God Save My Toes (it's cold.)

CAUTION: LONG ENTRY!! But hopefully it will catch you up on everything I’ve done thus far. (Let’s see if my entries start to reflect my time here by using more ‘English’ language as they go on…)

I was the first one up out of my roommates today—shocking, I know. I awoke naturally at 8:30, fixed myself a cuppa (2 tsp milk, 1 tsp sugar) in the adorable tea cup Brittnee bought me, and had a Scotch egg for breakfast. Scotch eggs are hard-boiled eggs wrapped in breaded sausage. And yeah, they sound kind of weird, but I thought they were good when I had them in Scotland and decided it would be a good, cheap source of protein. Friday we had our orientation with CAPA, the people who hooked us up with our internships. Apparently it’s not technically a sure thing. We all have interviews on Monday (YIKES!), which are more of a formality, but theoretically if they hated us they’d turn us down. Mine’s at 2:30 on Monday, and I’m nervous.  :( 

CAPA has a lot of good resources though, such as pamphlets on cheap eats and cheap shopping for essentials. They also have some excursions planned for between $50 and $350 that go on weekend trips to places like Amsterdam/Bruges (definitely going), Scotland (really wanna go again—is it worth going someplace I’ve already been if I loved it?), Paris (might go, but might just spend one day there when roommate goes with friends), and Wales (want to go, but the excursion itself doesn’t sound like there’s anything interesting there). My friend Daniel is in Leeds, up north, so we plan on hooking up sometime this semester and traveling together or just visiting each other’s cities.

Yesterday we did a little searching and found cell phones and groceries. Apparently people text message a lot here, and it's always free to receive calls and texts (it just costs to SEND them--including for local ones!). We also managed to find the London Bridge. Okay, I know it’s huge, but it’s so hard to find places here. The street signs are like, on the sides of buildings--OCCASIONALLY--but are not on any free-standing signs. It was a little less than impressive, mostly because it smelled bad from all the steamers’ exhaust. And it wasn’t falling down:(I'm standing on the London Bridge there, looking towards the Tower Bridge in the distance.) We did accidentally stumble across one of the coolest food markets I’ve ever seen. My Mom would have LOVED it. We walked into this whole covered area with a dome over it, kind of like how I’d imagined Covent Garden to be, and were overwhelmed by the smells of baking bread, apple cider, smoking meats, and seafood from the fish market. There were gourmet cheese and wine stands, and people were walking around eating samples of stuff. It was like an outdoor Whole Foods with even nicer smells and British accents.

Thoroughly hungry by then, we took the tube back uptown, went shopping at a Tesco, and lugged our groceries home (I forgot how much this sucked from my time in Ireland, although I think we were a bit closer to the store in Dublin). When I got home, my bags had FINALLY been delivered, and I was pretty ecstatic about this, so I unpacked. Then we tried out our phones, made some dinner, and watched the first episode of Celebrity Big Brother. Oh lord, we were warned, but we didn’t anticipate how ridiculous/addictive Big Brother was. It’s HUGE over here, even though it never took off much in the U.S., and people like Coolio and LaToya Jackson are on this one. British Big Brother always makes me think of Ricky Gervais on Extras, when his character freaked out on the show.  Here are some pictures of my flat, showing the bathroom, bedroom, living space, and close up of our kitchen amenities:

So, back to today. We made it out of here by 10 and took the tube downtown to Charing Cross, from whence we walked down the Mall road to Buckingham (pron: Buck-ing-um) Palace, to see the Changing of the Guard! Here’re a few pictures of the guards coming out of the fort area, turning the corner, and finally making their way through the gates near Buckingham Palace. It's cold out, so they were wearing gray wool coats and you can't see their red uniforms well:

Traffic had to stop for the entire (almost hour-long) procession. Pretty ridiculous. Also, it’s FREEZING here and our hands go numb when we try to take pictures. So bear that in mind when noting the blurriness. It’s cold enough to snow, and I keep seeing random crystals flying past, but it hasn’t come down at all. My new wool coat is definitely keeping me warm. It’s mostly my face and toes that suffer. Here’s a picture of me in front of the fountain at Buckingham Palace:

When the big procession was mostly over and we decided we were sick of trying to hold our cameras over the crowd’s heads to get a shot, we walked back up the Mall and through the beautiful Admiralty Arch into Trafalgar Square. The National Gallery is the big building in the background, which I’m definitely going to visit sometime.

That’s me up there with a Trafalgar lion, and then me in a phone booth with an extremely heavy door and porn on the back wall. It was so cool to stand in front of stuff I’d only seen animated versions of when finding clues…thank you, Eagle Eye Mysteries in London! Here’s a pic of my two roommates, Shannon (left) and Abby, walking down into the tube station:

After all that, we took the tube to Gloucester (pron: Gloss-ter) station to find some lunch. The tube is amazingly easy to use, by the way. I love it and it makes me feel like a real Londoner—plus I don’t get sick to my stomach on it, unlike those double-decker buses. The hallways are filled with movie posters, theater advertisements, and people playing instruments for money. The only scary part is that the doors don’t have a sensor on them, so we once saw a man trying to squeeze in at the last minute, and the back of his coat was hanging out of the doors when they closed. Bit dodgy, that!

We ate lunch at a delicious little French patisserie called Paul, which is actually a chain…but it must be a somewhat authentic chain, because we could barely understand what the people were saying to us. I had a chevre and red-and-green-tomato sandwich chaud, and then bought a mocha so that I could get a free mini macaroon. I was SO excited, since it was my first from a real patisserie. It was a pretty pink one, raspberry, and delicious. Damn Martha Stewart and her faulty recipes.
We headed back uptown to the station nearest our flat, Angel (nearest being at least a 15 minute walk). We went to Boots, which is their glorified version of a CVS. I bought curly hair gel stuff since we’ve all decided that our hair is a completely hopeless situation as far as straightening goes. Even though the weather is unseasonably cold, it’s freaking humid and I’m mad about it. Ah well. At least I managed to resist the temptation of British nail polish…..for now. 

After Boots, we went to a mall across the street, which was funny (the woman who directed us there to find hangers called it a ‘market’, and I remember the Irish calling them shopping centres). It was outdoors and two stories, and you went inside each of the little stores. Or, you could cross all the way under and come ‘round the block again to where you started. We also saw another open-air market, this time with things like scarves and bags and jewelry. I’ll check those out sometime when it’s not freezing.

Sooo, then we finally came back home, where I’m typing this. We didn't find hangers, and we really need them. My feet hurt from doing a huge amount of walking. :( Tonight we may check out a local pub, and/or probably will watch a DVD that one of us brought (hopefully one that’s set in England!).

Cheers,

Maren