The day's events: Sunday May 18th

Today we went on a bus tour of downtown London. It's hard to remember that we're downtown (in fact, I live on the edge of downtown) because no buildings are higher than five or six stories. As much of the original architecture has been retained. Any time you see a modern building, you know that that area was demolished by German bombings during World War II. We even saw a church scarred by shrapnel.

At the tour's conclusion, the bus dropped us off at Piccadilly Circus, which is a famous part of London, to eat lunch and look around. But the catch was that we had to find our own way home. Don't worry, we made it (obviously)! My flatmates and I plus two other girls have formed a big group for doing things. It's all very safe, and we constantly make sure everyone's with us. Basically, we have to learn by doing, so we figured out the underground (subway/metro) and looked at maps to walk back to our flats. I'll probably have to ride the Tube to work in a few weeks so getting some practice is helpful. Now mind you, everything after the tour was completely free for us to choose what to do. As far as exploring London, I'd really rather have a structured tour or ordered time for going someplace or somewhere instead of "Hey, be at the Knaresborough residence at 8AM tomorrow. See you then." and that be it. I don't know enough even to figure out what I want to see! Maybe I should continue consulting my Frommer's...But yeah, I'm all for structure. Unstructured time doesn't jive well with me.

(But perhaps that might be a sign of the changing times. As we get older, we're expected to do things by ourselves, to be adult-like. On this trip, we didn't know our flatmates, and we didn't have the typical ice breaker games to get to know people. You had to do it on your own time and take your own initiative. We just had our resident assistants pointing out a grocery store, not telling us what to buy, how much to spend, or even how to get there again. Nor are we told how much to put on our Tube cards or when to do basic household tasks. It's another, needed change.)

In the afternoon, we went to Sainsbury's which is a grocery store just a few blocks away. For now, we're buying food on our own and preparing our own meals. You should have seen me! No junk food whatsoever! Just a bunch of fruit, vegetables, and whole wheat bread stuffs. Milk isn't "skim" over here; it's "0.1%" as opposed to the normal 1% and 2%. While shopping, it was easy to pass over what we were looking for because the packaging for many common household items is a little different (ziploc baggies were in bags instead of boxes, for example). It was strange walking by the liquor section knowing I could buy whatever I wanted. Before I left, I thought I might try a little, maybe in a pub, but now I have absolutely no desire (what was I even thinking?). When faced with adversity, I make as much of my world black and white to minimize the chaos. After grocery shopping, we took the Tube over to the natural science museum, which has free entry. That place is huge! I hope to visit it more in the coming weeks. We mostly walked through a gem and dinosaur exhibit.

Ugh, but last night was not fun. The street just outside our flat can get very, very noisy at all hours of the night (and is very, very bright from lights from a hotel across the street), and the Tube trains run just outside the back of our flat. Wow, my dorm last semester was quiet as a mouse compared to this. Ah well. Hopefully, I'll sleep better tonight.

Whenever we have to get food outside the flat, I can't stop myself from beelining for the best-bang-for-your-buck (pound?) items, which are usually cheap and small. Plus, we have to fix our own food. I'm definitely feeling much more grateful for mom fixing supper or eating in the cafeteria the past two years. Tonight we went out for supper...each of us payed between $15-$20 for our meal, which is considered a pretty decent price for supper in England. Ugh. I'm going to be keeping eating out to a minimum. Tomorrow we have an orientation day where I'll hopefully find out what we're doing for the next three weeks. It'll be good to get a schedule down.

I've got pictures up on my facebook account, but I'm working on finding an online photo sharing site so that non-facebookers can access them. Any suggestions?