A Day In Manchester

Saturday morning I awoke to my alarm going off at 6:30 a.m. and let me tell you it's not something I've had to do for quite some time. It was not an easy task, nor was I happy camper, but I did it anyway. The reason? Well I was off to Manchester for the day. So I got up showered and ready for the day and then a bunch of us headed over to meet the bus for our 3 hour ride to Manchester. It was a pretty quiet ride over with everybody just listening to their own music and I fell asleep on the way over. We got to Manchester and Anette, Carina, Mikael, Martin, Simon, Belinda, Nagore, her friend, Anxo, Anais and I decided to go see the Manchester United Stadium in Old Trafford. So we got a bus... a DOUBLE DECKER bus :-D and took the 20 minute ride over to the stadium. The next post has all the pictures. We were all just so happy to be on a double decker bus! Haha. It was great! It was my first ride and several of the others as well. So we got to the stadium and entered the megastore and it was definitely a megastore and I got a Manchester United t-shirt for myself and something for Emily as well. Now Anette was DYING to take a tour of the stadium, like this was a dream for her. She loves football (aka soccer) and was just happy to be in the megastore but she wanted to be closer to the field, so we asked if there were any tours and sure enough there were and there was a student discount as well. So Martin, Mikael, Simon, Anette, Carina, Belinda and I took the hour and a quarter tour of the Manchester United Stadium, and we got to go into the locker room, press room, VIP room, down the tunnel.. basically everywhere. It was a great tour and really informative too! We got done with the tour about 2 p.m. and headed back to the city centre to grab a quick bite to eat and then do a bit of shopping. Surprisingly enough I didn't buy anything! Though we did find this HUGE shopping outlet, the only thing I bought was something to drink and eat for the journey back. It ended up being a pretty fun ride home and then we hung out a bit for Lisa's birthday.

This upcoming week I have learning week break, which means I will not be in classes. Which also means I will not be at school. My flight for Scotland leaves Monday. I will be in Scotland Monday through Thursday, then in London Thursday through Monday. So if you comment and I do not get back to you until Monday I apologize I will try and find at least one internet cafe Wednesday/Thursday just to do a quick check of email and that sort. But other than that I will not be reachable via internet until Monday. I'm really excited about going on my first big trip and the fact that I'm flying is huge! But I'm ready for it! So here goes nothing! Hope everybody has a good week. And also a happy mothers day UK style, because Mothers Day in the UK is on the 12 of March.

Photographic look at Manchester

We were allowed to go into the locker room and they had photo's with all the players, so I got mine taken with these two lovely lads!

The ever present and popular Manchester United Symbol
Sitting in the visiting teams section!
Me in front of the pitch! We were sooooo close!
Writing in the seats

My first view of the stadium from the bus!
The front going into the megastore
My first view of the pitch (aka field)
Mikaels legs, Martin, Anette, Belinda and I hanging out after coming out from the tunnel (there is an actual group photo, but the 2 people that have those pictures, haven't posted them yet!)
Writing in the seats!

One of the buildings in Manchester
Hustle and Bustle in town
View from the top of the bus
Me on my first double decker bus ride!
Some of us looking out the front window as we head out to Old Trafford!

Pictures that go with the post after this...

Great picture of the Wicked sign, with the double deck bus!
Dinner!
The Apollo Victoria
The stage inside the Apollo Victoria.. didn't come out so great.. but still you get the idea... great set.
Belinda on I on the way home while laughing hysterically. It was a really long, fantastic day.

A Day In London

Saturday was spent in London with Belinda and boy was it an adventure, but seriously one of the best days I've had since I've been here! Thankfully I have been to London once and it's pretty easy to get around so I was able to seem like a pro and we didn't get lost once!

My day started or continued at 6:20 a.m. when I began getting ready for the day. I had no sleep the night before and Belinda had gotten about 2 and a half hours, but we were troopers and were out the door by 7 a.m. The train we wanted to catch left at 7:22 a.m. and we made it by literally one minute... I endued up pulling off my shows so I could walk a bit faster. We got on the train and I ended up falling asleep about a half hour into the ride. So I got about an hour and a half of sleep, so that was a good thing! We arrived at Paddington station at 9:30 a.m. or so, hopped off the train and went upstairs to get our underground passes for the day and got our day long travel pass for areas 1 and 2. Then hopped on the underground to try and get discount tickets for a show, since the place at Paddington didn't have anything. Unfortunately Lion King, which is what we had originally intended to see only had the really expensive tickets left, BUT Wicked had two cheap tickets for £24.50 a piece. Not bad at all! We were both excited though to get tickets! So we headed over to Victoria stop just so we could have an idea of where the theatre was going to be. The minute we came out of the underground tunnel, we looked to our left and there was this huge photo of Wicked on the theatre we were going to! It was incredible... (there will be pictures later). At any rate, we ended up walking around Victoria for a few hours because we had time to kill before the show. We were scoping out places to eat as well! Haha, we saw the first place and were like ooo let's eat there, then would see another and say well maybe we should eat there... eventually we said let's just wait and see how busy everything is after the show. LoL!

So finally we were able to get into the theater after of course stopping for a milkshake! Hehe, I bought the tickets this time and Belinda payed for all the food. Next time it will be switched around! At any rate, we got in and decided to buy a program for £6, but it's really the nicest program I've ever seen. So worth it! At any rate, we were dying to get into our seats and we were pretty high up, but we had a straight view down! We had GREAT seats. Now it's going to be hard to describe.... the set was incredible! The show opened up and it was just so incredible and powerful the entire time... we had a great cast as well. The person who played Elphaba, Kerry Ellis was INCREDIBLE. So was Glinda, but I loved Elphaba. Fiyero was Adam Garcia... who has been in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and Coyote Ugly, but he was just fantastic. We had Miriam Margolyes as Madame Morrible... who plays Professor Sprout in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I could go through the entire cast... but everybody was great! It was so great that today I created my I-Tunes account and downloaded the entire album! I am just sitting here listening to the soundtrack. It was so great... the voices.... so great. I can't wait to get back! It was great! Fabulous, astounding! After that we decided to go and have dinner at Bella Italia and it was sooooooo good. Great Italian food! Then we caught the tube back to Paddington and caught the train back to Worcester and had a blast taking random photo's of each other on the way back and got back to school after ten past midnight. So it was a long day... but one of the best days ever. Will do a picture post of a few of the things that we saw late today!

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!