London, baby! Yeah!

Greetings from London!

Yesterday (16 May) we hopped on a flight in Phoenix and flew across the pond, landing at Heathrow about 20 minutes early, which was nice. I must say, though, that the seats were incredibly cramped, so we were all quite thankful for it to have ended sooner than expected. British Airways also deserves a round of applause for offering pretty decent tea and serving a palatable curry for dinner. Breakfast, however, was not as appealing. I suppose they couldn’t win at everything.

Immediately after landing, we grabbed our bags, went through customs, and waited a bit for our coaches to take us to the flats in Kensington, London. The area in which we are staying is very posh, and I would estimate roughly 95% of the buildings in this area still have their gorgeous, “unimposing” Victorian facades, which certainly promotes complete immersion in their history and a sense of glamour. Glamour aside, and with barely 15 minutes to get settled in our rooms, we waited patiently for the rather tiny lift to get our bags upstairs,  and returned downstairs for our “orientation” soon thereafter. Planning itself for the orientation and the way in which we were shuffled from Heathrow to London proper was not too smooth, in complete honesty. We hideously took up the entire sidewalk wherever we went, incensing the locals, practically screaming AMERICAN TOURISTS (not that our accents would give us away). Our RA Sian (like Shawn) guided us through a miniature tour of our little patch of London, showing us where to buy groceries, the location of the post office, and of course our classrooms. Classrooms! It turns out that I was indeed mistaken about our classes, thus they are in fact taking place in a classic brick and mortar classroom, with smatterings of in-field lectures when fitting. We had a lovely little chat about security, how to travel around the city, and the like, and were off on our merry way to do whatever our hearts desired.

It seemed that the majority of our rather nutty peers simply wanted to go out to the pubs and drink beer for the rest of the night. At this point, the jet lag had begun to set in, so Kristin (hi Kristin!) and I opted to do our own thing, popping over to a grocery store to stock our flat (more on this in another post), fiddle around on the internet for a while, then stroll around trying to find somewhere to eat. As luck would have it, we stumbled upon The Pembroke, which I at first thought was a Gordon Ramsay pub (it turns out that it is not). Regardless, it was pretty great. I had a steak pie with mash and excellently cooked green beans, and a glass of Shiraz-Cabernet. Lovely. It was very cozy, decently priced, and rather enjoyable.

My sleep cycle is still very off-kilter, as is to be expected, so we shall see how I fare today (17 May). On the schedule, we have nothing until about 1 pm, when we will then embark on our tour of a larger swath of Central London and run through Westminster Abbey. More to come (with pictures)!