Hills and Parks and Beaches Oh My!

I feel really stressed out. I need to start working on medical school applications and I don't even know where to begin. And I need to decide if I want to try to go to Athens this weekend or not but I can't decide since I want to go so badly but at the same time I don't want to be stuck anywhere what with the volcano and flights being cancelled. There have been a ridiculous amount of planes in the sky this week. Wednesday night I went with some girls to watch the sun set at Primrose Hill- it overlooks the entire city of London. While we were sitting there for about an hour, every ten seconds two planes would cross at the exact same point in the sky, going in opposite directions. It was obvious the airport was trying to catch up flights after all the delays. The newspapers have been blaming the government for unnecessarily closing down the airports for too long in order to get more votes for the party out of power right now as the election draws near. I should probably know which party is in power right now, but I'm not going to lie- I have no idea. I do know the parties are quite different from the U.S. ones... my friend Monica was explaining to me, for example, that the liberal Democrats here do not align directly with the U.S. Democrats but rather share half their views with the U.S. Democratic party and have their views with the U.S. Republican party. So the parties here do not split in the same way, if that makes sense. Either way, I find politics uninteresting. Here's some pictures from Primrose Hill...









Thursday I went down to Borough market. It's a food market where all the best chefs buy their food for the week. I got a lot of free samples so it was a great free lunch! After that we walked over to the Tower Bridge and went up it to get some pretty views of the city.


That building there, called "The Shard", is supposed to look like a giant piece of broken glass when it's complete.





Friday after breakfast we walked to Hyde Park and laid in the grass for a while. Friday night we went to a Shakespeare play at the globe for my Shakespeare class. It reminded me of Starlight at home because they had all these stands selling drinks and snacks and the globe is open in the middle to the sky so it is pretty much an outside theatre. We saw Macbeth. It was pretty creepy and gory- a lot of people die in Macbeth. Unfortunately we had to stand as our tickets were for the "standing audience" in the front, but luckily we found a wall to lean against. It was nevertheless a long three hours of standing.


Maddie and I in Hyde Park

All the trees are blooming!

The white building with the thatched roof on the other side of the river is the Globe.


At the play they made us stick our heads through this canvas... they did some special effects with the canvas to incorporate the audience. It was supposed to represent the black depths of Hell... yeah, Macbeth is kind of intense. We didn't like standing with our heads through the canvas so we found a back wall to lean against instead. The canvas was kind of dirty.

I love St. Paul's at night. You can see the big dome lit up in the background... that's St. Paul's. It was a beautiful night and so fun to walk over the Millenium bridge on our way back from the play.





Saturday we went to Brighton beach for the day. It was a forty-five minute train ride, so we left at 9 in the morning to catch the 10 am train and made it there by 11. One lady on the train told us we had beautiful accents. I never thought I would hear that. I think she thought it was pretty because my friend from South Carolina has more of a southern accent and the lady said she just loved the way she said "in South Carolina". Once we got there we walked through some markets in the streets towards the beach and when we got to the Pier we spent some time riding the rides... they had a mini-roller coaster and this thing that carried you up really high over the water and then released you so it felt like you were on a rollercoaster and looked as though you would go smashing into the pier until at the last second it would swing you up again to the other side. That was terrifying but great fun. Then we got fish n chips and sat at a table on the beach and then we walked down to the water and laid in the sun all day. Then my friend Bree had some ride tokens left over so she begged me to go on the carousel with her. As in the children's carousel. I felt quite silly but whatever, it was fun. After that we headed home for the evening and ate dinner at the pizza place on our corner that used to be Princess Diana's favorite place to eat. I got the American pizza :)



We put on our sun screen! :)






We like jumping pictures.





Today it is rainy and our internet is down at the dorm so I am at the Wellcome gallery club room using their free internet. I feel extremely stressed out though at the moment and wish I could figure out what to write my medical school essay on. I also need to start studying for finals. I should probably get going.