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Published: July 15th 2007
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Okay, first of all I apologize for making you all wait so long for another entry. Secondly I'll let you know I spent an entire hour before dinner yesterday uploading all the pictures one by one and then writing a detailed entry about the origin for each picture as well as an update about my trip to London this past weekend. It all got erased around the last paragraph, just before I got a chance to publish it. It was, of course, as really great Nobel Peace Prize Award winning entry so it's really a shame none of you are going to get the chance to read it, but I have a little time between classes now and I'll try to rewrite as much as I can so I can get this entry up quickly. Lucky for me it's 1:00 here and only 7 in the morning still in Pensacola so that gives me some time.
The first few pictures, aside from the one out the window of the plane obviously, are from my first day in Cambridge. Some are of my room inside St. Catherine's college; the one with the view out my window is of Corpus Christie
college across the street. I went on a ghost tour last night and actually learned some scary stories about this college and some other places around where I'm staying, but luckily there were none that we were told about here at St. Catherine's so I can continue to try to sleep easy at night. The one of the Anchor is a tiny little bar/restaurant down the street on the Cam just in between St. Cat's and the campus. The one's that are of us actually inside pub is at a really famous pub here called the Eagle, which coincidentally is also haunted.
There are also pictures from an Irish dance called the ceilidh that we went to over by Selwyn college where the Burnett honors kids get to stay. I went with my friend Anne Marie from UCF, George from New York and Peter from the Netherlands. We showed up late and walked in to find a sweltering room filled with people dancing and spinning and kicking and jumping. It was a little overwhelming and we stood to the side watching and laughing until the end of the song. Afterwards everyone in the room starting heading for a far
corner, so we followed them awkwardly, thinking they must be getting lined up for another dance. After walking halfway across the room after them, we realized they were in fact not lining up for a dance but going to the water table. We tried to shuffle back to our corner inconspicuously and wait for the next song to begin. When it did we were instructed to form groups of eight. Since there were four of us we started looking around for four more, but the only people still in need of partners it seemed was a large Korean family only in need of three. Even after a few of their family members abandoned ship, altogether we still had ten people in our group. Yeah don't ask me we were trying to figure out the math on that one all night. Anyway, the dance was hilarious, no one knew what they were doing, we just bounced around in circles laughing so hard we couldn't see for most of the song. The second and last song we did George and I were partners and somehow ended up in the very front line of the entire group. There were several dance steps that
had been explained before we got there; one of them was the "do-si-do," which I wasn't aware was a traditionally Irish step but oh well. Whenever the do-si-do was called out George would break into a sort of dancing jig and I would jump around in a circle flailing my arms in the air. We figured these were as good of guesses as any as to what the actual step was supposed to entail. Out a window directly in front of us, however, was a regular term Cambridge student collecting tickets for other latecomers to the dance, and when he turned around and saw us he burst out laughing and began quickly waving friends and strangers alike over to the window, where they all proceeded to point and laugh at us while he smiled and gave us a big "thumbs up." I think they liked us!
This past weekend I went to London with three other girls: Anne Marie, Ebony, and Laura, all from UCF. We got in around 9:00 Friday night and found our hostel, a place called the Generator, after a ridiculously pricey and short cab ride that equaled out to about $32 American dollars. The hostel
was a lot better than we were afraid it was going to be. We had a private bedroom for just the four of us that locked so we could leave our stuff in it when we went out for dinner and a bathroom down the hall that we used as sparingly as possible. Saturday we woke up and took part in a free tour the hostel provided that went all around the city. We saw basically everything there was to see over the course of the day, all by foot, with our backpacks. Since we only had a day we wanted to fit as much in as possible and so we ended up staying at things long enough to take a picture and then moving along to the next sight. We saw the London Bridge (along with the remaining little log from the original London bridge), Tower Bridge, Big Ben, the London Eye, the Globe Theater, the Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge, Buckingham Palace, and others... It would be nice the next time I go to actually be able to do things - such as actually going into some museums, seeing Othello at the Globe like we had wanted to
do, etc - as opposed to just seeing them in passing but it would take way more time than 13 hours to accomplish that. After staying the night in a hostel then spending all day going back and forth around London by foot and by the Underground, we dubbed ourselves the Hardcore Four, because we really don't know anyone else here at Cambridge that would have been willing to put up with that sort of a whirlwind vacation style. No one seems to have enough money for Paris this upcoming weekend, especially myself, but there's talk of just another quick day trip back to London to go into some museums and spend a little bit more time doing less things. That trip will depend on money as well, but we'll see and hopefully it will work out!
I have a bunch of pictures from London up until the point when my camera died, so those will go up sometime later this week with whatever other pictures I take up until that point. Other than all of that, my classes are going well. Just one more day of this section's classes tomorrow and then a break Wednesday before the new
section starts Thursday morning. I still have two research papers and some reaction papers to write that I'm sure I'll start at some point. We had been told beforehand that we weren't allowed to tape classes but my teachers don't really seem to mind so I think tomorrow I'm going to bring my tape recorder to my last 2 classes of this first section and attempt to record them. My teacher's have been so great I'm really actually sad to be having to leave the classes so soon, and I'm excited and nervous to be starting all over again with 2 new classes on Thursday.
Anyway, that sums everything up to the best of my ability for now at least. Sorry again to keep everything waiting and I hope you enjoy the pictures! I'll write more soon, I PROMISE!
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Mom
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Sounds Tiring!
Hey Nicole, Glad to know you are alive and well - we were starting to wonder! Your whirlwind trip of London sounds exhausting to say the least!!! Hope you get to go back and actually go inside some of the museums! Luv Ya! Mom