i tend to have many death weeks where i shut down and do homework for a week straight, but this one was different because i still had to do all of my london things… anyway… welcome to death week: london edition.
we had a huge shakespeare paper due monday, shakespeare presentations tuesday and thursday (which included each group member having to do a ten minute presentation in front of the class and then we all had to perform a scene from othello), and we had a three-page SINGLE SPACED paper due in our religion class on friday. like our assignments never ended. in normal school, this wouldn't be THAT bad, but since they give us no extra time to do anything, this was really rough. we had plenty of late nights this week.
i do have to admit that we kind of did this to ourselves though… we signed up to do all of our assignments pretty close to the beginning of the semester to get them all over with… it seemed like a good idea when we did that, but when the time came- we were definitely rethinking our quickly-made decisions. haha
although it was kind of rough, we still found some time to have fun :)
on tuesday night, we went to see the play, othello. this was a little overkill because we had just spent the whole weekend studying this play, but it was nice to just relax for a bit and enjoy it :) i actually really really like this play! i like most of shakespeare's plays though, so maybe that's not saying much. haha but i always love seeing the director's interpretations of the plays come to life! this interpretation wasn't my favorite, but it was interesting! there was a weird musical theme throughout. randomly, the actors would just start playing violins and cellos. haha it would've been more effective if the music followed the motifs of the play, buttttttttt that wasn't the case. haha but i was impressed that these actors could act and play these instruments so well. AT THE SAME TIME.
on wednesday, we had our day trip! we went to stonehenge and bath!
stonehenge was pretty cool. i like rocks. haha like it was cool to see in person, but i'm not too intrigued by the mystery of how the rocks got there… haha maybe i should care more about those things. but at the moment, all i cared about was getting back into the heat. haha even though i bundled up in like twenty layers, it was FREEEEEEEZING.
(okay i don't know how many different pictures you can take of stonehenge, so umm yeah… here is an unreasonable amount of pictures of the same arrangement of rocks)
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| confession: we are the worst at jumping pictures. |
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| HOOK 'EM |
BATH TIME. haha get it?
except there are no rubber duckies involved in these kinds of baths… :(
ANYWAY we went to bath. and i'm going back. like SOON. i loved it so much! we started our day with a tour of the roman baths. i took forever going through this museum. it was so cool because it was set up just like a classic, roman city and there were little movies on the walls of the baths of people getting in and it made you feel like you were right there with them! i love the idea of --pretty much-- community hot tubs with massages afterwards. i wish i lived back then so i could participate! it sounds so relaxing! better than any spa i've heard of! my favorite bath was the cold plunge bath. it was beautiful. it was a dark teal color and there were millions of coins at the bottom of it. naturally, i made a wish and threw a coin into it, too! i couldn't resist!
it was super tempting to reach in and feel the water because it was steaming and it was so inviting, but i resisted!
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| MY FAVORITE BATH |
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| when you can't get a good picture of something, buy a postcard! |
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| soooo steamy and inviting! |
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| this was a water fountain where you can drink the water from the roman baths |
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| it tasted like blood… i do not recommend it |
the little town of bath surrounding the roman baths was so cute! there were so many little shops that we're going to go back and explore! our next stop was the jane austen's house museum/jane austen centre! it was so fun to learn about jane and her family- and we were even able to dress up in jane austen clothing and write with a quill pen! it takes a lot more skill than you think it does… haha the best part was that everyone who worked there wore traditional jane austen clothes the whole time!
***if any of you jane austen freaks want any sort of paraphernalia, let me know- i have the hookups ;)
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| oh, mr. darcy ;) |
after the jane austen centre, we spent the rest of the night shopping and trying more new foods! haha whoever said that london only had gross food was very wrong. haha for dinner, we ate a british pasty. it was pretty good! i got the traditional pasty with steak and potatoes in it! yummmmmmm.
ps i don't know if i've mentioned this, but for our classes, we have eating assignments! over the course of this semester, we have to eat 8 different kinds of british foods and 8 different international dishes! it may seem like we just eat all the time because we're fatties, but i promise it's for a homework assignment ;)
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| madie being all cute and stuff. always. |
to finish our lovely day, i bought some british wellingtons! IT'S ABOUT TIME, RIGHT? they are so cute! i will take a picture of them soon so i can show them off :) i love them!!!!
then thursday came…. this was presentation day. the big day this whole week had been building up to. there were six people in my othello group and four of us had presented on tuesday, so this was my day to present my ten-minute presentation. terrifying. i actually wasn't too nervous which is weird, but i had done all i could to prepare, so this was time to just get it over with! haha i was really nervous about not having enough material to cover ten minutes, but my presentation actually ran about thirteen minutes! BAM. my presentation was on "racism in othello" and i think it actually went pretty well! after i finished, it was time for our group to perform a scene from othello. haha this was hysterical. someone recorded it-- i should try to upload it onto my blog sometime. you could watch it on any bad day and it would immediately cheer you up. hahah let's just say we are not professional actors at all…. but it was super fun. i played the part of desdemona, othello's wife. it was pretty rad. haha okay enough of that. after our presentation, we rewarded ourselves with some snog :) YUM. oh and then we came home and had a wonderful nap :) a very well-deserved nap :)…. (and this was the day that we decided that we needed to start getting more sleep at night so we didn't have to take so many naps. look at us being all grown-up! haha)
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| double double chocolate trouble… with the coveted pink spoon and everything!! |
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| ohhhh yeahhhhhhhhhh |
friday was our london walk day! we started at hampton court palace! the whole day, we got to wear these really cool cloaks. haha kind of weird, but it was fun! hampton court palace is cool because we got to basically walk through the palace and watch henry viii grow up right before our eyes! we got to see all of his rooms and different paintings of him at all different ages! he's one of my favorite kings because… well okay he's one of the only ones that i know and can remember because he had so many wives. hahah
the best part of this visit was walking through the gardens. they are GORGEOUS. all english gardens are trimmed perfectly and it looked like something out of a movie. it was almost unbelievable.
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| the royal throne |
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| #selfie with a swan |
unfortunately, the freezing weather made it nearly unbearable to be outside for too long, so we quickly ran across the street to find a place to eat! we went to zizzi (me, christine, ashlyn, maddi arnold, madi shupe, and lauren tagge) it was one of the most amazing italian places i've ever been to. i was a little nervous about eating here because i heard that italian food in england is never good, but this was HEAVENLY. i always love good italian food!!! so after that, we decided that we needed to get home to write our religion papers, so we walked back to the train station, and this is where the adventure begins…
the train station was closed. apparently that day, while we were at hampton court, there was a fire in one of the trains and someone jumped in front of a train and died, so they closed the train station. this made things rather difficult for us, sooooooo we walked across the street where they had buses acting as trains for a little while, but the last bus was full and the next one was going to be there in two hours. yikes. WE HAD A PAPER TO WRITE. (it was 3:00 at this time) we didn't know what to do at this point, so we huddled together outside trying to keep warm while we were all shivering and wet. at least we weren't alone, right? so we stood there for a while until a normal bus came by. we didn't know where it was going, but we got on it because we just didn't want to be miserable in the rain anymore. so we rode on the train for about an hour and then eventually found a tube stop. thank goodness for tube stationss! buses are hard to navigate sometimes, but with tube stations, we can get anywhere :) at the tube station, we all got coconut/vanilla steamers to warm up and then we got on the tube and rode for about an hour until we finally got home! we arrived at our flat at around 7:30 and immediately started writing our papers. as soon as we turned them in like an hour before midnight, we went out to the 24/7 corner store and bought digestives to celebrate. DEATH WEEK WAS OFFICIALLY OVER.
saturday was a blissful day :)
after our crazy stressful week, we took a whole day to shop and have a girls day! ashlyn had some major shopping to take care of, so we got everything she needed and then we wandered around all of the beautiful stores here. my new obsession is jack wills. LOVE IT. and we went into jcrew london. it was the most beautiful place i'd ever been in. there was a whole room dedicated to shoes. i thought i had died and gone to heaven… until i looked at the price tags. haha with some american stores like jcrew and urban outfitters, they literally just change the dollar sign to a pound sign on the price tag. yiiiiiiikes. i'm so thankful i live in america. haha i can't wait for everything to seem so cheap when i go home!!!
for lunch that day, we ate some delicious mediterranean food! i had chicken shawarma i think…? haha it was soooooooo good! and then we just shopped some more and watched a movie that night! (and probably went to bed early) overall, it was a very GOOD DAY :)
sunday was… fun. haha there's always something interesting to talk about from my experiences at church! first things first, church was moved up from 1:00 to 10:00 and i LOVE it. it's so much better earlier! now we actually have time to take a nap after church before our firesides! haha this sunday was also the first time for something else-- instead of working with my angelic, three-year-old sunbeams, i had to work with the evil 4-7 year olds! they were like little devils!!!!!!! i really hope i never have to teach them ever again. haha there are just so many of them and they all want to play with my hair and touch my face and sit on my lap, and that doesn't work very well with my personal space issues. haha so that was horrible, but i survived!
another thing worth noting-- there is this boy who just turned twelve in our ward, so in primary, we had a sort of "send-off" for him because it was time for him to leave primary and go to the deacons quorum. and the cutest thing. happened as he was leaving, he started walking through the door to leave, and he stopped and looked back and said to all of the primary kids he was leaving behind, "bye! thank you all so much for everything. i will never forget you." LIKE HOW PRECIOUS IS THAT?? man 12-year-old boys. gotta love them.
last thing to mention about this sunday was their fast and testimony meeting. it was our first fast sunday here, so we didn't really know what to expect…
so when it came time for the second counselor to turn the time over to the congregation to come up to share their testimonies, he said "please keep your testimonies short and to the point". i thought this was very interesting because in all of my wards, there are always long, awkward silences between testimonies, so i had no idea why he would ask everyone to keep them short. but soon, i found out. haha as soon as the second counselor sat down, literally twenty people walked up to bear their testimonies. and each testimony was at least like ten minutes long. and while they were talking, more and more people kept pouring to the front of the chapel because they all wanted to share their testimonies with everyone. and their testimonies weren't the normal ones i'm used to. they were each really unique and each one was so heart-felt. i wish that they didn't end the meeting so everyone could say what they wanted to say. it was a really neat experience.
well that's it for death week. PEACE.
from london with love,
pep xoxox
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