This one time, in London...

London - sounds great, right? Wrong. I am going to be the first to say that I am SO glad that I chose Cardiff instead of London for my study abroad experience.

I've heard so many great things about London - the sights, the people, the fashion. But what I didn't catch was the part about the random monsoons and hurricane-force winds.

Myself, my roommate and the male intern from Ohio set out early Saturday morning for the "Smoke," as they call it here. We hopped a train and travelled the beautiful English countryside for two hours before seeing any real sign of life. I was so excited to arrive at Paddington Station, the sight of so many movies I've seen and so many photos. To my horror, the place was freezing and only a small area of the station was actually temperature controlled.

The three of us, me in my recently purchased £17 Primark coat and my $45 TOMS, walked through the station searching for an information booth to tell us which Tube train we should take to get to our hostel, which was located in New Cross. Unfortunately, the Tube was under major construction and we had to skip around to a bunch of different trains and eventually an unreliable bus line to get to our destination. Armed with our Oyster cards and our backpacks, we set off on what ended up feeling like a five-hour bumpy trip in a sardine can. A man on the Tube train, smashed up against me, literally as soon as the doors shut, told me he'd drank a lot the night before and was feeling a little ill. Great.

We FINALLY got to the hostel, which ended up being not as bad as we thought it would be, but definitely not a Holiday Inn. We dumped our bags off, put our passports and valuables into a locker and set off for the bus stop to take us to Trafalgar Square for a Child Poverty Awareness event that I was going to for work. We met a young man wearing a Wales scarf on the way and chatted with him for quite some time. We got to the Square and parted ways, content with our lovely conversation about politics and language. We got to the event and people started to dispurse - apparently it started much earlier than I thought.

We went to the National Gallery and I got to see some of Monet and Van Gogh's paintings, which have always fascinated me. The rest of the museum was pretty boring, but whatever. We all need a little art in our lives, right?

We walked around the city a bit, catching site of Big Ben, the London Eye, Parliament, Picadilly Circus and Westminster Cathedral. We saw the MI5 and MI6 buildings, a couple of brilliant little parks, and walked the Thames for a couple of miles. We headed to a pub that we'd seen earlier for dinner, but were shocked when we saw it was nearly £15 for fish and chips. We went across the street to this delightful little diner-type place and had pretty good meals and a spot of tea before heading back out into the monsoon. We caught the bus to head home for then night and, what do you know, ran into the Wales scarf guy (whose name is Rob) on the bus once again. We invited him out for drinks and were surprised when the bus stopped mid-track and told us it was the last stop.

Rob showed us back to New Cross and took us to one of the student pubs where we had a couple of drinking contests and some pretty typical American-British conversations - mostly about language and accents and soccer/football and music and movies. We called it a night soon after.

The next morning, we left the hostel, and our Jesus-loving roommate, and found a comfy little restaurant just down the road for a cheap and hearty breakfast. We went sight-seeing once again and saw the Tower Bridge, London Tower, the Imperial War Museum, the Roman Wall, St Paul's Cathedral and the London Bridge before heading back to Paddington to catch our train to Cardiff.

We left London, with its pouring rain and high speed winds, and arrived back in Cardiff to dry sidewalks and our warm flat (which I mistakenly left the heat on in over the weekend). It never felt so good to be home, and after a long, hot shower and a cup of tea, I slept better than I've ever slept before.


This week has been pretty low-key in the office. The debates and things were pretty lively this week, so its made for some excellent press briefings and plenary sessions. But technology has been unreliable, so we haven't had much to do in the way of researching and whatnot. I've been working on cataloging all of Alun's speeches and debates so that I can then write summaries of them for his website that we'll hopefully launch by the end of this month.

We've been causally working on the Child Poverty event, but with only a week left to get anything done, I'm afraid things aren't going to go as planned.

I'm going to visit John, a friend from camp, this weekend in Scotland and I must say that I'm not much looking forward to the 7 hour train ride it will take to get there. But, not much sleep and a big meal will hopefully put an evening cap on me so I can sleep most of the way. Plus, I'm charging up my iPod.

Hopefully my next update will be accompanied with pictures from London and also from Scotland! I hope all is well and that everyone is doing well!

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