Parliament, the Globe and a Not so Silent Dance Party

I know, I know. I haven't posted in forEVER. I apologize. Especially since this post is only going to partially catch you up to speed.

First, we must go back in time 2 weeks to February 13, when we had another class trip to tour Parliament and the Globe Theatre. There's not a whole lot to tell, so here are the pictures from that. A good portion of them are stolen from other people since my camera ran out of battery half way through the day :(

Then, there was a "silent dance" in Trafalger Square that was super fun. The basic concept was that everyone comes with their iPods or MP3s and dances to their own music at the same time. It was supposed to be silent, but everyone was screaming, but it was still pretty cool to have thousands (yes, thousands showed up) of people jamming to their own beat at the same time. My playlist for the event included:

It's Tricky - Run DMC
What I Like About You - The Romantics
You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC
Footloose - Ken Loggins
Everytime We Touch - Cascada
Closer To Free - The Bodeans
Mickey - B*Witched
That Thing You Do - The Wonders
I Touch Myself - The Divynls
Pump It - Black Eyed Peas

We got up onto the base of a monument in the square for the dance which was pretty cool. We had a good view of everyone, but it was really crowded too which made it hard to really dance, not that that stopped us. Some people were even trying to jump off and crowd surf, but the crowd wasn't catching any of them :-/

After that we went out to dinner and then to the pub. Not much else to tell, although we did get back to Surbiton too late and the buses weren't running. Fortunately, our friend Matt was nice enough to walk Bri and I home at 12:30am.

Okay, that's it for now. I'll be writing again soon about our Scotland trip last weekend!

Photo Frenzy and Travel Plans

Well, well, well, do I ever have some pictures for you.

Yesterday was Photo Frenzy, an event put on by the study abroad office. It's basically a scavenger hunt. Our team (which we creatively named Team Us [NOT U.S. like the organizers thought]) was given a list of clues such as, "this bridge was only open for a week before it was closed for being too wobbly" and then we had to know this meant Millennium Bridge and go a take a picture of it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before Photo Frenzy, a few of us planned on getting up early and going to Abbey Road before we had to meet the rest. Well, we all ended up being late and we decided to do that another time since Abbey Road was quite far from where we were supposed to meet everyone. This gave us a little bit of time to walk along the Thames. There were street performers all along the river, and we had a great time just wandering around and taking pictures.

Then we met up with all the other people in our group, and started figuring out the clues! I wasn't the designated picture taker, but I stole the pictures off Matt's facebook so that I could show you! We didn't think we would win the prize for fastest group, so we tried to go for most creative, thus the reason for the funny poses in these pics. We didn't end up winning, but it was still fun!

There was also a bonus prize for best caption that starts with "You know you're in London when..." so that picture is in there too. We lost that prize to a group that definitely deserved it. They found a couple of cute British boys and captioned the picture "You know you're in London when you find guys that look like this," haha.

Here's our group pictures!

I really think we should have gotten most creative, don't you? hehe. So after that we met everyone at TigerTiger and got dinner and drinks. Of course, we ended up staying longer than everyone else, but they needed the room we were in and Laura wasn't done eating, so they let us sit in the VIP room since it was still early and the VIPs weren't getting there until later! But when they started showing up, we had to go find another pub, called The Crown and Two Chairmen. Of all the luck, we ended up getting a huge corner table, even though it was pretty busy. After hanging out there for a while, we headed back home.

Think you can handle another slide show? Good. These are all the pictures that I took of the day, starting with the walk along the Thames, some other sites of Photo Frenzy and, of course, our night at the pubs.

Okay, I know that was a long one, but I just had so many great pictures!

So, today is Sunday, and I've been relaxing all day. I'm so tired after yesterday and all the walking we did. I have some homework to do as well and class all week, so it might be awhile before I write again... mostly because there's not much that's going to be going on. We have a trip with British Life and Culture on Friday to Parliament and the Globe, though.

And the next weekend a bunch of us are taking a bus to Edinborough! We a travel meeting the other day and here are the tentitive travel dates:
*February 19- Edinborough
*March 12- Amsterdam
*March 27- Somewhere in England, we talked about either Liverpool or Cornwall
*Spring Break (not sure exactly what day we are leaving but it starts April 3)- Spain, Italy, Vienna and Prague
*April 30- Paris

The only trip that's set in stone right now is Edinborough, the rest we're still kind of talking about. And we also plan on making a trip to Neice, Dublin and possibly Berlin. I'm not going on all of these, but I haven't really decided which ones I'm not going on yet, haha. I just thought I'd let you all know what might be in store!

Missing home a bunch (even though I know it doesn't sound like it),
Kendyl

Snow, Museums and Getting Back to School

Hey everyone!

Well, it's been quite the interesting first week of classes... especially since class was canceled on Monday and Tuesday due to the "huge" amount of snow that we got. It probably amounted to about 5-8 inches total. The majority of the study abroad students are from either New York or Michigan, so we all pretty much thought it was insane that everything closed down because of that little amount of snow, but it's so unusual around here that they don't have the equipment to salt or plow it.

I didn't even leave the house on Monday because all the businesses were closed so I knew there was really no point. I just used the day to get some sleep and relaxing in, since we've been going going going since we got here. When I found out that classes were canceled the next day though, I knew I couldn't spend another day indoors. Luckily, businesses were getting back to normal even if the University wasn't.

Hunter and I went into the city and to some museums. First, the Imperial War Museum, which was really depressing, but kinda cool to see WWI and WWII from another country's perspective. And they had a Holocaust exhibit as well. By the time we got out of there we were about ready for something more on the fun side.

So we went to the Natural History Museum! haha. Okay, it might not sound like much fun, but it was more kid-oriented so there was an earthquake room that shook and other things with buttons to press or wheels to spin that appealed to my five year-old mentality :)

Then we realized that we had spent the entire day with the non-living, so we swung by Harrod's to look at the fish tank, haha, and proceeded to attempt to make a decision about where to eat. That took us through Leicester Square and China Town until we finally decided to head back to Kingston to meet everyone else at what has become our frequented pub, the King's Tun, for dinner. Anyway, here are some pictures from the day:

Wednesday, we finally started classes. I had my Shakespeare class... which might possibly eat me alive since it's about 30 drama students and me (and will involve some acting), but hopefully it'll be a fun challenge! And then I had British Life and Culture with all the other study abroad-ers, which is going to be fun. I went shopping in Kingston between classes and got some books that I needed (and some I didn't) and finally got a hairdryer! I was very excited since I've been walking around with wet hair way more than I would like.

Today I had by 19th Century Novel lecture, and there's a bunch of other study abroad students in that as well, so it's a little less intimidating than it might have been.

Anyway, I've had a request to take a picture of where I'm living so:

Other than that, I'm off to do some more book shopping and then back into Kingston to have a meeting with the crew about where and when we are going to do some traveling!

Hope all is well back in Michigan! Hugs to all,

Kendyl