The Week in Review:

Sunday:

We went on a sightseeing bus tour of London and ended in Greenwich. Greenwich is such a cool spot. We saw the painted halls, the queen’s house and wandered up to the prime meridian.

I thought of Kristy when we were walking towards the open market and passed the coolest color me mine like place. This one served ice cream as well, what could be better?!

Monday:

Monday was our first day of classes. As nerdy as it sounds I was so excited to finally have a set schedule. I only had one class in the morning then went for a run from school to Buckingham Palace. Though it was awesome once we got there we learned the hard way that “running” during rush hour is actually just trying to push your way through crowds commuting on Oxford street. After our run we started plotting lots and lots of trips. I want to go everywhere and anywhere!

Tuesday:

Moving day! We FINALLY moved into our permanent flat! It is amazing! I am in a triple with my roommates Suzanne and Annie. We spent all night trying to get our stuff organized and amazingly mine all fit!

Wednesday:

Wednesday was quite an early morning, I woke up at 6 to catch the tube to go babysit in Victoria for the morning. I am so happy that I have the opportunity to babysit, and Emma (my neighbor on Timber Ridge’s sisters daughter…) is the cutest 8-month baby! It is nice to be able to get completely away from school and the few extra pounds I earn are pretty clutch! Victoria is such a cool and beautiful area, I will for sure be exploring it much more! It is also nice that I don’t have any classes on Wednesday so I have all day to do some exploring!

Thursday:

Thursday was the first day I finally felt settled in our flat! We had our first “family dinner”! I am really excited about all my new roommates, we are all getting along really well! We also played host for the first time, it is so exciting to show all our friends our flat.

Friday:

Stonehenge & Salisbury: We woke up early to catch the bus to Stonehenge from Faraday House (Syracuse’s building in London). On the ride out of the city we were all silently hoping for the tour guide to stop talking and just let us sleep during the 2-hour drive out. Though most of his talk wasn’t the most interesting one story was quite memorable.

Post-war London, like most places, needed lots of housing quickly. As a result lots of housing developments popped up right outside of the city. Some were attractive some, not so much. One particularly interesting building was designed by Erno Goldfinger.

Name sound familiar? Ian Fleming would commute pass this building and hated it so much that he used the name of the architect as a villain in his James Bond series. Talk about revenge.

Stonehenge was really cool! Sure it may just be a circle of rocks in a field but learning about how it took 1,500 years to complete and how much went into the process was pretty awesome. And apparently it was the first time in a few years that it didn’t rain on the SU trip there, we have had perfect weather pretty much the whole time we have been here! Knock on wood that it lasts!

From Stonehenge we went on a roller coaster of a bus ride to the beautiful town of Salisbury! Our first stop was the cathedral, it is huge and gorgeous. Can’t wait to develop my pictures from this one, the way the light was streaming in through the stained glass windows was pretty spectacular.

We then wandered through the French market, had lunch outside a local pub, and had some amazing ice cream. Then knowing we still had a few more hours till our train to Bath, we started wandering pretty much aimlessly. We found a park where we sat for a while watching the sheep gaze just across the river, and enjoying the show the ducks were putting on for us. From there we wandered up the windy road to the train station. The short hour or so train to Bath was filled with picturesque images of the English countryside. Ignorantly I didn’t think you could get views like that in England, always thought they were only found in places like Ireland and Scotland.

We got off the train in Bath and easily found our hostel, Bath Backpackers.

We could not have asked for a better first hostel experience. The 6 of us were the only ones in a 10 bed girls only dorms, called Divas of course. We dropped our bags and went out to explore the town. We watched the sun set while we got lost in the center of town. My favorite thing about Europe is the architecture. I just keep saying how we don’t have anything like this back home. Even the oldest town in America doesn’t have close to as much history as these towns. We got take-away (take-out in America) and ate in a park before exploring more and attempting to socialize with the Bathians at a local watering hole.

Saturday:

The next morning we woke up, enjoyed the breakfast that was provided, loving the fact that it was better than the breakfast at the hotel we stayed at for the first week even though it cost a fraction of the cost. We then went on a free walking tour of Bath. We saw all of the sights, the Roman baths, the Abbey (pictured below) the circus (a perfect circle of houses, one of which is Nicholas Cage’s 6.8 million pound residence), the crescent (a half football shape of houses), and all the historical architecture that our guide was quite enthusiastic to tell us about. After the walking tour we had an amazing lunch at a café called The Walrus and the Carpenter, named after characters in Alice in Wonderland.

After lunch we wandered back to the center of town where we took a bus up the hill to Prior Park, where we lucked out that the National Trust was having a special event and it was free admission! It was a beautiful park where you could look out and see all of Bath. It honestly looked fake it was so beautiful! This picture doesn’t do it justice, but is better than nothing…

From there we took the bus back down and explored more of the city until our 7:41 train back to London. After we got back into the city it seemed like we went straight from Paddington station (named after Paddington Bear right Dad?!) to Leicester Square to meet up with a bunch of other ‘cusers. It was a really fun night and perfect end to our whirlwind of a trip.

Sunday:

So now it’s Sunday and the first day we don’t have a million things to do. It was nice to be able to skype with my parents for a while this morning and now it is time to stock our fridge and get ready for school tomorrow. That of course will be interrupted in a bit when we venture to Piccadilly Circus to see if they are playing the Eagles game (I am obviously going simply to please my Philadelphian roommate) and visit the Thames River festival where there are rumored to be fireworks tonight!

Sorry this is a long one again, but hopefully now that we are settled I will be able to blog more often ergo have them not be novels every time!

Cheerio for now (p.s. we learned in Bath that cheerio came from people calling for their chairs at the end of the night, Chair Ho, morphed into cheerio!)