I decided to entitle this blog entry Round-about Barcelona because that’s what we spent a lot of our time in Barcelona doing—going around roundabouts. While Barcelona is a beautiful and exciting city, one of its downsides is that its streets are very poorly marked. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times that we missed our turn (we had a rental car) and had to circle around in the roundabouts to get back to where we were supposed to be. In addition, there are a couple of really big roundabouts—not as big as the huge one around the Arc [View Full Entry]

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This blog entry will be short—I promise—and mostly pictures. I just wanted to post some pictures of our trip up to Yorkshire on Thursday and Friday of last week. I had my last exam on Thursday morning. I took my suitcase with me to the exam, and Gretchen and I left directly from my school and went to the car rental place. We rented a car, and then drove up to Yorkshire, which is about four and one-half hours north of London. (Incidentally, because of bad traffic, it turns out that London is about six and one-half hours south of Yorkshire!) [View Full Entry]

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When I was uploading this week’s pictures to my computer to organize them for the blog, I noticed that I really haven’t taken that many pictures the last couple of weeks. Part of that is probably because we haven’t been traveling, and another part of that, I think, has to do with the fact that we are really becoming used to all of the novelties of London. I think we’ll have more pictures the next couple of weeks because we’ll be traveling a bit. At the end of this week Gretchen and I are renting a car and driving up to [View Full Entry]

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I guess it’s been about two weeks since I last posted an entry to this blog. To tell you the truth, I don’t think that we’ve been incredibly busy in that last two weeks—so that isn’t the reason I haven’t updated it. I think it’s probably the opposite—a lot of these last two weeks has been fairly routine, so I felt like there wasn’t much to write about. Because the semester is coming to a close in the next couple of weeks, I have admittedly been doing some school work. I think I’ve probably spent more time studying in the last [View Full Entry]

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This blog entry is going to be mostly pictures again. (There will probably be two pages of pictures, so look for the links to the other pages of pictures at the bottom of this page.) Gretchen and I have spent the past five days in Paris again. We went to Paris about six or seven weeks ago, but we just didn't get to do all that we wanted to do in three days, so we went back with John and Heidi. Rather than flying this time, we took a train through the Chunnel (Channel Tunnel). Instead of flying--and having to take [View Full Entry]

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[I'm sorry if you got multiple emails about this blog entry. Somehow after I posted it, I accidentally deleted it. I think it sent another email when I tried to restore it, but that failed. I ended up having to post it again, and I think it probably sent a third email then. Sorry about that.] A lot has happened in this past week or so, but it feels like it’s been a slow week. So this will probably be a short entry. One of the more exciting events has been that Gretchen’s sister, Heidi, and Heidi’s husband, John, have come [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday morning Gretchen and I were flipping channels to check the weather. (Speaking of which, somebody described London weather as living inside a defrosting refrigerator—I think that’s probably as fair a description as any.) At any rate, we stumbled across the channel, The HITS, which is that VH-1 type music video channel here that we were watching when I wrote the England’s Top Twenty blog. We stopped at that channel just in time to see the beginning of Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve. (Oddly enough, here in England the music video channels ac [View Full Entry]

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Buon giorno! Gretchen and I have just left Venezia (Venice) and are currently on a train going to Firenze (Florence), home of the Italian Renaissance [which in England we pronounce as “Renee” (like a girl’s name) “sonce” (rhyming with “sconce”]. We had a wonderful time in Venice. We got there Sunday night after a three hour train ride from Milano. Because it was late, we caught a taxi from the train station in Venice to our hotel, which was close to Venice’s Marco Polo Airport. Once again, the taxi ride was horrendous. We’ve had sever [View Full Entry]

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[Note: I am posting this a couple of days late. I wrote it earlier, but it takes a while to load all of the pictures, and I haven’t had a couple of hours to sit down and dedicate to posting it. Just FYI…Also, I should mention, for my parents' sake, that we were not in Rome when the trains crashed...] First off, let me just give a quick clarification here in case you missed the last post. All of the pictures that we post on this blog have captions with them—even the ones at the bottom, below the text of the [View Full Entry]

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I have received emails from a couple of you. Apparently even though an email notification went out yesterday afternoon saying that a new blog was posted, a few of you reported that the blog was not yet posted. I'm not sure why there was a delay, but it is up and functioning now. Secondly, it seems that there has been some confusion about the photos that are posted with the blogs. Every picture that we post has a caption accompanying it. So while the photos alongside the body of the text are generally the only ones in which the caption shows [View Full Entry]

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