Alive and well in Amsterdam

Aside from a cold, I'm having a blast in Amsterdam. Tomorrow I fly back to London in the morning, then Monday evening it's back to Virginia. It's going to be weird being back in the US, but great to see my family and friends again. I just wanted to let you all know where I am and that I'm alive. Unfortunately I don't have time to tell you any stories. Love you all!!

Meg and I are now in Brussels, Belgium. Our lives are fantastic. We love it here, and we had a great time in Paris. Tomorrow we are going on a daytrip to Bruges, then on the next day (Thursday, I guess, the 12th, in any case) we are off to Amsterdam. The keyboards in Belgium are strange. I cannot figure out apostrophes or exclamation points and you need to shift to use numbers and periods, and many of the letters are in the wrong place.

I love you all and miss you.

Sad.

The Culture of London program is over. Tomorrow, my new family is torn apart. Surely I will cry. However, my friend Meg and I are off to Paris, so once that fact finally hits me (maybe when we emerge from the Chunnel), I'll get over it and be ecstatic again. I mean, I have been wanting to go to Paris for years, and I am pretty excited about it, it just isn't quite overpowering my sadness at this ending. This program has been one of the best experiences of my life.

I might not have computer access very much or even at all for the next 10 days, but I promise that sometime after I get home I will do some massive picture uploading for you all.

Love you and miss you!!!

Wicked

Last night I saw the musical Wicked, which was pretty fantastic. I'm glad that I hadn't read the book recently, because it probably would have driven me crazy. They did a good job cutting it down to play size, but the ending was definitely different, much happier and less open ended.

I spent the afternoon after class hanging out with my friend Jen going to cool bookstores on Charing Cross Road, but I couldn't find any used British "adult" versions of Harry Potter (she wrote both a children's and an adult version, and the British versions apparently have more references to British things. So I might just get the 4th one and lend it to Jordan, and not the 1st, 3rd and 4th plus an extra 4th for Jordan, as I originally planned if I could find them cheaply at a used book store.

Sorry!

I'm sorry I haven't been updating much lately. There's so much to do here, I barely have time to sleep! I'd like to assure you that despite the craziness going on in London what with the attempted car bombings, all of my friends and I are fine. I was out when it happened, but we were watching a jazz show in a different part of the city and didn't even find out about it until the next morning. I think I'm going to stay in tonight, though, just in case.

The last few days have been quite an adventure. Yesterday I got up early and went to the Tower of London with my friend Eric. It was pretty crowded, so it took us 5 hours to see everything rather than the 2.5-3 it took others in our group who went during the middle of the week, but we still had a great time and it was really interesting. Then we went and ate on the river Thames near the London eye, then walked over to Trafalgar Square to go to the National Portrait Gallery. That was really neat, because we could see what some of the famous Londoners we've been learning about looked like. On the way to the gallery, we stopped by the Canada Day celebrations in the square and got free Canadian flags, and Eric took my picture with a guy dressed up in a snow suit, trapper hat and goggles, and was carrying old fashioned snow shoes. Then Eric went to a play and I went to the "Dali & film" exhibit at the Tate Modern.

Today a bunch of us went to Portobello and Camden Markets, which were pretty interesting, but it started to rain, so I came back here to read Mrs. Daloway, which I need to have done by Monday morning.

Hope you are all well. I love you and miss you!!!

Lost

I had a pretty good day. I got totally lost trying to go to the British Library to read. A few of us were going to read for a couple hours before we got a tour of the Westminster area. We ended up spending so much time lost that by the time we found it, we only had 45 minutes, so we got some food and then read for half an hour. However, we did have a pretty fun time getting to know each other's poor navigation skills, and I pushed a wheelchair for the first time in my life, though I'm afraid I may have done it poorly. Hannah and I also managed to almost get our wheel-chaired friend Allison's feet hit by cars when we stopped at intersections (Hannah, really), and occasionally jay-walked at times when it was not quite as wise as it seemed (both of our faults), but I'm sure her life has been in less safe hands than ours before, and we made it there in 3 pieces.

Our tour of Westminster, Whitehall, and Buckingham Palace (only on the outside, though we are going to get a tour of the Houses of Parliament and then have drinks on the members terrace on Thursday!!!) was given by a British guy that is involved with coordinating building restoration, who also gave us a lecture last week about the history of London architecture. Then 5 of us wandered around Soho and found this really cool vegan restaurant, because the really cool-looking thai restaurant I read about in my guide book had a 15 minute wait. We are going to go back sometime when we aren't starving and check it out.

That's all for tonight. I love you and miss you all, and I'll try to upload more photos soon!

Keyboard Problems

So, I wandered around Hyde Park all day today. It was really cool, but I have to go to sleep, so I can't really go into detail at the moment. I just wanted to explain the end of the post from last night: apparently, my keyboard went absolutely crazy while I was in the middle of typing. I even asked Meg to make sure I wasn't hallucinating from lack of sleep or second hand smoke or something. It was really weird.