Paris Bound

Yesterday morning after lecture the class went to the Imperial War Museum. There we saw an intense exhibit about the Holocaust and explored the rest of the World War I section. We had the opportunity to go “in” the trenches and see, smell, and hear what it sounded like during the war.

This is a section from the Berlin Wall

Following the museum a group of us decided to get dressed up and check out the night life!

Megan, Kelly, and Jessica

It was a ton of fun...and they played American music so it was a nice taste of home.

Today we went to the Churchill War Rooms that were preserved since World War II. After the War Rooms some of us took a walk through St. James Park over to Buckingham Palace! It was breathtaking.

We were fortunate enough to walk past the Wellington Barracks as they were doing the changing of the guards! We were in the right spot to get a front row seat in front of the gates. 

Zach and Quinn

Julia, Quinn, and Zach

At Buckingham Palace

It was such a beautiful day...sunny and no rain (until now). 

I had to make friends with a duck in the park, of course.

A group of us is taking a train to Paris at 7 o’clock tonight! We are spending the weekend and coming back to London on Sunday. This is especially exciting because it’s Julia’s birthday tomorrow and Bastille Day on Saturday! We’re planning on going to Versailles one day and visiting the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, etc. on Saturday and Sunday.

I will not be bringing my computer to Paris so I won’t update the blog this weekend. Expect lots of news and pictures next week.

Updates to come, with love!

Busy

Today we studied more of WWI, the Great Alliance, and we had a guest lecturer from Regent’s teach us about the famous WWI poets. This was particularly entertaining for me because two of the more well known poets, Sassoon and Owen, met each other at Craiglockhart Hospital while recovering from shell shock. I am writing my final paper on the effects of shell shock on soldiers and the imagery they use in their poems would be a great addition.

Directly following class a bunch of us trekked out to find Wimbledon. We thought we knew what we were doing but once we got off the train we thought we could walk the rest of the way to the courts. It turned out that we had to bus and after a torrential downpour, too-full bladders, and waiting for the bus to arrive, we got on the double decker and headed up to the top. The view was so beautiful! Within 15 minutes we finally made it to Wimbledon.

We stopped at a pub to relax and gain our bearings before heading back to our flats and out again for an hour and a half long Jack the Ripper tour.

This used to be a hostel where a lot of Jack the Ripper’s victims stayed...gruesome

We stumbled upon some awesome looking places to stop and have some food and drinks so most of us decided to head back into town after the tour! 

Laughing so hard he was crying!

Tomorrow we have a professor from Cambridge coming to lecture us and we are going to the Imperial War Museum.

Updates to come, with love!