Saturday, January 23, 2010

Cambridge


Well Friday our group from UWSP took the hour and a half drive through the crazy streets of London to Cambridge University. We had tour guides waiting for us when we got there and they took us through the medieval city. The city was like nothing I had ever seen before. The city has so much history it is unbelievable. The University was founded in 1209, meaning that the University was more than 800 years old! It was crazy gazing at all of the buildings thinking about how many people had passed here before me. Some of the famous people that studied at Cambridge were, Issac Newton (first to understand gravity)Niels Bohr (helped with the splitting of the atom)Crick and Wattson (the guys that discovered DNA)and how could I forget Charles Darwin (the guy who has a small theory on evolution) It was pretty cool to think of what discoveries had been made here and so forth. We had about a two hour tour through the city and our tour guide explained the history of the town and the University. We had about four hour to wander around the town to explore and sight see. Two of the other guys from our group thought it would be cool to go see the Colleges up close and personal. Almost all of the colleges had no visitors posted on their entrances because it is a very touristy city. Well being college age and one of us had a backpack we looked like we belong. We walked right by the porters (British security guard) and went right into the college. We walked around the buildings, which looked pretty much like small castles, and some how we ended up in their residence halls. It was a pretty cool experience, "once in a lifetime". We did this for a few of the colleges and we got kind of bored. We ended up going to a modern shopping mall and sitting around for a bit. When we left we saw a bus that said FREE, a college students favorite word, we had no idea where it was going but we decided that we needed to explore. The bus winding through the city streets out to the outskirts of town in the exact oposite direction we wanted to go. Luckily there was a smart little English boy on the bus that explained to us where to go. We ended up walking for about 15 minutes back to town in the rain but it was a learning experience. When we got back to city center we decided to check out the church service in the amazing Kings College Chapel. The atmosphere in this place saw unreal.
Kings College has a world famous men's choir that sings at every service. They were so good they ended up putting me to sleep, it had been a long day so a dark chapel with relaxing music put me right to sleep whoops. Well that was the end of the day in Cambridge. We are going to Westminster Abby tomorrow to a church service there. Tomorrow I will have attended more church in the last week than I have in the past two years. Peace.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Blimey I'm Here!


Well here we go! I finally arrived in London 3 days ago after the longest day of my life. The flight over was pretty boring, while the entire plane was sleeping, I sat there wide awake in a chair too small for a 10 year old. After we gathered all of our luggage and found the bus, we made our way back to our home for the next three months, International Student House right in the heart of London. Once we made ourselves home in our four person dormroom that looks like it came right out of the movie Hostel we set out to explore the city. That night we ended up going out to explore the subway system in London, The Tube. We took the tube down to Parliament and as soon as we got to the top of the stairs Big Ben was right there in from of us within ten feet, there it hit me, I'm in LONDON!!!! After we walked around and gazed at Parliament, Westminster Abby, and Big Ben all light up we went off to a pub to have a pint. We finally made it back to our dorm and hit the sack after being awake for 34 hours :/ Sunday we had a group meeting with the rest of the UW-SP group at 1PM but for some reason we thought we would wake up without an alarm, guess what?!? That doesn't work with horrible jet lag. I woke up at 1259 and rushed down to our meeting, what a good way to start off the semester..... We started our classes Monday, I was signed up for an international studies class but I decided that I wanted to take the theater class instead, I had to keep up with my ritual of dropping a class every semester. The theater class is going to be pretty sweet. Every week we need to go to a performance in one of London's hundred theaters. This might be the easiest three credits I have ever earned. Monday night our class went to our first play, The Six Degrees of Separation, some people didn't like it but I thought it was pretty good. My day today consisted of going to the largest museum ever! We went to the British Museum. This place was huge! There are over ninety rooms filled with artifacts and history, I was only able to make it through ten of them within the two and a half hours that I was there. I am probably going to be going back at least 4 or 5 more times to make sure I get everything. Well That was my first few days in London. GOODNIGHT!