Oxford and Football Friends

Last weekend our programme took us Americans to visit the lovely town of Oxford. There were loads of people everywhere like there was a fair going on or something. It is very much a college town, students on bicycles everywhere!

Other than London it is my favourite place in England by far. It has a great atmosphere and it's very lovely. I would like to go back again but I'm not quite sure how possible it would be with all that is coming up in my life.

March is almost here and I am up to my ears in schoolwork. I've got projects, papers, exams and everything else you could think of due in the next couple weeks.

I hate schoolwork, I wish I could just learn and not actually have to do the dreadful parts of uni.

One of my projects Eric, Hannah, Kirsten and Ryan (this is alphabetical order, guys) helped me out with. I am doing a photostory about uni life and I needed some pictures of people who appear to be friends.

So since today it only rained once we got to go out to the local park to take photos and kick around the football. We stayed out for over an hour climbing trees, laughing and getting incredibly muddy. Our shoes were all caked with mud!

Lovely, eh? 

March also means my roommate from my college in the States is coming to visit me! She is currently living in Ireland so she'll be flying in for her spring break. I am so excited to see her. The only thing I know that we will be doing is going to London for a day which should be wonderful. I love London. 

I will write again once all this dreadful schoolwork is complete. 

London

Yup that's Big Ben. Pretty sweet. I didn't see it close up, this was just taken from the coach I was on.

Have you ever felt when you go to somewhere completely new and you feel as if you've been there before? That's how I felt coming to London. Sure, I had no idea where I was going since in reality I had never been there. But as I was walking around I didn't feel uncertain or out of place, I felt as if I fit right in.

Future moving to London plans? Maybe! Once I have money it is certainly a consideration.

My tour guide today was my lovely roommate from Philly, Kayla! She's living in London doing an internship programme and meeting Daniel Radcliffe (aka Harry Potter).

She showed me where she's living (the area is so posh), her school, loads of landmarks (St. Paul's, Big Ben, London Bridge, the London Eye), Piccadilly Circus (the Brit's version of Time Square), the TARDIS and we visited the British Museum (where the English have Greek stuff) and the Tate Modern Art Museum.

It was such a lovely time, it couldn't have been better! It was wonderful to see her again and I am already planning on returning next month.

Also I had the absolute best falafel ever at Piccadilly Circus! It was spicy and also had non-spicy bits to help soothe the spicy bits. Delicious, I highly recommend it.

At the Tate I was so glad to be able to see works of art that we had been talking in my art history classes. Loads of work by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. Being able to see such famous pieces is such a privilege to somebody with close to zero ability to create visual art.

So yeah, London is fantastic and you should go if you haven't been. It is well worth the trip!

Birthdays

YAY BIRTHDAYS! On Friday we celebrated Hannah's 20th birthday which is the photo above. We all surprised her at Nando's, went out to Wetherspoon's afterward and came home to play a card game or two. We had such a lovely time!

Then on Monday we celebrated Eric's 19th birthday by eating nachos, fajitas, popcorn and cake in our flat kitchen. We watched his favourite film Moon with a bunch of people who came over. It was also a lovely time. Hannah, Kirsten, Emily and Ryan set everything up and did a fantastic job for the party! Especially the cake that Hannah baked was beautiful. You can see it pretty well in the picture above but on the inside the cake was yellow and blue.

I think our flat is glad that there aren't any more birthdays until April which we won't even be here for. For those birthdays (which includes mine) they will be properly celebrated when all of us return from spring break.  That should be wonderful, I cannot wait!

Speaking of spring break, I just bought my ticket to go on a bus tour all across Europe! I am incredibly excited about this, I can't even imagine how wonderful it will be. We are starting in Amsterdam (the Vincent van Gogh Museum will be visited), the Swiss Alps, Rhine Valley in Deutschland, multiple cities in Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome) and finishing off in Paris where I will cry as I look upon the Eiffel Tower. It is going to be the best time ever!

I am glad that I get to see the countries where my ancestors originated from. My family is from Italy, Germany, France and Britain so I have one already checked off the list! I know that I will fall in love with these places, no doubts.

That is about it for now. I will be writing up about my journey to London next week!

Weekend in Stonehenge and Portsmouth

Yup so that's Stonehenge alright. There really isn't much to say other than that it was pretty cool to see something that is so incredibly famous.

This weekend we took an excursion through the programme to Stonehenge and Portsmouth which included us staying at a Holiday Inn in Portsmouth. We were supposed to visit the Naval Docks there but it was so terribly windy that they shut it down for the weekend. This caused some issues with planning but our lovely directors figured it all out.

The weekend was great but what really made it a bit less fun was the horrid wind. My goodness it was absolutely AWFUL. I swear I have never experienced such intense wind in my whole life. Especially when we checked out the beach in Portsmouth it was insane!

The girls that I roomed with at the hotel were Kendra and Cait. We had such a good time together!

After we checked in and got to our room we sat in our beds watching the Olympics. It was so great to just relax after being windswept all day.

For dinner the three of us plus Kendra's boyfriend Sean, Ben, Austin, Jazmin, Emily, Laura and Landry went to a pub called The Slug and Lettuce. Such a weird name but quality food. They did a great job accommodating for our large group which is always nice.

Once we finished eating we went back to our room, got in our pyjamas and then we had everybody from dinner (minus Emily and Laura) over to play truth or dare. It was like we were all in middle school again (the only decent part of middle school). Some of the dares involved yelling in the hallway, making prank calls and Kendra putting eyeliner and mascara on Sean.

The next day we went to the D-Day Museum which was all about World War II stuff and D-Day which was really great. It sparked a lot of really deep conversations among us. Subjects like how can people allow this to happen and that we don't do anything to help horrible issues of the modern day.

That was basically it after we saw a cathedral in Salisbury.

In the next post I will write about Hannah and Eric's birthdays (this would be unnecessarily long if I wrote about everything that's been happening here also).

Birmingham

This past weekend almost all of the Americans from my programme went to ring in the Lunar New Year in Birmingham.

I think all of us had expected the celebration to be a bit more lavish than it actually turned out to be. But I'm certainly still glad that I went of course. It just wasn't quite what I thought that it would be. Maybe it's better in London, I've heard good things about celebrating Chinese New Year there. We got to see lion dancing, young girls dancing to "I Got A Boy" by Girls Generation and lovely fireworks.

Also there we got to go to a free art museum (see photo above). I love looking at art very much! They had a modern and postmodern section and as I was walking in there first was a room with white walls and nothing on the walls. I laughed so hard, if somebody did that as a joke they are hilarious. There were some of Degas' dancer sculptures and a huge sculpture that I saw in art history class (the name escapes me right now).

On Saturday we're going to see Stonehenge and then go to Portsmouth on Sunday (to see old Royal Navy stuff). It should be fun to be away for the weekend! I am rooming in the hotel with two girls, Cait and Kendra who go to the same uni as I do back in the States. There is a really good chance that it will be a great time with those two.

The rest of February my weekends are packed with stuff. Next weekend I'm going to London to visit my roommate, Kayla and my friend, Olivia (both are from my Philly life) which I'm super excited about! I glad that I'll get to spend time with people from last term so we can talk about Philadelphia, MCPC and our new English lives. Then the following weekend I think I'm going to Oxford (can't quite remember).

Life has been absolutely crazy busy even though I really don't do a ton of stuff. I keep busy doing minimal school work and spend a maximum of my time with my friends in our flat. In the next couple days we are celebrating Hannah and Eric's birthdays (I can't write what we're doing just incase they read this) which will be fun. Hannah will be 20 and Eric will be 19, oh I remember the days of youth! Haha I'm still 20 but not for long!

But honestly the coolest cats are Kirsten and Ryan. They're hilarious, attractive and always say intelligent things. And no they did not request that I write them into this blog :P haha! Love you guys!

I will be writing another entry next week when I get back from my weekend trip and done celebrating the births of my lovely flatmates!