Reality

I hate homework. It's just a draft of a paper that's due. But they don't believe in structure here which means I'm totally guessing as to how this paper is supposed to look AND what's really annoying is that I know my topic well enough to write a dissertation on it but it won't matter because without GUIDANCE it's going to look like a blob. A giant pool of a blob.

In other news, three days til Taryn! And I still really don't want to leave London ever, but I have to book my ticket from SD to DC. So weird...

Pictures from Scotland:


Edinburgh, Day 1. View of New Town from Old Town



Holyroodhouse Palace!

Scottish Parliament. Totally different from British Parliament.
Thing. With crests.
Bagpipes guy!

Our tour guide, Owen. He's from Canada. The steps behind him are preserved from back in the day when people use trick steps as a form of home security.

View of Edinburgh from the Edinburgh Castle (yes another castle in the same city). It was gorgeous that day!

The Edinburgh grave yard where JK Rowling frequented for inspiration. Here is Tom Riddle's grave, he was a real person!

The restaurant JK Rowling spent everyday in, writing her first two novels. We ate dinner there that night.

Beautiful.

The crew in front of the Edinburgh Castle.

Building.

The table in The Elephant House that JK sat at everyday while she wrote.

Hostel. Reminiscent to the hotel I first stayed in when I went to New York with the littles. This speaks for itself.


These pictures are from Day 2 in Scotland where we went around the country on a 12-hour bus tour:

Stop #1: Pitlochry. Cute little town that pretty much looks like this up and down the one main street. Meg decided she could totally spend the rest of her life here.

We took lots of pictures outside our windows. This one's blurry but you can imagine that it was amazing. This is when we started entering the Highlands...I think.

Stop #2: "Loch" means "Lake" and there are a million of them in Scotland. This was the first one we stopped at!

Stop #3: All the next pictures are at Loch Ness!! We did NOT find the monster :(


They really just made the Loch Ness Monster into some cute little pet, like a big worm.

Stop #4: Three Sisters Mountain
This is one of the sisters, the other two are on either side of it. They were HUGE and there was no way to get all three of them into one camera frame. I even crossed the other side of the freeway to try!

I'm an awful human and told Fei I would tell her how to pose to make it look like she was climbing on top of the mountain. It took her WAY too long to realize I was messing with her haha.
We felt like taking "epic" poses.

Stop #5: Whiskey Capitol, Scotland
Free drinks anyone?

Stop #6: Hamis the famous "coo"!!
We were cold and tired to say the least. Which was great since this was our last stop before returning back to Edinburgh. Fei went to dinner with a friend from school who was studying abroad in Scotland while the rest of us had dinner at some place that was not DEACON BRODY'S like I begged. No one listens to me. (Deacon Brody was the real inspiration of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde) Whatever.

Then we got back to London. And showered. Be thankful you didn't run into us between those two things.

TV rots my brain

I don't watch tv at all when I'm in the States but here I can't get enough of it. And I think it's because I don't have any other commitments here so if we're not proactive enough to go OUT we all stay in and watch show after show. I'm caught up on Glee and One Tree Hill (because I'm a girl). And I'm done with Seasons 1 of How I Met Your Mother and Criminal Minds. Someone needs to stop me. I really think that it's because we've been so exhausted since our Scotland trip. So, I'm not too upset that we've spent the last five days just doing nothing. But, we can't let this go on forever haha.

Thus, last night we did a pub crawl. Best night ever, honestly. We went to five clubs/bars and just danced the night away.


I'm going to be catching up on work tomorrow, Fei has a friend in town, and Sammi and Meg are going to the Cliffs of Dover. We're getting all of our work out of the way for Taryn's visit to London on Thursday. I cannot wait for her to get here, we have so much planned for her to do. And honestly, I just miss her guts.

[Ed-in-bra] Scotland

We went to Scotland for two days and two nights and it was an awesome awesome trip, I don't even know how I'm going to blog it for you. I'm just banking that no one relies on my blog for a vicarious experience of Europe because I'm totally not good at this.

So lemme break it down: Me, Meg, Sammi, Fei, Emily and Nick. 10PM overnight bus from London to Edinburgh, arrives at 7am. Arrive. Check in to Hostel...more on that later.

Day 1: Walk around the city. Go to castle #1: Hollyrood House. 11AM meet in front of Starbucks for the New Europe 4-hour walking tour. 4-hour tour with Owen, the man. Tour includes lots of facts. End tour. Walk around some more. Dinner at The Elephant House where JK Rowling wrote her Harry Potter books =]. Sammi bought an Elephant. Hostel. Sleep in assigned beds in the J room. I was "Jungle"

Day 2: Wake up at 6:30 AM. McDonalds. Bus. Mini hayride pre-boarding. Road trip commences. Pitlochry. Loch Ness (didn't find the monster). St. Augustus. Three sisters mountains. Whiskey capitol, Scotland. Hamis the coo. Back to Edinburgh. Dinner. 11pm overnight bus back to London.



great trip. i'll elaborate later. with pictures. bye!

It was off the hook. boop boop boop boop

David, Keith, Nini and Clare are studying abroad in Nice, France this semester and we've been trying to coordinate good times to visit each other forever. They were here Friday through Monday, except the girls left Sunday afternoon.

Day 1:

Meg and I picked them up from the tube stop in the afternoon because Sammi had class. So, we decided to play a joke on Sammi and tell her their flight had been canceled. Of course she was really mad at me when she realized I had lied to her =]. I didn't mind though because we got a kick out of it and I think it made it even better when they walked through the door after she'd thought they weren't coming.

Anyway, it hasn't rained in London since the 2nd day we were here when it sprinkled for 15 minutes. Of course, the first day the Nice crew gets here it starts pouring while we walk to Regent's park next to our flat. We showed them the park and Queen Mary's Rose Garden. And within the first couple of hours of them being here, the girls had already decided they loved London. I'm pretty sure Clare wants to live here now haha.

We wanted to make sure we got to do everything with them in London but during nice weather do we decided to wait out the rain by staying in doors as much as possible. Since they were also exhausted from traveling we came back to our flat, got ready and took them out to dinner at The Rocket. We got there at 5 or 6 and we stayed until 2AM. It was fun showing them a taste of what our college town is like and we were so glad they enjoyed the cheap food and drinks! Emily and Brain came down to hang out from the enclave and so did Jon Louey and Suzanne from LSE. Basically, AU took over the Rocket that night but it's starting to seem like AU has pretty much taken over the entire city.

Day 2:

I love sleeping, we all do, which explains why none of us woke up for our alarms and nearly missed changing of the guards because we were so tired. We DID get there in time so they got to experience the craziness of Buckingham Palace coupled with changing of the guard all before Noon. When the ceremony ended we walked to Westminster Abbey and Big Ben/House of Parliament but we figured they didn't have enough time in London to try to do a tour of either building but we know enough about that stuff to give them a quick summary anyway.

After lunch in front of the Jewel Tower site we went down to the Thames and showed them the London Eye. Nini, David, and Clare went with Sammi on the Eye while Keith, Meg, Fei and I took a tour of the Movium-- the Movie Museum.

They had a great time on the London Eye and you can get pictures from Sammi or Nini's facebooks, but Keith had already gone to the Eye before and the rest of us are waiting to do that with Taryn when she comes next weekend. So we gave the Movium a shot and it was amazing. Inside are tons of costumes and props from really cool movies like all of the Harry Potters, Star Wars, The Bourne Trilogy, The Borrowers, Sherlock Holmes, Gladiator, etc etc. My favorite thing in the entire Movium was Hermione Granger's Time-turner from Harry Potter. I am really surprised at myself for not trying to take that home with me.

We also took a tour of the Cartoon Exhibit where they displayed some of the original sketches of animated characters from my childhood--Tom and Jerry, Ren and Stimpy and a lot of Disney.

The final part of the Movium was a Beatles exhibit that had Ringo's drum set on a stage. There was also no one in the rooms, so my biggest regret is not getting up there and pounding away. Ugh. The images in the room were all for sale and they were incredible. If you love The Beatles, actually, if you have ever even heard of The Beatles, you HAVE to go to the Movium.

Timing worked out perfectly because the four of us finished the same time that the four on the Eye did so we met up and moved onto the next leg of the touristy. Again, because Thrash had done the touristy-London thing I stayed back with him while the other 6 did a tour of the Tower of London. While they told us later that it was awesome, Thrash and I had our own adventure. First we got lost, and that's mainly because I was in charge of directions. THEN we found a secret market that I don't know if I'll ever be able to find again. And finally, we made it to our destination...the Clink Prison Museum.

Yes, you guessed it...it's an old prison, called the Clink (which also coined the term "the clink"), that's been turned into an interactive museum. There was a lot of writing in the descriptions, and it was tiny. But the mannequins and the torture tools were so ridiculous that I really couldn't complain since it was only like 3 pounds to get in. Well, the pictures speak for themselves I think and it was perfect because I was with Keith haha.

After we were all done with our tours, we met up on the other side of the Tower Bridge to eat fish and chips at the world's best fish & chips place ever. It's kinda our spot now. And Thrash got to see the Tower Bridge go up and down! It's how boats get through.

We ended the night at O'Neills with people from LSE and the Enclave.

Day 3:

For the second day in a row we all slept past our alarms and woke up a little too late for what we had originally planned to do. So we took them to the British Museum so they could see the Rosetta Stone. What we didn't know was that there was an exhibit of ancient Egypt so there were Sphinx heads everywhere....hello Phi Sigma Sigma central.

But afterward I had to take the girls to the airport because they were leaving a day earlier than the boys. Sammi took the guys to the British Library in the meantime. As a side note, there was a huge blowout sale at the bookstore on the tube stop and I bought too many movies.

Moving on, Day 3= Emily Beyer's birthday-eve so we got dressed up pretty and met up with everyone at Ping Pong, a place that serves dim sum. It was real classy. And Meg actually ate stuff there! She's really starting to take risks when it comes to all this food nonsense.

And to finish of Emily's bday we did some club hopping and lots of dancing and I made the live band wish her a happy birthday =].

The boys left us on Day 4, and it didn't take to long to realize that we missed them a lot. It was a nice reminder that no matter how much we love being here, it's going to be so nice to get back to AU and be with our friends again.


Oh and I can't forget. At the Movium, Meg and I found a DVD cover of Stardust, our favorite movie.

Horsing Around

Fei and I tried Horseback Riding today. UCL was offering a beginners lesson for the equestrian team so we decided to try it. First of all, it took us longer to get there than we actually were there for which is crazy but this team loves riding so much that they make the commute every single week just for an hour on the horses. They were all obviously great riders so we felt a little silly when we told them we were just hoping to try something new. At the end of the lessons, they gave a speech about joining the team, and while Fei and I won't be doing that we would absolutely love to go back.

As surprising as it may seem I had the best time! I know I'm a huge chicken when it comes to dogs but I really loved the horses. My horse's name was Oliver and Fei was riding Topper (I forget what hers looked like but mine was just regular brown and so adorable). The taught us a sitting and standing trot and how to turn which is pretty impressive for how short of a lesson it was. My horse was a champ, you usually have to give a horse a little kick to get it moving by mine must have been really excited to start moving because he sorta just started up on his own.

Afterward, Fei and I just realized how mad we were at our parents for not signing us up for riding lessons sooner. It was so sweet. Too bad we couldn't take pictures when we were riding so I didn't get one of us with our horses but I did take some pictures on the sidesteps.

If you ever have the chance to try horse riding I'd absolutely encourage you to go for it.



Barbicana & The Museum of London

Ok, and you've probably figured out that I'm posting madly out of order, it's just really hard to keep up with this blog. So I'm adjusting the date of post to the date of the thing I'm talking about but anyway the day AFTER horseback riding I decided to play a little game with my short day of classes. I got out at 11am and closed my eyes and picked a spot on the Underground to explore. I landed on Barbicana which was a weird little place but after walking a mile in APPARENTLY the wrong direction I noticed on the map that if I headed back to the tube and walked a mile the OTHER way I would have ended up at the Museum of London.

So of course I walked right over.
And stayed there forever. They had an exhibit on London 4000 years ago and took you through the history up to today which was really interesting but way too much to do in just a day, so I'll have to go back there. But there was also an exhibit on the Great Fire of 1666 which most people wouldn't care about, seeing as how you are all Americans. Though, going through the exhibit was really eye opening because it proved the severity of the fire and depicted how much it effected the city. From landscaping to politics, the fire had a massive role in the way that London has changed since the 17th century. So while I'd love to tell you all about what happened during the fire I also have another 15 days to catch you up on, but trust me when I say that I definitely know all about the fire now. Feel free to ask :) In the meantime, I took the liberty of taking pictures of FAQs about the Great Fire just for you!

Park it like it's hot

We spend a lot of time at parks. Probably too much time. So on this day we decided to explore a new park we hadn't gone to yet called Holland Park. Meg didn't get to take a nap there so I'm assuming that means we have to go back and do it the right way. I didn't take any pictures because we were only there for a couple of hours before we came back to do dinner. Also I started to feel pretty sick that morning and I really didn't want to be out but I'm glad I went because it was a gorgeous place. They have sections of the park dedicated to other countries and their style of garden but we only got to the Kyoto Gardens. We also saw peacocks! They're allowed to do whatever they want so while most of them were in their little fenced in area, one of them was walking along with us on the sidewalk.

Since I wasn't feeling too hot and we'd all had a long day before (PLUS we were doing a 7AM day trip the next day) we decided to bounce. We'll go back againnnnn!

Harry Potter

Harry Potter obviously changed my life. It made me re-believe that having magical powers was, once again, possible. Since the times of Matilda and Sabrina the teenage witch I've wanted nothing more than to be able to move things with my hands or evaporate from one place to the next. This is because I'm an utterly lazy person. Regardless, we nearly peed our pants when we heard we could get a guided tour of the London that Inspired Harry Potter! Unfortunately my camera must have been on the wrong setting that night because a lot of the pictures look weird.

Anyway we met at Temple station and our tour guide was this cute old guy that wore a vest that would change colors at ever stop. It even turned into the British flag at one point. Between that and his use of firecrackers, he kept us pretty entertained. The first place we went to was an actual film location. He told us that this is the only location filmed in any Harry Potter movie that wasn't touched up with any effects in post production. This place was the Australian Commonwealth (in the UK they have commonwealths/high commissioners instead of embassies/ambassadors). The Australian Commonwealth is where Gringots Bank is filmed :)

He told us that JK Rowling name the famous goblin who opened up the magical bank was named Gringot because there is an old word for gold that is "ingot" and what do goblins do? they growl! so "gr"-ingots=Gringots. Why goblins? Well, JK says that what magical creature would be better suited to work in a bank than these miserable yet clever creatures. Good call.

At this point to security guard was starting to shoo us off of the steps so I only got a couple of pictures and these are the clearest ones. It definitely is Gringots and they filmed the underground Gringots scenes right on this main level of the Australian Commonwealth!



Next we went to the Lyceum Theater which was where he all of a sudden started to talk about vampires. We were all a little confused about it because we were pretty sure this was the Harry Potter tour and we were getting nervous we were on a Twilight tour or something. Anyway that's when he told us what was important was actually on the BACK of the theater.

Behind the theater are three placards enscribed with three literary writers that are important to theater today: Terry, Stoker and Irving. Stoker was the creator of Dracula. And when JK Rowling was writing Harry Potter, this placard inspired her to add Sanguini in the 6th HP book at the Christmas Party. I'll be fair and say I didn't remember a word of this but this speech connected back to the start of the tour where our guide told us he would reveal a lot of history and mythology that inspired JK Rowling's characters.

Like Dumbledore. There is a huge obsession with King Arthur in England as I've said before and apparently JK is into it just as much as the Royal family is. Dumbledore is based off of Merlin which is why he is the principle wizard out of all of them in HP. Albus means white and Dumbldore means "bumble bee" so Albus Dumbledore= white bumblebee and in many passages of the book she will refer to Dumbledore as walking down the corridors humming to himself.

The names Hogwarts, Dumbledore, Weasley and Dursley all come from Rowling's childhood. Also, her best friend as a child was Ian Potter, and her favorite boys name is Harry. So some stuff is purely sentimental for her.

We followed our tour guide to the Coal Hole, a pub nearby. He started to tell us about the concept of the Invisibility Cloak. Rowling never mentions name of the person she stole the idea from in any of her books but apparently he was the cruelest man in the world. Our guide made a joke that this man would sit down next to people and they would say "what do you want" and he would reply "how can you see me, i'm wearing an invisibility cloak only members of the order of (something) can see me" and the man said to him, "no, i can see you". And the crazy old man with the invisibility cloak once asked, "then why don't people ever talk to me?" So maybe he was crazy, maybe he really had the cloak, or maybe people just ignored him so much that he thought he had it. But as legend continues, one day a man was sitting in THIS pub doodling on paper, centuries ago. The man looked up to see this guy (so sorry I forget his name) staring at him. The first man goes back to his doodle. A few minutes later the invisibility cloak guy gets up, walks to the table the first man was sitting at and puts a piece of paper, face down, on his table. The invisibility cloak guys proceeds to leave the pub. The first man was so irked by this (remember he was the world's cruelest man, no one liked to deal with him) that it took him a few minutes before he had the nerve to turn the paper over and see what was written on it. When he finally turned the paper over, he saw that the man had doodled exactly the same image that he himself had been doodling while he was at the pub. Did he have the invisibility cloak? Was he sitting right next to this man as he doodled, copying down the sketch to prove he really did have it? No one knows, but JK threw this idea into her novels.

Cross a few streets to the Metropolitan Police Department. Here it is, the phone booth that takes you into the Ministry of Magic. THIS is the phone booth that inspired her. Dial 6-2-4-4-2 (M-A-G-I-C) and you get right in.


Too bad it was a busy night because we couldn't get close enough to take a picture of the name of the actual pub (people thought we were crazy tourists snapping pictures of the building) but here on the corner of this block is the place that inspired the Leaky Cauldron. I'll have to go back in the day time to see what it's actually like although it did seem pretty appropriate and we definitely could feel how she took this and turned it into the Leaky Cauldron.

Diagon alley. here is the place on Cecil Court that JK spent hours at coming up with the concept of Diagon alley which is a play on "diagonally" the direction she walked to get there or something like that. Similarly, Knockturn alley= nocturnally (something to do with her being there at night, or I'm making that up I'm not totally sure). Anyway it ABSOLUTELY looks like Diagon Alley even though this isn't where it was filmed. The whole time the tour guide reminded us that this was a tour of the London that INSPIRED HP not the places the actual filming happened. This tour was much better anyway because, as he said, film locations never look real when you visit them so you only get disappointed! He explained to us her reason for picking owls over any other animal as the choice pet and showed as that one of these stores is an antique store where inside the window display is an owl. Interesting.

Also, here you can buy HP money!! I have to back track a little because before the insight of Diagon Alley we went to this side alley that was called the Cash Exchange and I was so attentive to the information that I didn't even get any pictures of what was supposed to be important. Apparently, Rowling never mentions where she got the concept of the invisibility cloak as I said earlier. But, she does mention where she got the concept of the philosophers "sorcerers" stone...a man name Nicolas Flamel. Flamel was born in the 1330's but no one knows the actual date of his birth...or death...or even if he is dead. It is literally the most fascinating story I've ever heard. Apparently in a dream one night an angel told Flamel he would find a very important and valuable book one day but he would not be able to read it. The dream made no sense to Flamel so on he went with his life. Until one day, at a book store, he found a book that was in Old Hebrew he purchased without any idea how to read it. He traveled around trying to find someone to crack the code for him and the first person he found able to translate for him died. Eventually, he figured it out and this book led him to the philosophers stone. It is said that when he "died" he ordered that he be buried with his wife and he put a curse on their grave site that anyone who ever dares to open their tombs would be cursed forever. Well years after he died someone hysterically told the story that he met Nicolas Flamel, and this caused panic and someone decided to check the graves. When they opened the graves...they were empty. The "secret" to the stone is that whoever has it has the power of youth and wealth. So Flamel and his wife have been sighted for the last 7 centuries as recently as 1990's enjoying themselves in different parts of the world. This story is the inspiration to HP & the Sorcerers Stone & Hermione (obviously) is the one to make the connection. But now I just think it's the coolest story ever and I want to know the truuuuuuuuuuuuth!