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Published: July 22nd 2012
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Queen Victoria statue
Ever since watching The Young Victoria a couple of weeks ago, I feel like I've seen her everywhere. Then again, I am in London... Sorry for the long delay in blog posts. This one was originally written last week but due to technical difficulties was never published. So just humor me and pretend you are reading this last week.
This week at work I made a mid-summer resolution to actually start checking items off of my to-do list because I realized that I now have less than four weeks left. I feel like I've been here for five seconds and done nothing. To make up for the feeling of having done nothing, I decided to get up early on Saturday morning and get as much out of the weekend as possible.
Little did I know that my Saturday would begin at 3 AM with a fire alarm. Joy. From an early age, every American has it drilled into their brain what to do during a fire alarm (and if you live in California, you also do about 5 million earthquake drills). While the fire alarms differ in frequency, they are standard across the country in a "beep beep" format. So you can imagine my surprise when I woke up to a constant beeeeeeeeeeeeeep sound in a very unfriendly frequency
Love Birds at Hampton Court
Get it?? Cuz they're birds...and they're in love...ok never mind. at 3 AM. If you know me well, you know that when I wake up I am 100% delusional and disfunctional for the first five minutes I regain consciousness, adding to the confusion. Eventually, I realized it must be a British fire alarm and threw on some jeans and headed for the stairs where I learned a valuable lesson. Even though I'm technically on the ninth floor, 11 flights of stairs separate me from the ground floor. Thus, in the case of a real fire, I'm toast. Anyways, I made it down to about the second floor before the fire alarm was turned off, much to the dismay of everyone in the staircase, as everyone let out a huge groan. By that point, we at least should have made it outside--it would have made the effort somewhat worthwhile. I guess we really didn't need to worry though, it hasn't been 300 years since the population was last cut in half so we still have about 200 years before the next huge London trauma.
I think my eyes had literally been closed for 30 seconds after the fire alarm stopped when my real alarm went off at 6:30. I met
up with Ainscow near Hyde Park, where we walked around Kensington Gardens and tried to see the Princess Diana memorial fountain but it was closed. Unfortunately, it started dumping rain, and they had to cancel the changing of the guards, which was next on the agenda. However, we managed to accidentally find the headquarters of the official Olympic store. Rachel and Olivia both wanted Olympic souvenirs so we went inside. Olivia is easy to shop for--anything horse related and I know she'll love it. Rachel's harder because she's picky and plays a sport no one has ever heard of. Determined to find something to do with water polo, I started asking around. The first employee I talked to took me to the water bottle section of the store (they have about 10 different Olympic water bottles), the second lady I asked didn't know what water polo was, and when the third person I asked (who I am pretty sure was also the manager) told me she didn't think water polo was in the Olympics, I gave up. Luckily on our way out, Ainscow spotted the only water polo thing in the entire store. Rachel, you better love it.
Walking
home from Kensington I passed two women in the street. They stopped me and one of them said "Excuse me, are you a local?" I thought about it for a second before saying that I was. They gave me a strange look once they heard my American accent. They shrugged it off and then asked me where a store was that I had never heard of. Clearly I am not at "local" status yet, although I do feel like I know the area really well. Most days people stop and ask me for directions and I can give them pretty accurate directions.
Sunday, Will, Will, and I woke up at the crack of dawn to go to Hampton Court. I get Hampton Court and South Hampton mixed up, so when we went to buy tickets and I asked for three train tickets to South Hampton, the guy looked at me really confuesd. Eventually, we managed to get on the right train. Hampton Court Palace was beautiful, and by far one of my favorite places we've visited thus far. It is one of only two surviving palaces owned by Henry VIII, and hasn't been inhabited by the royal family since
the 1700s.
The Hampton Court gardens were by far the best part. Sadly, we did not realize the gardens were free. I wish we had known and I would not even have gone into the palace itself--it was very underwhelming, especially since we had gone through the gardens first. In addition to the vast gardens, there was also a maze. I was somewhat disappointed with the maze because my only experience with British mazes has been the one that Harry and Cedric Diggory ran through in
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was quite the impressive maze. The maze in Hampton Court took me under 10 minutes to find the center of the maze, and there was no portkey to take me to Voldemort waiting, just a whole bunch of little kids yelling and screaming. Not sure if Voldemort or the kids were worse. Just kidding, we all know the screaming kids are worse.
When we went to Windsor Castle a couple of weeks ago, we discovered that if you have a train ticket you get 2 for 1 admission to most local tourist attractions. Not wanting to waste our train ticket, Will and I decided
to do the Tower of London upon returning back to the city. We definitely did not realize how big the tower was, and it took us a while to get through the whole thing. My feet were killing me by the end!
The Tower of London was also really beautiful. For over 600 years, the Royal Menagerie lived there, and there were wire sculptures of the more impressive animals all over the tower, including a polar bear. The polar bear was second only to the crown jewels. I really wanted to take a picture like this
woman but they were yelling left and right about taking pictures. It was very cool to be able to see the crown jewels and some of them were way over the top. My favorite was Elizabeth I crown--it was purple and had a lot of jewels on it, but she kept it classy (some of them were way over the top).
Exhausted after a day of walking around, I said goodbye to Will and met up with the other Will (it's confusing having two close friends named Will!) to go to Micky D's. I felt so sorry for the guy that took
my order because I just wanted a single cheeseburger for 99p and I paid in all 1 and 2 pence coins. YOLO. Got to get rid of those coins somehow--the laundry machine only takes 10p coins and up.
All in all, the weekend was a blast. One more week of my internship and I'm sure it's going to be a great one!
Again, sorry for the delay in posting. Stay tuned for the upcoming blogs...spoiler alert--they cover the musicals and France!
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