London Town

Saturday September 17, 2005

I am sitting in my dorm right now getting ready for bed and the sound of Freshers returning from the Beef and Barrel pub down the street is echoing loudly throughout the Ted Lewis Courtyard. I have been noticing how social and friendly the locals are – just now I saw a group talking down by the benches and another group entered the courtyard, one girl screamed “Hello! My name is Emily!” the entire group said “Hey!” and they all went and introduced themselves, and are still talking 20 minutes later.

If you have ever seen the movie “Rear Window,” you get a very clear understanding of what my view looks like: rooms surround the courtyard in 5 story buildings and now after meeting tons of people I can literally just look out my window to see if they are home, and to just yell down or yell up to get their attention.

Today was great; all of the international students were given a guided tour of London. The busses set out from Enfield at 9 am and we picked up a Blue Badge Guide at Baker Street (famous for the residence of Sherlock Holmes.) Blue Badge Guides are Londoners that have taken a series of rigorous tests about the history of the city and can offer some great insight. Angela, our guide showed us around Buckingham Palace, Parliament, The Tower Bridge, Leichester Square, Covenant Gardens and Piccadilly Circus – we also saw Hyde Park and the house where JM Barrie lived – author of Peter Pan and subject of the movie “Finding Neverland.”

The tour lasted a couple of hours – this weekend in London is called ‘open to the public weekend.’ Where many royal houses, banks and government buildings are open to the public for one weekend out of the year – there were huge lines outside many of the famous places of interest that are usually closed. This weekend London also hosts the Thames River Festival and that included a boat race down the Thames River, and various venues along the waterfront. Tomorrow night they will be setting off fireworks down the river at about 9 pm and a couple of us plan to head down for the festivities.

I have been getting to know some really great people – three Rams and I (Cassie, Michael and Meghan) cruised the city with Eric, an orientation leader from Essex, and Cristobal, or Cris – a student from Spain that is Living in Ted Lewis also. We began our adventure in Covent Gardens where we grabbed lunch from a small deli – I had a toasted bacon and avocado sandwich and then we headed to watch some of the street performers. The one we watched put himself in a straight jacket and had 3 minutes to undo himself. We then headed down towards the West End Theatre district where we saw the theatres that house ‘Mamma Mia!” “Marry Poppins,” “The Producers” and “The Lion King.” We are all going to try and catch some shows in the coming weeks.

We finished the day by trying to cram as many people as we could inside one of London’s iconic red telephone booths, and headed back to Enfield for some supper. Tomorrow I am heading to Brighton, a sea side resort similar to Coney Island in the southern coast of England. Until then.