London

Is not a very creative name for an entry. That's okay, though. First, I'm going to reel off the laundry list of places we went in London and then maybe I'll talk about what I found interesting about the city in general. So: Tuesday - Tour (Big Ben, Parliament, that part of the city), War Rooms, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Jack the Ripper tour through the East End Wednesday - Historic London tour (different part of town), Tate Modern Art Museum, wandering Thursday - Tower of London, Natural History Museum, Abbey Road, getting lost somewhere near Abbey Road Two things jump out of this list: we frequented museums and tours. This is almost entirely owing to the fact that both of these things were free. That said, museums and tours ended up being a good use of time. The tour group we found was, we're pretty sure, made up of maybe 4 people and in our 3 tours we saw 2 of them. The two guides we had were both Australian and pretty insane, but they gave entertaining and occasionally informative tours. Near the end of our first day tour, an older British woman came up to me and said "He's quite mad, isn't he?". Referencing our tour guide, of course. She rambled on about how she'd never seen anyone so odd, and then let me know: "He's not a real tour guide, you know". I felt bad telling her that yes he actually was, so I let it slide, but it somewhat illustrates the nature of this particular tour guide. The other guide was more normal. The museums were museums, so I'll cut any further description out. Except for saying that they were uniformly excellent, especially for being free, and that the Museum of Natural History was absolutely huge and completely crowded. As was the Tower of London, but this is expected since it is peak tourist season. Getting lost on the way back from Abbey Road was an interesting experience, but at least we got to see what was one of the less wealthy parts of London. And Abbey Road looked like it does on the album cover, so I was not disappointed with that. I'm sorry for not writing more in-depth about specific experiences, but I thought I'd rather write a little bit more about general impressions and random musings since there was just so much that happened while I was there. I don't want to write a newspaper article so much as a journal. That said, London is a busy place but I like the feeling of it in general. The underground is some sort of miracle, the accents never get old to me, and hundreds of years of history are there right next to ultra-modern business. I've never been to New York, but from what I've heard/seen on TV/read/whatever New York would be a lot like London if it had 1,000 year old churches a quarter mile from Times Square. It's weird, because people in general seem completely unaffected by the history around them. I don't mean that I expect Londoners to go around staring at landmarks, but I guess I do mean that their newer buildings and so on seem geared toward the future e.g. the London Eye. In other parts of Europe, including what I've seen of Norway now, architecture and business seems somewhat bound to the past; that doesn't seem to be the case in London. Also, the businessmen are much more like Americans than I would have thought. Mostly, that means they're on cellphones and are loud and pushy in the streets. The culture in general, at least in 3 days of limited sightseeing, resembles America's a lot more than I thought. Unfortunately, it's just a little bit too long ago to come up with much more to say about my time in London, but it was a fun way to kick off a semester of studying abroad. Later posts will probably be more specific, but they'll still feature random thoughts more than facts about what I've been doing. For anybody who read this post but not yesterday's, there are pictures of London linked to that post. A lot of them. So check them out since a picture is worth a thousand words. And there are captions, so it's more like a thousand words and change. Next week: Culture Shock (?), language barriers, arriving earlier than you need to, and living next to the best pub in Hamar.