Week One Part 1: Of Jetlag and London

Yeah, so, I’ve been meaning to start a blog about this whole crazy Prague Trip/Study Abroad experience for a couple of weeks now, and have just never gotten around to it. Yah for procrastination! But, I have finally gotten some free time, almost a week to the day since I left Washington Dulles. It seems like a whole lot longer.

We’ve been having a blast though. The AIFS Group, about 72 of us from all over the country (that is the US, not the Czech Republic) spent two days in somewhat gray and overcast London, and then flew to somewhat gray and overcast Munich, before busing ourselves to somewhat gray and overcast Prague. I can’t wait for spring.

Getting out of DC was great. There was very little waiting in the security line at Dulles, and then I discovered that they put a Five Guys in the International Terminal…my last American Hamburger for four months. The flight to London was almost completely deserted. I got an entire row to myself. I might even have been able to stretch out and sleep, if not for the vicious turbulence over the Atlantic. I probably dosed off for an hour, but I don’t really remember it.

And then we got to London, which was also really awesome, but was also kind of hurry up and wait. First we spent twenty or so minutes waiting to clear the border crossing, then we waited for our luggage, then we waited for the rest of our group's flights to come in, then we waited in the London traffic, which makes rush hour in DC look like a drive in the country. And then when we finally got to our hotel we discovered that we would have to wait almost four hours until our hotel was ready.


So, determined to make the most of it, the other four people from DC and I headed out on a mission of exploration. First, of course, we had to get some British Pounds, and then we hit up a Starbucks in London…a nice taste of home, though because it’s a four Pound cup of coffee, I paid nearly eight dollars for the privilege. Fleeing somewhat refreshed, or at least enough with enough caffeine in our systems, we decided to cross Hyde Park and check out South Kensington, and two of the museums there the Victoria and Albert and the Natural History Museum. First though, we had to cross Hyde Park. Despite the lack of anything green, the park was pretty neat. We walked right past Kensington Palace, where Princess Diana used to live, and the tall buildings of the city were surrounded by the fog so it looked really pretty.

Thanks to our map, we managed to reach the Natural History Museum, which was awesome, in part because it was free. It also had some interesting exhibits, one about bugs, that showed all the places they lived, and some extinct mammal fossils. To be honest, by that point the jetlag had started to get to us, and we sort of just breezed through it. We then headed next door to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V and A, as the British call it, seems a somewhat oddball collection of stuff. There were paintings, statues, suits of armor, and medieval nick-nacs with little to no overall all theme, expect maybe that the Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert, would have liked it.

After we finished up there the five of us decided to head back to the hotel, and see if maybe the rooms were ready. As it happened, they were. So, I headed upstairs…about three hours later, I realized that I taken a rather unplanned nap and that I was really really hungry. So my roommate and I headed down to the street and out to a small restaurant near the hotel. After running into three other people from our program, Americans have to stick together after all, we had a nice authentic British meal...chicken and chips(that’s French Fries), so basically just like home, just more expensive.

With some nice British Food in our stomachs, we headed back to the Hotel and had the welcome to London drink. Which turned into a marathon session of “hello my name is…I go to…my social security number is…oh wait, that last one didn’t actually happen. But it could have, since we all seemed pretty exhausted. After that, the group split up again, and me and two others headed down to Queensway to walk around. After about an hour of that, the jetlag really caught up to us, and we headed back to the hotel and basically collapsed.

And there was night…and sleep…and it was really good.

The next morning, we awoke, went to breakfast and got one a coach(bus). For three hours, a nice British lady took us around to the major sites of London. We stopped at Buckingham Palace, saw the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abby, and Number 10 Downing Street, were so close to Nelson’s Column that if the windows had been open we could have touched it, saw Fleet Street and the economic heart of the United Kingdom, explored the original Wren building; St. Paul’s Cathedral, and took pictures of Tower Bridge and the Tower of London.

The coach (bus) dropped us off at Covent Garden, which was basically an outdoor shopping center. From Covent Garden, the two people I hung out with on Tuesday night and I decided to check out Westminster Abby. We walked down the Strand, past the ministry of Defense and Number 10, and reached the Abby, only to discover that it would have cost us each thirty dollars to get into it. After wrestling with it for a while, after all when is the next time we were going to be in London, we decided that it was too expensive. Somewhat dejected, we headed to the Westminster tube (subway) station and headed up to something that was completely free, the British Museum.

I think it is safe to say that the British Museum is essentially the warehouse of all of all the material that the British took from their colonies, back when they had an empire. There were gigantic statues from Greece and Egypt, tapestries from the Near East, Jade work and Buddha statues from China, Japan and Indian, The Rosetta Stone, that helped to translate Ancient Egyptian, thousands of books from King George III(the only that lost the American Revolution) and mummies(I do wonder what the people who were mummified would have thought about being put on display in three thousand years). Best of all, they let you take pictures in the museum.

After we saw all the British Museum stuff we could handle, we headed back to the hotel. From there, a much larger group ventured out into London’s West End. The West End is essentially London’s answer to New York’s Broadway, and in this instance it did not disappoint. We went to see Wicked. Which, pardon the pun, was wicked assume.

After that me and some others headed back to the hotel, as we had a 4am wake call.

And it was night, and the next day we flew to Munich…