England, day 1

Greetings from the little island across the pond. It's currently 3:50am, and even though I went to bed only about 4 hours ago, my confused body still thinks it's only 9:50pm, so I'm wide awake.

My flight left at 7:10am yesterday morning, and after an early cab ride, I made it to the airport before even the British Airways customer service people. About 20 people were already in line to check in by the time I got there just after 5 am, but the BA employees didn't show up until about 5:15.

The flight was relatively uneventful... it was the first time I've flown on a 777, so that was neat. There were a couple toddlers sitting across the aisle from me, and I was very impressed at how well-behaved they were for the entire 6 hour flight. I watched Derailed during the first part of the flight, but I fell asleep later during Good Night and Good Luck, so I can't really recommend either one.

Lauren met me after I went through customs and picked up my bag, and then we took a cab to get from Heathrow to her apartment in Windsor. But instead of just heading outside to where you would expect a bunch of cabs to be lined up, we had to call one. The cab turned out to be a Mercedes, which I realize doesn't have the same luxury status here as it does in the US, but it was still nice. :)

After getting to the apartment and dropping off our stuff, the two of us and Lauren's roommate John went out to a bar/restaurant called Brown's to have a drink and some food. The only beer that I recognized on tap was Amstel, but I wasn't about to get a beer in Windsor that I could get at home, so I tried an Erdinger, which is a German wheat beer. It came in the most ridiculously tall skinny glass, but it was surprisingly good. We also got an appetizer titled "Rocket, Parmesan, and Flatbread" which was a bunch of dark green lettuce-type veggie (i.e. rocket) and parmesan cheese piled onto some flatbread and doused with olive oil. It was pretty good too, although I now (still?) have killer garlic breath.

We walked home along the River Thames and I got to see a little more of Windsor, albeit in the dark. Far and away, the main attraction in Windsor is Windsor Castle, but the town itself is otherwise very quaint and was very quiet at 11pm on a Monday night. The streets are very narrow and all of the residential buildings we passed are all just two stories high. They looked like townhouses because everything was connected. Postage-stamp yards looked pretty common.

Just down the street from Lauren's building (which is much newer, so it's 3 stories tall) is a roundabout, which we drove through on the way home from the airport and on the way to Brown's. I've decided the only thing more nerve wracking than driving through a regular rotary would be driving through a British rotary where traffic is going the wrong way and you're sitting on the wrong side of the car. :)

Eeeearly Sunday morning

Okay, I consider pre-8am to be early, even if other people don't. I'm sitting here waiting for my laundry to finish so that I can put it in the dryer. But this isn't just any Sunday morning waiting for laundry - it's the day before I leave for England! I'm visiting Lauren, a friend from high school who's doing some of her med school rotations in Windsor. I missed my chance to visit her in St. Maarten (ahh... tropical paradise), so I'm going to rainy, cold England instead. :)

The only problem with this whole trip is that I have a project due in my math class the Wednesday after I get back, so I've been scrambling to finish as much of it as I can this weekend so that I don't have to do any work while I'm there. Ugh, I guess I can't really complain because we don't have many regular problem sets in that class, but this isn't very good timing! Stupid grad school - everyone expects you spend holidays (okay, I guess spring break isn't officially a holiday) working on your research instead of getting away from your research. Anyway, woe is me.

So this trip will bring my total time spent abroad (excluding trips to Canada or my 3-hour foray into Tijuana) to about two and a half weeks. When I was a senior in high school my family went to Munich for about four days to visit my older sister who was studying abroad there, and then when I was a junior in college I went to England over spring break (notice a theme here?) to visit a friend who was studying abroad in Cambridge. We went to Paris for a couple days and spent the end of the week in London.

(Apologies for the old camera that I took on the trip. And the fog.)




So I've seen enough to be able sigh knowingly and tell someone else that seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre is sort of a disappointment, but I don't actually know anything about... well, anything in Europe.

Well, time to rescue my laundry. Less than 24 hours!

Last April

To be filed under "what does beer on a Tuesday make you look like?"

(compliments of the 2005 Houston Yuri's Night photo gallery)

Seriously though, I looked at the Yuri's Night homepage to see if there'll be a party somewhere nearby this year, and the closest one is in Worcester, Mass, which, unfortunately, is out of my public-transportation-accessible radius. And there will be no more commas for the rest of the post.

Agh, I'm having a serious crisis of motivation at work lately, which explains why I'm blogging at 10 am. It doesn't help that I spent the weekend in Baltimore pretending that real life didn't exist, when in real life, I have a test coming up tomorrow. This is why I'm tired of being in school (already) - tests.