Things I have learned Part 2

11.  London is amazing! So many sights to see, and beautiful buildings!

            But the air quality is still poor, with exhaust and smoke everywhere.  I was a little nervous about staying in such a big city for so long, but it’s actually great!  There is so much to see and do, and it’s all at my fingertips! 

22.     The tube is easy to navigate and use.

            Get an oyster card and use the public transportation here.  The oyster card is a card you can load money on and use to get around the city, deducting money for every ride.  Cheaper and faster than individual tickets, so definitely worth everyone’s time.  It’s also so easy to navigate around.  The map is comprehensible and concise, even if it is not entirely to scale.  If you have to get to someplace quick, it’s the easiest thing to use. 

33.    Walking is also a great way to get around here.

            It’s quite something when you just stumble upon Buckingham Palace, or St. Paul’s Cathedral while just wandering around.  Taking a path around the river will get you to a lot of the biggest sights.  But if you wanted to be somewhere quieter, take some of the back paths around the city.  There is some amazing architecture hidden around the every corner. 

44.   Everything is more expensive here.

            From food to merchandise, London can really be expensive, especially for student travelers.  Look for non-expensive sandwich shops, and chain restaurants can be a good resource for a quick, cheap meal. Not all chains here have terrible food either! 

            Luckily, there are some things that are cheaper.  The theater here is much less expensive than in the States.  Especially with student discounts, tickets can be anywhere from 20-40 pounds for really decent seats.  I personally am going to see Aladdin and Phantom of the Opera, and each ticket was under 50 pounds, and I am not even in the nosebleed section. 

55.    I really love London.

A lot! 

Paris Travel Complications

Last weekend, I journeyed to Paris with a couple of girls for the weekend.  It was a pretty intense experience!  For anyone who does not know, the Euro Cup is currently being held in Paris this summer, basically a huge soccer (football) tournament between different European countries.  Security was at an all-time high all around Paris, especially with the bombings that happened a few months ago.  I received a bunch of State Department warnings about the possibility of terrorist attacks in the country and the week leading up to the date of my departure the news repeated warnings to British citizens visiting France that there was no guarantee of their safety.  Scary thoughts!  I was getting pretty nervous a few days before, but I had already paid for the apartment we were staying at and would not get a refund if I decided to pull out that close to the arrival date.  Plus, there was the other girls going with me, I couldn’t just leave.  But I didn’t have to worry so much, I did have two people constantly traveling with me, and it turns out that a large portion of our study abroad group was traveling there anyways, most on the same train!  So we had each other if anything happened.  And nothing did, thank goodness! 

There was a slight hiccup at the beginning of our trip.  We all took the Eurostar into Paris from London after our Charles Dickens walking tour concluded near the steps of St. Paul.  The Eurostar is a high-speed rail that travels under the English Channel and through France to Paris all under 2 hours and 30 minutes.  Or it was supposed to be that long, however, we hit a slight glitch.  There were protesters on the tracks about 15 minutes outside of Paris, holding up the trains for longer than an hour.  So our 2 hr 30 min train ride turned out to be nearly 4 hours!  We got in so late that our landlord for the apartment that we rented for the weekend couldn’t wait up for us any longer and had to send instructions about the apartment via text. 

So we finally arrived in Paris, at the Gare du Nord International Stations, and it was chaos.  No riots or anything, but the place was packed.  A soccer (football) math had just finished and drunk fans were stumbling all around the platform and in the streets, yelling at each other and at the fans of the rival team.  The line for the information booth was more of a mob around the counter, so there was no chance for us to ask any questions in the next hour, and the taxi line was even longer.  We had pre-ordered metro passes to use, but the place where we were to pick them up was closed, because it was nearing midnight by the time we starting trying to get out of the train station. So we did the thing that we hoped would work best for us and tried to find the closest metro station nearby and then walk to our apartment. 

The first route did not work out well.  The streets were full of drunks, and one guys even hissed at us!   We immediately did a 180 and moved in the opposite direction.  We finally made it to the metro station and fortunately meet a very nice and understanding employee who was cleaning out the ticket machines.  The metro line stops selling tickets after midnight, so when she noticed the three of us very desperately trying to get the machine to give us tickets, she came by and gave us some and got us through the gates!  The metro line was easy enough to navigate once we were on it.  The hard part was navigating the streets of our neighborhood in the dark.  It took another 20 minutes to find the place (we passed it several times, as it was right next to our metro stop) and then another 20 trying to find and open the door.  We were on the top floor of the building, and we forgot that in Europe and in the U.K., building floors are measured with the ground floor not counted as the first floor, as it usually is in the States.  So in America, the first floor is the ground floor, but over here, the first floor is actually what would be the second floor.  Because we did not remember this, we miscounted the floors and fumbled at people’s keyholes on the floor below us until we realized it was not our floor.  The door was very difficult to open, you had to pull the door in a series of intervals while you were turning the key, which took us a while to find out, but we finally made it in and crashed around 1 in the morning.    

At that point I was not impressed with Paris whatsoever, and was wondering why on earth I would have wanted to come to this city.  Luckily, the next few days completely changed my mind.

A few pictures!

Here's me about to enter Christ Church College!  Shhh... there are still studying students about!

Here's more of the side entrance to Christ Church.

Here is the beautiful Radcliffe Camera.  I pass it every day when I walk to class.  What a great landmark to use to navigate!

I just ate lunch at The Eagle and Child under a picture of C.S Lewis and next to an inscription from J.R.R. Tolkien! 

Forget the people's faces in the corner and check out the ceiling of the Bodleian Library of Oxford!  Like stone spiderwebs!  For the rest of the library tour we took we were not allowed to take pictures, so this room is the only one except the entrance hall that is allowed to be photographed.  But from what little we saw, it was incredible!  

Sorry for the poor quality, but check out what we saw from the bus!  Drove right past it down the highway to Bath!

This is Bath, not Oxford.  Here I am standing in the ancient Roman Baths looking at a statue of a Roman Empire with the Abbey of Bath in the background. Isn't England cool!?

Things I've noticed...

Things I’ve noticed…

1.     If you don’t put milk in your tea, you will get funny looks. 

I am a tea drinker, and love a good cup of black tea with honey, but I never usually put milk in my tea.  So when I arrived and my lovely host family asked if I would like some tea, and then what I would like in it, my reply of “just two sugars, thanks”  made them look at me as if I’d gone insane.  When their daughter and her family arrived and tea was made again, and my host family explained my ‘unusual’ preference, the daughter looked at me as if my head had just popped off and started rolling around the floor.  In short, if you don’t want anyone to lock you up in an insane asylum and if you are not allergic to dairy, just put the milk in your tea. 

2.     Not much sidewalk etiquette.

I’m not saying anyone is rude while walking down the street and pushing people off the road, but there is a lack of uniformity of movement that is more common in the States.  There, most people move as you would while driving with two lanes of traffic moving in different directions.  I thought at most, the lanes would just be switched here, also like the roads, but I was wrong.  Everyone moves in hoards and weave in and out of everyone else, making the simple action of walking down a narrow sidewalk potentially dangerous if you are suddenly forced to jump into the street by someone running as fast as socially acceptable to catch a bus. 

3.     Light switches, windows, and power sockets.

The light switches in the bathrooms (or loos/toilets) are all cords in private homes.   So if you are groping around in the dark trying desperately to illuminate the much needed facilities, feel for some string. 

The windows here do not have screens, like most homes do in The States.  Welcome, all manner of insects, to my domain! 

The power sockets here, while a completely different shape than those back home, also come with switches to turn them on and off.  A useful way to save energy if you have to leave and don’t want to unplug everything.

4.     Yellow Lights

In the United States, traffic lights go from green to go, yellow to slow down and prepare to stop, and red to fully stop.  But here, they add another yellow light to the sequence of traffic lights.  Instead of an immediate shift to green after a red light, here, the yellow light will flash, allowing drivers to slow pull ahead, and then move at the speed limit once the light is green again.  But most people still jerk ahead at a yellow and nearly hit pedestrians who are still crossing the street!  I really miss the ‘pedestrian always has the right away’ idea from the States.    

A student watching other students.

On our second day here in England, our group spend the entire day touring Oxford and going over the details of our program, playing tourists before we actually knuckled down and started our classes for real.  Downtown Oxford is swarming with tourists, students, shoppers, and locals, making navigating the city challenging, but not undo-able.  I love being here while the schools are still in session across all levels.  Every morning I see primary school students walking along the sidewalk (pavement here!) to school in their uniforms, with their parents chaperoning a little behind while chatting away on the walk to school.  The University is still in secession as well, and even better, it’s exam time for them!  Well, it’s not great for them, but great for everyone else, as it is custom for students at Oxford to dress in a formal uniform when taking exams, so they are easy to distinguish in the crowd with their formal white button down shirts, black pants (trousers here!) or skirts with their robes, with either a red, white, or pink carnation.   The flower distinguishes what exam they are taking, white for the first, red for the last, and pink for the ones in the middle. Then, when they have taken and passed their exams, all their friends bombard them with champagne, whipped cream, confetti, glitter, flowers, balloons, leis, party hats, and other crazy stuff to celebrate their end of term.  I have seen some students walking around, taking pictures and celebrating absolutely covered in whipped cream, with gigantic party glasses, and glitter covering every inch of their bodies, with half empty champagne bottles and laughing without a care in the world.  I now know how I should party after finishing my exams.  What a great idea!

Finally Here!

I can't believe that I finally made it here!  It seemed like such a long time away from when I signed up in December to now, but at the same time, I don't think I prepared enough.  There seemed to be so much that I needed to do, especially as the day of departure and all the last minute activities related to the trip loomed over finals week, adding more stress to an already stressful event.  But I have arrived, and here is what I have learned:
1.  It can, in fact, get warm here in England.
             I was so sure that it would be cold to me as a born and breed California girl, but no, I was sorely mistaken, which is particularly unlucky as I had only packed pairs of long jeans and two short sleeve t-shirts out of my five shirts.  Any weather can seem hot when you walk in direct sunlight for over five hours a day.  And that is what we did.  The first day involved both a practical and historical walking tour of the Oxford area.  And in jeans and a (lite) sweater, it became very warm, very quickly, in 26 C, or around 78 F.  However, there is a quick solve to this problem:  second-hand stores are everywhere!  We had several pointed out to the group today as we toured around the center of Oxford, and another girl on the program and I are already planning on going shopping tomorrow for all of our needs,  I plan on buying some light tees, some capris, maybe even some shorts.  If the weather turns terrible for the rest of the trip, then I'll just have some for when I get back to the face-melting heat of a July on the West Coast.  It's a win-win situation. 
2.  Packing more can actually be helpful.
             I was very adamant about not packing too much and being able to take a carry-on on all of my flights while traveling in Europe and the U.K.  This meant that I needed a carry-on suitcase that would not exceed 22lbs, or be longer than I believe 22 inches.  I managed this after several frantic days searching trying to fit everything I thought I needed while staying here.  I forgot that, given that I would be gone from home for around 6 weeks, I had a reason to bring two suitcases.  Now I find myself in the predicament of needing to buy some cosmetics and hair products and now lighter items of clothing, and the list goes on.  If I decided to bring more stuff, this wouldn't have been necessary at all.  However, it does give way to new adventure of shopping in a new area and bonding with some of my fellow classmates.
 Pictures and more stories to come!