London Baby!

So... I still haven't put up pictures yet because like my mom says I'm a type A person and have to perfect everything. I have three on and all the words all cute and next to them, but then when I add another picture everything gets all screwy and I can’t deal with it right now. But tomorrow I’ll have all day to mess with it so just hold your horses and you’ll get some pictures.

We got to our place of residence yesterday morning. It is seriously… the cutest thing ever. We live in the more ritzy part of town on a street called Palace Court. The house is 5 or 6 stories high I think, we live on the third and yes, we are DEFINITELY out of breath after walking up the stairs to our dorm, dorm # 3. We live with fourteen other girls in our room. There are eight on our side, and six on the other, split by closets which are actually smaller than the ones in the freshman dorms. Tressa… imagine the hanging room we had cut in half with two shelves on the bottom and one on the top. Ridiculous. There is also a massive drawer for each of us under the bed. It has no dividers and get unorganized very quickly. I am trying my best to convert to being a type B person like Bobette… a complete slobJ We have bunk beds. We decided instead of each choosing one we will share both. Basically the top bunk is for sitting and doing things on our laptops, the bottom is for sleeping . Yes, we do both things together. Somehow being on top of each other in bunk beds is not close enough for us… we must share a twin bed.

We had our first meal last night. Wow. This is going to be interesting. Think cannon center with no selection. Not even a salad bar. We had broccoli cheese soup, with carrots in it for some reasons, and bread. That was it. It definitely made us feel like we were at an orphanage, and we are going to try to get everyone to play Kira’s orphanage game from when she was little though. We also have plenty of good window sills for singing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow”, and, again, sleep in a bunk room of fourteen girls. You really can’t get more orphanage than that.

Our house is decorated so cute! Our ceilings go really high, even in our room (I can stand on the top bunk and barely touch it), and have the cutest designs on them. They are Kira’s favorite part. We have really cute drapes. There are a million chandeliers throughout the house too. There is a cute little reading room and dining room. The bad things are: the duvet covers they gave us are really ugly, and there are RATS. I don’t even want to talk about it.

I didn’t believe in jetlag. I thought I was too good for it. Then it hit yesterday. We woke up at three in the morning and no matter what we did we could not fall back to sleep. We ended up showering around 5:30 and going to breakfast at 6:00. Weirdest thing ever. We got a free full English breakfast at the hotel, thanks to Paul, gold member of Marriot. The best things there were the mushrooms and fried tomatoes. I probably ate an entire plate full of button mushrooms and at least three whole tomatoes. D to the E to the L-I-C-I-O-U-S. We got to our house around 10 because we were so worried about our bags getting there before us. They didn’t show up until about four, and one of Kira’s was missingL. Sore subject. All we did the rest of that day was meet all the other people who are here (I generally like most of them, and I actually do talk to them… somewhat), take a walking tour of our glorious neighborhood, eat the nasty food, and were in bed by nine.

Today I woke up at seven. You guys, it is such a weird thing to naturally wake up and be fully up at that time. I can’t decide if I like it or not. I would tell you to try it but it would be nearly impossible because you can’t use an alarm. It’s just weird. We got ready and went to Portobello Road. Our first attempt in getting there took us in a full circle and we ended up right back at our house. We finally made it though and it was the coolest thing I have ever been to. You all need to come visit me and we will spend hours there. Basically it was a huge antique mall that went down the whole street . And don’t underestimate the fact that I called it a street… we were there for at least three hours, we stopped at about 25% of the shops, and didn’t even make it all the way down. Oh my gosh… so much china, and antique jewelry, and the coolest old maps ever, and a TON of books, and random things like really cute vintage lace (anyone have any ideas for what we could do with this I’m dying to have a reason to buy some), there were a few cute boutiques too… we found the cutest purses ever, and then a bunch of food stands… it was heavenly. I am going every Saturday for sure. I think I found something I wanted to buy for everyone I know. We had to stop though because it was so freezing cold. Today was the coldest ever. Our taxi driver told us it is the most snow London has gotten in 30 years, but it is hardly covering the ground.

So we came back (got completely lost on the way and found the cutest cathedrals… which are everywhere… art history in rare form… I love it), and were reminded that tonight was the last night Peter Pan was playing!! We had to go. We got a bunch of girls and went to down town (for the first time so far) and rushed to the half off ticket offices and none of them had tickets. We found out that we had to go to the theater that it was playing at to get them, but it was like half an hour (by tube) away. The other girls wimped out but me and Kira were determined to get there. Then we found out that the tube station with the exit was closed, so we found a roundabout route and took a cab the rest of the way. The theater was in this big arena thing called the O2. It was really cool… had a movie theater and a ton of places to eat. We got our tickets, the cheapest ones were 37 pounds, ate some dinner, and went to our seats. It was in a globe theater, so with our cheap-o tickets we had to sit basically behind the play… but it wasn’t full at all so we got to move to these awesome seats right in front. At the top of the globe theater they projected where the scene was supposed to be… it sounds lame but it was definitely legit. It looked so real… like when they were flying it moved around us and you could see Kensington park and everything. The play was SO good. We absolutely loved it, even though we are always depressed by the sad ending. A bunch of other kids from our school were there too… but they did not appreciate it half as much as we did. So now we’re home and we have to leave at 8:15 tomorrow for church. Ewe.

That’s all for now… I love you all!!

Brittany