On A Scale of 1 to American!

Well today was quite the emotional day filled with exhaustion and delusion, nerves, excitement, awe, and top it off with quite a bit of pure confusion! Kick started the day at 4:15 this morning and am running now on approximately 35 hours without sleep, like I said delusional. We had a four hour flight from SLC to New York and I was planning on getting to know everyone in the group. Too bad for me I was shafted 10 rows in front of the group by myself. The perk was it was quiet and I got a lot of my unfinished reading done! We then had a 4 hour layover in New York so I got to know a lot more people because as exciting as airports are, we all wanted to start our group bonding session so I got to know a few more people. Then, we had literally the longest flight of my life from New York to London, being 7 hours and this time I was near the group. I got to sit by a retired little New Yorker man (unfortunately no Brooklyn accent) and he had been all over the world, but mostly to London. He showed me his passport and you couldn’t even count how many times he’d been there. He gave me lots of tips and gave me his son’s business card that lived in London and told me to call if I ever needed anything. He was a sweet little guy and as we left his final advice was to party it up in the pubs because it’s quite a bit of fun. Well, so much for that idea!

On the flight I got more reading, what you could call an attempt at sleeping, although the little man next to me had his feet sticking straight up in the air while he was trying to sleep, AND I got to watch movies for free so I watched just one. I’ve been dying to see the Artist and I was finally able to see it! How I stayed awake will forever remain a miracle to me, but I loved the movie. When we landed we had to go through Customs where they stamp your passport and you have to let them know why you’re there. Our customs officer had the coolest British accent and for all I know I had drool coming out the side of my mouth. Then I noticed he had a ring on it and that put a kibosh on that one!

Once everyone was through Customs our teacher took off with his wife and daughter and said he’d meet us at the end of the tube. Unfortunately he didn’t give us any instructions and so we all wandered for a while and after about an hour we found where we were supposed to go. The tube was quite the interesting place, prime people watching! I heard very few speaking English and well there just weren’t a whole lot of white people in general! We met a Slovakian family and they were so cute and nice! When we got off the tube there was no one there to greet us like they had said, so someone decided we find our flat on our own. Well, apparently someone knew where they were going because 5 or 6 blocks later we finally made it, luggage and all. We had some down time for a while, yet still no one knew where any of our professors were.

We went to the grocery store, which completely lost me. They have very little of your typical American brands and so I basically had no idea what to buy (Plus, everything is SO expensive!). I ended up buying the basics along with crumpets because I felt like that was a necessity. They basically taste like squishy pancakes except you’re supposed to toast them, which I can’t say I did.

After a while we were all getting pretty tired but we were told to try hard to stay awake so that we could adjust to the time change faster. So, to stay awake by taking a walk around Hyde Park. We are literally right across the street from Hyde Park in a flat that apparently used to be a mansion. I have three roommates and we share a bathroom with a shower that has either scalding or ice cold water. The molding is all old style English and it is really neat! Hyde Park was the coolest place ever! It runs into Kensington Palace and Gardens which is currently being prepared for Prince William and Princess Kate, so basically we’re neighbors with royalty! We also found our Madonna is giving a concert in Hyde Park so we’ll get to jam from our flat! We also ran into some missionaries there and one of them had a fantastic Irish accent! Anyways, we walked around the garden and the park for a while because it is HUGE. It’s probably going to be one of the main study places we have. Anyway we had to be back for meeting with the flat owner to go over rules and such. This is when the tired spell hit everyone and there were lots of heads bobbing to try to stay awake. After that we went to a restaurant called Wagamama, which was a pasta place and I got some noodle stuff, which was mediocre tasting, kind of bland though. The waiter took forever to get us our To-Go box and bills so we were there for quite a while. After that we came home and that was the first adventure in London!