Never a dull moment

Another week of classes has gone by. All the classes seem pretty easy so far, but they are at least an hour and a half long each so it's easy to get antsy and distracted (there is only so much literary London I can take at 9am Monday and Wednesday mornings). We took it easy for the most part. We walk around almost every day but other than that nothing too exciting.


On Thursday, my two friends and I decided to find Platform 9 and 3/4 from the Harry Potter books. The three of us are all really into the Harry Potter series so we were very excited to find it. So we took the tube to King's Cross (the station where the platform is) and finally arrived to find it to be very anti-climatic. It's on some little corner of the station next to construction sites. But It was cool to take some pictures with.


After that, we just walked around the city. We ended up going to Gordon's Wine Bar again for a light dinner and a bottle of wine. After that, we joined the rest of the group for the festivities of the night to begin.


Friday we woke up and decided to explore once again since there is always something new to find. We walked around for what ended up being like 8 hours. At Trafalgar Square we ran into a Gaza Protest, which was pretty interesting. There were thousands of people screaming, chanting and holding signs. We listened to a few speakers, but when they brought up America not doing it's part, the crowd got pretty rowdy. The group of us decided to not give away our accents and get out of there in case it started to really get out of hand.




Saturday we went to Bath. It was about a two hour bus ride north. It was amazing to actually see the Roman Baths, but other than that, it was really touristy. They had really modern structures around the Baths with random artifacts hung on the walls. It was jammed packed so it was a lot of standing and waiting to get through the whole thing. They gave you these big phone like things to type in numbers located next to all these artifacts to hear why they were important. Then we finally got to the Bath and it was really really cool. You weren't suppose to touch the water, but of course we all did. The bath is fed by a natural spring that pours out steaming hot water at around 46 degrees C (aka 115 degrees F) They used it as a place for healing as well as a shrine to the goddess Minerva. We spent about half hour hanging around the Bath before exploring the town. The town basically consisted of little shops, pubs and a lot of row houses. We found a beautiful park that had the countryside in the background that we walked around for an hour. We left around 4:30, the perfect amount of time to see the baths, get some fish and chips at a local pub and wander around the small town.


Today, a couple boys and I woke up and walked to this open flower market which was a lot cooler than any of us anticipated. It was just a street of any kind of flower, plant, tree (orange and lemon trees) and bulbs. All the shops along the street were filled with tea, coffee, bizarre artwork/jewelry and interesting little gadgets. We decided that every Sunday we spend in London we are going to wake up and go to one of these weekend street markets. We walked home through Hyde Park and Notting Hill, both of which were beautiful. But of course, in the rush to meet the boys on time, I forgot my camera.

Tonight is the Superbowl so the pub at school is staying open late and showing it on the flat screen tvs they have in there. It doesn't start until 11:30pm here so I'll only watch a little bit of it.