the parents all the way. We then had to sit around for an hour but did so with the seminar group. I’m kinda tired now so, TO BE CONTINUED!

Split the days up

Dad did not want his picture taken, we were trying to figure out the shuttle to Penn Station.

Marble is always ten degrees cooler than its surroundings.

The street outside of the subway, I don’t remember which street, my mom took the picture.

M&M screen on top of M&M world

So many kinds of M&Ms

Mosaic at the Subway station.

Beard Papa, I kinda want the mango drink.

Tasteys

And mochi. That chocolate was a lie, it was coffee





The Beard Papa bike, which had a flat tire.

Lunch time, Mom got a iced green tea which she said tasted like grass.

Me with my udon, I should have taken a picture of exactly how many mushrooms were in it, it was ridiculous

Battery Park, last time we were here, they were doing something on Ellis Island and we didn’t get to go, so I wanted to go. We did not have a lot of time there since it took forever to get to and from on those ferries what with the waiting in line and all. They really packed people in on the ferry from the stature of liberty to Ellis Island though, it was kind of funny. We joked that we were going to be processed.

Ellis Island

Statue of Liberty

Piles of Luggage, I think most of the stuff they have was donated, people didn’t leave it all here.

The Registry Room- It was massive; this is the room where everyone was processed

Graffiti on the walls, it just looks dirty, which tells you how much is actually written on it.

Ellis Island needs to clean their sinks

After this we bummed around, had some fantastic sandwiches in SoHo and then went back to the hotel where I did some final packing and inadvertently made one of my suitcases 53 lbs. Oops, they didn’t charge me a fee though.

New York 154 miles! We weren’t actually going to New York but it was close.

My constant companion while on the trip, luggage.

Dad driving

Mom sleeping

Sleep time

One state down

Welcome to New Jersey

Final state down

I pretty much had to get all this packed today before we left for New Jersey on Saturday. For the most part all of it was packed except for a few things.

My melty birthday cake. It was chocolate though so we left it outside for the birds.

Took dog for a walk and took pictures of the field. I’ve been doing a little work on the presentation all during this week, but not that much.

Party time—Mrs. Wong, my employer and mother of my friend Liz threw me a going away party.

Last night of work over! Time to work on my presentation……….yeah.

The Road to England!

The Breakfast of Packing Champions!- Cereal, if you’re at all curious.

The mess- Before I could pack, I had to make sense of my room and since it’s too big to get into one shot, ignore the dresser, that mass of clothes to the left is just clean clothes, later to be replaced with packing.

8:33- It didn’t take too long to clean up so it was time to take the quizzes on two of the books I had to read

Ready for the quizzes

11:19- Done finally, it was really hard to take a picture of this clock.

Whoa, clean

Ross- I only had one large suitcase and thus, needed another one

This was a ridiculously large suitcase, it came up to my waist.

My new suitcase, it’s not as big as the other one, I swear.

Momma

Recharging the batteries at Starbucksn

Oh look pun!