We arrived at Heathrow Airport around an hour later than we were supposed to and made our way directly to the tube. We were trying to figure out the ticket machine when a gentleman asked me if I needed a ticket. I said yes, both Leslie and I did, so these two men gave us their day passes! So we didn’t have to pay and headed towards home. We changed trains like experts and before I knew it, I was walking down Churchill Avenue in the pitch black wondering what my host mom and roommate would be like. I soon found out when a short, elderly woman opened the door for me exclaiming in a German English accent “Katelin! Oh she’s here, she’s here! We don’t have to worry anymore!” I was confused by this because I told her I would be arriving at 5:30 pm and it was 5:35 pm.
Chloe was sleeping on the couch, so I didn’t get to meet her right away but I got to have a cup of instant coffee with Alice. She has a coffee pot, apparently she doesn’t use it. It was at this moment I decided I’d be drinking tea for the rest of the trip. Chloe woke up and we had fish and potatoes for dinner, all covered in a nice butter sauce. I could feel my arteries clogging already. Chloe and I chatted for awhile, she’s from Michigan, junior and we got along right away since neither of us were English majors on an English program trip. We share a room on the second floor with two twin sized beds, an awesome floral chair, a giant wardrobe and a desk. Thankfully the room is big so it’s not too crowded.
The next morning we boarded our first train for London centre with our directions in one hand and tube ticket in the other. We made it two stops before our train was terminated due to a “passenger incident,” which in the London translation means that somebody jumped in front of a train… again. We luckily still made it to the school on time, which is a converted old house literally in the centre of London. We met the important people that would be running our program, but more importantly, we met each other. There are 13 of us on this trip, 12 of them are girls and the guy has longer hair than me. We had a delicious lunch and then had a presentation by a police officer of the dangers of London. He gave us some fun things that we’re supposed to use to protect our belongings, but that we’d much rather torture each other with. The presentation terrified us but at the same time we learned a lot.
We went for a walk around the area surrounding us and then were allowed to go home, or in our case, go buy cell phones. We paid a whopping one penny for the phone, so it wasn’t a large investment. We had another butter dinner with Alice, who doesn’t eat dinner with us, and then headed for a pub in the neighboring town. The pub was cheap, lots of beer selection and all locals.
The next few days went about the same as the first day. We had introductions to our teachers and the classes we could take, had lunch and then went out in the city. We went on a river boat tour of the River Thames that started right across from the London Eye and took it all the way down to Tower Bridge, which is appropriately next to the Tower of London. We spent around three hours at the tower, which is actually a castle I would say, and it was an amazing history lesson of the English culture. It mainly covered all the ways people were killed in the past, since we visited the tower were the prisoners were held and usually killed in, the place where Anne Boleyn was beheaded and also Bloody Tower. So after that uplifting day, we all went out for a pint, and this time everyone in the program went.
Classes officially started on Wednesday and I attended all of them to get an idea of what classes I wanted to take. In the end, I decided on Graphic London, Shakespeare and Tudor England. Graphic London is a class where we read graphic novels, which I have no experience with, Shakespeare is self explanatory and Tudor England is the study of the Tudor period in England. The Thursday of the week we attended our first play, As You Like It at a wonderful theatre also in central London. The performance was spectacular, and I loved it, mainly because it was my first real theatre production that I had ever seen. Our Friday event got cancelled due to rain, so we decided to head to Camden Market instead.
I can’t even put into words the size or quality of this market, it literally goes on forever and has just about anything a person could desire. We went split off into two groups and decided to tackle the market at our own rate and meet up in a few hours. My group stuck mainly to the tourist shops, shoe stores and the indoor buildings when it started to rain. It was fantastic, a place that I could visit multiple times and still never be tired of.
On Saturday we did the normal tourist route of Buckingham Palace, down through St. James Park, through the Horse Guard Area, down to Big Ben and then ended beside Westminster Abbey. All of this experience was overwhelming; it was hard to believe we were actually seeing all of this and that everything was so close! We took a double decker bus through the city, and got off when it ended. We decided that we’d had enough of a day and went home to rest, which is pretty much all that we did on Sunday too. Not the most energetic first week ever, but we sure did have fun!
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