wildcard_47 | my adventures in England! (Reply)

Oh, friends, where to begin?? First of all, wow. This week has been absolutely insane; between getting here, having orientation, then going on our coach tour on Thursday, a two-hour walking tour of our neighborhood (Little Venice) and surrounding neighborhoods on Friday, plus the day trip to Stonehenge and Bath on Saturday, I feel like we’ve been going a million meters an hour! (Notice I did not say miles, haha! Am still trying to get my conversions down - pints and cups and metres, etc. Good times. Right about now is one of those rare times when I wish I'd paid more attention in middle school.) Anyway - I present to you our week's adventures!

Let’s start with Thursday. Since the coach arrived at 1:30 for the tour, we got to sleep in, for once! Our tour guide, Brit (oh, yes, that was indeed her name), was bubbly, fun and was the perfect person to show us around. She was very knowledgeable. So, to start out, we drove through Little Venice (our neighborhood), then through Paddington, Notting Hill, and made our way around London from there. Saw all the big sites from the bus, mostly – Harrods, Kensington Gardens, Big Ben/Parliament, etc. – but did get to leave the bus twice, at St. James’s Park (so we could see Buckingham) and at City Hall, near the Tower and Tower Bridge. Besides that, we also saw “the city” (the financial district/oldest part of town) and about a thousand other landmarks. Oh, and we also saw some naked Welch schoolboy bum while we drove in traffic (as they were kind enough to moon us from their coach). See my previous post for more details. Hilariously, Brit’s first reaction, besides laughter and exclamations of shock, was “Oh, that’s the Welsh for you!” As the tour was a complete whirlwind of "on your left/right is...", I want to be able to go back to many of the sights we passed (such as the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, etc.) on my own and explore. Or at the very least, I’d like to take better pictures of them – my pictures from the bus are these blurry, awful things that are not worthy of postage.

Friday was just as fun. Sean, our guide for the walking tour, is a grandfatherly Irishman turned Londoner who’s lived in England for forty years. He’s also, strangely enough, a cousin to Prof. Boyle, one of the English professors from back home. Anyway, Sean showed us around the neighborhood, first taking us around the back streets of Little Venice, then through Maida Vale; afterwards, we walked down by the canals – going through Lisson Grove. After about ten minutes of walking beside the canal, we went back up into the city and walked to Regent’s Park, via Hanover Square. Regent’s Park is gorgeous; it had so many lakes and green areas that it reminded me of Elon's landscape. Only better. :D (The resemblance was even stronger because of the thousands of pigeons, geese, and swans residing there.) Anyway, Sean left us at Regent's (he lives nearby), and the group split in half - part of us took the Tube back to the flats while the group I was in, plus Gabie (our prof-in-residence) walked back home through St. John’s Wood.

Friday night, we went to the Warwick Castle, a tiny pub down the street from the Tube stop, for a drink and dinner. Most of the girls had some cider (Strongbow, I think), I had a Foster's, and another girl had a San Miguel (which she hated, so we switched drinks mid-meal.) My food (I had chicken pie) was very tasty, but I still think the Wetherspoon is my favorite pub so far. Anyway, dinner was a good time, and the reactions from the locals (who drunkenly threw out the words 'Americans' and 'tourists' every four seconds and stared in our direction each time those words was said) were funny to keep track of.

Saturday was an early day for everyone. The coach was supposed to arrive at 7:45 a.m., but our morning alarm went off without being heard and was ignored for a good twenty minutes. So I woke up at 7:10 (after being informed by my roommate of the time), launched out of bed, consumed cereal like a fiend, and ran to get ready. Despite this setback, my entire flat was able to be downstairs and outside right around 7:45. That was okay, though, because the bus wasn’t even on time. It came around 8 or ten after. We had the same driver as on Friday – Danny – which was brilliant as he was excellent at navigating through London traffic. There was no lurching or excessive braking on this coach ride – it was very comfortable. Basically, the drive to Stonehenge consisted of two things – sleeping, and listening to my iPod. Mostly it was the latter as I was tired but couldn’t really nap. So I just stared out the window at the English countryside. Strangely, it was reminiscent of a Virginia-type landscape – there were trees lining the motorway, but lots of open fields past that, for cows or sheep to pasture. There were also houses scattered here and there on the hilltops. The landscape was beautiful, and different enough from US landscapes to make me feel like I was in another country. It was something about the look of the land and the shape of the trees, I think. Anyway, our route took us on the M4 out of London, past Heathrow, and then we traveled on lots of smaller roads to Stonehenge.

Stonehenge itself was very cool to see in person, and was also pretty, as far as aesthetics are concerned - but a bit anticlimactic. I wish we'd been able to touch the monument or something, that would have been amazing. Although I did take some pictures that will make the folks who create Windows XP desktops VERY jealous. My Stonehenge pictures totally own their wimpy background photos. Anyway (back on topic), we were issued little audio guides (about the size of walkie talkies) and learned more about the monument that way as we walked around for good snapshots. The oh-so-helpful roboguides told us about the legends associated with the building of Stonehenge and how, according to modern science, it should have been basically impossible to construct, etc. etc....how legends tell that it was built by Druids, aliens, or ~~Dumbledore~~, er, I mean, Merlin. That other wizard guy. ;) Anyway, after an hour at Stonehenge, we re-boarded the coach and went on our way to Bath, which took an additional hour.

Bath was quite the surprise for me in two ways. One, the actual Roman baths are completely underwhelming. We got there, went inside the official Roman Baths building, saw all the sights, and eventually got bored. There’s only so many times you can hear the words “Sulis Aquae”, Minerva, and “healing properties” before you get really tired of seeing old rocks and hot, greenish, untreated water. There was also quite a crowd down there, which made it hard to navigate without smashing into someone. The second surprising thing about Bath was that the town – despite being a complete tourist trap – is one of the most beautifully built. Period. The architecture is very Georgian, very classic, and it’s shockingly consistent and gorgeous throughout the town. The Abbey in Bath is magnificent. My pictures didn’t even do it justice, but it’s so beautiful. We got to see a lot of the town through Sean, who was our guide again and did a small history-based walking tour with us. That was probably my favorite part. We also got to do some silly things - including eating our packed lunches in the square by the Abbey and feeling like complete dorks. After the craziest walking tour ever (Sean really books it for a 70-something man!), we got onto the coach and absolutely crashed, mostly sleeping during the trip back to London. We arrived back at the flats around 7:30 p.m., had dinner, and I spent the rest of the night watching TV and vegging, and turned in early.

Happy Year of the Rat, everyone! This morning/afternoon, there was a Chinese New Year celebration in Trafalgar Square. It all started with a parade at 11:00 am. Thus, we got up around 9 and were walking to the Tube at 10 to get to Trafalgar and find a good spot by the street. The celebration was huge, but not as gigantic or as crazy as I was expecting, so that was nice. Our plan to get there early worked brilliantly, as we were very close to the parade start (standing near St. Martin in the Fields) and got to see all the lovely parade people as they walked past in traditional Chinese dress, waving flags, doing martial arts/types of dance, and running around as the dragons! After the parade ended, we went up to Chinatown to get some Chinese food (because, why wouldn’t we!), but every other person in London had the same idea, so we went back to Trafalgar and bought food off of the street vendors. Then we hopped over to Tesco, back to the Tube, and then arrived at the flats.

At 10:30 tomorrow, the adventures continue as we try to avoid the flats while construction crews work on the water mains. So, a small group of us are meeting to go to the Impressionist Art Museum, which will be brilliant! Tuesday marks the beginning of classes, at which point I will have to get used to London all over again! It should be interesting to see how well I can get to Bloomsbury Square...but at least I've read the required reading now, so I'm that much more prepared. (We'll pretend I didn't just start and finish that reading this evening...)

And I said all of that mess to say: I hope you are all having lovely afternoons - I'm going to bed. Cheerio!

P.S. I'll post a link to pictures in a few days! (As soon as I get them all sorted, that is.)