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.

Cheers: Where nobody knows your name

I stayed up too late last night, and my allergies have been killing me, so after class today I felt like crap and decided to take a nap for about an hour. Somehow while half asleep I managed to turn off my alarm when I hit snooze, despite the buttons being far away from each other, as I often manage to do. So I slept for 3 hours, woke up at 5, and felt guilty for wasting the day, since I knew everyone would be eating at about 6:30 at the refectory, and going somewhere after that, so I really only had time to upload some pictures. However, we went to a cool pub this evening called the Queen's Head, had a good time and a few drinks, then headed out to find somewhere to dance. We found free coupons to get into Cheers and went there. It was intersting to see how what started out as a bar and TV show in America is a crowded dance club in London. Ze hqd q good ti,e dqnding qnd ,qking fun of the ridiculous people qround us: Sorry; qppqrently ,y keyboqrd hqs gone crqwy 9I szeqr; itùs not ,e0; so Iùll sqy goodnight:

The events of the evening.

Wow. This place is amazing. So far I have been to St. Paul's Cathedral, from the crypt to the highest gallery, the Tate Modern (though we only had 45 minutes there, so I really must go back, especially since all museums are free here), saw Les Miserables at the West End (we bought tickets an hour before hand for £22) and Othello in the Globe Theater.

Tonight, after Othello, we walked through the financial district on our way to Spittlefield for Indian food. Spittlefeild is a really cool area. There are tons of Indian restaurants, and at that point we were travelling in a ridiculously big group, so the one of the men outside the restaurants, whose jobs are apparently to entice people to come in, offered us free drinks and 30% off of our meals if we picked his restaurant. The service was pretty slow but the food was really good, and it cost 4 of us only £20 together for dinner. Afterwards, a few of us escaped the group by ducking into a really cool indie museum that had an "art cafe" in the basement, though we did not venture down there. The guy running the store told us about concerts in the area. We joined up with 3 more people in a hookah bar that was out of hookah, despite the name of the place being "The Hookah Bar," and drank delicious tea (and I don't even like tea). A few of our group (at that point, a managable 6) really wanted to find a place with hookah, and we found one not too much farther down Brick Lane called Casa Blue. It was a ridiculously eclectic space. They were playing salsa music, and had a few tapestries on the wall, one looking American Indian, and several others depicting machines of war from WWII, such as tanks, helicopters that said "USSR" on their sides, and machine guns. There was a stuffed animal chicken hanging from the ceiling, as well as a Brazilian football (read: soccer) jersey, and the requisite cool lamps you find in nearly every hookah bar I've ever seen, as well as blinking strands of lights. Interestingly, in hookah bars in London they also sell cocktails, though we stuck to tea.

We met some really interesting characters at Casa Blue. One of the members of our group, Greg, met a tightrope and stilt walking performer that is performing somewhere tomorrow at noon. He also does "high opera," but doesn't sing. Greg was a little fuzzy on the details when he related them to us, but apparently high opera means he is up high, as well as stoned. However, he doesn't smoke cigarettes because he has bronchitis, but I guess that doesn't stop him from his pursuit of altitude.

Meanwhile, my friends Meg and Jen and I spoke to this really interesting guy named Francois, who was born in France and moved to London with his parents when he was 16, and has lived here for the last 17 years. He told us all the sights to see in Paris, mostly the famous, touristy ones, but also a cafe called "The 2 Cigarette Butts," except in French, but I didn't catch it. He talked to us about the differences between the English and French, and how he got to vote whether or not they should put the pyramid up at the Louvre when he was a kid. He told us we had to go to a patisserie and look at the magnificent cakes, and how everything the French do is meticulous and perfect, from the cakes to every building, even in the poorer parts of the city. We talked a bit about America, where he had been once when he was dating a woman from Norfolk who was in the US Navy. He told us that it is really weird to him to hear the names of states when he asked us where we are from, because for him those places only exist in movies, and you only hear American accents regularly in TV shows, such as Night Rider and Prison Break. He professed a love of Mexican food, and says there are no good places to get Mexican food. Apparently they don't do it right in the few existing Mexican restaurants. It was then that I got the brilliant idea that would solve all of my problems of wanting to move to Europe but not wanting to leave my family: I'll be a lawyer in the States for a few years, make a bunch of money and spend very little of it, then we can move here and open up a Mexican restaurant, because there's no way I could do that without my Mexican food loving parents from Texas (among other places). It's perfect. After I related my brilliant idea, Francois told us about a couple from Seattle who came to London and couldn't find any decent coffee, so they opened a coffee shop, which became a hit, so they opened up a few more, and were doing really well, when Starbucks offered them a whole bunch of money (£2 million was the figure Francois gave us, though since it was in the flow of conversation, I trust the information but not the accuracy) to continue expanding their business as they pleased, as long as they used the Starbucks logo. He also told us about the differences between barristers and solicitors, being the latter, and how there's a tradition of hierarchy that is severely limiting the ability of lawyers in England to function as they should. Eventually, we had to leave so we could catch the Tube before it stopped running, and we parted with Francois with a handshake and kiss on each cheek, the European way. So far, our visit to the Casa Blue was my favorite part of the trip so far because of the combination of atmosphere and human connection.

It's getting pretty late (it's 1:49 am here), so I don't think I will be able to upload pictures as I planned to, since my computer cable is in my room, and I am in the computer lab, and what with getting it, and logging on to the slow computers in the dorm, and going through that whole process, it will take too long, since I need to read before I go to sleep, and I need to get up somewhat before class (which is at 10:50 for me, since they are splitting us in 2 for class tomorrow), so that I can call Mrs. Miller, my mother's friend who happens to be staying in London until Friday, which I have alternately forgotten and not had time to do over the past 3 days (I'm sorry Mrs. Miller).

Good night. I promise to upload photos tomorrow.

Welcome to my London blog.

In about an hour and a half, I'm leaving for the airport. My plane takes off at 11:10 pm and lands about 7.5 hours later at 11:35 am.

I am now accepting alternate title suggestions for my blog. Monez in London isn't quite doing it for me.

I promise to put all my pictures up somewhere as well, and include the link here.