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Tower Bridge
They just put the Olympic rings up!! My mom emailed me to say that my sister is going to the junior championship for her horse show and that she was sad that I hadn't updated this in a couple days. So this one's for you mom.
Over the course of the past week, all of the regular LSE students finished their last finals and slowly but surely moved out. By the end of the week, the entire 12 stories of the dorm were only filled with our group, containing just 13 students. However, over the course of the weekend, the dorm filled back up and now I think there are even more people than before...or at least they are a lot louder than the group before them. Unfortunately, they are all from the states as schools tend to group the international students together (they do that at the school I'm studying abroad at in China too). They are probably really cool people but I'd like to meet British people in Britian, instead of a bunch of Americans. Still, there are a lot of people from Boston schools like Northeastern, so they've all heard of Babson which means I don't have to try and explain what Babson is.
The only problem is that I've now been asked about 300 times when my flight got in today, or if I've figured out how the internet works, or if I'm excited for my first day of class tomorrow. My flight that got in three weeks ago was great thanks, yes my internet works, and yes I'm excited for my first day of class that starts in three weeks.
I can't believe I've already completed two full weeks of my internship, and been in London for three weeks. Part of me feels like I've been here two seconds and the other part of me feels like I've been here for years. A number of us from Babson have been asked directions by tourists, and some have even been asked directions by UK residents! The best is when people who live in the UK ask us for directions because as soon as they realize they are getting directions in their own country from Americans, they go crazy.
My internship this week was a little bit of a roller coaster. We got to sit in an important meeting at the beginning of the week, but there was a computer error and
we ended the week on a bit of a sour note. Someone accidentally put into the BT system that we ended our internship at the end of June instead of the end of July, and thus our IDs were deleted from the system. We won't be able to access our computers until Tuesday. The good news is is that we spent the last two days touring the different BT buildings all around London, got to work with different members in different BT Group organizations, and tomorrow are spending the day with a couple of engineers to see what they do on an every day basis, especially as the Olympics are getting closer and closer.
In other good news, because of this computer issue, Ayush and I have got off work early the past two days, which gave us a two more hours each day to explore London...aka two hours of napping. I know I should be using those two hours to go to some museums around London since there are so many and almost all of them are free, but between work and our nighttime activities, there is very little time for sleeping. And I know my life motto
is "you can sleep when you're dead", but I just read an article that says if you have that motto you die early.
Wednesday night was our alumni dinner. We met at a restaurant in Covent Garden. (this little touristy square thing that actually has a bunch of cool shops. I love doing my grocery shopping there because it's close by and has a million grocery stores.) There ended up only being three London based alum plus one of our group's parents whose father went to Babson, but they were all recent alum so it was pretty cool. We swapped Babson stories and asked them about moving to London. All of them were ex honors students at Babson who had been on the London trip and loved it so much they moved after Babson. One of the three actually just continued his internship another summer and then got a job offer from them. He's now been all over the world for work--exactly what I want to do!
Saturday morning, Will, Will, and I went back to Greenwich. Although we went a couple weeks ago with the professors, we went to a different area to the O2. It's this
Walk Way
This is the tunnel that runs underneath the Thames. It was really great to see water on the floor and duct tape on the walls...made me feel super safe and not at all like the river was going to come crashing through at any second. huge arena but it's inside and has a bunch of restaurants and other fun things to do. We went to the British Music Experience. It's this museum that is dedicated to modern music, starting in 1945 and going all the way to present day. I have been looking forward to this for a while, and I think my enthusiasm showed when we walked into the building. I accidentally yelled "I'm so excited!!" at the top of my lungs when we were entering. And, as you can imagine, it earned me some interesting glances from everyone nearby.
My dad would love the British Music Experience. It's dedicated to everything related to British music for the past 75 ish years. It had all of the oldies that I grew up listening to in my house. They had a room where Gibson had donated 6 or 7 guitars, a couple of keyboards, three drum kits, and some other vocal stuff where you could go and play all of the instruments. The guitars and bass guitars were really nice, but I couldn't figure out why the drum kits looked the way they did until I saw a bunch of kids hitting the drums
as hard as they could while their parents watched from the sidelines. Anyways, it let you record yourself playing the instruments and you could save it and listen to it later at home. Pretty cool. There were also exhibits dedicated to each decade. There were obviously exhibits dedicated to the big names like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but what I didn't realize was that a lot of what my dad used to play at home were originally British artists who made it big in America. They also had a recording of the person who wrote a lot of songs for big artists like Katy Perry (this chick wrote I Kissed a Girl...definitely thought that Katy Perry had wrote that).
Afterwards, we decided to walk back to Greenwich to eat at this cute burger place that we had eaten at a few weeks prior. It was a longer walk than we had anticipated but it was well worth it! It was on the expensive side but between the cheeseburger, french fries, and gigantic milkshake, it was the best meal I've had in a while.
Today we were off to a little bit of a slow start, considering
Chelsea Bridge!
They were so kind and named a whole bridge after me. we stayed up talking last night until 4:30 AM. Will and I ventured over to the Victoria and Albert museum. I didn't really know anything about her until I watched the Young Victoria with Emily Blunt a week ago when it was on the BBC channel (you can watch everything for free here--it's great!) Afterwards, I dragged Will over to Chelsea. I've decided I'm moving there after college. Everything has "Chelsea" somewhere in the name. Bloody fantastic!
We got lost on the way back from Chelsea and accidentally walked the entire way back. I usually average about 5 miles a day (it's a little over 2 miles to work each day, and then we usually walk around London at night or at least walk to the grocery store or out to eat). However, I set a new personal London record this weekend by walking over 15 miles in two days. Crazy.
We ended the weekend by going out to see the Euro Cup Final...or whatever it's called. I don't really like soccer but I go for every time for the experience. It's really fun to be in the pub with everyone yelling. We went to a more laid
back place today so that we could sit and watch Spain kill Italy 4-0. I felt so sad for the Italian guys--it's never fun when you win by that much...unless it's the 49ers doing it!
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