It Comes in Pints? I'm Getting One!

Ok, I know it’s been a while. Fall break plus a stressful week after midterms lead to a delayed blog post. But I’m here now!

Texas Embassy

So I guess we’ll start with what happened after ReyRey! We got back on Monday night and absolutely crashed. Tuesday was a pretty chill day; didn’t actually do much during the day but we had big plans for the night! We started out with dinner at the Texas Embassy where we enjoyed overpriced fajitas and margaritas. The second floor of the building is completely devoted to Texas schools and they have literally every college’s flag hanging from the ceiling…except SU’s. Not surprising. But it still felt the most like home since we’ve been here. From there we headed straight to the theater for a showing of Wicked! It was amazing, as usual. Eighth time’s a charm! After the show, Isaac and I headed back to our respective flats and got ready for our trip to Paris the next day.

Paris, France

Because we had booked the first train from London (the 5am train) we had to take night buses to King’s Cross which is a long and tricky task. We left our flats at 3am and made it to the station and through security just in time to stop and get our metro day passes and board the train. Two hours later, we arrived sleepy but excited in an overcast and gloomy Paris, France. Since I had already been, this day was Isaac’s and I was just along for the ride. First things first, we needed food. We headed in the direction (or what we thought was the direction) of the Louvre in search of a cheap but delicious breakfast. We enjoyed our croissants and wandered around the city. That’s basically all we did that day; we wandered from major site to major site, taking pictures and enjoying the day. We got lost a few times on the metro system just because neither of us spoke a word of French so reading their signs is just a nightmare. But we made it. We must have walked more miles that I want to think about that day but we gratefully collapsed in our train seats that night and arrived back in London around eleven, just in time for me to wish my wonderful man a very happy birthday!

I spent the rest of the week doing absolutely nothing productive and enjoying having the flat to myself (Bree was in Ireland).  It was great to have time to myself to just read and do whatever I wanted. SOO relaxing.  The next week brought about the second half of the semester’s classes. We got our grades back for all of our midterms which stirred up some intense turmoil with professor Hylton’s classes. We had two meetings with CAPA faculty and a meeting with Dr. Futamura who is our SU liaison while we’re here. At one point, we actually broke out the SU Student Bill of Rights to create an argument for getting our grades changed. At the conclusion of everything, I think we’ll be alright but this semester isn’t what any of us wanted or were even expecting as far as classes go. It wasn’t what we were promised by the SU study abroad people and we’re definitely a group of confrontational students so both CAPA and SU know exactly how frustrated and disappointed we are. But we only have 6 more weeks of classes left. Sigh.

Oxford

Christ Church College Dining Hall

But today was our last excursion from London. We headed out at 8am for Oxford. It was really cool in its own way. Oxford is mostly a college town but Oxford University is a combination of something like 30 different colleges. And not like colleges like we have where they’re different departments of education, more like houses…kinda like the Ivy League houses but on steroids. The city is gorgeous and we even got to take a tour of the Christ Church’s dining hall which was used as the model for the Great Hall in Harry Potter. There were four long tables, and another long table at the head and the room was lined with long, beautiful windows that lead to a high, vaulted ceiling. The staircase that leads to the dining hall was used in the first and third movies as part of the entrance to Hogwarts. I WALKED WHERE DANIELLE RADCLIFFE WALKED. It was awesome. After that, we made our way to Shakespeare’s Milkshakes and downed some yummy deliciousness before heading off to The Eagle and Child, the pub that C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolken frequented together. And that was pretty much the end of our tour. 

Yummy Milkshake!

The Eagle and Child

We just got back and Bree and I are relaxing before gearing up for the week ahead. My parents get here on Tuesday so it looks like I have some cleaning to do before they get here! As always, more pictures are on Facebook!