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.