Pictures

These are from our trip to Bath and Stonehenge:

This one is the sun setting over the Thames from the Vauxhall Bridge in London

I'm Never Leaving This Country!

So I realize that I've been here for about 10 days now and haven't written anything yet, so this is going to be a ton of information all at once!  First of all, I'm having an AMAZING time and I absolutely love everything about London and the UK and everything!  Food is about the same price as it was in DC and I'm doing really well at sticking to my budget, so things aren't as crazily expensive as I thought they would be, although that's probably because the pound is dong so badly compared to the dollar at the moment.  But I'm ok with that!

So I'm in 4 classes right now, International Marketing, International Trade, Fundamentals of Finance, and British Life and Cultures.  All but the last will be over before our spring break in the first week of March, so I have 2 three-hour sessions of each class until the end of February.  British Life and Cultures goes throughout the semester, and since I didn't end up doing the internship because my visa got screwed up I'm taking another class during the second half of the semester.  A few of us had the same problem so we're taking International Business or something like that so that we'll have more than just one three-hour class a week for 6 weeks. I'm really enjoying my classes so far, there are only about 10 of us in each one.  My Marketing professor is really cool, he's worked mainly in travel and tourism and he lives in the South of France, so I guess he flies back to London for Mondays and Tuesdays to teach class for 6 weeks.  My International Trade professor is RIDICULOUS, he's Italian and he's the most radical person I've ever met, he legit thinks that 9/11 and all Muslim terrorism is sponsored by the U.S. government in order to keep Americans in fear so that they can keep military spending up and keep Lockheed Martin happy.  Absolutely ridiculous, but the whole class is really just a big discussion and he really encourages people to debate, so I have a great time in it.

I haven't been doing too much touristy stuff yet, although last weekend our program took us on a bus tour of London so we could sort of figure out what is where and see things that we'll want to come back to, and we also went on a walking tour of Kensington on the same day.  I've been going on really long walks when I have free time, I've been just picking a Tube stop and going there and wandering for a few hours and then finding the closest Tube stop and taking that home again, which I have really been enjoying because not only am I getting good exercise but it's also a way to really get to know the whole city rather than just the parts you see on tours and a good way to know where things are in relation to each other rather than in relation to just the Tube.

Yesterday we took a day trip to see Stonehenge and Bath, and it was probably one of the best days I've had here!  Stonehenge was ok, I was kind of underwhelmed but then again it's just a pile of rocks that no one actually know what it is, so there's kind of a limit on the potential awesomeness.  But it was still fun, I guess kind of one of those things you have to do.  BUT the complete opposite was Bath, which was SO AWESOME!!!  I seriously would love to just move there and never leave.  Ok so after Stonehenge we drove through Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire about an hour to get to Bath, we took sort of a driving tour of Bath, and then took a tour of the Roman baths there.  It all looks very much like Rome, which is kind of interesting because it's built on 7 hills and almost all of the buildings there are built in the same kind of stone in the same style.  It's a city of about 100,000 people and way cooler than London in some ways, a lot of the streets are small and windy since it's built up around a medieval town, there are a lot of cobbled streets that are blocked off so cars can't drive on them, and the Bath Abbey is beautiful.  Some friends and I are planning to take the train back for a day trip since we only had about an hour there to walk around and since we loved it so much.

We've been making a lot of travel plans and I'm so excited for this semester!  I signed up to do an adventure weekend in Wales that includes sea kayaking, surfing, coasteering, rock climbing, so much awesome stuff.  Also, when Tom come for his spring break we're planning to go to Rome for a few days, and for MY spring break, my friend Dana and I are going to Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, and Berlin!  I really can't wait for that because it's like one of the main musical centers of Europe and I've been learning about these places since I was like 5 years old in all of my music history stuff, and also Dana is a music minor so she'll be able to appreciate the music with me rather than just being bored by all the classical stuff and not being interested.  I want to get to Dublin and Paris at some point, and I'm also planning to go visit Snowdon's sister Luli (I think that's how you spell it?) with Dana, we'll probably take a long weekend and see Glasgow, Edinburgh and St. Andrew's.  And I'm sure other things will come up too!  

My living arrangements are awesome, I'm in a first floor flat with 4 other girls and the RA for the building.  Her name is Leslie, she's from Nova Scotia and she's AWESOME!!  She studies voice at the Royal College of Music and she's really chill and cool.  So she has her own room and bathroom, and then me, Dana, Jackie, and Sarah are all in this HUGE room with our bathroom.  The room is really big and our whole flat has 12-foot ceilings so it feels even bigger.  Then we have a living room and a kitchen table and a separate kitchen, so it's almost better than my apartment last semester.

So that's kind of the brief overview of my time here so far, if you've made it all the way down here then congratulations!  Hopefully I'll be better at posting more often but I just wanted everyone to know how amazing of a time I'm having and what I've been up to.  Here are some pictures that I've taken so far, I hope you enjoy them!

Phone Number

Just a quick update - my international cell phone number is +44 7525 549 055.  However, it will be super expensive, like $1.29 a minute apparantly to call me.  So what might be easier is if you email me or instant message me and let me know when you want to talk, and I can call from my computer for about 2.4 cents per minute.  

Just letting everyone know!  I'm leaving tomorrow woohoo!

-Katie

Gearing Up

Hey Everyone, 

This is my first blog entry about my trip to London!  I'm leaving in 6 days and wanted to set my blog and everything up before I leave.  

I'll be in Kensington, London, and I'll be staying in a flat-type setup with a few other people.  Luckily, I'm already friends with a good number of people in the same program with me, so I'll definitely know the people I end up living with.  As far as contact information goes, I won't find out my exact address until I get there, but my username on Skype is KatieLaBarre (creative, I know).

I'll hopefully be posting an entry once a week or so, so look for more in a week, it'll be my first full day there!

Talk to you soon, 

Katie