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| Farewell
For a year before coming here I wondered about what it would be like to study in London for a whole semester. Now I'm wondering just as much what it will be like to finally go home. I miss my friends, I miss my family, I miss having a normal routine, and a comfortable bed. I'm just exhausted, mentally, physically, and emotionally and I'm very ready to finally come home and get a big hug from everyone. But there is a part of me that wishes I could stay here....or at least that I could somehow uproot the state of Missouri and make it a suburb of London. I was hoping that I would change as a person, and I feel like I have. I feel like I've grown up a lot and learned SO MUCH about myself. I have also fully realized the existance of a BIG, REAL, EXCITING world out there that can actually be experienced and touched. And I have experienced a good part of it.... and my feet have landed in 6 different countries, and I've run my hand over some of the most important pieces of world history. I've done, seen, and learned so much about the world and myself but apart from that I think the most significant part of my experience over here is that I feel like I have truly LIVED over the past 4 months. I've had so much fun, gone outside my comfort zone, made friends with people I never would have considered before, released my inhabitions and thrown everything to the wind. Every morning I have woken up EXCITED for what was to come my way that day, week, or month, and every day I did the best I could to do and see and experience everything that was in my power. Never before have I been able to say that and who knows if I'll ever be able to say that again. I have loved every minute I have been here and will cherish the hilarious memories, THOUSANDS of pictures (honestly....thousands), and friendships for the rest of my life. London, I will miss you and I will miss the person I have been here...but hopefully I will be able to take a piece of her with me back to Missouri.
My suitcases are all packed. My room is clean (relatively...). My taxi is coming in an hour. We'll go to Paddington Station and then take the Heathrow express into the airport. Everything is taken care of. Now all I have to do is say goodbye...... | | |
| *Tears*Tears*Tears*
Carly left today at 12:15. We all got up and went to breakfast together. Carly and I shared our last cups of Earl Grey. About an hour before her taxi everyone started converging on our room to goof around a little and finally say goodbye. I had to walk out of the room at one point because I burst out crying. Weird. I never cry. Then we carried her stuff through the turn-stiles for her and sent her on her way. We could all tell that as soon as she sat in the taxi she was starting to lose it. We ran around the circle and met the taxi on the other side just to wave one more time. It's was so hard saying goodbye when I have no idea when I will see her again. That has been the theme of the week for me....
I've spent the afternoon by myself packing, walking around the park, and last minute souvenir shopping on Baker Street. It's starting to rain. How fitting. Four gorgeous days of warmth and sunshine and now, in my last few hours of being here it's raining. Everything is pretty much packed up. I have no idea how it all fit, but my suitcases are SO heavy! Full of new clothes, dirty clothes, souvenirs, and memories. | | |
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Only a few more days left for sightseeing and saying goodbye! (Primrose Hill, St. Paul's, the Tate Modern and a dorm crawl)
We are so fortunate that the weather in London has been insanely gorgeous for the past 3 days! As soon as finals were over (and thank goodness they are finally over!) the clouds disappeared and the sun shone bright...VERY RARE!! We spent yesterday sleeping in and recouperating from a fun night out Thursday night. Practically EVERYONE from Reid Hall hung out at Tuke Bar and then headed to O'neill's in Piccadilly Circus where the live band kept taking our requests and dedicating songs to the crazy kids from Regent's College! So fun! So we slept in on Thursday and then Carly, Jackie, Nikki and I walked through the park to Primrose Hill. We had been told by people that we should check Primrose out, so we went not really knowing what to expect. But it is indeed a hill. There were people laying in the grass everywhere and there was a great view of the city at the top. Laying in the grass with my girls overlooking the city we are going to miss SO MUCH on a BEAUTIFUL spring day is EXACTLY the kind of stuff I want to be doing during my last few days here. Thursday night pretty much everyone who is still here took part in a huge "dorm crawl." Our room was one of the rooms on the list so we had to do a little cleaning and decorating. 30 people ended up "crawling" from room to room and I have NO clue how we fit that many people in our tiny little 315! It was a fun, crazy night though. A good way to say goodbye to the people who were leaving early this morning.
Trey left last week. Tanor left at 3am last night. Nilda left at 8. Chris left this morning at noon. *sniffle* It was weird saying goodbye because it almost doesn't feel real. I still feel like I'm going to walk upstairs and they're going still to be goofing around in the hallway or something. I'm sad to think of what it will be like tomorrow when I have to say goodbye to Carly. I know she's going to cry...she's just like that...but I have no idea how I'm going to be. But I'll definitely see her again, no question. She's promised to come to Drury to visit..hopefully for Bid Day in the fall. But I guess we'll see.....
It was still one of my goals to see St. Paul's and the Tate Modern, so Brittany offered that I could come with her and her family who is here visiting for a week. This worked out great because everyone I know but me has already been there and didn't want to pay to see it again. So we left around 10 and picked her family up from their hotel on Edgeware and made our way to the cathedral. It is HUGE and has the 3rd largest dome in the world. It's funny because it looks a lot like what our capital buildings in the states look like..hardly at all like a cathedral. We walked around inside for a while and then climbed the 530ish stairs to the top of the dome. SO exhausting, but really really worth it. Allison was right when she told me the view is better than from the London Eye. You could see EVERYTHING! and it was such a perfect day too! Then we went underneath the cathedral to the crypts. The Duke of Wellington, Florence Nightengale, Van Dyck, and Lord Nelson (AND his horse....weird) are all buried here. Very cool. After seeing everything in the cathedral we walked across the millenium bridge to check out the Tate Modern. Honestly I wasn't impressed at all. The building itself was really ugly, I thought, and the interior is going through some major construction, so only 2 out of the 5 floors were actually open. Disappointing! But I did get to see a bunch of really cool Jackson Polluck paintings along with a few Picassos. Then we headed back across the river and ate a really good lunch at Strada, an Italian restaurant. YUM! Britt's family was a lot of fun and they insisted on paying for everything. SO nice!
After my adventures with the Hopp family I headed back to school while they headed off to see Covent Garden. It's my friend Andy's 21st birthday today (YAY!) and all the guys were planning on sitting out in the park with a trashcan full of ice and beer, playing frisbee. So I went out and showed them my skills (hehe!). We're going out later to celebrate more, but for now everyone is spending their time packing. Speaking of....I should probably do that. I haven't even started and I have NO CLUE how I'm gonna fit everything back into my suitcases. Oh well!!
I'll see everyone in a few days!!!!! | | |
| Westminster Abbey (a whole lotta cool dead people!)
Today was the May Day bank holiday which means an extra day off of classes and a WONDERFUL (and very helpful) 4 day weekend for us students to finish our mountains of papers and study for our mountains of finals in the coming week. So we took this opportunity to not only spend hours in the computer lab and library, but to spend more time seeing and doing what we still have left to see and do in London. Thursday night Nikki and I went out to a club called O'Neill's in Piccadilly Circus and had the funnest night with 7 Spanish rugby players that we met there. SO FUNNY! Then I spent all of Saturday working on research and writing papers. Blah! (and it was SUCH a beautiful day too!!) Sunday was spent sleeping in and then walking through the park on what will probably be our last trip to Camden Market. I found a bunch of gifts there for people I was still shopping for and found a really cute skirt on top of that! Definitely a successful shopping trip! After that we spent a fun night hanging out with everyone in the dorms playing games and watching movies. Then today Cyndi and I decided to go see Westminster Abbey. I still have several things left on my list to do this week and seeing Westminster is now one I can cross off my list....FINALLY!
Because it was a holiday the line to get in was SOOO long, but it moved pretty fast and we got in within about a half an hour. Not too bad. Compared to the other hundreds of churches, basilicas, and cathedrals I've seen in my travels, Westminster Abbey architecturally isn't that impressive. It's historical significance and the hundreds of important people who are buried within its walls which make it SO interesting. I saw the tombs to pretty much every monarch that has sat on the throne of England, most importantly Elizabeth I, Edward I, Henry VII, Mary Queen of Scots, Richard I, and Oliver Cromwell. I also saw the coronation chair where every monarch has been crowned since 1301. Although it was pretty cool, the chair was made out of plain wood and looked like it was about to fall apart! After that we saw poets corner, where about 120 writers and artists are buried. Being able to stand at the burial site of SO MANY important writers has been one of the coolest experiences I've had here in London. I stood on Alfred Lord Tennyson's grave marker (yes, Donny, you're uncle!), as well as Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Lord Byron, and Rudyard Kipling. I also saw Jane Austen's grave marker (she's my FAVORITE!!) as well as Charlotte and Emily Bronte's and even Handel. The walls of the Abbey were also COVERED in monuments and memorials to certain families and famous people in English history, including Franklin Roosevelt, Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, and Winston Churchill. There was also a Grave of the Unknown Warrior (which I thought was a kind of funny comparison to the wording of our Tomb of the Unknown Soldier) that was pretty cool. Walking through Westminster was kind of like wandering through a really huge time capsule.....but a time capsule made of dead people...if that makes any sense. It was SO cool and packed to the brim with British history. I'm really glad I finally made it there!
Left on my list of things to do in my last week in London:
St. Paul's Cathedral Abbey Road the Tate Modern picnic in the Park
the Peter Pan statue/Hyde Park souvenir shopping cleaning
getting everything into my suitcases saying goodbye crying
figuring out how to get to Heathrow Airport with all my stuff
.......We'll see how much of this actually gets accomplished..........
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| A Beautiful day in Kew Gardens (and a little venting....)
Here at Regent's we don't have classes on Fridays, which is really nice because it gives extra time for travelling and homework, which is especially nice the week before finals and the week before we all go home. HOWEVER, this week was different. My wonderful English Palaces professor, Brady, decided at the last minute that it would be a good idea to schedule a Friday fieldtrip for our class to Kew Gardens. BOOO! I was hoping to use this entire weekend for doing and seeing things in the city that I hadn't gotten to yet, and this fieldtrip really ruined my plans..... In actuality it turned out to be a really really fun day! Only about 9 people out of our class actually showed up at Kew yesterday morning. The smaller group meant that, for once, Brady walked a little slower and talked a little louder and gave us more freedom to suggest where to go and what to see next. I had been to Kew Gardens earlier in the semester with my drawing class, but since it was still cold then, there was hardly ANYTHING blooming. Yesterday was completely different. There were tulips EVERYWHERE and every other tree was covered in white, pink or red blossoms. GORGEOUS!
Apparently Brady used to give tours here when he was a student, so he knows quite a bit about the Gardens. The gardens, in some form, have been here for hundreds of years as a sort of royal plant collection of all the plant life that has been taken from every part of the earth the British Empire ever touched. This is what makes Kew the only garden of its kind with the most variety of plant life in the world! In fact, in the middle of our tour we were walking in a field and noticed a little tree that looked like it was in a cage. Brady joked about it a little bit, wondering if the cage was to protect the tree or to protect the people. We found out that it is the oldest species of pine tree dating back to prehistoric times. It was re-discovered, still alive, in a ravine somewhere (they aren't disclosing the exact location until the species is off the endangered list) in 1994 and there are only a few hundred trees of its kind. There were actually pictures shown on the plaque of a living sample of a branch next to the oldest known fossil of its type and it was exactly the same! Really cool! and the weird thing is that the tree really does still look prehistoric. The bark is almost scaly looking and the needles are flat. Unlike any tree I've ever seen before, that's for sure.
Throughout its history Kew has also been a residential site for rich merchants and the royal family. We were lucky enough to be able to view the newly renovated Kew Palace, which hasn't even officially opened to the public yet and where Queen Elizabeth dined for her 80th birthday only a week ago. Our class can now say that we are some of the first people to walk about the rooms of the Kew Palace in almost 200 years! The story behind the house is really neat, and the way it has been renovated is also really cool. The rooms of the bottom floor have been recreated to the style when King George (the second, I think) and his family lived there. Then the upper floors have been left the way they have been for the past 200 years, with projections telling the story of the King's illnesses and his family's tragedy playing on many of the ruined walls. It was really cool!
After seeing Kew Palace we walked to the part of the garden that is called "The Wilderness." We studied this area in class as it is actually a manufactured "wilderness" area with roman looking ruins that are actually called "follies." We learned in class that during the 1600s many gardens were manufactured to look as if they weren't manufactured....with fake bridges and roman ruins added in for interest. It's funny, but some rich people actually had hermitages built on their grounds where they paid a man to live there and be a hermit. Apparently it was seen as "good luck" or as a sign of prosperity or something. I dunno....kinda crazy. Anyway, this area of Kew was really neat and was covered with Blue bells, which are a famous native English flower and which are in season right now. Beautiful!
After this, Brady let us go and Jackie, Nikki and I continued to walk around the park. It had turned out to be a BEAUTIFUL day and everything was so pretty that we couldn't leave! We walked around taking pictures, smelling the flowers, trying to find the famous Kew Garden badgers (yes, badgers run around the whole park!), and rolling down hills. It was SO FUN and we were SO EXHAUSTED when we got back to school that we ate dinner and then went to bed!
Now I'm spending my beautiful Saturday in the computer lab working on the MOUNTAINS of papers I have to write for finals week next week. Last week was our last week of real classes and it was really sad saying goodbye to our teachers and talking about when we are all flying back to the States. I feel kind of stuck right now between wanting to have the BEST last week ever, spending all my time having fun with my friends and having to spend HOURS working on papers, projects, and studying for finals. UGH! I just have no motivation to do anything school related right now....but that really isn't any different from how I would feel if I were at home at Drury right now. It's just an end of the semester thing and I just need to push on and get everything done. It's just sad to think that I'm going to be SO busy and that my last week is just going to fly by at light speed.
I really am ready to go home though. Really ready. I love everyone here, but I think everyone is getting a little tired of each other. This too makes it hard to have a memorable last week together. I'm just hoping that the friendships I've made here will continue once we all get home and back into the insane highschool-ness that is Drury University. I guess i'll just have to try my hardest to keep up with people over the summer and then we'll see how things end up when school starts again. It's going to be so weird going back.... almost like I've had a completely different life for 4 months that will just seem like a dream once I get back home and realize that nothing there has changed.
I'm being too pensive right now...I think I need to start working on my papers. I hope everyone is doing well and I can't wait to see you in less than 10 DAYS!!!! YAY! :P | | |
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