Saturday in London

Planning Spring Break has been seriously stressful, and to add onto it, I had to go into the city today to book the trains because I was unable to do it online or over the phone (long story). To top it off, they were doing major rail construction today and the over and underground trains were out of service in some places and it took me three times as long to get into the city as it should have.

After all that, plus the 7.50 gbp that I had to pay to go into the city, I decided to enjoy myself after the booking was done. Can you guess where I went?

Why to visit my favorite building, of course! I walked the Thames near the Houses of Parliament, which is so amazing on a Saturday because there are so many street performers and such. Well, I attempted to get the experience on video, but as you probably know, nothing truly amazing can ever be captured on film... or in my case an SD card.



I also spent some time in a bookstore (yes, mom, I took your advice) and bought a hot dog from a vendor for lunch.

And recreated one of my favorite London moments that didn't get properly captured before. My first time into the city, if you'll recall was to meet Casey and she said that she was taking me for a surprise. We took the tube to the Westminister station and there is one exit where you walk up steps and out onto the street right at the base of Big Ben.

And now I'm home and back to the planning of our Spring Break adventures. I have one more hostel to book and then I'll send out an e-mail with the specifics.

Eating our way through Amsterdam

I think I've made you wait long enough to hear about Amsterdam.

We left Friday afternoon and our plane got in at about 7:30pm. Of course, after passport control, a train from the airport into Amsterdam and then a tram to the hostel, we were pretty exhausted and just grabbed some food at a pub nearby and passed out for the night.

Funny airport story: Going through security on the way to Amsterdam, we forgot to take the liquids out of our bags, and so they had to search them individually. And guess what I forgot I had? Pepper spray. I had put it in my checked luggage on the way here, cuz obviously I knew they would have an issue with me taking it on the plane, but I completely forgot it was on my key chain and it's illegal in the UK. They were really nice about it considering it's legal in the US, but I did have to talk to a police officer about how it's illegal here and blah blah blah. We had extra time so it wasn't too bad, but it was semi-amusing.

On our first full day we got up early and went to see Anne Frank's House. There was a line around the block once we got there, but luckily Jackie thought to get tickets early and we didn't have to wait. After that, we needed something a little happier to do, but Bri and I still needed to get our I am Amsterdam cards that get you discounts on all the attractions and give you passes to all the public transport, so we started heading for the tourist center. On the way, we saw a shop called Lots of Cheese and just had to stop. We all got cheese and bread or crackers and had a little picnic before heading back on our way :)

Once we'd gotten our Amsterdam cards, we headed for the all you can eat pancake cruise! It was pretty awesome, though it was cloudy and raining by the time that we got there, but at least we were inside by then. We spent the whole time coloring (it was a family cruise) and eating way too many pancakes.

That night we had tickets to a comedy show, Boom Chicago, at 10:30 so until then we wondered around, hit up an internet cafe, did some tourist shopping and finished what was left of our cheese and crackers from the morning. We also witnessed a canal race. Two girls with rafts paddle the width of the canal (with their hands) and once they reached the other side, took a shot and started paddling back. Unfortunately, one girl fell out of her raft in the middle of the canal. But, it was quite a sight! And there were a whole group of people gathered to cheer for them.

Anyway, the comedy show was very good. All the comedians were american so there was only a few skits that we didn't really understand. There was one part about how to pretend to be a Canadian if you're an American in Europe which was really funny considering I keep having people ask me if I'm Canadian and now all my friends are teasing me about it.

On Day two it was very nice weather so we decided to take a canal cruise (the pancake cruise wasn't through the canals). It was really amazing how many canals there are throughout the city. You don't really notice as much when you're just walking over them rather than going down them. We got to see a lot of the city then.

We stopped for lunch at a Mexican restaurant, which I know, sounds weird, but we've been obsessed with having nachos lately. Scotland had really good nachos... This restaurant was very authentic though, so it's hard to compare with pub nachos... moving on.

Then the Van Gogh Museum which was out of this world. They had an exhibition called Colors of the Night, and they had brought in Starry Night from NY for it! I hate how cliche it is for me to love that painting, but I can't help it. But that was just the big finish to the exhibition. Although it wasn't all VanGogh, the other artists were ones that he admired, and all of the works were of nightime, or twilight. Plus, they were date order, so you could see the progression.

On a whim, Bri and I checked out the House of Bols afterwards. We had split with the other 3 after lunch since they had other things that they wanted to see. The House of Bols was pretty much a 10 euro ad for Bols with a cocktail at the end. There was a supposed museum that we went through, but it wasn't amazing.

That night was just a little more tourist shopping and some amazing Chinese food for dinner, plus chocolate covered waffles for dessert.

Our last day, we went to the Rijks museum, which was only mildly interesting. There was a room for Dutch pottery that was kind of neat and we got to see a few Rembrants. Then onto the flower market which was very cool. Just a whole strip of tents selling flowers and bulbs. Unfortunately, we wouldn't have been able to bring any back, but Jackie bought a bouquet of tulips anyway and we all carried one around for the remainder of the day.

Then, we headed back to the hostel to get our stuff, and on the way stopped at a park nearby to take pictures with the big I am amsterdam sign that they have there. And had another chocolate covered waffle. We were running pretty ahead of schedule but we figured it was better to hang out at the airport than some random place where we ran the risk of getting behind, so we went and ate at the airport, more cheese and baguettes :) where we sat around and talked about how we had eaten our way through the weekend and were sursprised that they didn't have to roll us out of the country.

Now it's just the rush of homework to get done before we leave for Spring Break! The dates that I know for sure right now are as follows:

April 1- fly to Prague
April 14- fly from Rome to Barcelona
April 17- fly home to London

We will be taking a train from:
Prague to Vienna either the 3rd or 4th
Vienna to Venice the 5th or 6th
Venice to Florence the 7th or 8th and
Florence to Rome the 10th or 11th.

Most likely we'll take trains overnight between the two dates, so that we don't waste time on travel and don't have to pay for a hostel those nights.

I miss everyone so, so much. 11 weeks to go! Love you!

-Kendyl

Jane Austen, the National Theatre and Oxford

Okay, I've really been failing at keeping this updated and since I've missed so much, I'm just going to give you all a quick post to get it at least partially up to speed.

3 weeks ago a few friends and I went to see Jane Austen's house. It was amazing and we all totally geeked out when we saw her writing desk. The area was also very beautiful and we might go back when the weather's warmer. Before we went into the house we stopped at a cute little tea room across the street for lunch. Here are the pics:

The weekend before last we had two trips with British Life and Culture. First, on Thursday night, we went to see Pitmen Painters at the National Theatre, which I really enjoyed. It was about these men who worked in the mines that started an art group and it was based on a true story.

That Saturday, we went to Oxford. It was really pretty, but I'll admit it wasn't my favorite trip. Here's the pictures from that:

I just got back from Amsterdam late Monday night, but I'll save that for my next post. Hopefully, it won't be as long between posts from now on.

Love and kisses,
Kendyl

Apparantly there are no Scotish people in Scotland...

Well, it's been almost a week since I've gotten back from Scotland, so I suppose that it's time to write about it!

We left at 11pm on Thursday night (19 February, yes, I went to Scotland for Dad's birthday :) on an overnight bus to Edinburgh. We got in at around 7:40am on Friday morning and were all kinds of exhausted. We went and checked into our hostel, Princes Street Backpackers, which was very nice and then slept til about 11am, since none of us really got much sleep on the bus. We decided to just go exploring, and walk around that day and use the next 2 days for the real touristy stuff. Only 6 of us had arrived at the time as 2 of our friends had stayed for Friday classes and were arriving the next morning.

Once we were ready to go, we hit the streets... and it was raining. The first inside thing we found to do was go into the National Gallery. We walked around there for quite a while, got some food at this place called The Wash Bar, which had amazing nachos. Sounds weird, but they actually have nachos everywhere around here, and this place had great guacomole :) Then we headed out for more exploration to the Royal Mile, where the streets are pretty much lined with tourist shops. We stopped for coffee to decide what to do for the rest of the day and decided to do a ghost tour at 9:30pm. To waste time before that we did more shopping, specifically looking for this one store that's all hats (Fab-Hat-Trix) that we didn't get to before it closed unfortunately, and then stopped at this great, cheap pub (Maggie Dickson's) for dinner.

At Maggie's we met a group of Irishmen that were having a Stag night... without the groom, haha. They were singing very loudly across the pub so we joined them and then started a song war with them and another table where we all were trying to sing our sing the loudest. Of course this eventually prompted one of the Stag night guys to come over and talk to us. We convinced him to sing a traditional Irish song for us and then the other table joined him in singing it because apparently they were Irish as well. I got the whole thing on video, haha.

We headed over to the ghost tour afterwards, which was a tour of the underground city. It was alright, more informational than scary, though the guide certainly made on effort, and at the end was successful as another guy jumped out at us when the only light that we had was from a small flashlight.

Day Two: I had to get up early because Briann and Scott's bus was getting in at 7:30am and I somehow volunteered to make sure they got to the hostel alright. Briann was put in the same dorm as the rest of us but there wasn't room for Scott, so he was down the hall.

Something I should mention about the hostel, especially for all you facebookers that have seen the interesting tags on the photos I posted over there: each room in the hostel was lettered and each bed inside that room was named something that began with that letter. We were in room H with a guy we nicknamed Mr. Spain until we found out his name was Salva (short for Salvador) who had been in Edinburgh since September and in that hostel for 3 weeks (we aren't sure why as he spoke very little English) and a couple from France who also spoke very little English. Anyway, back to the bed names... here's the list: Briann-Herb, Mr. Spain-Hell, Colleen-Hallucinate, Erica-Haunted, Shana-Happy, Jessica-Hairy, French guy-Hansome, French girl-Harlot, Jackie-Hot Stuff, and me-Horny. Yeah, that would happen to me. And then Scott was in room J in the bed named Jumbo. Anyway, somewhere along the line we all decided that we should start calling each other by our bed names... haha.

We found a deal for a ticket that got you admitted to 3 different attractions and on all the hop on, hop off tours, so we hopped on one got to see the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Royal Yacht, Brittainia and then had dinner at Zizzi's, a chain italian restaurant. As it turned out we ended up missing the last tour bus and had to take a public one back to town.

At the restaurant we had decided to try to see Tom Riddle's grave (he is the namesake of the villian in Harry Potter for anyone who doesn't know) but that was during the day, and by the time we got to Greyfriar's Cemetary it was really dark. We attempted to find the grave anyway, but it was too dark and most of us we a little creeped out to be in a cemetary in the pitch black with only our cell phones as light. We did, however see the cafe that JK Rowling wrote a good portion of Harry Potter at. And we saw Greyfriar's Bobby, the statue in memory of a dog who visited his deceased master's grave everyday until the dog dies himself.

Then, it was back to Maggie's for the night. We got a big table at the back and played the drinking game King's. I only had 2 Strongbows, for the record, there are witnesses. The rules that we had (whenever you draw a King from the deck you make a rule) were as follows: anyone (except Shana who made the rule) who said the word "and" had to standup, shake their butt and blow a raspberry, anyone who said the word "drink" had to pretend to have T-rex arms until someone else said "drink" and anyone who said "what" had to put their hand over their face like a claw until someone else said "what" and took it away (the forth King never got drawn). In the slideshow you'll see Erica doing both at the same time. Her and I basically passed the clas between the two of us all night. We also met another Stag party that night, made up of guys from Cornwall, England. Me and some others left at this point, but the people that stayed met a separate group of Englishmen and a couple Norwegians leading us to the conclusion that there are no Scotish people in Scotland, haha.

Day Three: Visited the Scott Monument and then took a bus tour to Edinburgh Castle and Hollyrood Palace followed by a nice dinner (that started off not so nice as two people decided to try haggis and Briann and I almost puked from the smell). A little bit more souvenier shopping and drinks (hot chocolate) at The Wash Bar. Our bus left at 10pm and got back into London at 6 something. Good thing I didn't have class until 4pm! I slept the next two days away :)

There's not much to tell about our last day, but I still have a ton of pictures from it. Some are stolen from other people though, because me camera ran out of battery on our way to the Palace.

Well, that' s all for now, folks! Next time I'll tell you about the trip we took to Jane Austen's house this weekend!

Missing you all terribly,
Kendyl