All Packed Up...

With our school finishing on Thursday, everyone has started to depart away from London and head other places. Some are going home and others are headed all over Europe.  It has been a long couple of days spent with the group, packing, saying goodbyes, and going around and doing the things we did on the first couple of days we were here.  It has been a trip of a lifetime that has shown me things about the world that no other experience can do for you.  The places we have been, the things we have seen and all the relationships that were built changed who I am today.  

Someday and somehow I will be back to this great place.  Thanks for all the memories!

Cheers

Jimmy

A walking tour of the Olympic site

Not much has gone on in the last week because we all have been finishing up on homework for the end of the semester.  It is pretty crazy that we have only 1 week of class left.  We finish our classes up this Thursday and people leave as early as Friday to go back to the states.  It seems like only yesterday we arrived in a totally foreign land and now it is sad that people are leaving what we now call home.  So many new things that we have learned and grown accustomed too and now we are going back home to leave it all behind.

However, today we headed over to northeast London to do a walking tour of the 2012 Olympic site tour.  It was a very neat experience because all of it is built but the area is undeveloped.  The stadium is going to hold 80,000 people and is brand new.  It is quite the stadium.  We also saw a lot of the surrounding area of the Olympics such as aquatic center, new flats for the athletes, transportation for the Olympics, and other areas.

Other than that, not much is new.  I am getting pretty excited to have my Dad fly over and show him the whole European thing.  Should be a whole new experience in Eastern Europe.

Hope all is well back home,

Cheers

Jimmy

A trip to Brighton

On Saturday our whole group headed straight south to Brighton, which is a city right on the English Channel.  It was about an hour and a half and we were on the bus at 7:45 AM.  We got to Brighton and had a walking tour around the city and it was about a two hour tour and we learned quite a lot about the history of the city.  We started out walking around the Brighton Pier, which is what makes the Brighton city famous.  There is a large Pier with a ton of food and snacks all toped of with a amusement park out on the very end.  Here are some of the pictures of around the city.

Right when we got off the bus, this is a picture of the Pier from a ways away.

The entrance to the Pier.

St. Stephan church in Brighton.

The Cricketers, the oldest pub in Brighton.

Royal Pavilion Palace.  It was built with a Indian style for King Charles.  

Front view of the Palace.

A piece of Art on the shore.  It only is visible with sunlight and can only be seen from a good distance.

Brighton Pier

View of the beach from the Pier.

We headed home and took it easy after everyone was sun burnt and tired.  Sunday we did a lot of homework before we had a dinner with our whole group and a comedy show.  We went to Adam's Ribs and it was very good.  It was kind of an American style place with big portions and great food.  After dinner we headed over to a comedy show in Piccadilly Circus.  It was a lot like the "Whose Line is it Anyways" that you will see on TV.  It was an improve show all based off of audience inputs.  The show was so funny and it had all of us rolling on the ground laughing!
Other than that, we all have a ton of homework.  It has caught up to us with a bunch of papers and tests that we need to read.


Cheers

Jimmy

Paris

This weekend we went to Paris with a small bunch of people from our trip.  We started off on Friday night and got onto a coach.  From London we traveled to Dover and the white cliffs and drove our coach right up onto a ferry with hundreds of other coach buses.  We got off and sat in what seemed to be a cruise ship with dance floors and hundreds of bars, stores and food places.  We sat there and it took about an hour to get across the channel.  After a while we got back on our coach and headed the rest of the way to Paris.  By this time it was the middle of the night and we slept the rest of the way to Paris.  We arrived at 7:30 AM and were dead tired so we checked into the hotel and went to bed for about 2 hours before getting up and at things at 10 AM.  Our first stop was Notre Dame.  It was huge and very intricate in its detail.  It was very similar to a lot of the Cathedrals that we have seen this semester. The interesting part about the cathedral is that it is on an island and the river runs right by it.  Here are a couple of pictures of it:

front of the cathedral which is very similar to Westminster abbey.

Front door and the detail around that.

Inside.

Huge stain glass window near the altar.

After this we walked over to the Louvre to see the good ol Mona Lisa.  The Louvre is actually huge with buildings that form a courtyard in the middle.  It was quite the building and very interesting to see the actual Mona Lisa.  It is much smaller than you think.  It is about the size of a large pizza box, maybe a little bigger but not much.  However, they devote an entire wall for it.

Courtyard of the Louvre.

Its own wall.

There she is.

After the Louvre we headed up to the northern part of the city of Paris to visit another famous church on the top of the hill.  It is called Sacre Coeur and it is a big church on top of a big hill in Paris.  There was street performer and all sorts of drawings and art work you can buy up near this church.  

We spent a little bit of time here and watched some street dancers along with some street music.  It was a lot of fun.  After this we headed back to our hotel to take a quick nap and change into warmer clothes for the night.  It was 75 and completely sunny during the day but being on top of the tower we thought it would be kind of chilly.  From here we headed over to the Eiffel Tower when it was still light out and took some pictures.  We walked around and admired how large the tower actually is.  We headed to a little cafe about a block from the tower and had a nice little French dinner before going back to the tower at night.  Here are some pictures of the night.

It was a long way to the top of the tower but it was well worth it as you can see in the view.  It was a great time and a fun view of the city.

We went home, exhausted to say the least and went right to bed.  We got up and headed back to the bus station where we got back on the bus and made our way home.  It was about 3 hours until we hit the channel but this time we took the tunnel under the ocean.  It was a very interesting process.  You have to go through customs and what not and then you literally drive your bus right into a open train and you take off.  40 minutes later you are in England where we had about another hour on the bus and home we were.  It was a great city to see and a fun experience all in all.

Back home in London with class all day today.  Went to the gym and now were going to watch the Twins and Yankees.

Cheers

Jimmy