Happy Birthday Mom!

Hi Mom, hope that you had a great day today!  Happy Birthday.  See you in 6 days!

Notting Hill Carnival

It's so funny how much the the planned day differs from the actual day.  As of last night, Nicole, Linda, Jenesis and I planned on meeting at 9 walking to the train station, getting on the train around 9:45, making it to the Westminster Abbey service, and then going to The Notting Hill Carnival.  But as plans never really work out and how much better is life because of that.  So we missed the train, despite being there at the train station.  We watched it leave and didn't realize for another 5 minutes that, oh that was our train haha.  But another train was leaving within a twenty five minutes so it wasn't a big deal.  Oh! When we went to buy our tickets, we had a group of four so we knew that we would get a discount, but we had no idea how much it would actually come out to.  When we were buying the tickets, the cashier asked if we would like to buy the tube passes and we asked if they were cheaper there and he said yes.  In all we paid 11 pounds for a roundtrip ticket to London (or what they call a "return" ticket) and a day travel card!!!  When I traveled with my mom, she paid 30 pounds for a return ticket and over 6 pounds extra for a travelcard, so we got a steal somehow!

We realized at that point that we weren't going to make it to Westminster Abbey by 11:15.  The problem with that was that Jenesis' friend was meeting her there.  She will be studying in London until December and Jenesis was planning on meeting up with her before the service.  Since we do not have cell-phones, communication is a little difficult when things like missed trains occur.  But we got to Westminster and we waited for her friend to get out of the service.  Jenesis finally found her when we were going to leave so that was a lucky catch.  From Westminster we headed to the Notting Hill Carnival.

Notting Hill is a HUGE Carribean Carnival.  We knew that there would be costumes and dancing, but I don't think we expected what we found - Red Stripe, some crazy dirty dancing, portable speakers/stages, and tons of people.  The pictures don't do the festival justice (though I think my head started to hurt again by just looking at the photos).  Most of the stores in the area were shut down, and many of them even boarded up their windows and doors.  It is estimated that over one million people show up for this festival.

After a few hours, some of us were ready for a little peace and quiet so we left and tried to go back to Westminster.  Unfortunately, the Organ Recital was too full so we failed a second time to see inside the abbey : (.   Everyone was exhausted by that point so it was probably for the better that we started heading home.

The Last Few Days

Lately, I have been held up in the library.  I just wrote a long boring thing about school, but who wants to hear about school?  No one.  Anyways, I finally emerged from my hole, and went to formal dinner tonight.  I was skyping Matt earlier today and after telling him that I was getting ready for formal dinner, he replied, that sucks.  But truly, dinners are very fun.  Before dinner they had one of the theatre professors come give a performance/presentation on all the different accents through out the UK.  I think that it has been something he has studied a lot.  It was fun though.  Well, here are some pictures from tonight.

This is beautiful Pembroke, where I go to school and live (for another 10 days)!

 Nicole and Jenesis.

The Shakespeare professor, aka the accent guy, asked whether any of us would try out a scene from James Bond and Kimmi said that she would do it. The professor was acting as Bond and Kimmi's last line was, "Come back to me Bond".  I'm pretty sure she blushed but she did so good!

Linda, the sweetest girl in the world.

I don't think I have ever eaten fish that looked so much like a fish.

Dinner

Dessert

A stroll and some tea

This has been my first weekend staying at Cambridge.  I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going somewhere over the weekend, because it just feels like that is what you are suppose to do, but I have loved it.  Being an introvert and a crazy person, I need some time to be alone, to just sit and think, or to sleep in.  I have spent the last 6 weeks in constant motion, moving to a new city or country ever few days.  It is so rewarding and exciting but its also super draining at times.  Today I slept in, sat in my bed for a while, went to brunch with friends, and then took a lovely walk to Grantchester to have tea and scones at The Orchard.  It was something that I had wanted to do since I began planning on coming to Cambridge, so when I was getting ready to go on the walk, I had one of those moments where I appreciated everything that was going on.  After the walk, I came back and worked on my essay based on the question, "What is Wilsonian diplomacy and how did it influence the making of The Treaty of Versailles?".  It was so pleasant to not feel overwhelmed.  It is the worst to be reading, but feel like there is just no way you can possibly read fast enough.  Anyways, after working on my essay for awhile Nicole, Linda and I finally ate great food!  So went to Nando's, a restaurant known for having spice and it was so good.  So parents, don't be disappointed that I didn't go to Ireland, I really did enjoy today a lot and appreciate a day of downtime.  Below are pictures from the walk to Grantchester.

RUGBY!

On Friday night I had the opportunity to go to watch a professional rugby game.  Truthfully, I knew nothing about the game and learned very little at the actual match.  It was a pretty strange game though.  There was a lot of lifts, random kicks, huddles, and dog piles.