Whoopsie!

I meant to do another blog before I left....I guess this counts.
I get on a bus in less than six hours to go to the airport. Yay!
It's an eight-ish hour long flight. I'll be back in the US at 1:11pm or something. It's going to be a very long day.
But I'm excited! It's been grand, but I miss my own house and room and everything. And a shower with the showerhead attached to the wall. That'll be nice.

Toodles, London. See you again someday.

Land of the yummy cheese and chocolate. And really cool mountains.

I'm really quite terrible at posting my blogs soon after I go places. I've been back from Switzerland for a week now. But hey, better late than never, right?

Well, Switzerland was awesome of course. I stayed in Interlaken, which is a relatively small city located between two lakes and amongst the beautiful Alps. I left to go there on Thanksgiving and got to have a real Thanksgiving dinner the next day at our awesome hostel, Balmer's. I spent most of my time in Switzerland shopping and relaxing, but I did spend one day hiking up into the Alps. The hike consisted of a bus ride, a train ride, a very long walk through an adorable Swiss village with a really cool waterfall, and then a gondola ride (not the Venetian kind) up a mountain. And then I ate a Toblerone and took a bunch of pictures. Then we came back down. 

I regret not paragliding while in Interlaken. A variety of extreme activities such as skydiving (which two of my friends did), paragliding, cliff jumping, and so on are one of the greatest draws to Interlaken. I am determined to paraglide someday.

My purchases for myself were a Minichamp Swiss army knife (with Henry on it!), a silver necklace with an edelweiss charm, and a Swatch watch to add to my collection. And chocolate. I think I lost count of how many Toblerones I had while I was there...

Some of my favorite pictures...

The view from our hostel window.

Interlaken

One of my favorite pictures from our hike.

Awesome waterfall.

A random rock by the side of the road...

Eating a Toblerone with a Swiss flag and a mountain in the background...how much more Swiss can you get?

Love the Alps <3

Taken from the other mountain we rode a gondola up to.

My very own knife. :)  I haven't cut myself yet...

Our little hostel, Balmer's.

Paris at night from a plane.

Oh, and here are the rest of my pictures from the trip.

221b Baker Street.

This past Saturday, I got to visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum which is located at the famous address where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson lived. I mean, they didn't actually live there, but you know what I mean. It was a super duper cool museum, but it wasn't really that much of a museum. I forgot my stinkin' camera, but I went with my friend Colleen, whose pictures I stole from facebook. :)
It was a home decorated in the style of the 1890s-ish era that Holmes and Watson lived in. They had all sorts of neat little artifacts from the stories and it was easy to just pretend that they still lived there. On the upper floors, there were wax figures of characters and situations from some of the most famous Sherlock Holmes adventures. One of my favorite parts was being able to read real letters sent to 221b Baker Street that were addressed to Holmes, asking for his help on solving mysteries. People still send him letters to this day, and some of the best ones were displayed. The greatest ones were sent by kids. They were hilarious. This one was my favorite: 


I must admit, my favorite part of the experience was the Sherlock Holmes shop next door. It was FANTASTIC. I wanted to buy everything.

Here are the rest of Colleen's pictures.

I'm off to Switzerland tomorrow for a few days. Yay chocolate!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's about darn time I did tourist-y things.

I've recently been panicking because I thought I wasn't going to have enough time to see some of the major London sights whilst here, which seems just kind of ridiculous, but trust me--it feels like I have had no time to do anything. So today (despite the fact that I have a big research paper due this coming Tuesday) I went with a friend to the Tower of London. Yay!
We literally spent hours there, and I'm pretty sure we saw every single thing there is to possibly see within the Tower. There's not really that much to say about it except that  it's old and awesome and the sight of some awesome historical events. We got a great tour by one of the Yeoman guides aka Beefeaters. His name was Simon.
It was a beautiful day here. It was like 60 or something and sunny and gorgeous. I heard the weather is downright nasty back in Illinois. Ha-ha. Sorry.
Before  we went to the Tower, however, we shopped for a wee bit at Harrod's. We had been there before, but just within the past week a new shop opened up inside the store completely dedicated to Harry Potter memorabilia and it is AWESOME. Intermingled with the merchandise were actual props from the movies including such things as the characters' robes/clothes, Harry's broom, everyone's wands, Hermione's bottomless bag, some of the Daily Prophets, the sword of Gryffindor, and much, much more. It was extremely cool...and I spent a lot of money. I may have bought Snape's wand. It was expensive. I'm calling it my Christmas present to myself...along with every other item I purchase for myself from now until Christmas. I also got a free knit Dobby because I was one of the first five people of the day to spend over a certain amount! Huzzah! He's adorable.
After we visited the Tower, we tried to go to Westminster Abbey, but it closed just a little while after we got there so it wasn't worth going in. But we got some nice pictures of the outside!

Here are all the loverly pictures from the day's adventures. Didn't take any pictures of the Harry Potter stuff because I'm stupid. Here's my Dobby holding Snape's wand, though.

Okay fine. I admit I'm not a very good blogger. I'll tell you about Bath now.

Yikes. I'm awful. We went to Bath Friday the 4th, and I'm just now blogging about it. I'm the worst. I do have an excuse, though! I've been locked in the British Library during my free time to do research on the pirates of the South China Sea during the early 19th century. Fascinating, I know.

Bath is beautiful. I wouldn't mind living there at all. Every building is built of out the lovely yellow Bath Stone, and it just makes you feel like you've traveled back a couple centuries.
I mean, there are also rumors that Johnny Depp owns a house there in Park Crescent (see picture below)....so that may be a good reason to live there as well. ;)

The Roman Baths were very awesome also. They slightly rekindled my desire to someday become an archaeologist...

After exploring the baths, we got to enjoy some delightful afternoon tea in the Pump Room, which is right next to the Roman Baths.

Roman Baths ^                            ^Pump Room

The Pump Room is so magnificent and grand. There was a guy playing the grand piano while we drank our tea and ate our delicious scones. I've developed a bit of a scone addiction. It's something I'm going to have to work on before I come home to the land of no afternoon tea. At the Pump Room, I had the Ceylon tea. It was yummy.

 Before

After

So that was fun. I greatly enjoyed pretending to be a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. Both "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey" were set in Bath. We also got to drive by the Assembly Rooms where they would go to balls and all that fun stuff. 

All in all, it was a lovely day in Bath and I would love to visit again. Or live there. Either one.

Now I'm off to have an authentic English afternoon tea in my art history teacher's vicarage.

Cheers! 

Yeah football! Woo.

Thursday night was the Fulham Football Club v. Wisla Krakow match. It was a very interesting experience. I had a great seat, but it just happened to be right in the middle of some very passionate fans for the opposite team. So that was terrifying. They were just yelling and singing in Polish the whole time. And I mean the WHOLE time. At least I wasn't in the bigger Polish cheering section, where some of the fans set off smoke bombs for some reason. It made the whole field smokey for a while and it was just stupid.

Notice all of the police surrounding their section.

Also, being in a section with a lot of hardcore football fans meant that I didn't get to sit down the entire time. That was kind of stinky. But hey, at least Fulham won! 4-1! I left before it was over in fear of the angry Polish men who were now even angrier.

And that was my British football experience.

I'd trust them with my life.

Tonight was the taping of Trust Us With Your Life. It was GREAT.
They gave us free beer/wine when we got there. Probably to try to make us laugh a lot. Didn't need it.
We got there early and somehow managed to be in the VERY FRONT row. It was ridiculous. I swear there was a guy kneeling with his camera in my face for over half the show. If I don't get airtime, I will be legitimately shocked.
The gist of the show is that it is an improv comedy show with four guys acting out different scenes from the "special guest's" life. They acted out each scene in a different way--one was rapped, one was putting words into someone else's mouth, another was a song, and so on. Very "Whose Line is it Anyway?"-esque. This show was created by the same guy who created Whose Line. He's a genius.
The special guest for tonight's show was Florence Henderson, or more commonly known as Mrs. Brady from the Brady Bunch. I'm kinda sad we didn't get a different guest--David Hasselhoff was the guest this past Sunday and I believe Ricky Gervais is tomorrow's guest. Oh well.
The brilliant comedians we had in tonight's show were Wayne Brady, Colin Mochrie, Jonathan Mangrum, and some other guy. The host was Fred Willard, who is a good actor but a not very good at all host.
I had lots of accidental eye contact with Wayne Brady. It was awesome.
There were lots of laughs and LOTS of clapping. After the show they had to shoot a ton more footage of introductions and "links" and the ending and us clapping over and over and from every angle and my hands were quite tingly by the end. It was fun, though.
So the show will hopefully premiere next January in America on ABC. Watch out for the episode with Florence Henderson. You'll probably see me laughing. The other episodes will probably be worth watching as well. It's no Whose Line, but it does have hilarious moments.