All You Need Is (London) Love

Well it's been a week since I have been here!! It's so crazy to think that!

**Caution: This may be a long post!**

First of all, I will tell you about my living situation a bit more. I live in a 5 story building, where I live in the basement level, which is directly across the road from Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. For those of you who don't know what that significance means, it is roughly the same as living in a high rise overlooking Central Park in NYC! Basically, you have to be very, very, very rich to live here. This house costs 5 Million Pounds to own (that's roughly $9 Million!!!!) In our area is the former home of Princess Diana, Kensington Palace. It is literally a five minute walk from my doorstep. On August 31st was the 11th Anniversary of her death, so the palace gates and grounds are covered still with flowers and memorials and tributes to her legacy from people from all over! It's quite neat. Everything in this area has so much history. A few doorsteps away is the former homes of Freddie Mercury, Sir Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliott, etc... So I am pretty privileged to live in quite a fancy and extremely nice area!

My roommates are all from New York and have the strong New York accent (except one from NC). So I am pretty much the hillbilly once again in London! HaHa. It's quite an interesting time with them! :)

My classes started on Monday. We have classes for 3 1/2 hours at a time! YIKES! It's quite long! I am taking Understanding Civilisations: Islam and the West, British Life and Cultures, and British Politics. In the Islam class, we learn about the foundations of the religion that is Islam and how it relates to the "west." It's ok I guess, nothing too special yet. British Life and Cultures is very interesting. We discuss what it is that makes up British Life and Culture, obviously. We are taking several "field visits" to tour the Houses of Parliament, see old St. Paul's Cathedral, Tate Modern, and Shakespeare's Globe Theater. It's going to be very interesting I think. In British Politics, we already are learning about the British government and Prime Minister roles. We also learned all the traditions about the Queen and her figure-head roles of the government. Now that's my kind of stuff! (I bet I just got 20 different eye-rolls from people reading this! lol)

Famous Abbey Road Crossing

It's really cool to go out and see all these neat things in and around London. Today we went and saw Abbey Road! That's the famous studio and crosswalk where the Beatles recorded their most famous Abbey Road album. It was really neat to see the building and what everyone writes along the gates to the building. I found a lot of really cool things people had to say. I was also going to write something, but I got there and realized I forgot my marker! Darn it!

As for traveling, I have already set up 2 trips so far. The first one is in 2 weeks and I am going to Istanbul, Turkey for 4 days. We are going with my Islam and the West class. I cannot wait to see all of those sights in Turkey and be in a totally new culture. What a great experience. Secondly, today my roommates and I signed up to go to Edinburgh and the Highlands of Scotland for 4 days with this International Student House organization. It's a pretty sweet deal; we get transportation, 6 meals, housing, and a tour guide in historic Scotland all for 130 pounds (that's about $275! What a great deal!) I was impressed by the cheapness of a lot of those things. That will be October 10th-13th. I am also in the midst of trying to figure out plans for my trip to Italy (Rome and Florence) for my week break. A trip to Paris for the weekend sometime in November or December will also be in the works.

I have tried several times to upload my limited pictures on Facebook, etc for people to look at, but our internet is not very fast at times and it doesn't work. Sorry! :( Hopefully soon they will be up!

As for now, it's been nice blogging for you all this evening. I should now go to some reading for tomorrow's class or watch some weird British tv.

Justin