Spring in London

Spring has sprung in London. No especially exciting news to report from work. Natasha Richardson, as I’m sure you all know, died the other day so we were covering that on Thursday. Jade Goody also died, which is sad, but she stretched out her death for so long that I’m kind of glad it’s all over, although I’m sure her funeral and tribute coverage will be taking up a lot of my time this week.

Wednesday was a busy day for me. In the morning, we got up super, super early to go on an inside tour of Parliament. It was a pretty cool tour. It took a while, and most, but not me, were hung over from the evening of St. Patrick’s Day before. I was just tired. We even got a talk from one of the members in the House of Commons, Graham Brady. He was pretty nice, and only a little bit boring. The night before we got a lecture on how the British government operates, which was also interesting. A very different system from the States. Some of their officials aren’t even elected, which would never happen in the States. It was pretty interesting. Parliament was pretty cool as a whole. It’s cool because when you walk out of the Tube station the first thing you see is the huge tower of Big Ben. Pretty impressive.

After Parliament was over, a group of us, arranged by me, went to Leicester Square to buy play tickets for Phantom of the Opera that evening; a play I’d been wanting to see since I got here. The play did not disappoint. It was astonishing. I thoroughly enjoyed my evening.
The afternoon was rather uneventful. Much to my relief I got a haircut, which was desperately needed and walked around a little. My friends and I have planned to go to Barcelona for Easter Break in a few weeks, which should be fun. However, travel arrangements seem to be getting more difficult as we go along, so that is always a constant thing to do.

My parents came into town on Saturday, so I’ve been pretty busy this weekend and next week. They got here on Saturday and we kind of just hung out and helped them get over their jet lag. I wasn’t a big help with that. We went to Portobello Market first thing because it’s one of my favorite places in London. Dad wasn’t a huge fan because he gets claustrophobic really easily, but Mom wanted to buy the place out. We ate a traditional, although Americanized, English breakfast and walked around Notting Hill a bit. We navigated the Tube back to their hotel where they found out information about getting tickets to a play they wanted to see. We managed to find the theatre where it was at with a bit of trouble, but it was in a really pretty area of London right near the Thames.

We then navigated the Tube to St. James’ Park, which I’d been eager to see for a while. My parents sat and soaked in the beautiful day. Then it was time to go back and collect Shale, my brother, who had stayed behind at the hotel because he was just that jet lagged. We went to dinner at a restaurant called Ask, which is a chain Italian restaurant that had really good food. There are many restaurants I still haven’t tried despite being here for a while now.

Yesterday, the family woke up early and went on a day trip to Cambridge. Mom wanted to go there out of all the other places to day trip around London. We took kind of a goofy route to get there because no direct route was going out there yesterday. We took a train then a bus then a train and were finally in Cambridge. Cambridge was a really nice city. Much, much prettier than Oxford was. I wonder why our program decided to take us to Cambridge over Oxford.

Cambridge was a really quaint town with a huge cathedral and the little colleges right in the center. It also had gardens and a river running on the side of it, which was beautiful. We ate lunch at a cute place called Auntie’s Café and dinner at a pub with amazing fish and chips, the Eagle. We just walked around and shopped the rest of the day before taking the much less confusing route home of a train that went directly into Liverpool St. Station, so we could take the Tube from there back to their hotel. I was exhausted after the day was over.

Anyway, just another Monday in London. More updates on how the week with the parents went later.