London Calling! Part Two

After our tour of the south of England, we decided to explore London. First thing Monday morning we headed out to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard. On our way, however, we got a little sidetracked--first by musical tickets and then by some silly hats. When we passed by the little theatre district near Victoria Station we decided to see if we could get cheap tickets to any of the shows that were playing. As luck would have it, we only spent 20 quid to see Billy Elliot. We even met a student from Switzerland (Anna) who also got tickets to go to the show. Eventually we made our way to the Palace and had plenty of time to spare. 5 minutes later we got split up, but used our hats to locate each other.

Silly hat in front of the Buckingham Palace gates.

Angela, Maddie, and I with our silly hats after the changing of the guard.

Buckingham Palace-like a boss.

After Buckingham Palace, we got a quick bite to eat at a small café then headed over toward Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and Parliament for some photo ops! I wanted to go into Westminster, but Maddie and Angela thought it would be boring. On my list for next time, though!

Red phone booth + bobby hat + Big Ben = It doesn't get more London than this.

I am terrified of heights, so climbing onto whatever you would call that tall death trap was pretty scary.

More Big Ben with the silly hat!

Westminster Abbey and Parliament--so beautiful.

After Big Ben, we went over to the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone, then went to King's Cross Station. Three guesses why! If your first guess was "Because Katie finally got her Hogwarts letter and the study abroad in France is actually a cover for her leaving the USA to study magic with Harry Potter" you are correct! If that wasn't your first guess, you are most definitely a muggle.

Look, Ma! Platform 9 and 3/4!!

Look at me, all cute pushing my cart through a wall.

BRB GOING TO HOGWARTS

After Platform 9 and 3/4 we headed back to the hostel to freshen up a bit before heading over to Billy Elliot. Seeing Billy Elliot was actually pretty special for me because I used to watch the movie with my grandma. It seems like everywhere I go, I find a little piece of her to remind me that she must be watching me from somewhere.

The next day we headed over to the Tower of London (NOT an actual tower, guys!). We walked around and took some photos while Maddie and Angela mulled over whether they wanted to take the tour or not. Eventually they decided against it and we headed over toward Millenium Bridge and The Globe Theater.

In front of the Tower of London

Millennium Bridge--wrecked by Death Eaters in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Inside the one and only (or maybe 3rd...) Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

When we got to the Globe and bought our tickets for the tour/exposition, we also got free tickets to see a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream that afternoon. That was pretty awesome, actually. We had to stand the entire time, and the audience was all middle and high school aged children (who were a bit loud and obnoxious, actually), but the performance was amazing. And it's not a performance that they do publicly--they put it on specifically for school children, so it's something not many tourists get to see.

Later that night, we headed over to The Rocket bar/pub for a drink in honor of Diya--one of my best friends who studied abroad in London last year. The Rocket was her and her friends' favorite haunt while they were there. So holla! It was pretty chill--no one there since it was about 7pm on a Tuesday.

In front of The Rocket, giving props to my best friend that I've known since I was 6 years old.

Maddie was pretty beat, so we headed back to the hostel pretty early and just chilled. The next morning, we went to Camden Market and Abbey Road before heading off to the airport for our flight to Edinburgh. 

I don't even like the Beatles...

London Calling! Part One

The first stop on our trip was London. A little backstory--we bought all of our tickets together, save the one from Paris to London. Well, tickets all bought, we thought we were doing well. I started to put together an itinerary to give to our families (back home and host) and almost had a heart attack. When looking at flights to London, we decided to leave later in the evening (rather than taking a 9am flight) because we weren't sure just how long it would take us to get to Paris and how early trains ran. So we all bought tickets for a flight closer to 6pm... Or so we thought. In putting together the itinerary, I realized that I had booked the 9am flight.

Cue the freak out.

I immediately emailed Maddie asking her to confirm what time her flight was at. Of course it was at 6pm. Same with Angela.

Cue an even bigger freak out.

I immediately get on the phone with the travel company that I had booked the ticket through. They said they would check into changing the flight and call me back when they knew how much it would cost. Slightly calmer, I descended for dinner with my host family. I told my host mom of my plight and she was actually really awesome. She immediately got on the computer with me to look at the fine print and company policies. We determined that even if I wasn't charged any penalty fees for changing the flight (under French law, you have the right to cancel your flight within 7 days with no charge), the flight itself had more than doubled in price, and there was no way to avoid paying the difference. So my host mom told me that I should just go by myself--I was already slightly familiar with London, and Maddie & Angela would be joining me no more than 8 hours later.

So, that's just what I did. I phoned the company back and told them I wouldn't be needing to change my ticket and I got a train out of Orléans at 4:58 am Saturday morning (the 25th of February). I'll spare you all the travel details as everything went smoothly.

In the London airport I get stuck waiting almost 2 hours for a bus into the city. This was less than ideal, but it did allow me to meet a couple kids doing something called a Jail Break. Essentially--they were college students raising money for some cause or another. I think they said that they had already raised 12,000 pounds and now had 36 hours to get as far away from London as possible without using ANY money. Similar to a road rally, they also had a list of challenges to complete. While I was buying myself a sandwich for lunch, they approached me and asked if I'd be willing to buy them something to drink (soda, water, juice, etc) to complete one of the challenges. I did, they took a picture with me. I should've had them take a picture with my camera as well, but I gave them my email address to email me the picture and haven't gotten anything yet. Oh well, I do hope that they got far away from London (they were trying to get one of the airlines to give them a free flight out of the city).

When I made it into the city I just kind of wandered around for a while. I found a couple of poets performing on a street corner and stopped to watch and talk to them for about a half an hour. Then I wanted to find my way to the Thames riverbank (to find some street artists), but ended up turned around and at Hyde Park. I grabbed a hot dog at the entrance--watched a minor fender bender unravel. One man, rear ended by another, got out of his car and was positively SCREAMING at the guy behind him. The guy who hit him was actually trying to just leave the scene, but there were too many people watching at this point, so the angry man finally succeeded at getting a pen and getting his information.


Once in Hyde Park, I sat down and rearranged my luggage a bit while I ate. Then I just wandered. I found a group of guys roller-dancing which was actually quite amusing. I sat and watched them for quite some time just enjoying the sunshine and warm weather (that's right--sunshine in London!). There's some video I took of the roller-dancing here.

After Hyde Park, I decided to brave the metro to head up to Camden Market. I wandered around there for about an hour before deciding to head back toward Victoria Station (where I'd be meeting the girls) to grab some food. Well, the Camden metro stop was an absolute MESS. There were so many people that I decided to hoof it to another metro stop. The only problem was that the map I had purchased did not actually have Camden area on it. So I wandered around aimlessly, getting pretty lost, until I got directions from some nice woman and ended up back where I started.

While waiting for Maddie and Angela, some Russian guy came over and started talking to me. He was very strange. He said he tutored kids for free, so to earn money he would resell Underground tickets. Highly illegal, and I'm just glad he eventually left. Maddie and Angela finally showed up, we got lost on the way to the hostel, but finally made it (exhausted and hungry). Luckily the hostel was also a bar that served cheap pizza.

Our hostel -- The White Ferry Inn near Victoria Station. Definitely recommend

Sunday morning we were up bright and early to head out to our tour of Windsor, Stonehenge and Bath. The queen was actually in residence at Windsor, so I suppose I can say that I was once in the same building as the Queen of England. The castle was absolutely beautiful, but the most impressive thing was Queen Mary's dollhouse. It is absolutely HUGE and exquisite.

We weren't allowed to take pictures, but here's one from Google to give you an idea of the size of the doll house.

 

Windsor Castle

This is where guests come to visit the queen--like at Will & Kate's wedding reception.

They had this gorgeous garden moat thing.

Quick picture with the guard before heading back to the bus!

After Windsor Castle we went to Stonehenge. It's pretty incredible. We had absolutely beautiful weather, so I'll let the pictures do the talking.

The heel stone--it looks like it's got a sock puppet face.

After Stonehenge, we headed out to the little village of Lacock (pronounced "lay-cock"). First, lunch was AMAZING. We had beef wellington (for free--I don't think it was supposed to be included with our tour, but it was). Then we explored this cute little medieval town for a bit and saw where they filmed parts of Harry Potter.

Various pictures of the Harry Potter filming activity in Lacock.

The restaurant where I had the most amazing beef wellington ever.

Professor Slughorn's house from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Professor Slughorn's house again.

After Lacock we headed off to the city of Bath, where we got to go into the Roman Baths. The Roman Baths were built around a hot spring, and it's said that the water has the power to cure any ailment (a result of it containing no less than 23 different minerals).

Looking down on the Roman Bath.

Pretty colors! :)

Sitting next to the Roman Bath.

Drinking water from the hot spring. It had a bit of a funky aftertaste, but was otherwise pretty good.

After Bath we headed home to London where we had fish and chips for dinner (in true English style). And so concluded our first day together in London. More to come. :)

A little teaser.

HELLO! Okay, I know I kind of disappeared off the face of the planet the last two weeks. Sorry about that. I was traveling with Maddie and Angela during our winter vacation and all I had was my iPhone, and I just can't format blog posts from there (nor did I have time to). So let me catch you up on what's been happening.

The week before we left on vacation was rather uneventful. Seriously, I don't even remember what happened. I'm sure we did something, but it's all blotted from my memory now. The only thing I do remember is theater on Friday before we left--we finally got the full script and got assigned our parts. I am (dun dun dun) the evil sorceress. I was kind of hoping to get the romantic lead (yeah, right-- a girl can dream), but the sorceress should actually be a really fun role to play. I'm excited to really get into the role.

Other than that, I had classes. I got a couple tests back from my writing class. I didn't actually do too bad (at least on the French grading scale). On the written comprehension I think I got a 17/20 and on my written production a 15/20. That sounds pretty low, but according to my host family and other students, 10 is actually average. If you get a 13, you're doing well; 15, even better; and 17 is pretty spectacular (and almost no one gets a 20). I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that a 75% is a good score (feels like failing to me, but I'll take everyone's word on it).

Now, it's going to take me a while to sort through and upload all my pictures, not to mention that it's hard to cram two weeks of travel into one blog post. So I'm going to do three blog posts today (possibly tomorrow depending on when my host family gets home)--one for each city. I promise they'll be crammed with pictures and worth the wait. For those of you who are also on Facebook, I'll be uploading even more pictures there within the next couple days as well.

À bientôt!

A Tour of Tours

What a crazy, crazy week! I meant to update on Sunday, but time got away from me and OH MY look at the time! It's Thursday night already!!

Here are the highlights:

Friday night I had dinner with my host parents and a couple of their friends--one of whom happens to be an English professor (I think) at a local school. So that was actually really cool. I actually understood about 95% of what was going on. However, I stayed up MUCH too late, and had to get up SUPER early on Saturday morning because....

WE WENT TO TOURS! ...It was actually not all that exciting. For those of you who maybe aren't familiar with the area, Tours is a slightly larger city about an hour away by train. It's actually quite similar to Orléans, is situated on the Loire, and has a chateau.

So Saturday morning, when we arrived in Tours, Angie called her friend Emmanuelle who lives in Tours and was going to show us around. We went to the tourism office and putted around a bit waiting for Emmanuelle. I got some shopping done (woo, shopping!)

Eventually Emmanuelle met us and she had her brother with her. So the 5 of us walked around town. First we went to the cathedral. I don't know why, but I love cathedrals. Maybe because we really don't have churches like that in the States. Partially I'm overwhelmed at the work that people put into them. I don't know. Anyway, pictures!!

The cathedral of Tours

Angie with Emmanuelle

Angie, Maddie, and I

After the Cathedral, we went and saw the chateau. It was actually not terribly impressive, and we didn't go inside. It was still blisteringly cold out, so we probably should have gone inside, but we just moved on pretty quickly.

Yeah... this was pretty much it.

Then, after a detour into a gaming store (Maddie, Angie, and I geeked out over Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings replicas), we walked around the old part of town. Maybe it's just me, but I absolutely ADORE these old buildings, they're so cute!

Absolutely adorable!

Emmanuelle and her brother went off to spend some time together, and so cue our three hour lunch break at a crêperie (yum!) to avoid going back out in the cold. Then we walked down to the Loire and ran into a bunch of Anonymous protesters (I was pretty psyched). Then we took gratuitous pictures of all the ice on the Loire before heading to the wine museum. The museum was pretty tiny, but I thought it was actually pretty interesting. Maddie and Angie got bored. lol

Maddie failing at eating salad. We were cracking up.

Anonymous! Why hello there!!

On the riverfront (those are Angie's and Maddie's shadows, too).

The Loire hasn't been this frozen in almost 20 years.

After stopping in a bookstore (I stocked up on French reading material), we headed to Emmanuelle's apartment for tea. This was absolutely splendid. We spent most of the time talking in French (her brother, François spoke very little English). This was very agreeable. Finally, we had to leave to get dinner before our train. We wanted to go to this restaurant called La Souris Gourmande (roughly: the mouse chef) whose dishes are based entirely on cheese.

Next time, little mousie, next time!

Unfortunately for us, it's a very popular restaurant, and there was no room without a reservation. So we went to McDonald's (naturally) and chilled until our train came. By the time I got home, it was 11:30. Quite the long day.

Sunday was a study day as Ethan and I had to prepare our presentation on Mardi Gras for Thursday (today!). Then I met Angie and Maddie and we got all our tickets for our big vacation coming up!! We're heading off to London, Edinburgh, and Dublin next week!

Tuesday was Valentine's Day, so the girls and I headed out for a drink in celebration at a little pub called the Hendrix on the Rue de Bourgogne. I had this sweet concoction called The Doors in which I got a glow stick (woo). Then I tried absinthe. It tasted like licorice. I ended up a little tipsy. Nothing seriously major.

The Doors. Pinapple-y and delicious.

Yesterday we went to see The Iron Lady (with Meryl Streep!). It was absolutely fabulous. However, I was expecting it to be in French, so when it started, it took me several minutes to realize it was in English. It was very confusing.

That's pretty much all for now! Not sure what we'll be up to this weekend, but I'm sure we'll do something.

The Little Things

So, I meant to put all these things in the last blog post, but I got so excited about the cute little goose I met that I completely forgot! So here you are, some random stories.

First, I'm not sure why, but a lot of people I meet here think I'm German. There was the random girl behind the cheese counter who asked if I was German (did I pronounce "chevre bleut" weird?). Then my history professor is convinced I'm German. He often likes to find out how various words are translated in various languages. So he'll give us a word ("chipie" for example), tell us what it means, and then ask what the word is in our language--so we have to translate it from French into whatever language (English for me) and then translate the definition of that word back into French and explain it to the class. Well, he ALWAYS looks at me and asks about German. *shrug* Strange. One of the girls in Angie's class said it was because I looked German. Do I look German? I have no idea.

Second, I miss my cats. I know, I know! That's so lame. BUT, the one saving grace is that Angie has two lovely little kitties at her apartment--Taz and Cookie. Well, last week while we were supposed to be working on homework but ended up talking instead (this happens often), I had Cookie on my lap. Taz must have gotten jealous because he jumped up on the table and when I picked him up to put him on the floor, he decided to sit on my shoulder instead.

Taz is so cute perched on my shoulder.

And then I became a kitty jungle gym.

So finally, on my way to school every morning and on my way home every evening, I get to take the tram. This is actually quite lovely. I don't have to worry about traffic, I can read or just jam out to music, space out, etc. It's quite preferable to driving. Also, we get to cross two rivers: the Loire and the Loiret. Both are absolutely gorgeous. But from the very first tram ride, I fell in love with this little house on the Loiret. I'm certain that one day it will be mine. And I finally got a picture (albeit a crappy one because it was taken from the tram) of this wonderfully adorable house.

House on the water: you're doing it right.

Now, I know you can't see it very well, but it's so cute and full of character. And right off their back (front?) door is a dock with a couple boats. How awesome is that?