London Town

After a short blog-hiatus, I'm back in the game!  And with wonderful stories and memories from London and Dublin! Anyways, you're probably thinking "Mandy, how were you able to pick up and leave for 10 days?  Don't you go to school??" Well, the answer is yes, I do go to school, but as part of my child development class we go to London for a week, and then we had the weekend to travel. So basically we had a few academic visits throughout the week in London combined with a ton of time to sightsee on our own. So starting from the beginning, here are a recap of my adventures from the UK and Ireland...

The Beginning-
After a bright and early wake-up call, Jenny and I headed to the Norwegian Air ticket counter at the Copenhagen airport where we met the rest of our class.  From there we hopped on a plane and headed to London!  After a quick 2 hour flight we touched down in London town and began our bus adventure to the hotel we were staying in.  After a little lunch and unpacking we headed to our first academic visit of the trip which was to a crazy "adventure playground" where the kids essentially run rampant and climb high structures with no rules.  After having 5-6 minor heart attacks at the playground (from watching these kids swing from bridges 2 stories off the ground) our class headed for dinner at a Pakistani/Indian restaurant (we are studying multiculturalism, so we sampled various types of food throughout our stay), and then to the London Eye where we got a beautiful view of the city and all its attractions.  After this, everyone was exhausted and just headed back to the hotel to get a well deserved good night's sleep.  And so began the London trip...

The Middle
So throughout the week we saw a bunch of different schools including an all Muslim school and mosque.  All of this was super interesting and cool to me because before I took this class, I didn't really have any kind of understanding of Islam and its fundamental beliefs.  We also saw an extracurricular organization called CARE which used a local professional soccer team (in Greenwich) to unity and teamwork through athletics.  So basically, all of our "academic" visits were really cool and they were hardly academic and mostly just involved me playing with kids for a couple hours. Perfect.  When we weren't doing any of these school visits, we had time to sightsee on our own or in our group.  On one of the first days, we took a bus tour of London and hit most of the big sights including: The tower of London, Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral, and some other sights that I'm right now forgetting.  In my spare time I also made it to Kensington Gardens/Palace, Notting Hill, and Abbey Road.  All in all a pretty successful tour of London.  One of the nights we also got to go and see Avenue Q- which was amazingly funny.  This night of the trip was probably one of the most memorable due to a certain incident.  While I was getting on the tube, there was a whole crowd of people getting on behind me.  Somewhere in the shuffle, a woman kicked the back of my foot and sent my shoe flying underneath the train tracks.  As I turned around in horror the doors of the train closed and we started heading to the next stop.  Now this doesn't seem so bad, but keep in mind I have 1/2 hour to make it to dinner and then to a play.  So that eliminated any possibility of going back to the hotel and grabbing another pair of shoes. So like a true friend, Jenny gave me her sock until I could purchase another pair of shoes (I cant go to a play in London without shoes!) So we ran off the tube and started searching London for a place to buy shoes.  Boots, flats, heels, slippers for all I care!  The problem with London is that "cheap shoes" is an oxymoron.  They don't exist.  After an hour of searching the London streets in one shoe and one sock, Jenny and I decided we had to take a break to join our class for dinner.  We finally found the restaurant and scarfed down some pretty decent Chinese food.  And then the search party began again.  Finally, I spotted and angel in the form of a TJ Maxx across the street.  Jenny and I ran in, found the cheapest pair of shoes money could buy, and made it back to the playhouse just in time to see the beginning of Avenue Q.  Although I did get ridiculed the rest of the trip for not "minding the gap," the whole ordeal made for a pretty laughable story.  The only other good story I have from this part of my trip is that I met Johnny Depp while he was filming the Pirates of the Caribbean 4.  What a hunk.

The End
So after our wonderful time in London, Jenny and I headed to Dublin to meet up with our friend Raymond.  Our first full day there, Jenny and I took ourselves on a walking tour of Dublin, hitting all the good sites and even going in some museums and culturing ourselves.  Once we were through with that, we met up with Raymond and he showed us around Trinity and we hung out with a bunch of his new friends at school.  The next morning we woke up super early for a bus tour of the Irish countryside.  This was so beautiful and I would totally recommend it to anyone visiting Dublin.  Once back, Raymond took us to a traditional pub dinner and to some of the local bars and such.  I even overcame my fear of beer and tried a Guinness, which to my surprise, wasn't so bad.  After a wonderful weekend of Irish festivities Jenny and I finally headed home- to Copenhagen.

Whew, what a long post, but I've been gone so long so I think it's ok.

Much love,
Mandy