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