Lessons Learned

Week three is by far the best week since it was our first real trip with school! So we spent the first two days in normal classes, meaning we had Shakespeare boot camp on Tuesday. We have four hours of Shakespeare class that day which may seem like a lot, but surprisingly passes rather quickly. The majority of us have Shakespeare, only Chloe and the other Katelyn aren't in the class (and yes, two of us have the same name and there's only 13 students). But even with Shakespeare boot camp, we were all extremely excited for this week!
This was the week that we would be taking our class trip, a three day adventure with our advisior and professor up to York. None of us knew a lot about York, but we had heard it was beautiful, clean and overall, a trip worth taking if staying in England. We were supposed to leave Kings Cross bright and early, around 8:15 am which meant that we would have to leave our houses around 7:30 am. Chloe and I woke up when we were supposed to, finished packing and heading to the station. We were about ten minutes behind schedule but we thought we'd still be fine, Kings Cross is only about seven stations down on the Metropolitan line, which we live on. We thought we were running late but we decided to wait for Leslie and Erin, since they lived at the same stop as us. They finally showed up, just a little before 8:00 am and we sprinted up the stairs to catch the train that had just arrrived. There were no announcements about what stop we were on, no announcements about anything in fact, so we just rode without concern of where we were, only what time it was and how far away we were. We stopped at Baker Street, about three stations away from Kings Cross and we had 15 minutes to make our train. We thought we could make it, if we sprinted when we got to the station. But all of a sudden, the doors closed and we went back the way we had just came from! Since there were no announcements, we hadn't realized that the train terminated at Baker Street and then went back towards our homestays. We panicked, as did the rest of the people stuck in the carriage with us but none of us could get out.
We got out at the next station, got the next train which we knew would take us to Kings Cross and crossed our fingers. At this point, we were all laughing because we couldn't believe this was all happening, and there was no reason to be freaking out, we knew it was highly unlikely that we would make the train. Our train was supposed to depart at 8:30 am. At 8:29 am, we made it up to the platform but there were too many trains departing, we didn't know which one was ours. Covered in sweat, anxious and upset, we stood confused in the middle of the station, watching the chaos around us. We called our advisior and he told us to go buy new tickets for the train. Since he had our tickets, we had to pay full price, 45 quid. We were not excited about that, especially since he said we could not be reimbursed by AHA. We got a train later that day and took all of the essentials with us: Haribo gummy bears, Cadbury caramel chocolate and our iPods. We made the most of the trip, arrived a little afternoon and started our tour of York.
We climbed the Roman wall that surrounds the city and followed it until we had to get down because of a "threatening tree" and then meet up with the rest of the group. We walked up into the center of town where The Shambles are located. Its a strip of shops that sell anything from whiskey, to wool, to chocolates and had multiple cafes. We walked around, walked inside a few of the shops and went to a cafe that had a deal for a cup of coffee and a doughnut, we couldn't pass that up! We met up with our group again and headed to the Viking Museum, a rather amusing trip which had a ride inside of it that taught you about the Viking history in York. We all loved it, one because we could sit during most of the time in the museum and two, there were a lot of good looking guys dressed as Vikings all around the museum. We were then allowed free time, so we walked out to our hostel, which was about 20 minutes walk from Main Street. We had a meal at the hostel and then were allowed free time to do whatever we pleased.
The most logical decision to us was to walk back into York and find a pub, which proved extremely easy since the English are huge fans of pubs and having a pint at any time of the day. We found an awesome bar that was all people our age and had a few drinks. Some people drank a lot, and some of us nursed one drink because we were too exhausted to drink much more. We went back to the hostel somewhat early and dropped into a deep sleep in the sketchest bunk beds I have ever seen in my life. For those of you that have seen Step Brothers, it was something like that, and I was surprised those of us on top didn't fall through.
The next morning we were up early, a little too early in my opinion, to explore all that York and its surrounding area had to offer us. This was the day that we were heading to Fountains Abbey: a beautiful old abbey in the middle of the countryside that has fallen down, but is surrounding by a magnificent water garden. As beautiful and inspiring as this location was, the weather decided it didn't want to cooperate. It was a chilly, well thats an understatment, day that had a brutal breeze that would sneak up and freeze any part of your body that skin was exposed. Of course, that was the day that I forgot to bring a scarf and the gloves that I thought were in my pocket were indeed still on my bed at the hostel. It was a brutal day. I took my nice camera to take pictures but didn't up taking that many because it hurt too bad to push the button or to try to change the shutter speed, it just wasn't worth it.
After about three hours of snot freezing, goosebump raising, and frostbitten toes from the cold, we headed towards warmth. We enjoyed a sack lunch at the abbey and then we were all so cold, we decided to leave early and return to York for a little bit of free time. We went back to The Shambles and then headed back to the hostel. That night none of us wanted to brave the cold to walk all the way back into town, so we picked up some super cheap alcohol on the way home so we wouldn't have to make a trip to a pub. We quickly finished that alcohol so a small group of us went to taste test local brews at the bar in the hostel. York Brewery is the oldest brewery in England and they have many delicious types of beer. We eventually went out at got a couple more beers a local off license and then sat around socializing. We still went to bed fairly early because yet again, we had to wake up early.
The next morning we walked into York and went to Yorkminister Abbey. The outside looked like your traditional abbey, and we weren't overjoyed to be going to another church. But it again, was beautiful on the inside and we had a guided tour through the entire thing. We learned so much, which was good, and also realized that our professor has an extremely intelligent 21 month old little girl. Not only can she walk steadily, but she can speak full sentences and get her point across easily. She uses bigger words than are in my vocabulary and she is not intimidated by anything. She was looking at a quote that was carved out on the floor and turned looked at her mom and said "O." I thought she was being cute, pointing out a letter she was extremely familar with since her dad is a professor at UO. But no, she was just noticing a letter of the alphabet in this inscription and then she started counting all of the O's she could find, and she counted all of them, all 11. My jaw dropped. I don't think I could count to 11 until I was like four years old and didn't know the alphabet until about that time too.
After the abbey, we had a little bit of free time so most of us sprinted across the river to York Brewery for a tour. We got a beer with the tour, and met a funny old man who loved that we were from America and loved the fact even more that I knew almost all of the hops in the brews because most of their hops come from Oregon. It was a great experience, plus it gave us the opportunity to have a pint in the middle of the day before we had to go to a museum. We walked through the museum quickly, since we had limited time to go anywhere else in the town and then run back to the hostel and get our things. Leslie wanted to go to the quilt museum because her mom quilts. I agreed to go with her there, but only if we could go to the whiskey shop afterwards.
We barely made it to the hostel and then back to the station but we did it! We were so glad  that we weren't late, for once, and we thought that we would sleep the whole way back to London. But boy was I wrong! I got to sit right behind my professor's little girl, and again, she blew my mind with just how intelligent she was. She picked up on character traits that we would have never guessed. We were asking her, "What does Mommy say?" her response being "I love you," then "What does Daddy say?" again, "I love you." Then we asked her what Martin, our advisor, said. She thought about it for a second and then, "Martin says, follow me!" Martin is our tour guide, he leads us everywhere so he is saying that a lot, but for her to pick up on that, impressive.
About an hour later, I found myself making Play Doh animals, only to have them destroyed by the same person that insisted I make them. It was a great way to spend the end of the trip, it made me miss my childhood though and all those times Ryan destroyed all of the things I built with Play Doh. :) Also, the things that she would request ranged from a duck, to a rhino, to a T-Rex, to a wooly mammoth. I know I didn't know all of those animals at her age. We all went to bed as soon as we arrived at our homestays and laid low for most of the next day. But Saturday night we had to go out, it was Wendy's 21st birthday!
There is a local bar, The Junction, that is a short 15 minute walk from our house or about 5 minutes away if we take the tub. Wendy chose there for her birthday, and we were glad, it was close and karooke night! We had a great night, buying her lots of drinks and enjoying each others company. I lost a bet to Chloe which meant that I had to go talk to guys at a corner booth, which thankfully, Wendy went with me. Turns out there were extremely nice guys, interested in why we were there, it wasn't really a place where they have ever seen Americans. They bought us a round of drinks and we spent the rest of the night until closing chatting with them. We all exchanged numbers and decided to meet up at Quiz Night so we could team up, Americans and English, and then we would for sure win all of the quizzes. By far, this was the best week of the trip so far!