Saturday

Just another random day in London...
Kristy is in Madrid for the weekend! How exciting. I think today I'm going to a French restaurant for lunch. Apparently they have a 3 course meal for 3 people that's 15 pounds. We'll see about that!!!
Afterward we're planning to go to Portobello marktet. It's a flea market/farmers market that's over a mile long. They have anything and everything. I'm so tempted to splurge!
Tomorrow i'm supposed to hit up a Buddhist temple so I can write a 5 page paper about it before spring break. Yippee. After that I think i'm going to try to find this Hillsong church and see what it's all about. Also I want to check out Herods (mall), but I've been told you need to dedicate a full day to it. It's huuge.
I need to start getting ready, considering it's 1:50pm. Yeah.. bum times.
<3

Edinburgh Pictures!

Edinburgh, Scotland!!!

Alright so I've come to the conclusion that I need to update more. I keep hearing it from everyone but more importantly, I forget a lot of stuff! I need to write it down before it leaves my mind. I got back from Edinburgh, Scotland about an hour and a half ago. This weekend felt pretty long actually. Let's see, where to start...
Diana, Rachel, and I decided to take the megabus on Thursday night in order to save $ on a hostel. Our bus was leaving at 11:15pm and was to arrive in Edinburgh at 7:30am. Another thing, before I get deeper into my weekend. Edinburgh is pronounced E-DIN-BRA. Haha. Anyway, so we packed our stuff and rushed to the bus station. While we were waiting at the bus station we noticed a homeless man that seemed to be waiting for the same bus as us. Strange. He appeared to be drunk. A couple minutes later I look over at him and notice that his hand is in his pants.... he was pleasuring himself. I wanted to throw up. He did not care about hiding it, or who was looking. Nope. Then we soon noticed he was staring at 2 children while doing this. Everyone was in shock. We then loaded onto the bus. This homeless man came and sat on our bus! Every single seat was filled. Naturally we were all exhausted and trying to sleep. A woman with two tiny children had a horrible time trying to keep them quiet. They were crying for a good 3 hours non-stop. The sleep was very uncomfortable. No foot rest, the chair tilts back about half an inch, and the bus was FREEZING! I'd wake up about every half hour thinking we were almost there. Around 5:30am I woke up to a loud BOOM. I looked around and saw that the bus driver had run the front of our bus into a bus stop. The front windshield had cracked, and as a result we had to get out of the bus and stand around for half an hour in 20 degree weather for another bus to come pick us up.... Horrible. It felt like forever. The next bus came and i'm pretty sure we left a rabbi behind. He ran into the hotel to go to the bathroom. These buses really could care less if they leave people behind. We arrived in Edinburgh around 7:35am. We were cold, hungry, and tired. Oy. The walk to the hostel seemed like forever, although it was very beautiful. Edinburgh is such an old and amazing city. Our hostel was called Castle Rock Hostel. It was literally right next to Edinburgh Castle. The hostel was very cute and quite big (I will post pictures later!). I had this idea of what a hostel will look like, and this was nothing like it. Diana said that this was definitely one of the nicer hostels. Each room had a subject written on the door. For example our room was called "Nuts Nuts Nuts". Then each bed has a plaque next to it with a type of nut on it. I was a peanut, Rachel was a brazilnut, Diana I think was a hazelnut, and the other beds were titled cashew and Michael Jackson. Hahaha. Michael Jackson, 'cause he's a nut! I thought that was pretty funny. Check in time wasn't until 2pm so we got breakfast from the hostel and decided to go on a free walking tour. The walking tour was 3 hours long. We went to a lot of places and learned a lot of pretty interesting things. Afterward we came back, checked in, and took a nap. We went to dinner at a place called Alabanch. It was very yummy. I got a pesto pasta, Rachel got a salad, and Diana (the brave one) got Haggis. We all tried some of course. I think it tastes like lamb. After that we went on a "ghost tour". We went to all the creepy areas including a cemetery and learned the history of murders within the town. This tour was about 2 hours long. When it was over we went to The Bank Hotel and got some drinks. There was some pretty good live music there too.
On Saturday, we woke up around 9 and had breakfast. We ran down to Highland Tours to get on some tour. Unfortunately all the tours had left at 830 (even though online it said 930). We then planned to take a train to Glaskow. While we were walking to the station and all of a sudden saw about 50-70 police officers rushing towards us. We asked around and they told us that there was a march. We got excited and decided to stay in town and watch the march. Of course we figured we'd see a band of sorts with Scottish men in their kilts.... riiiight. No. It was an anti-fascist march. Haha. We ended up getting sucked into it and the police told us we couldn't leave the march since we were already in the middle of it. Diana was talking to a police officer while we were walking and asking him questions and all of a sudden a lady from in front of us turned around and said "SHUTUPPPP!!!!!" in a really horribly evil voice... like I will stab you if you don't shut the heck up. We all looked at each other like what the hell? A couple seconds later she turned around and said "sorry, we were just having a moment of silence in this peace rally. You're not supposed to talk during it". Quite the bipolar lady. I was like.. "yeah. way to go peace and love!!!!" Stupid. Anyway. We then decided it was too late to hit up Glaskow and went to the National Museum of Scotland. After spending a couple hours there, we came back to the hostel. We got some dinner and did a pub crawl. After 3-4 pubs we went to this club called The Hive. It was pretty nice. Of course we danced a lot and had fun and then came back and went to sleep.
Sunday morning we woke up, packed our stuff and got back on the bus. I thought that the bus ride to Edinburgh was long.... the ride home was ridiculous. We stopped somewhere a couple hours in. The bus driver told us that we had 15 mins to go get food and stretch our legs. While we were leaving to continue home, we saw a girl running towards the bus. Everyone started screaming to the bus driver "wait!! hold on!!" and he just kept going... that girl was definitely left behind. Sucks.
Anyway that was my weekend in Edinburgh... or what I can remember at least. The place was soo beautiful. The air was so clean and crisp. Amazing. I could have easily studied abroad there. I truly recommend anyone and everyone to go visit. It's a very beautiful place for a honeymoon!!! Haha.
Pictures will come soon.
Thanks for reading!
<3

Valentine's Day

Valentines Day... you think there's romance at home? It's nothing compared to this place. Everyone is so damn cute! Walking around holding hands, kissing, watching couples stroll around the park together. Oy.
So Kristy, Rachel and I decide we're going to have a nice romantic dinner together. We wanted to go on the tube and venture out to find some ethnic food. We ended up finding this sushi place that looked pretty decent from the outside. We were excited to find out that was at a decent price too! Rachel ordered a salmon and avocado roll, and a side salad. Kristy ordered a miso soup, spicy tuna roll, and some other specialty roll. I ordered a Salmon box. It comes with fried salmon, salad, rice, and cucumber rolls. The rolls that came out were SO tiny. There was hardly anything in them. Everything was flavorless. We all confirmed that it was the worst dinner we've had since we've been in London. None of us were satisfied. We quickly got the bill, even though we were still hungry, and ran out of there. Next door there was a thai buffet. It said 6 pounds if you stay there, or 3.50 for take away. We got super excited about that until we realize that the take away box was pretty small. I stuffed that box like there was no tomorrow. I didn't even put the lid on it. I put sooo much food in there. The food wasn't that great, but it filled me at least. This was a pretty horrible night.
After the horror that was dinner, we decided to lift our spirits and go to South Kensington Station to get some chocolate. They have the best chocolate there. We're addicted. Chocolate covered cashews, chocolate raisins, yogurt raisins, chocolate honey bites, chocolate covered bananas. Yum. After getting chocolate, we ran back to the dorm to watch some of The Notebook that was playing in our common room. None of the couches were available so we decided to watch a romantic movie in our own room. We ended up watching Love and Basketball. Some girls came over to the room and we hung out until around 2am. I guess the night wasn't a total loss, but we will never go to those restaurants again. Ever.
I will post pictures of our horrible dinner tonight later on.
Thanks for reading!

Paris continued..

So this past weekend I went to Paris. It was SOOO beautiful. We stayed at a hotel called Mercure gar de lyon (I think). Look that up on google! It was a very nice hotel. I'm surprised that they hooked us up. Haha. Our hotel was right next to a train station (although we took the underground the whole time).
The first night we arrived to Paris around 730 or 8. We had an hour to grab some food and then get on the boat tour. We ran around on the streets and found this nice little shop that sold baguette sandwiches for 2-3 Euros. We ended up getting that. Some of the girls got a bottle of wine to bring onto the boat. The boat tour was amazing! It was a little over an hour long. We sat outside which was freezing but it had the best view. Everyone was drinking their wine and taking pictures. I took plenty of pictures and a couple of videos from that night. Haha. After that we got dropped back off at the hotel. A group of us decided to venture out and go see the city. We walked around and realized a lot of things were closed. We ended up finding this little cute bar on the corner of a street and stopped there for some drinks. Rachel and I were tired/hungry so we ended up walking down the street a bit further and getting a medium pizza for 10 Euros! It was sooooooo delicious. It hit the spot. It was actually colder in Paris than it is in London. Who would've thought? Haha.
The second day we woke up around 830 and ran downstairs for breakfast. My roommate didn't end up waking me up for that so it was a good thing someone else knocked on my door! Also, before I go on... my roommate snored... yeah. I'd say I got about 10 hours of sleep AT THE MOST this whole weekend. It was very frustrating, but I couldn't help but be entertained at the same time. After breakfast we went on a bus tour. The bus took us around to all the big sites. One of the places we went to was Notre Dame. We had an hour and a half to explore. It was beautiful. I was in awe the entire time. I'll post pictures later! At some point I had to just sit and look around. I wanted to just sit and be in the moment. I couldn't believe where I was! After that we continued on the bus tour for another hour and drove by a lot of main sites. Right as we were exiting the bus at the end of the tour to head to the Eiffel Tower, it began to rain. Just our luck! We had previous tickets so we didn't have to wait in line which was nice, but the pictures aren't as nice as they would've been because it was pouring! We spent about a half hour at the top and came back down. That night we went out to the Eiffel tower at night. It was beautiful. We also got some dinner. It was a very nice and relaxing night.
Sunday morning we got up and went to breakfast. After breakfast a group of us decided to rent some bicycles and ride them down the river to the Louvre. The problem was you had to slide your credit card and none of ours worked ('cause they only accept international credit cards). We took the underground to the Louvre. I cannot even describe how beautiful the Louvre was. First of all, it was GIGANTIC! We spent about 3-4 hours there and I don't even think we scraped the surface. Everything was amazing. I don't quite understand why some people would stand in front of one painting and take 50 pictures of the exact same thing. We get it... Take a couple pictures and move out of the way for other people. It was really busy. Very hard to walk around with so many people but it didn't ruin my experience. After the Louvre,we went to the Arc de Triomphe. It was massive! We spent some time there looking around and taking pics. After that Kristy took us to this place that serves Grek and we got some! Yummmmmmm. We felt fat. You can choose your meat but what the sandwich is, is basically 2 cheeseburger patties in a pita bread, with salad, yogurt and cucumber dill, onions, and french fries. Lots and lots of french fries. It was amazing. Best Grek i've had (and yes i've had more than 1).
After that we had to get back to the hotel and get on our bus to go back on the chunnel. Oh that's another thing, we took the chunnel to Paris! It was cool. Most of the time you couldn't even tell you were underground. I slept most of the way there. It's only a 2hr 15min ride. Pretty cool. On the way there though my ears kept popping. It was pretty painful. The way back, not so much.
Anyway, that was the jist of it! Thanks for reading.
<3

Paris!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm too tired to type up about this weekend right now, but I will do it as soon as possible! Enjoy the pictures and the video in the mean time!

Avenue Q!

Tonight Rachel, Kristy, Ashley, and I went to see Avenue Q! I hope it's the first of many shows I see! It was hilarious. The singing was spot on. Amazing!