do you realize??

good heavens, blogging is hard.
so i can't guarantee the quality of this post.

my first week of london:
monday, we had our first day of classes. i have humanities, religion (a history of the church in Great Britain), shakespeare, and a women's literature class. the classes are actual classes, unfortunately. we have homework, lots of it. i actually like it because it gives me something to do and keeps me grounded. honestly, who can complain when part of your homework is to visit the national gallery and look at paintings. i cannot. and i don't. i do complain about trying to read four victorian-romanitc age novels at once though.
not my favorite.
not my least favorite, but not my favorite.
anyway, we went to the british museum. which blew my mind. they have the rosetta stone, which at first i didn't think was the real thing, but upon further inspection i realized it was. and i got all giddy. they also have pieces of the freize from the parthenon and other statues.
( i am not posting pictures because those are on facebook. and all of you that read this saw my facebook.)

on wednesday we went to bath and stonehenge. stonehenge was awesome, but honestly hard to focus on what you're actually looking at when there are 40 girls all around you trying to come up with witty poses (i don't exclude myself from this group). bath was beautiful. all of us commented on how it didn't really feel real. it felt like disneyland or something set up like that. we visited bath because jane austen spent time there and some of her books are based there. or parts of books. the roman baths were also fantastic.

i hate describing stuff. i run out of adjectives.

one of our assignments is to go on walks around the city. this week we walked the walls of londinium, which is the border around the orignal roman city of londinium. they have pieces of the actual roman wall left. this walk goes mainly through the business/financial section of london, so there are a lot of modern buildings and very concerned looking men and women. what i liked most about this walk was the juxtaposition of the old and the new. they have remains of old churches that have either been bombed or burned down, but they leave the remaining walls up. churches taht are hundreds and hundreds of years old.


like this. all of the centuries pictured right here. i am sorry to say i don't remember the name of this wall, but i believe it was a wall that stopped one of the many London fires. it has roman foundations. anyway. that is the best illustration of that. i just love that they leave it up even though it serves no purpose and it isn't really that beautiful. but it's history. and they're proud of it. so the weedwack and build around it.

we also toured westminster palace, and go inside the robing room, the house of lords, and the house of commons. i would love to go sit in on a session at the house of commons. they're wild. the tour guide told us that while they aren't allowed to directly insult eachother, they can go around it. for example, instead of calling someone a "big fat pig" you could say "the gentleman who obviously eats too much there in the front row." such classy people.

another one of the walks we went on was called "the wild side of the thames." wild it was. there was actually a river festival going on yesterday and a handful of open-air markets. the highlights:

tower bridge. we crossed it.


fancy food borough's market


my first turkish delight at the open-air fancy food market.

books! i bought a book of poetry from 1899 for 4 pounds here.

okay honestly i'm tired of this. but today was magical. we got split up into different wards, and the ward i am in is so fantastic. a very eclectic and colorful group of people. honestly, it was one of the more spiritual church experiences of my life. after that, i split up from the three girls i went to church with and went to the national gallery by myself. i soundtracked it with sufjan stevens and sigur ros, and it was the most magical thing of my life. i stayed there for a couple of hours. my favorites were the van eyck portrait and "the virgin of the rocks" by da vinci.
best, most magical sunday afternoon ever.

also went to a couple of plays this week, one being at picadilly circus.


there it is.

this was way too long.
i'll get better at this.

anyway, needless to say i am absolutely in love with this city.