procrastination to the Nth degree

So it's only been a day or two. And I'm already back.. fueling your obsession with this thing. Let me think, what's the date today.. Sunday. Well, actually for me it's the wee hours of Monday. But for 'yall it's still Sunday so I'll leave it at that.

And I think I left off on Friday... Friday we went with our school group (as a required field trip) to the Tower of London. We had seen the outside our second day here, but we got to go inside on Friday. And just as everything so far in London, it was awesome. We didn't have a guided tour, just admission to get in and wander ourselves. I got stranded somehow, and wound up wandering the place by myself and it was actually quite nice. I got to see the Crown Jewels (another thing you can't take pictures of)... a 530 carat diamond! The place is awesome, so many things to see and they have this really cool armory museum (that don't worry dad I've got plenty of pictures of) but for the sake of everyone else, I won't put them up here.. I'll try and stick with the universal picturesque shots..

inside the first gate.. this is what you see

in all of the towers where they imprisoned the people they were religiously persecuting there were tons of these carvings, as last minute ditch efforts. some of them were really elaborate like this globe..

others were strictly just their names, or a few sentences about their fight a lot of Jesuit symbols..

walking along one of the outer walls

pretty self explanitory

Then as we were leaving the Tower of London.. I ran into, oh I already told you.. here's the picture.

After all the excitement we came back to the flat.. all but one of my roommates went down to the pub on the corner.. I stayed in, not doing anything in particular. I had the thought of maybe walking the 50m to meet up with them in a bit but then I started watching their version of a show like CSI or something similar.. and wow, they are much more graphic over here. I got scared! My roommate Bethany and I were watching it and we had to put our chain lock on our door! There was no way I was going out there at night by myself. Such girls.

Then saturday, I woke up and was the first one in my flat to get dressed.. and it was around 11. I got dressed and my friend Josh and I hopped on the tube to Portobello St. Market. A huge antique, open air market. I didn't take any pictures, too many people. I want to go one weekend with nothing but my camera, so that I can have my hands up snapping pictures without worrying about my pockets. So those will come later.. We were at the market until about 3 or 4, then we came home and chillaxed. And then Saturday night I went down with my roommates to the pub.. We started talking to this group of guys two Englishmen, and Italian and Bulgarian.. who was my favorite. Because his name was Boris. :)

And now today. Today was jam packed, until this evening around 8.. I don't think I was in the flat (awake) for more than two hours maybe. This morning Josh, Bethany and I tried a different church, St. Mary's. It's about 4 minutes away on the tube.. or a 15 min walk. It's an Anglican church, Josh's cousin had told him about it so we decided to try it. And we loved it!! We were talking about it all day. Great atmosphere, good people.. lots of fun. But we started talking to the guy who leads the church after the service and he told us that the students usually come to the 5 or 7 service.. so we're excited for next week to hit up the service with more people our age. This morning service (at 11) was full FULL of young families. That's all. Just lots of young couples and kids. The kids go away of course.. but they were every where for the first 15 minutes or so. Then after church we came home got re-set for about half an hour then two of my girl roommates Violeta and Bethany and I headed back to the tube to hit up Oxford St. to do some shopping. No serious damage.. because we spend all of our time in Primark. The cheapest store to ever grace this earth. Then after wandering around Oxford st for an hour or two we headed to Trafalgar Sq. to witness the Russian Winter festival.. which is actually their New Year Celebration.. I think. There were stages with performers (singers singing in russian, i'm assuming russian rock stars maybe)There were thousands upon thousands of people. All of them speaking russian. I didn't understand a word that was spoken the whole few hours I was there people were coming up and handing us fliers for things and talking to us in russian.. there were so many people there and it was so loud usually it resulted in us staring at the person in disbelief until they walked away. We didn't understand anyone except for the lady yelling "next" when i was in line for food. Which I kind of just pointed to something on the sign.. cause everything was in russian. We asked someone how to say what i ordered and it comes out to chebureki. We tried it (bethany and I) and fell in love. it was delicious. amazing. a little piece of heaven. we had to come home and google it to find out what it was we were eating.. turns out it's lamb. ooh man. wrapped up this this little pita looking pocket of dough, fried to goodness. I need to find these in fresno, clovis, or any surrounding area. DELICIOUS.

Here's a little video right after the countdown (which was at like 6pm) of music and dancing. The little things flying towards the camera are confetti like things that were being spewed everywhere. and keep in mind that this is probably only 45 degrees of the 360 in which crowds of people like this were about. I told you, lots of people.



But, sadly now I must tell you that I will be gone, until Thursday. We are going on a field trip. A long one... and I'm not going to tell you where. You'll just have to wait. And no, it's not cause I don't know where we're going. It's a power thing.. I like building the suspense.