Back In My Own Bed

A lot has happened in the last 24 hours, so I'll start with last night.

After I finished my last post, I went to my 10 person hostel room. It's probably around 3:20 AM, and I'm pretty exhausted. When I get to my room, pretty much everyone is asleep and its pitch black. I locked my stuff in the girls room because I know that I won't have to worry about it there. I meant to take my flashlight out with me, but I left it in the backpack. So now I can't see a thing and I'm supposed to find my bed. What I ended up doing was using my cell phone as a light. Basically I went from bed to bed and swept up and down to see if there was a person sleeping in it. This did work except a random person woke up while I was sweeping them and looked at me. Now this was awkward. Eventually I found my bed and slept hugging my laptop. Not quite the body pillow I'm used to but oh well.

So the bed was alright, as was the night's sleep. The next morning, when I was trying to get to breakfast, I ran into a little trouble. I couldn't really get down from my bed without jumping and waking people up. So what I did was I grabbed onto the bed post pole and put my feet against the pole too. Basically I repelled down the bed to the ground. This worked quite well.

It looked something like this.
So for breakfast it was plain cornflakes and rolls with butter and jam. Not bad. All in all the hostel was pretty good.

Our first destination of the day was Harrods. Now for those of you who don't know what Harrods is, picture the most extravagant department stores you've ever seen. It's located on Brompton road in Knightsbridge. This is what it looks like.
It is absolutely enormous. There are 330 departments in the store that sell pretty much everything imaginable/unnecessary. So first of all, as soon as we stepped foot into the department store, we were asked to leave and re-enter from another entrance. Apparently groups are not permitted to walk together because of the amount of space they occupy. Kinda dumb. Also, we had to carry our backpacks in our hand, which I couldn't understand as well. So we split up and went into another entrance. First I was overwhelmed by the perfume, makeup, and estrogen. Someone could spend an entire day in this store alone. Everything in the store was outrageously overpriced. I felt like I didn't have enough money to even look at some of the things there. Like there was this brief case that cost 1200 pounds a tv with a television on it. My personal favorite was the piano that cost 53,799 pounds. The people who worked in the store did eyeball us a lot because I suppose it was obvious we weren't going to buy anything. But the ladies who worked in the massage area were really nice. First I enjoyed a nice foot and calf massage machine. Then Ani, Bryan, and I rode this horse like machine called the iGallop. It seemed to serve absolutely no purpose, but it was fun.

Me riding.
As we were meeting up to leave a group of animal right activists were protesting Harrods. Something to do with fur hunting being illegal in the UK, but Harrods imports fur from other countries. Basically they wanted everyone to stop shopping at Harrods until they stopped importing fur.


This was one of the protestors dressed as um.. I believe Tony the Tiger.
This is another one with the sad eyes.
From Harrods, we caught the tube to go to the British Museum. It was amazing.


Here's me and Travis in the front.
Kacie in the grand court.

So the first exhibit we went to go see was the Ancient Egyptian section. They had a great display of mummified corpses and sarcophaguses. I particularly enjoyed the statues and stelas, which are basically blocks of stone with hieroglyphics and pictures. The main exhibit that I came to see was the Rosetta stone. It dates to about 196 BC and was used by historians as a key to deciphering the rest of Egyptian hieroglyphics and texts. I was seriously awestruck looking at this significant piece of history.


The Rosetta Stone.

We took a break for lunch. I was craving this hot dog stand right outside of the museum. It was the grilled onions that got me. Instead we went and had some paninis. Then back to the museum.

For the second go around, we spent most of our time in the Greek exhibit looking at pottery and sculptures.

Ani Posing

I'm looking foward to seeing more sculptures on our trip to Rome. We left the museum at around 4 to catch our train back to Cambridge.

The bus ride back was interesting. There were these two rather dodgy German fellows that got on and were very expressive of their feelings for one another. This included kissing and thrusting one another against the door. Awkward.

We made it back home after about 1 and 1/2 hours of travel and had dinner. We had steak and kidney pie with potatoes and veggies. For dessert we had icecream and pineapples. Delicious as usual. Clair and Rebecca bought a group of us tickets to see Ocean's 13.

Laura, Clair, Bryan

Jennifer (haha) Rebecca, Ani

The movie was hilarious and well worth seeing in the UK. I highly recommend it to everyone in the states if you haven't seen it already.

Then we rode our bikes back home, and I was very glad to be sleeping back in my own bed. Again I apologize for the delayed update, I fell asleep last night and couldn't make it all the way through. Tomorrow we will be going to the world famous Stonehenge to view the mysterious formation of rocks. Also we will be headed to Bath, a famous town in England known for its architectural beauty and ancient Roman baths. Goodnight all.

-James