Day 8-Pubs, Theater and more Pubs.

22 June 2007
It's finally Friday. I have officially made it through a week in London. On Monday I wouldn't have thought the week would go by so quickly. I am steadily making new friends and trying to make arrangements to travel to other, less expensive, places.

Today was a rather quick day. We had two orientation sessions for the new students where I had to get in front of the group and introduce myself. As silly and outgoing as I appear to be, I still get very nervous and quite frankly dumb when I get in front of an audience. Basically I just try to say something humerous about myself as quickly as possible so that the introductions can carry on quickly to the next person and I can get out from under the gun.



After orientations and work I went with a group of my flatmates to "Jack Horner" Pub. We sat out on the street side (Tottingham Court Rd. to be specific) and drank beers and cider and had traditional pub fare. I had a bacon cheeseburger which was excellent. It had British style bacon on it (which is more like Canadian Bacon that the US variety) and tomato relish which was terrific. I also had some great chips as well. To top it all off, the pub had the US version of Heinz 57 Ketchup, Yum!

After the pub it was off to the Duke of York Theater for Little Shop of Horrors. On the way back to the Study Center to meet with the group I noticed the London Eye for the very first time. Although I have walked down the very street before I never looked up and noticed how close we were to it before....either that, or the thing is just so massive that it appears to be just down the street from us. Either way, I thought that was cool too.

The theater is located right in the middle of the famous West End of London. On the way we passed by lots of pubs and clubs and even walked through Chinatown. Nice.

The theater itself is about 115 years old and is quite an impressive old building (but then again..in London, nearly every building is an impressive old building, in fact the building I reside in is over 300 years old!). The show was very entertaining and up to the end followed very closely with the movie. It is only the very end that has a twist in plot that differs from the film....I don't want to spoil it here in case you are ever in London to see the show, but if you'd like to know e-mail me and I'll tell you.

After the play we walked back to the Study Centre again through Covent Garden and the Seven Dials which is an area where seven different roads all intersect in seven different directions. It's very cool that in London there are several places where streets were built after structures. This means that sometimes the road goes under a building or takes random twisty paths, it's very unique. After that I met up with another flatmate and gave him the 10p tour as well. He arrived late today without luggage because his bags were somehow detoured to Zurich (hope they enjoyed the flight). We walked down Oxford Street a bit and then down another parallel road. Even though I have only been here a week I feel like a bit of an expert in the locating of grocery and drug stores.

Tomorrow we are supposed to go on a walking tour of the Bloomsbury neighborhood. This tour is actually one where the history of the area is discussed including info about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group. It should be quite interesting provided I wake in time to go. This time I really will bring my camera as well. Sunday we are taking a tour of the city by bus and will have another opportunity to take photos of the area. I will try to get a gallery up that day so that you have more than my long-winded texts to read.

Hope everyone has a great night.

~Jenn