james shaw's blog: Here Comes the Weekend.

If there is only one truth that had remained constant in my life, it is this: No matter what I do or how I plan, I will always lose sleep. Usually during the school year, I'd sleep 4 and 1/2 to 5 hours during the weekdays, and crash on the weekends. This could be a major problem considering that I'm traveling on the weekends. Therefore I am screwed. But what the hey, it's England baby!

Today's post is filled with highlights and scary things.

So today was the last day of school for the week. I really love the way this program is set up. We came here to study, which we definitely are doing. During the week we are expected to buckle down. On the weekends, however, we don't really have much homework and thus we can appreciate where we are.

Today we studied air flow in the respiratory system using Bernoulli's and Poiseulle's principles. Lunch was at Churchill College again. After lunch, we were distracted by something pretty amazing. Get ready because here comes an awesome highlight of the day. So there was this Mama duck with her 10 little ducklings. Ten. This was awesome. They were so little that they could walk on top lillipads.

Here they are. You can count them.

I ended up taking way too many pictures of the ducklings, but oh well. Then this other duck started wandering a little bit too close. Then the mama duck went POSTAL on this duck. It was hilarious. She kept biting even as they flew around.

So then we went back to the classroom and finished the light homework for the weekend. Before going home, the girls booked the hostels while Garrett and I threw the frisbee around. Not fair I know.

This is a very scary picture of Susannah. I'm not sure what's going on here.

On the bike ride home, Garrett took us a new way that I didn't know much about. So on the way back, we passed by this field that was fenced off, and I was like "oh cool there are monkey bars." (here comes another highlight) And then out of no where, bunnies. Hundreds of them in the field. It was so strange to see them in the middle of the field just standing around. After we went a little further down, we crossed this railroad bridge and saw all them running in and out of their burrows in the side of this hill. This is very intriguing, and I think I will come back. When I got back, I started telling Simon about this. I thought that these could be hares, but apparently the hares here are huge. I'm talking like small dogs. Are you serious?? How is this possible? Simon was telling me about one time they went camping and they saw this huge hare just sitting there. Imagine if you saw this outside your tent.

Or this. Oh my God.

This is potentially the most frightening thing I could ever think of. So apparently in South Korea, they are trying to raise giant rabbits as a possible food source. This could feed a ton of people.

This reminds me of a show on the Discovery channel called Man Vs Wild. This is the best show on tv. The premise of the show is this guy who used to be British special forces

and now travels around the world. The show puts him in the middle of extreme conditions in various places on Earth, like the Sahara or European Alps. By simulating conditions that any ordinary hiker could face, Bear Grylls is given only a knife, flint, and water bottle and is given only 5 days to reach some sort of civilization to be rescued. This show is absolutely ridiculous and highly entertaining. I recommend watching this show if you ever get the chance.

Bear Grylls finding himself some dinner.

So for dinner we had steak, onion rings, and chips.

Delicious as usual. Notice the tomato decoration. Very fancy.

After dinner, a group of us went to Robin Hood and Little John's pub for a nice dessert. I had apple and cinnamon tart with vanilla ice cream. At dessert I learned that Ani is ridiculously good at German. It's interesting to find out everyone's hidden talents.

The group: Natalie, Rebecca, me, Laura, Kacie, Jennifer, Clair, Susannah.

Various desserts.

Travis with a stogy.

Then I went home and here I am. I need to sleep. Tomorrow we are going back to London to tour the city. We will be staying there overnight, then coming back on Saturday. Hopefully our tour will be somewhat more substantial than what we've already seen of London. By this I mean, I hope we actually go into places instead of admiring from the outside. There's still a lot I would like to see like Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. I also want to ride the London Eye, which is a huge Ferris wheel that you can see all of London in.