Traveling...

Today, I booked my first flight in Europe! Okay, well it's actually not to far away, but I booked it and that's really exciting for me! I'm going to Scotland Monday thru Thursday of my Learning Week break. The Saturday before that I am going to Manchester through my school and then I have all day Sunday to kind of just chill out and wait to head to Scotland. I have a friend, Katy, that I met while working at Cedar Point and I am so excited to see her again, she's going to take me around Stirling and Edinburg, then I'll be back back to Birmingham early Thursday morning, like 9:40 a.m. early. So am looking to meet up with several people in Paris from Birmingham, but it's not so easy! Hopefully will be able to get that taken care of tomorrow. PLUS next weekend, Belinda and I are going into London for the day Saturday to go and watch the Lion King. The show starts at 2 p.m. and then we're going to get dinner and head back to the flat. So should be a good next couple of weeks. I've only got one paper due in March and it's due March 5. Everything else is due April and May. Just thought I would try and keep everybody posted!

ACCEPTANCE!!!!!!!!!!!

I was on my laptop checking my e-mail accounts and decided that I should probably check my IUP e-mail as well. I went on and I had 6 new e-mails, I was like "geez, I just checked it this morning." At any rate, so I kind of just skimmed the subject lines of the new emails and I see "Letter of Acceptance." I quickly clicked on it and the Washington Center symbol popped up and I freaked out all I did was see, "you've been accepted for the summer of 2007," and I started freaking out! Like, screaming, jumping up and down than ran up the stairs to tell Belinda who thought I was having a heart attack, because I was shaking and the such so much. At any rate, I've been accepted and I now have a long list of things to do for that as well. But I am looking forward to it. I can't believe I got it and I'm so excited. I'm waiting for placement, but I'm in the International Affairs Program and so I'm really hoping that I'm going to get the UK Embassy, but we'll see what happens. So there you have it, there was lots of screaming and fast breathing and excitement, but it was bound to happen after waiting all this time to hear a yes or no!!!

Flatmate Picture Post 2 plus an update

Belinda, Me, Alix on Valentines Day
Dan and Simon. Dan is actually from IUP, but I didn't know him before I came here, and Simon is from Australia
Dan and Anette. Anette is from Norway, (this was also on Valentines Day, they were secret Valentines)
They weren't paying attention to my camera, but this is Shawinder from Leicester and Irati from Spain.
Then we have Nagori, Alix, Irati, the Canadian sandwiched between the Spanish girls. This was on our way to Birmingham.

Tomorrow, or rather later today, I'm giving my first presentation of the semester and it's my first marking (grade) of the semester. Of course it is pretty important since it is 20% of my grade and the other 80% is the actual written case study based off of the information that I give in this presentation, but hopefully I will do well. I definitely have put in the effort. So we shall see. This past weekend about 8 of us went into Birmingham to do some shopping at the Bullring and it was soooo much fun! It was a lot of walking around, but still 3 floors of shopping, PLUS some of the stores had 4 floors... ohhh it was a girls dream. Won't be going back there for a while. Next shopping trip will be in London. Actually I have to seriously consider what I'm going to be doing with my learning week. That's an entire week we have off to turn in midterms, but if one turns them in early, as a lot of students do, then you have an entire week off with no work to worry about. I'm thinking a trip to Italy and that area would be quite nice. I'm going to have to check prices though. Then Spring break for me actually starts March 30 since I don't have any classes on Friday's and then I have all that time until the 13 of April. Ha. So yay for planning trips. At any rate, I really just wanted to do a quick update of some photo's and a brief update of what was going on. I'm off to bed, so I can be ready for this presentation tomorrow, then it's off to Tesco with about 12 or 13 other people (the cheap grocery store) in hopes of getting a decent bit of food, so I don't have to go every other day!

First Flatmate Picture Post

Top: Susan, from the States, Jennifer, from Australia Bottom: Alix, from Canada, and Kristen from IUP
Esko and Yosh. Esko has been in the UK for two years and Yosh is from the states. This is during our Valentines day party. Esko drew Yosh's name. Haha.
Susan and I.
Anais, from France, Brett, from the States, and me
Matt from the UK and Heikki from Finland

Alix and I. Alix is from Canada.
Jenny from the states up front, then Kristen from IUP, Me, Simon from Australia and Alix.
This is Belinda (aka Belle) and I before going out Valentines Day night.
This is Jeff in a lovely posed picture.. hah. He's from the states.


This is Yosh he's from the states as well and no he's not actually drinking from the bottle he just thought it would make for a funny picture and it did.


Okay, I've got ten up for now... the next wave of pictures will come once Belle puts up her pictures, until then this is just a portion of my flatmates.. I've got so many more!

London Trip

Kristen and I in front of the Tower Bridge
A picture from within the Tower walls.
The London Eye AND a double decker bus, because I'm just that good, haha! I can't wait to ride that!

Kristen and I in front of Buckingham Palace, note the guards in the background!
Me in front of Westminster Abbey

Kristen and I in front of Big Ben
Shakespeares Globe Theatre

The snowman that people decided to build outside my window, while throwing snowballs at my window!
View from second landing in my flat. So many people were out in the snow. Most snow they've had since 2000
The parking lot, haha... it was so funny.

So it ended up snowing here on Thursday and it's the most snow they've had since 2000. So it was a pretty big deal. So of course lessons were shortened or cancelled and mine ended up being cancelled Thursday night and then all lessons were cancelled for Friday and Saturday. So right before I ran off to class (this was of course before I realized it would be cancelled) a few of us were like we should go to London. There was some definite enthusiasm in that and when I came back 15 minutes later, Dan was looking up train tickets, Kristen was packing and Fridg (also known as Jonathon) was packing too. So Dan bought the train tickets and we realized we had about 5 minutes maximum to pack and get to the train station before it closed at 7 p.m. Yeah... so I ran down the stairs packed whatever I thought was necessary, this was a completely spontaneous trip can you tell, lol, then we ran to the station. Well Fridg and Dan ran, Kristen and I walked fast. Our train didn't actually leave until 7:58 so we were okay we just had to make it there to pick up our tickets or we were going to be in big trouble. But we made it in plenty of time even those of us who walked quickly! So we went to a pub around the corner and had a sit for a bit just thinking about what we had just done. We really couldn't believe that we were going to be going to London and that we had literally decided this in the matter of a minute or two and then just did it. It's not something that I would normally see myself doing, but I have been looking forward to London for so long! Our plan was to go into London Thursday night, stay in a hostels, get up early Friday morning walk around London all day, have dinner with a family that Fridg knows, then catch the train home that night. Well things didn't exactly work out that way but I'll get to that.

We got onto our first train here at Worcester and then headed towards London Paddington or at least that's where we thought we were going, because of inclement weather we ended up going a different route and wound up in London Waterloo, which was fine because we were able to take the tube to where we needed to be for the hostels. We got to the hostel about midnight and checked in and headed to our room... and contrary to what one might think.. it wasn't that awful. I mean it wasn't a 4 star hotel, but that's not what you're paying for either. At any rate, we went in and just passed out we were so tired from traveling and wanted to get up nice and early and have a good start to the day. So we went to bed, woke up early to take showers, which was an interesting task because the shower that Dan had used the night before had apparently been nicer than the ones that Kristen and I used in the morning, lol. Oh well, it got us clean! We had a light breakfast... aka, toast. Then began our trip out into London. I must admit I was quite excited since it was my first time there. It was their 2 time in, but they were still just as excited... of course I did end up takin 116 photo's. Which I will not post all of them here, but I will post some of them on here, just so you can see how gorgeous it was. We walked through Hyde Park, saw Buckingham Palace and there was definitely something going on too, because the Royal Flag was flying and there was a line of cars waiting to get into the palace and the Royal Police were on their hands and knees checking the cars for anything suspicious. We never did fin out what it was though. At any rate we saw Big Ben, which is actually just the name of the clock not the entire tower, Westminster Abbey, which is gorgeous both inside and out, we went to the Towers and saw the royal jewels... what I wouldn't give for some of those!!! Then we went to Tower Bridge and walked over that... saw the London Eye several times and by the time we knew it, it was time to go and meet up with the family Fridg knew.

We had a great dinner and it was such a great time and we're talking and talking and they drove us into Richmond which was a stop that would allow us to take a faster way into Paddington... which would have been great if the trip from Waterloo to Paddington wasn't so long. We missed our train from Paddington to Worcester by 2 minutes. The trains in London are never late, unless it says delayed on the display board and of course when we're leaving they're not delayed only when we're going! Hah. But not to worry, we were able to go back to the Martin's (Fridg's family) and stay the night there... though by the time we got back there it was after 11 p.m. and our plan for the next morning was to leave at 4:40 a.m. from Teddington, to catch the train to Waterloo, then we could get from Waterloo to Paddington taking a faster route than we had the day before... and we would catch the 6:52 a.m. train from Paddington to Worcester. Which we did... of course we only got about 3 or 4 hours of sleep, but it was quite alright. It was an exciting trip and makes for an interesting story about my first time into London! It was beautiful and exciting and I can't wait to go back, because a day was just not enough... there are so many places that we didn't get to go and didn't get to see though we walked well over 10 miles that day. So I am definitely looking forward to my next time back in London. As I said these are not all my photo's. But I will put as many as possible up, beginning with the snow then moving onto the London ones.

Just a few pictures and a quick update!

This is the hill that Belinda and I climbed up and down, to many times to count. It's pretty dreaded, but it's definitely what has been keeping us in shape... although now we do know a way to get into town, which avoids this hill!
A view down the hill... it's really steep! I'll get a better picture!
I honestly never noticed that there was a Little Hollywell Hill and it's not nearly as bad as the hill above (Hollywell Hill) so sometimes we'll cheat up come up this one instead!
This is just one of the views that I see walking into town each day, I wanted to have it so you could really see what was going on in the background... hopefully if you can enlarge it you will... it's actually really pretty.

So tonight was the super bowl and well over here it started at a bit before 11:30 p.m. Yes, we were able to watch it and it was really fun trying to explain what american football was and how it was played, because some of the people we watched it with had never seen football before. Just the other day they had to explain rugby to us, because we were watching the England vs Scotland game (England won) And I have to admit that rugby is hardcore, like more hardcore than football. At any rate, it was really cool, I left a bit into the third quarter since I really wasn't concerned with the two teams, but that's alright, not to concerned! Not many people can say they've watched the Super Bowl in a different country, but I now can! Also something that I should have assumed would happen, but didn't when I was thinking about it, was that they didn't show any american commercials, it was all british commercials. That's okay though, they're all up on the internet anyways!!! Tomorrow begins a new school week and can't believe I'm getting into my third week of being here and my second week of school already! Time is flying by.....

First week of classes complete

So my class on Wednesday, War, Media and Democracy, sounds like it is going to be great! Now granted we were only in there for about 35 minutes for our first lesson, but still, that's all he had planned for us! We do have to read about the The Victorian War Correspondents from the Crimean War, but that's for our lesson next week. At any rate, that's sort of the gist of the class, each week we go over a different war and he lectures for an hour and gives us background and history and then talks about media impact on the war and that sort and then the last hour is debate and that sort of thing. Our assessment for this class is not an exam but a written case study on one of the wars that we are doing and it is worth 80% of our grade. So will need to put a lot of effort into it, but the word count maximum is only 2500 words, which is not a lot compared to things that I've written for American classes. Still I think this will be my favorite class. My Thursday class, Social Psychology and The Media, should be good as well. We have some interesting topics to discuss, but after learning week the class becomes like an independent study and we no longer have to go to it and just have to work on our independent projects, which are basically like mini-dissertations. Approximately 4,000 words. So that should be interesting in itself, the paper is due May 4, for 80% of our grade and the presentations are during weeks 11 and 12 for 20% of our grade, so after May 4, I will be done with that class. But this class also sounds really interesting and like it will be really cool and fun to go to. We were going to go to Birmingham this weekend, but our plans have changed, because one of the exchanges ended up getting a house here, so they are having a house warming party Saturday. So I think we are going to Birmingham next weekend perhaps. We are all beginning to look at trips now that we've had our first week of modules and have found trips for 14 pounds and under in some accounts! Well I'm off for now! Hope all is well in the states!