London on Saturday

Let me begin by saying that today I received a lovely care package from home! Treats and French dressing! Yay for being able to eat salad! Thanks Mom! Anyhow, The Story Continues... Saturday morning we woke up (pretty early, I might add) and got ready to head out for the day. It was nice to be able to leave our stuff locked away at the hostel.  We also got a complimentary breakfast each morning at the hostel. We were out of the hostel by 8:30 or 9, ready to discover what we could around London.

Street where the hostel was located

We honestly couldn't have asked for better weather on Saturday, at least in this part of the year.  It didn't rain on us! And it was nice and sunny to be able to get some good pictures.  We headed to Piccadilly circus again on the subway.  This early in the morning there were absolutely no people out and about yet.

National Gallery

We wanted to find Trafalgar Square so we headed in that direction, not planning on bumping into it as soon as we did.
But we found it! It was so pretty. Trafalgar Square is home to the National Gallery building as well as a large open square with statues and fountains and a monument.  We then continued walking,

                                               attempting to find Buckingham Palace.

Trafalgar Square

We walked under a large arch and it seemed like the road stretched out in front of us forever, but it didn't look like it was in the middle of a city.  We came across a large open area covered in gravel that was situated behind a large building (we had no idea what it was...we'll discuss this later) so we turned and crossed the road and headed through St. James's Park towards Buckingham Palace. The park was beautiful even in the gloomy state that winter causes. There were so many birds, some that even looked really strange and had big feet. They also had pelicans (that were absolutely huge).

Pelican! with Kristin and Emilie

 At the far end of the park stood Buckingham Palace.  The flag was flying! (which I believe means the Queen is there).  At this point, more and more people were joining in on the act of Tourism with us and they were crowded around the front gates as well as the whole open area in front of the Palace.

Buckingham Palace

While we were there, we checked the schedule for Changing of the Guards (because so many people have told me to see it and we were there right around the right time).  It usually occurs at 1100am everyday, but it depends on the time of year and such.  Anyhow, we found out that it would occur that day, but back at the mystery building, not the palace. We had time to spare when we got back to that building, which...I'm still not sure what the name of it is, but it's essentially a Calvary Headquarters/Admiralty Buildings--government buildings essentially.  It also houses a museum.

Guard

 There were guards on the opposite side of it, both on foot and on horses (I laughed soo hard when someone tried to stand next to the guard and get their picture taken and he turned and walked away...but that's because he had to pace back and forth every few minutes).  It was here that we saw a bit of a changing of the guards ceremony.  Across the road, there was also a movie filming, which was pretty cool--think it had Tom Cruise in it.

Changing of the Guard

Next, we headed down the road that the calvary building was on.  This road had a lot of government buildings on it.  It was here that we saw Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben.  It was funny because we got to an intersection and here were all these things.  We then crossed the Westminster Bridge while passing the London Eye, and ate lunch at a small restaurant we found.

Big Ben

Next, we decided we wanted to head towards London Bridge, the Bank of England, and St. Paul's Cathedral.  We took the subway to London Bridge, and walked towards where the bank would be. It was quite an adventure trying to find the bank, when in reality it was right across the road from where we started.  We walked way past it and then turned around and walked all the way around the bank once we found it, just trying to find steps (because we thought it was the place in Mary Poppins with the feeding of the birds song...but we later found out it's not.  You should've seen us asking 'natives' where the steps from Mary Poppins were...hahah).  So we never found the steps and had walked a really long way trying to find them.

St. Paul's Cathedral

So we ventured towards St. Paul's Cathedral. (For both our sakes, I'm going to not talk about St. Paul's in this blog post--we actually did the tour and I started typing it, and it's really long. So that will be a whole other post--tomorrow.) But it was amazing!!

Harrods

From St. Paul's, we took the subway to a fancy part of town, home of the huge department store 'Harrods'.  Our motto as we walked through was basically 'looking, no touching or buying'.  Everything in that store is extremely expensive. We saw a big stuffed bear for a kid that was £7,000 (which is ..more than $10,000?). It was a little insane, but pretty awesome to see. So that was a pretty fancy neighborhood.  We saw a woman who had her daughter there trying on clothes, and the nanny was right there as well. Sigh. So we left because we got sick of not being able to even think about buying anything.

Tower Bridge from London Bridge

We headed to dinner.  We decided to get out of that area and head back to Piccadilly Circus where we had seen a restaurant the day before that looked really good.  We got there and they told us the wait for a table would be about 30 minutes, so we waited..didn't seem that long, right? Wrong, 30 minutes turned into an hour. But once we finally got seated and had food in our bellies, it was definitely worth it.
We headed back to the hostel after dinner, it was about 10 or 10:30. Quite a full day, if I may say so myself.  But such a good day! =)

Friday In London

This past weekend, I traveled to London with the other girls studying here from Cornell. We had a blast and walked a tonnn.We left Friday afternoon and took a taxi from school to Telford Central, then the train from Telford to Birmingham New St., then another train to London Euston Station. The trip took about three hours in total, but the train made quite a few stops along the way.  I didn't know much about where we were staying or how we were getting places, but there we were in the middle of a big railway station in London.  Emilie and Kristin had arranged for us to stay in a hostel, so that was our first priority when we got in the city--finding the hostel. Emilie had printed walking directions from the station to there--a two and a half mile walk--so we started walking. First great thing about London: at each of the crosswalks, painted on the street, it tells you which direction to look for traffic.  We only nearly got hit once. No big.

Red Double Decker Bus!

Thankfully we didn't have any big luggage to carry around with us as we each only had our backpacks. It was great to see the city with all the lights and traffic...and the buses! We finally made it to the hostel. The hostel was located in Paddington, which is a residential area in London and the street was very pretty and also relatively quiet.  It was Kristin's birthday on Friday, and it was dinner time when we got there, so after we settled in and got some directions from the main desk about where we might go for a birthday dinner (they were so helpful!), we headed out to the 'underground' (subway station) nearby.  We took the underground to Piccadilly circus, which we found out is basically the Times Square of London.  At night, there are a lot of lights and people and it's a very exciting and bright area.  There are a bunch of shops and places to eat, as well as entertainers on the street.

Piccadilly Circus

We ate dinner at a restaurant right there on the square, literally called 'Grill on the Square' and we had some traditional fish and chips! (My first English meal!) It was absolutely delicious. We attempted to look for some dessert next--ice cream. We couldn't find any ice cream place that was still open that late at night, though there were little shops (shoppes?) located there.  We ending up heading to McDonalds (how American of us) for each of us to get a McFlurry. Their McFlurry is a little different than the kind we have here at home, but it was good ice cream and it was fun to people-watch while there. While at Piccadilly Circus, we checked out M&M world and then took the underground back to Paddington and went on back to the hostel to get some sleep and showers before our busy Saturday.

*Gasp* Cliffhanger! I will report on Saturday next.  Brace yourselves--it was a very busy day!

Triptriptrip

Good Morning, y'all.
It's finally either warming up here or I'm getting used to the cold..I'm assuming both, actually. I haven't had to wear a coat to class the last couple days, even though it's still a little chilly, but class is only a couple minutes away.  That means that I no longer freeze at night and/or have to wear five layers to bed at night. Yay! 

Today is a bright, sunny day and I'm looking forward to maybe taking some pictures. I don't have any classes today, but I'm leaving in about an hour to go to London for the weekend! This is my first big sightseeing/touristy trip! That's all for now, I shall update you soon! Wish me luck!

Groceries

Today I got my groceries delivered! It's a very popular thing here...I know in some places in the United States you can do that, but here, they deliver to ~98% of the addresses in England. Before I came here, I knew that it would be a possibility to do so, and it is so nifty for a college student without a car who also has to cook all their own meals.  Taking the shuttle to town is difficult because you can only get so many groceries before it's more than you are able to wait for the bus with or travel on the bus with, bags in hand.  Trying to get a ride from someone else always makes me feel uncomfortable too.  So delivery, at least for groceries, is very nice.
The store "ASDA" is like the Walmart of England, I think. That's where I ordered my groceries from, I can go online and view all their different products and add them to my "trolley" and choose a time slot to get my groceries delivered. I got a call fifteen minutes before the delivery guy said he was going to show up and he was here on time and also right on schedule with my time slot. How nice! Also, anything that they didn't have in stock on the day of delivery was substituted with something of equal or greater value. For instance, I ordered a block of cheddar cheese which they ended up not having in stock, so instead I got two blocks of a different cheddar cheese worth more than the one I ordered and I got charged the cost of the original cheese I ordered. They okay all the substitutes with you and are willing to refund you the price if you don't want the substitute. I also ordered eggs and there was one broken one, so I was refunded the price of the eggs.
The one thing I was worried about when ordering food was the space that I have in the fridge and freezer.  I have three spaces to put food--the fridge, freezer, and a cupboard.  I share a shelf with another girl in both the fridge and freezer. That being said, the people who live in my corridor are used to living without us two girls here with them and they...take over a little bit in the fridge and freezer.  Our shelves are filled with things that are not ours.  (There's not much to do about that, really..especially when they can't understand us and I don't care too much anyway).  In turn, I was pretty weary of space when I was ordering food, so everything fit!
So that's my grocery ordering experience.  It's pretty handy and my shelf of the fridge, freezer, and food cupboard are now stocked well!

Tuesday

I can't believe that it's already my third week of classes here at Harper! I still have some hiccups in my schedule that I'm trying to work out, so this week I'm still going to new classes that I haven't yet been to.  Maybe in seven weeks when term is over I'll finally have it straightened out!  In the 'set-in-stone' classes, most of my professors have already given me my big assignment that will be due near the end of term.  One of said assignments is a 2,000 word essay which got a 'This-is-the-type-of-assignment-I'm-used-to-doing-on-a-weekly-basis-at-Cornell' response when it was assigned.
Today's ventures brought me to the other side of campus, a solid twenty minute walk with a road crossing involved (gasp!). Apparently there's a shorter way to get there that I have yet to discover as I added visitors to my return journey across campus--visitors who decided we should take the same way back to campus as I took getting to class (where's the adventure in that?)  They were very nice girls (which made me quickly forget the familiarity of the walk I was making), one of whom was from Ireland (love the accent) and is itsy bitsy and plays rugby.  The other was adorable, and English through and through.  My class was in a building that looked like a garage from the side I approached, and I was scared that maybe I was approaching the wrong building. There was a large shop door and only a plywood door to enter into on the side I approached.  Some innocent bystanders told me otherwise and that I needed to go 'round the back.  The back looked more like where I was supposed to be, but still did not have a classroom feel.  The classroom I entered felt more like the entrance way of a house.  The whole back side of the classroom was glass and the classroom was small, which made for good discussion in class. I hadn't yet been to that class, Psychology of Food Choice, in case you couldn't tell by my quandaries about how to get to/into the building. It was good. That's all I have to say about that.
Crossing roads here is a tricky business. Cars drive on the wrong side of the road. Go figure that one out.

Can't sleep? Blog.

Today was quite a bum day.  I still feel so tired all the time, but then can't sleep at night (proven by the fact that it's 1am right now and I'm still going strong). I try to get to bed early and then toss and turn for a while and finally revert back to the internet where I can talk to some people from home as it's still only 8o'clock there.  I believe I have class at nine now everyday.  I didn't originally have classes early Monday or on Friday at all, but because of all the changes to my schedule, I've had to dig into my longgg weekends.
I realized (as I was skyping my family) all of the stuff that I seem to have left out of my blog that I still think are really important things that I want to remember from my experience--like that there was really bad turbulence on the plane ride to Manchester that I was basically too tired to care about.  I can't seem to remember any of the other things right now, but I will certainly make a list for future reference.
You know those red phone booths? There happen to be two (at least) here on campus. Just a fun fact for y'all.

Shopping Center

Shopping center (centre?) is just a fancy way to say mall--and the actual way they say mall here.  Apparently, I was in desperate need of a mobile phone. Facebook just wasn't working for all of my communication needs in the day and age which is 2013.  So today I ventured to the Shopping Centre in Telford with a friend.  For starters, the weather today is sunny, but it snowed last night, so the roads were considerably slushy being that they have no winter weather equipment (i.e. plows, shovels--there was a shovel taken on campus and we got a frightening email about it, they need every piece of winter weather equipment they can get!).  The trip was so different and exciting.  I have no idea how to get to Telford in the future because the roads are confusing and there are tons of roundabouts, but it was a nice trip.  The Mall was big! (At least to this small-town Delaware County girl)  We surely got lost because it isn't so much one strip of mall, but squares and there are 'streets' within it--Easy to get lost (If you don't believe me, look at this map).  I remember looking around and knowing that I had seen that bank before and we must've been walking in circles (squares, actually).  As far as phones go, I am a terrible decision maker--the poor girl who waited on me, bless her for putting up with that.  Hey, I'm foreign.  But now I have a phone, and I'm back in the mobile community. 
I also think that it's important to note that I saw a Staples, KFC, and Krispy Kreme while on this venture today.  'Merica.