Mid-Term Break

This past week was our mid-term break, so my beautiful girlfriend, Lane, came to visit for the week! We did a lot of things together, so I this post is going to be just an overview, and I'll follow up with some more detailed posts on some specific places we went!

Her plane landed late Friday night, so the activites started on Saturday with some sight seeing. We started with the Eye, and then moved up to Big Ben/Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Horseguard's Parade, where we found a military recruitment fair set up, although it probably didn't help their case that they seemed to have some trouble landing the helicopter. Then we walked through St. James' Park up to Buckingham Palace before grabbing some dinner and having a relaxing evening.

Sunday, we went to see The Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre, which was outstanding and a very well done adaptation of the movie. The costumes were brilliant, and I was particularly impressed by how they did the giraffes. If you're a fan of the movie and you've yet to see the musical, you should put it on your list. After the play, we grabbed a roast dinner, and then wandered through Covent Garden Market.

Monday, we had tickets to a ride on the Eye (separate post coming) which was very cool, and not nearly as nerve-racking as I had expected, though that was helped by having a priority pass. After the eye, we went to the near-by aquarium, before enjoying afternoon tea at a tearoom near the British Museum.

Tuesday, we went over to Greenwich to visit the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian line, although we didn't go into the observatory itself (it's pretty expensive!). It was a cool, windy day, but we wandered through some of historic Greenwich after lunch before making our way over to the Air Emerites Cable Cars, which were much cooler this time than they were the first time I went on them because we had much better weather this time around, so there was a lot more to see.

On different halves of the Earth! 

We even had the USA car!

On Wednesday, we made the trip to Paris, which will of course have a post to itself, so I won't say much on that right now.

Thursday was our shopping day, so we spent an absurd amount of time in Primark before hitting a popular department store, Selfridge & Co, and enjoying some Pizza for dinner.

Friday was our "Catch-up" day to accomplish the things that we had wanted to do, but hadn't yet done. We went to see Freddie Mercury's former home, although there wasn't a whole lot to see from the street, then we went to Madame Tussaud's, so most of the pictures from that will probably be on Facebook rather than in this blog, although it was well worth the visit, and it would be cool to see the one in NYC for, hopefully, fewer cricket players. From here, we visited Abbey Road Studios, and had our picture taking walking the iconic zebra crossing before moving on to Angel Road Station, home of the third longest escalator in Western Europe.

Saturday was our final full day, so we visited the London Zoo, which was really well done, with the vast majority of animals in very realistically constructed pens which seemed to be true to their natural habitat. We were there for 3.5 hours, and still didn't quite manage to cover everything before we had to leave due to the zoo's closing time! We made our way over to Camden Market to peruse the stalls before heading to southeast London for some pre-Bonfire Night fireworks to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot of November 5th, 1605.

Not only was it the best week I've had here so far, it was the best week I can remember in a long time, and it has put me in much improved spirits for the final 5 weeks of my program!