London

I love London. It's amazing here (although the weather has definitely taken a turn from the sunny days of Dingle). Getting to London was a very long and tiring day of travel. We left the hostel at 7:45 am and then drove straight to Shannon Airport. I slept pretty much the whole time but every time I woke up we were in another random town. It took us about three hours to get there. From there we checked in and then flew into Gatwick Airport. The flight was really only like an hour and going through customs was extremely easy which I was thankful for. We actually only had to give them our ticket stubs for the plane. Then we got on a coach ride for about an hour and a half until we finally ended up in London. We are staying in these apartments pretty close to Hyde Park. The park itself is HUGE. I ran around there this morning with the pigeons eating what looked like chips in the water and random swans. So the first night in London my apartment gets in and we finally get to unpack since we'll be here for three weeks. I really want to throw out all of my socks and buy new ones. Anyway, we are so hungry we end up going to Queenstreet and trying to find something to eat. I don't really know how it happened, but we ultimately ended up at this pricey Japanese restaurant. Oh well. It tasted really good.
Yesterday we had orientation/class and then we did one of those hop on/ hop off bus tours of the city. It was actually a lot of fun. I feel like I know where a lot of things are now. Kait and I had this movie moment when we turned the corner of the street and there was Big Ben and the Parliment houses and the London Eye. It was pretty fabulous. We had a group dinner at the Palm Court which was tasty.
Today I offically became a member of the library which is fabulous because it means free internet for an hour every day. Whoohoo! You don't know how much you miss it until you don't have it. My friends and I want to go to all of these different attractions/shows but we couldn't look up the prices because we don't have the internet. Oh how handy it can be. :) I hope to see a ton of shows while we are here - Wicked, Cabaret, Avenue Q, Phantom of the Opera... all of these are playing all over town. :) Hopefully I'll get to go to a few. No side trips for me - just theater. Well, I hope all is well at home and the quarter is going by well.
K