London weekend

Today is the last day of classes! That’s very strange but… oh so nice J Unfortunately, that means the due date for my massive pile of final papers is looming ever closer. My plan is to finish at least one of them by tonight… so naturally, I take this time to update you all on my life! See how much I care about you all?

Last weekend I went to Paris with Lauren and Megan, my two friends from Villanova, and my roommate Niki. Thursday night we went to see Les Miserables which, as some of you may know, is one of my absolute favorite musicals of all time! The performance was incredible. Megan and I had each seen it already, but Niki and Lauren hadn’t so we were excited to see what they both thought. Everyone thought it was amazing… a wonderful way to start our trip!

Niki and Megan had both been to London before and done all the touristy things, so we all kind of broke apart and did our own thing for the day. Before we split up, though, the four of us went to see Abbey Road together and went to Kings Cross Station to try to get to Platform 9 ¾ . After that, Lauren and I decided to stick together and find our way to the Tower of London. We took a guided tour with one of the Yeoman Guards and got to see the Crown Jewels! The tour was very informative and a lot of fun. After that we headed over towards Buckingham Palace and ended up walking through St. James Park, which was beautiful! We did some bird watching and found the oddest-looking bird we have ever seen. The only way to describe it is it looked like a dinosaur bird. Unfortunately, searching “dinosaur bird” on google hasn’t returned any good results yet. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the streets of London, finding Shakespeare’s Globe theatre and the Millennium Bridge. The other girls met up after that because they were going to a concert but, since it was to see a band I wasn’t really familiar with, I decided to save the 30 pounds and wander around Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus for a while, then went to explore Harrods. All very good decisions, I must say. The Egyptian Elevator in Harrods is ridiculously cool.

Saturday we took a bus tour to Windsor Castle (the Queen was home!), Bath, and Stonehenge. Stonehenge was definitely my favorite part. It was so cool to finally get to see it! It was also kind of funny to see people protesting tourism at Stonehenge… people with signs that said things like “Let our ancestors that are laid to rest STAY at rest.” There really isn’t enough evidence to suggest that Stonehenge itself is a burial ground… nor do we know whose ancestors actually built it… Anyway, we also went to the reconstructed Roman Bath house in Bath. I got to nerd out and show off my archaeological knowledge… it was fun J

Sunday was… not that exciting. Just caught our flight home and started working on that massive pile of papers…

So Sunday I head off to Paris for a few days! Disneyland Paris is launching their “New Generation Festival” on Saturday so we got a pretty good deal to go down for it which should be fun. They’re officially opening a few new rides and a bunch of the more recent Disney characters will be around. Then Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are exploring Paris and Versailles, and back to Galway on Friday! And then only a few more weeks until I’m back… how strange!