Week of Tourism and so much more...

Ok, so it’s officially been my first week here in London. It has been a whirlwind already but I’ll try to fit in as much as possible….

So from Tuesday till Friday we encountered the most boring orientation material known to man so I will not bore all of you with the gruesome details. Thursday I had my interview for my internship, which went sooooo well and I can’t wait to get started tomorrow. After getting a tad bit turned around and asking a lovely lady in a shop for directions, I found out the company is a two person operation with two interns, me and a girl named Elena; she is from the UK and seems very sweet.  My job entails blogging, tweeting, and data basing (I think I made that word up), among other things. 

I said I wouldn’t bore you with orientation stuff, but I do have to mention the extremely inefficient way of registering for classes here in the UK. Does anybody remember registering in the 50’s? Well, I don’t but I got a pretty good taste of it this past Friday. We had to line (queue) up at a classroom which held desks that represented classes with the professor of each class positioned at their designated desk. Once we entered, we had to find the class we wanted to take, go up to the professor sitting at the desk and have them manually sign us up on a piece of paper. Once the slots on the paper were full, the class was full and we had to figure out where to go from there.   Luckily, I got all the classes I wanted and walked out rather quickly (I was trying to get out of Friday classes so I could travel, especially with Ben in March, but no luck), others were not so lucky and were stuck in the congested hot room for hours! After signing up for classes, we had to line (queue) up at another room and get all our classes officially signed off. It was painful, but I got through and we move on.

Enter Friday night. I have never pegged myself as a drinker, mostly because I don’t drink. So, I’m sure you can imagine I was a little nervous when I was supposed to go to a pub/bar (I don’t know the difference) with a bunch of people I had only known for a few days. I was pretty sure I didn’t like alcohol from the stuff my father had given me to show me how horrible the taste was so I never tried it myself (it worked), and I wasn’t excited to be pegged as the girl who hates drinking and doesn’t see the point in it. We ended up going to a pub (we were later told it was the largest pub in London) called At World’s End in Camden Town. The music was so loud and had an emo screamo theme to it, which I was not feeling off the bat. Hmmmm, this was not going well. So after consulting with a few people, I decided on a Rum and Coke combo. This was absolutely delicious and it is the only drink I will drink at this point, which I get made fun of for, but oh well.

Saturday a bunch of us went to the British Museum, which was the biggest and busiest museum I have ever seen!! I stayed in medieval Europe room for 45 minutes; it is my favorite time in history. We had lunch at King’s Kebabs, which was so yummy. I have never had a kebab before and it was gigantic and extremely greasy (all the better). I had a little bit of a confusing moment when ordering my meal because the man asked me if I wanted chips, and I didn’t know why I would. I looked at him in a quizzical way, thinking I misunderstood and then he said, “Do you want fries?” Oh right. What a typical American, oh well.

 The next day, we had a preview of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace. We even walked a little bit of the Princess Diana Memorial Walk, which was a beautiful park in the middle of London. We barely got to see anything, so we are going back at least three times in the next three months. A few of us have decided to try and attend a service at the Abbey, which would really be something to remember. We had lunch at a cute little shop right next to our house, which I can’t remember the name of, but they had the best chicken penne pasta ever created!

I will be writing two blogs this week since I started my internship and classes (and my first shopping trip!), so keep a look out early this weekend for an update. If you want to check out any pictures of my trip so far, I have been correlating my albums with my blog titles on my Facebook.

Love from London,

B