Here Goes Nothing...

Hello everyone! I'm going to assume it's friends and family reading this and as you probably know I'm spending spring semester this year studying in London at the Foundation for International Education (FIE) in South Kensington. (Also called "The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea"which I feel really fancy saying.) Anyway I decided since I have too many family members to count never mind talk to on a regular basis while oversea's, while still having time to go to classes and explore, I'm going to keep this blog with posts and pictures about what I'm doing. If anyone does want to talk to me my email is sriordan9256@westfield.ma.edu, or if you have a smart phone there's an app called textme that allows you to text internationally for free as long as you are connected to wifi, my username for that is scriordan942288.

 (Since I know it's going to come up, I am aware that my spelling is terrible, please ignore any words I butcher since my attempts at spelling are sometimes beyond the help of spell check.)

So for a brief overview of the last six days. I flew out of Logan Airport at 9:10 Tuesday night and landed at Heathrow around 8:30 the following morning. I made it through immigration and customs with no problem, and was actually able to find someone on my flight who was also coming to FIE who was willing to share a cab (thank goodness because they aren't cheep). Now one thing about FIE that's very different from Westfield (aside from the fact that it's in a different country) is that it doesn't really have a campus. South Kensington is a mainly residential area, with a few museums and shops, and the school bought a few buildings all within a few blocks of each other in this area. So we went to one of the buildings to check in, the girl I was sharing a cab with was really lucky and happened to live in that building while I was assigned to one down the road. I decided to try and walk there since it wasn't far and the directions seemed simple enough. That was a bad decision. The street signs here a- don't look like the ones in the US and b- are much lower than the ones in the US so consequently I couldn't find them. I walked a few blocks with all my luggage got confused and had to back track to the checkin building to ask for help. After that I decided I was too stressed and my luggage weighed too much to try and walk it again so I just got a cab to bring me to my dorm. I'm sharing a flat with 3 other girls from the US. The flat consists of one bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen, and it's very nice.

The rest of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday passed in a bit of a blur. We had to go to lots of information meetings as part of orientation, were given a tour of the general area to see where to buy food and other basic necessities, and went food shopping. To be perfectly honest it didn't really hit me that I was in London until yesterday when I went on a tour of the Palace at Westminster (Parliament). My roommates and I took the tube to central London and as we came up the stairs out of the station the Eye was right in front of us across the Thames, and Big Ben was literally right above us. It's so beautiful! We took a bunch of pictures, and I was smiling and giggling like an idiot the whole time because this was the first time it had really hit me that I was in London, England, and not any other city.

The tour itself was awesome as well. You aren't allowed to take pictures in the building but I took a ton of the outside. Our guides name was Nigel (seriously can you think of a more English name for a tour guide) and he was awesome, he knew so much about the building and it's history and was also really funny and entertaining.

That was yesterday, today we went on a bus tour of the city, getting on and off at a few locations. We saw Buckingham Palace, also extremely beautiful (I apologize in advance for how much I'm going to overuse that word). The Eye, and Bug Ben again, drove over London Bridge (thankfully it didn't fall down), and saw Saint Peter's (Feed the Birds from Marry Popins was stuck in my head for a while after that) among other things.

I've taken a bunch of pictures and I'm going to try and upload some, sorry if it doesn't work I'll figure out how to eventually and I'll write another one of these in a few days.