Day to Day London Living

I had all of these random pictures of some of my favorite things that I really wanted to post...so here they are. An average day for me in London would include: waking up around 6:30 and running through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, class until noon, a museum, park, or other excursion to a historical site, dinner, a night walk and bedtime...way later than it should be.


Big Ben. I love him.


Shopping at Harrods. Everything there costs about 300 pounds of more...so in my bag I have a chocolate muffin, one of the few things under 100 pounds. Don't I look like a regular though?

South of the Thames with our Bueno bars. Mmmm. Chocolate here is way Way WAY better than at home.


The Tower Bridge. I think it's my fav.


I took this picture when we made our trek to Wembley Stadium when the US was playing England. The only bummer is...we didn't actually go in...because tickets were too expensive. So we went to a really funny little restaurant that was completely empty, and watched the game. It was an adventure though!


Hampstead Heath. I should have gone there earlier. It's been one of my favorite places. It's totally natural and so beautiful. A huge HUGE park of just fields and fields and lots of ponds and forests and all kinds of stuff. It was way fun to walk through.


The Kenwood House at Hampstead Heath. This house and the grounds are beautiful. I would live here if I was a really rich guy in London. Actually, it totally reminded me of somewhere my dad would live if he could pick anywhere in the world. It's surrounded with hundreds of acres of beautiful land it was just perfect.


Borough market is truly one of my favorite things about London. It's a huge food market that they have everyday. The best way I can describe it is...Costco sample day + the Farmer's Market x about 1000. It's so fun. We just make laps around it and get samples so we don't have to buy lunch :).

Punting on the Cam, and other Cambridge Things

We went to Cambridge on Wednesday...and it was just great...just like all of our trips are just great. It was a pretty fun little town, and it was really green and beautiful. We walked all over the town, became best friends with a little old woman who worked in the church (at first she was mad at us for coming in to use the restroom, by the time we left she was calling us "darlings"), went to a market, saw some of the different colleges (but most were closed off because it was exams week), and best of all, went punting on the Cam. Punting was super super fun. Actually it was really hard, but it was great. It was ten pounds to hire one of those guys to steer your boat down the river for you, two pounds if you wanted to do it yourself. Of course we opted to do it ourselves. I think it made it way more fun, but, it was pretty intense. I think I would become a professional skipper of Cambridge punting if I went to school there.





We got stuck in lots of trees and little side eddies...this was just one of them.

Punting in front of the Bridge of Sighs.

The London Temple

About a week ago we took a day trip to do baptisms at the London Temple. It was so beautiful and so great to spend some time there. I've been looking forward to it since I got here, and I thought it was just perfect. Loved it!

BLADE OR DIE!!!

If you were to ask me what my very favorite thing I've done in London so far would be....this would be the answer: BLADE OR DIE!!! We definitely didn't die, we just bladed, hard core, through about seventeen miles of London. This probably won't mean much of anything to any of you...but I'll give you a little rundown of our route: we started at Hyde Park Corner skated past Buckingham palace, up around the Museum of London, around St. Paul's, Regent's Park and Primrose hill and back down Oxford Street. Doesn't that just sound like a cool route? It seriously was one of the coolest things I've ever done. Bladin' to music through the streets of London with about 200 other people on the FNS (Friday Night Skate). They totally stop traffic and let you blade down the middle of the road. I only crashed about three times. It was grand. It was absolutely amazing.
The whole crew at the Centre...we were so prepped.

The competition. Don't worry, they look hard core but we blew them out of the water.


I had to choose to bleed or die...when I fell...and bled. Don't worry I chose to blade.


Right in the middle of the bladin'


The pink tights made the whole night. Really.

And here's a video of the bladin' craziness.

"I'm Henry VIII, I am, I am"

Last Wednesday we took a day trip to Hampton Court. It was a pretty awesome place. It's a pretty good sized palace (I wouldn't mind living there...) that Cardinal Wolsey built and the Tudor family ended up living in. It's apparently haunted by the ghosts of Henry VIII two wives who were executed. I didn't see any ghosts though, and I was searching for them. Basically there was a lot of drama that went on under this one roof (or several roofs I guess) with Henry VIII crazy family. It was cool to see. We spent hours walking all over the castle and then hours walking through the gardens, which were beautiful. After Hampton Court we wandered along the south bank of the Thames and ate dinner down there instead of going back to the Centre. So that was last week's excursion...and we leave in twenty minutes for Cambridge, our excursion this week. I like that they call them excursions, it makes it sound really intense.


The architecture was really cool in all of the buildings. I think that the kitchens were my favorite part. They could cook for like 800-1200 people almost daily. Lots and lots of meat I guess. I'm glad I wasn't a cook there.

The entire inside of the palace was beautifully painted and really elaborate. We weren't supposed to take pictures...so we snuck a few :)

Me and Henry. I didn't like him much before I went, but, after singing his song all day and walking around his house, we became better friends.


The chimneys were my very very favorite part of the whole castle. They all had different cool patterns in the brickwork.


This is the Privy Gardens behind the castle. This isn't a very good picture of it but it looked like the place where they hold the ball in the Count of Monte Cristo. I wanted to wear a mask and walk around and stuff. It really did look like it...a lot.


More of the gardens.


The hedge maze behind the castle. Yep, it was just like Harry Potter...except not quite as long, not quite as hard and not quite as dark with some really funny theme music playing. As you can see, I got lost.


The whole group of us behind the palace.