Life in the C.O.W.

After a year in The Capitol of the World (London), I decided to compile my mass emails to one place, complete with photos!

Itchin' To Travel - 7 Oct 2007

Hey everyone!!

Sorry it has been so long since I have written! I have been pretty busy here in London. It is crazy how different studying abroad is from living abroad. The "real world" has come and hit me right in the face, harder than I could have imagined. I work from 8:30 to 6 everyday with an hour off for lunch and then usually come back and hang out with the roomies for another 4 hours before we go to bed and it starts all over again. Luckily we have been able to do a lot of cool things on the weekend.

One weekend we went to Windsor Castle, the official residence of the royal family. I had been there before in 9th grade, but I still think it is one of the most impressive palaces I have ever seen. The whole town and castle seems like it is really far away but it is not even an hour away by train and is right next to London Heathrow, the biggest airport in the country.

Why is it that Steph is the only one that can figure out when to jump??

We should be models!

Another weekend we went to a place called Hampton Court Palace. It was the official residence of many kings including Henry VIII and King Charles III. The palace itself was interesting, but nothing amazing after having been to Buckingham and Windsor. Hampton Court is well known for it's gardens and it has "the most famous hedge maze in the world". We decided this had to only be for it's age because the whole maze was really really small and took about 10 minutes to solve but it has been noted by the Guiness Book of World Records as being the oldest hedge maze in the world.

Hampton Court Palace

Clearly perplexed by the hedge maze!

We have also started to do some of our classes that are necessary to participate in the program. We had a British History weekend which was actually fairly interesting considering the lecturer had 2 hours to go through 4000 years of history!! The other classes have been basically worthless and were things I had studied in high school economics and some of my college management classes. As pointless as all of the classes have been, the people I have met so far on this trip are awesome. I end up hanging out with my roommates (at least the two that are ever here) most of the time.

Buckingham Palace (or Dollarqueenbacon Palace if your name is Steph)

The British culture is still taking some time to adjust to. They use the words cheers and rubbish for everything. Rubbish is not only the word for trash/garbage but is also used for something you are not happy about. It is really common to hear my boss say "that's quite rubbish" when something is messed up in one of our systems (of course you can always substitute rubbish for various expletives!) It is also impossible to find a trash can (rubbish bin) anywhere in the city. They were almost all taken out of the city after a bomb went off in one in the late 1970's. In addition to this it is almost impossible to get any shopping done in the city. Everything closes at around 5PM (before most people get off work). Because everything is closed before most people can buy anything, the stores are total chaos on the weekends. All 7 million people in the greater London area go to the stores on Saturday and Sunday. Despite some of these frustrating things, I am still having an amazing time and cannot wait to see what lies ahead.

The food here is a lot better than I could have ever imagined! Right next to the office we have an amazing fast food Indian Restaurant called TiffinBites. It is so weird getting something like that fast food! There is another place right by work called Fuzzy's Grub which is like getting a Thanksgiving Dinner everytime you go! They specialize in roast meats and you can get any kind you want and add mashed potatoes, roast potatoes, cranberry sauce, dressing, all kinds of veggies, yorkshire pudding (an egg and flour pastry type thing), horseradish, cheese, gravy and anything else you could ever imagine. All of this is either mixed in a big tin or put on a sandwich. It is incredibly low calorie but still makes an amazing lunch!

We are going this next weekend to a place called Carcassonne in the South of France. It is a giant medieval walled city that was used as the main castle in the movie Robin Hood with Kevin Costner from the early 90's. Everything I have read about it and all the pictures I have seen make it seem like it will be one of the coolest things I have seen thus far. Thanks to discount airlines and cheap hotels it will be less than $100 per person for everything! Here is a link to a picture of it http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Carcassonne-vignes.jpg . . I am also going to be hopefully traveling to Istanbul, Turkey and Sarajevo, Bosnia in November, now I just need to find people to go with me! We have started to plan out our biggest trip (at least the first big one!). So far at least 6 of us and probably many more that said they would be interested are going to Egypt at the end of January. For less than a round trip plane ticket from the States we could not only get there but do a dusk camel ride across the desert to the pyramids, a hot air balloon ride at dawn over the Valley of the Kings and a day trip on an ancient style Felucca boat on the Nile river!

It has been great hearing from all of you wherever you have been in the world, I hope all is still going well and I will talk to you soon!!

Sean

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