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Published: July 18th 2008
So my first "official" drive into London was straight out of National Lampoon's European Vacation. We had our end of the session Riverboat and this year part of my job was to drive the DJ equipment down to Festival Pier for the disco boat. The ride in was fine, got there with few problems. We had a blast on the boat with the kids and then came the interesting part ... the drive home. I knew I wasn't lost since I could see Big Ben but somehow I kept ending up back at Big Ben ... over and over and over again. So there I was in a stick shift van for 9 on with 6 people, on the wrong side of the rode, the wrong side of the car, and a huge amount of electrical equipment driving around in circles. All I kept hearing from the back of the van was "look kids, it's Big Ben and Parliament" ... oh probably about 10 times. We got a great tour of London ... Marble Arch, Green Park, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Earl's Court, Elephant and Castle, Westminster Abbey ... it was all in good fun and we finally made it back.
Only to stay up patroling kids since most of them flew out today. I then spent hours in the airport with a bunch of crying Ukrainians begging the airlines to just put the unaccompanied minors through security so I could go home.
As always, this day just pulls on my heart strings. To see an enormous arab boy crying and hugging a russian, and 20 other kids from all over the world waving goodbye in tears is such a sight. I always think I am going to stop caring about it but I don't. The amazement that these children can get over things such as religion is just amazing. And granted, they are just children, but in many countries certain ideals and ways of thinking are engrained in them at a very young age. Yet they come here and become best friends with another child who is everything they are not. I wish we could all learn a lesson from what TASIS gives to its students every summer.
So the pictures are my annual "London" river pictures and some silly ones of us partying on the boat.
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