Last Week in London

So, I kind of forgot to write about my last week in London, and now I'm not sure I remember everything that happened...
During the week I was pretty busy with end of the term papers and finals, but I did take a long walk one night from the winter fair in Hyde park to Green Park and Buckingham Palace.
OH--The last weekend about half of the house went to FABRIC, the largest nightclub in Europe, supposedly. It was ridiculously expensive to get in (about $25), but it was definitely neat. There were three rooms, but each of those rooms had different sections. We got separated at one point and it was nearly impossible to find everyone again. We danced until about 3 am and then all had to try to find a way home, which is always an adventure. Two people and myself opted for taking a cab, but it took forever to get one and we didn't end up home until around 4 or 4:30. The day after that I went to Oxford St to get a gift for secret santa and also I don't think I'd been there yet. It was SUPER busy, probably because it was a Saturday and because it was 2 weeks before Christmas. Later that night was the Christmas party at the house. It was really nice to get everyone together again one last time and sort of say our goodbyes to each other and London.
Sunday my room decided to have a group dinner of sorts. It was delicious and really great to just sit around and talk and eat together, something I don't think the four of us had ever done. Monday morning two of my roommates left, leaving just Kat and I. We went out for a traditional English breakfast (eggs, sauasage, beans, tomatoes, toast, and tea). We spent the majority of the day packing and then went out for a pint and dinner at a pub in Soho with Jen. I had bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes) for the first time. After dinner we went back to Oxford St for some last minute shopping.
Tuesday morning Kat Jen and I went out for some coffee before heading off to the airport. Unfortunately the 3 block walk to the tube stop was ridiculously challenging as my giant suitcase's wheel was broken. It was not a fun journey. After the tube ride, Kat and I went to our separate terminals and started the long journey home.

Looking back on London, I realize what an incredible opportunity I was given. Living in London was SO different from living in Rhinelander or Appleton, and I wouldn't trade that experience for anything in the world. I really feel like in the past three months I've grown as a person; I've become more independent and more open to new experiences, and I cannot wait to make it back there again!

QPR, Bon Iver, and a Night O' Drag

Over the weekend I hung out with a few people from the house; we went to a party with a bunch of Imperial College Students, the college I go to for Amnesty and Film Soc meetings.

Also over the weekend was the football match. It was so much fun!

It was the Queens Park Rangers, our team, and the Wolverhampton Wanderers. It was so cool to see the frantic energy of the fans and to see the nation's favorite pastime in person.

Some of the guys from the house got pretty into it:

On Sunday I went to the Bon Iver concert! They were so AMAZING! And our group met up with Mike Noyce, the guy from Lawrence who's in the band, and went for a pint at a local pub before he had to jet off back to the States.

Monday was the last play of the term: Wig Out! It was really interesting and fun; it was about two rival drag queen gangs and a Sinderella ball.

Some people from the house decided to also dress in drag...

Christmas time in London

So, this week we went to what I think has been my favorite play all term, August: Osage County. The story was really interesting, the acting was amazing, and it managed to be hilarious as well moving and thought provoking. I was very impressed.
After the play Kat, Jen, and I went out to a pub for a little bit, The Princess of Wales.
Wednesday we went back to the Imperial War Museum, this time to look at the holocust exhibit. It was very informative and very heartbreaking.
Thursday I went to the tree lighting ceremony in Trafalgar Square. It was nice to walk around and see all the Christmasy stuff going on all around. Afterwards, we had a tree trimming party at the house, and we all made decorations for the tree.

Later that night Colleen, Ashley, Kat, and I went to a club in Shoreditch that was pretty fun, but extremely expensive. I bought a mixed drink for £6, about $10!
Yesterday I went to Camden Town again for some Christmas shopping.
After that I finally got to see Westminster Abbey, which is absolutely gorgeous. I was also there for the evening service and got to hear the chorus sing; they were so good!

Later Kat, Colleen and I walked around the Christmas market in Southbank. I love that there are so many cool Chirstmas things going on in London, but it would be much better if there was snow here!

Stonehenge/Transport Mueseum

I've been back from my trip for about 2 and 1/2 weeks now, so I guess it's about time for another post.

Well, the first week back after break was rather uneventful. I was tired from so much travel, and I had to write a paper the week I got back. Not fun. The only thing I did really was the weekly play, which was a modern adaptation of Othello.

That weekend the whole house took a trip to Salisbury and Stonehenge. We spent some time at Stonehenge, then spent the day wandering around Salisbury, then finished with another play, A Month in the Country.

Last week was Thanksgiving; we had a massive dinner with the whole house, plus guests. I think there were about 40 of us all together. It was really wonderful.

That Friday my Anthro class took a trip to Cambridge. The town itself was really neat, and then looking at all the building of the universities was really cool as well.

Over the weekend Kat and I went to Covent Garden, which is a cool are with markets, shops, and street performers. While there, we also went to the London Transport Museum, which was a really neat, interactive mueseum that look at the history of trains and the tube, mostly.

Spain and Italy

Well, I have put off updating this for far too long. My trip to Spain and Italy was AMAZING. We went to Valencia and Barcelona in Spain, and Venice, Rome, and Palermo in Italy.

Valencia was first, and it was beautiful. The beaches were gorgeous, and the building of the old quarter where we stayed were really neat. We even got to climb up a castle that used to be the entrance to the city. Also the weather was wonderful while we were there: blue skies and 70 degrees. One day we went to the aquarium there and got to see a dolphin show; it was so cool!We also went out and had a traditional Valencia meal--paella. It was delicious. Probably the strangest thing about Valencia, and Spain/Italy in general, was how different their sense of time is. We went out for dinner at 8 or 9, and that was still early by their standards. We wandered around the plaza de la virgen at 1:30 am and the place was packed. Some of the clubs we saw advertised didn't even open till 2 or 3 am. Crazy.

After Valencia was Barcelona. I liked Barcelona compared to Valencia, mostly because Valencia was a very chill place, not a lot of tourists. But in Barcelona the atmosphere was totally different: very busy and lively (and touristy). We wandered Las Ramblas one day, which is the main touristy street in Barcelona. It's actually a sucession of five streets that are connected, and it's basically tons of shops, street performers, cafes, and markets. I also saw the Sagrada Familia, a famous church, as well as many Gaudi buildings. In Barcelona we met up with other people from the London Centre and walked along the beach at night before heading out for tapas and a flamenco show.

The least fun part of our journey was trying to get from Barcelona to Venice. It took us about 12 hours of ridiculous travel; we took the metro in Barcelona to the train station, which didn't take us the airport as we thought, but to some random bus depot which then took us to the airport, which flew us into "Venice", which was actually a bus ride away from Venice, the bus then took us to the outskirts of Venice where we had to jump on a boat to get to the island our hostel was on, which we then had to try to find in the dark. Yuck. The next day was very wet and gray, but it was amazing to see the city on water. We basically just wandered around, checking out the sights.

From Venice we went to Rome, which started out horribly due to a downpour and no umbrella and no idea where our hostel was. However, once we found our hostel things cleared up a bit and we went to the Vatican that day. The next day we got to see quite a lot by foot because a) it was somehow gorgeous out (it was supposed to rain, thank god it was sunny) and b) Rome is much smaller than I thought. We saw the Colosseum, the Pantheon, random ruins of ancient Rome, the Trevi fountain, the Spanish steps, and a bunch of other places I can't name from memory. We also had really good pizza and gelato while there. In fact, we got kicked off of the Spanish steps due to our messy gelato. Oops. Oh-another interesting thing in Rome was a huge march that weaved all through the city. 100,000 university students from all over Italy were in Rome to protest the new privitazation of the schools. At first we would just see lines of armed police blocking streets, and we didn't know why, but eventually we ran into (and kept running into) the marchers.

Our final stop was Palermo, Sicily. Getting there was also interesting; at first when we looked up trains from Rome to Palermo we were concerned because it's a 12 hour trip and we really didn't have that much time, but then we realized we could take an overnight train and the timing would be perfect. Yeah, good in theory but our train was uber sketchy and just weird in general. And we were woken up at 7 am, despite having another 5 hours of traveling. Once we got to Palermo, things were bad for a bit because we could not find our hostel. It was ridiculous and frustrating; the numbers on the buildings made no sense and there was no visible hostel. Eventually, we found the entrance to our hostel which was all torn apart and messed up. Then we took the six flights upstairs (even though apparently it's on the 3rd floor) and finally found our hostel. Depsite it being difficult to find, it was one of my favorite places. It was actually more like a B&B, and the owner made sure we had maps and recommended places to see and was all around the sweetest man ever. Sicily wouldn't have been nearly as good without his help. Anyway, the city of Palermo was neat; there were cool churches, another gorgeous beach, an interesting catacomb, etc. But my favorite part was taking a bus ride up to a village of Palermo in the mountains, overlooking the sea and the city. It was breathtaking. We also had dinner with another guy from our hostel one night, which was interesting because we had no idea what the menu said and literally picked things randomly and got a surprise meal. It was delicious though. And I got a canoli from this really fancy bakery while there, which was also delicious.

Overall the 10 day break was extremely hectic (5 cities in 10 days will do that), but it was SO worth it!

Obama!/Flogging Molly!/10 Day!

What have I done with myself in the past few days?!?
I don't even know; I've been busy with schoolwork and such mostly.
Tuesday night was election night, so I stayed up nearly all night watching and also studying for a Bio midterm. I, and pretty much everyone else here, was extremely jazzed with the results. YAY OBAMA!
Wednesday was the midterm and nap day and...
FLOGGING MOLLY!!
The concert was absolutely amazing!
The bands that came on before were really good too, except one was exceptionally loud and I was right near the giant speaker so I can't hear that well out of my right ear...
I'm sure I'll be fine. :P
It was so cool to see Flogging Molly in person and be right there; I was in the front row so I was literally like 10 feet away from the guitarist. They had so much energy and are such cool people in general. They even talked about the election and they dedicated one of the songs to Obama.
I took a ton of video and pictures, but my laptop isn't working so I'll have to upload them another day.
Today was spent mostly on writing a midterm for my British Life and Culture class as well as planning for the 10 day trip.
I won't be updating my blog until at least the 17th, so until then you will all have to wait for news about Spain and Italy!

Shenanigans: Halloween and Pictionary

For Halloween Kat and I were going to go to this club SIN, but when we got there the queue was really long so we just decided to wander through Soho and find a fun club. We met this one girl who was dressed as a cat, I believe, and she told us about this club and took us there, but it ended up being an older crowd so we kept on wandering. Eventually we found a club that Kat had heard about before and we hung out there for the night. I danced until about 2 am when my body finally gave into exhaustion. On the way home we got a huge batch of hot chips with salt and vinegar on them and it was pretty much the tastiest thing ever.
Saturday I was going to go to Portobello Rd to get my eyebrow pierced (!), but the place was closed. Perhaps when I get back from my 10 day break. Speaking of, Sunday Kat and I planned our 10 day trip; we are going to Spain (Valencia, Barcelona?) and Italy (Rome, Venice?, SICILY!). I am ridiculously excited!
Sunday was also wonderful because the DeStasios, the biology professors here, invited a bunch of us over to their flat for dinner. Having a real meal was so awesome! And it was so delicious! And we played pictionary and just hung out; it was a nice night.
Today we took a trip to the Imperial War Museum for the British Life and Culture class; it was an interesting museum, mostly for the sake of it creating interesting discussions about the nature of war.
Later we all went to a play that was actually really good. It's called War Horse, and it's originally a children's book. It's about this boy and his horse whom he loves very much but is given to the soldiers for WWI. He ends up actually enlisting just to find his horse and be with him. The story itself was really cute, but what was impressive was that they had life size 'puppets' for the horses. There was this sort of horse frame with two people inside controlling the leg movements and one guy outside controlling the head. It sounds bizarre but it was really well done.
Check out this video if you want to actually see some clips of it: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=trIFlkJBFhw