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!