It has been a crazy couple of days. Our flight took off from Newark, New Jersey around the time the sun was setting on the 25th of August. About 7 hours later, we landed at Gatwick airport, about 45 minutes outside of London at 7 am local time, after having seen the sun rise again over Ireland. We were witness to an amazing sun rise, just in time to descend below the think layer of clouds that has yet to clear. As a group, James, Zoe, Ryan and I decided the reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is because it never rises in the first place. We were met at the airport by Professor Marschall, who is our Gettysburg professor that is teaching our seminar while we are in London. We made it into our residence hall in Chelsea, London around 9 am. The next few hours were spent unpacking and at an orientation for the building. The rooms are basically tiny, but they’ll work for the month that we’ll be here, plus, I’m not planning on spending a lot of time in the hall when London is right outside my window. We’re up on the 7th floor, so we’re got a pretty good view of the London, which is awesome. Tuesday afternoon we went for a walk along the shopping district in Chelsea which starts right up the street from where we are staying. This also brought the adventure of trying to buy a cheap cell phone to use for calling other people in England, which wasn’t too difficult once I figured out what was going on. That night we went out for dinner at Henry J. Beans, which, ironically enough serves mostly cheeseburgers and french-fries. Notice how I have yet to mention sleeping? This is because, from the time I got up on Monday morning to when I finally managed to go to bed, I had been up for a grand total of 33 hours with out more than 2 half hour naps. Needless to say, I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. I didn’t move again until 5 am when I was accidentally called by one of my friends from Gettysburg, who called me when she was trying to call someone else, and hung up quickly when she made the connection she was making an international phone call. We gathered as a group around 8:30 am on Wednesday. We had our first experience on the Tube, London’s underground metro system. Our seminar group met up with a tour guide who took us all around London and the city. We started at the Tower of London. Our tour guide took us to the spot where the public executions were. There we got on a boat up to Westminster, and walked all over the place, ending in Trafalgar Square. We got to see Big Ben, which I've taken many, many pictures of. There was also Westminster Abby and the Parliament building, as well as Buckingham Palace. The tour guide was pretty fun and had a bunch of stories to tell us, which made it a good experience.
Westminster Abbey, pretty cool, we'll be going for a tour of this later.
We got lunch from an Arabian restaurant we found new the Square and took it back to sit with the pigeons and people to eat. We then walked up to Piccadilly Circus with is comparable to Time Square, just not quite as big. We got on a bus there that took us all over London, giving me more photo opportunities of the Eye of London, the Clock Tower, and just about anything you could imagine in the city.
The Clock Tower and Big Ben through the Eye.
Thursday brought us our first seminar session and a free afternoon. We took the opportunity to get out of our tiny rooms and head out to a coffee shop just down the street and sit in an internet café for a while. Thursday night we went out and saw Spamalot, which was hilarious. Tomorrow we’re off to Cambridge for the day, which should be fun. I’ll talk to you soon!
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