ice castles

It's been a busy few days here, between classes and day trips and general exploring, it's been difficult to get time to do much on my own. I'm definitely enjoying myself, but if I said I wasn't a bit exhausted, I'd be kidding myself.

Sunday we went to Windsor Castle. Brian, our tour guide, instructed us that this is the Queen's favorite castle, but she was on vacation so we didn't get to schmooze. We did see Queen Mary's dollhouses and the castle itself is absolutely gorgeous, but the state apartments and chapel were closed so it could definitely have been more exciting. The really positive part of the trip was that the sun was shining for the first and only time so far. I thought it would be depressing to be in a cloudy place all the time but the city is so cool that I'm barely fazed by the haze (muahaha). Windsor in itself was such a cute town and it was a lot of fun to go there and see.

Monday was the first day of class, which I'll get into later,  but IES had an event where they took us to the Icebar in London. It's just like it sounds, a bar made entirely of ice. It's -5 degrees in there, the bar is made of ice, the glasses are made of ice, the walls, benches, etc. are all made of ica and they give us these big warm ponchos when you walk in so you don't freeze. Definitely a tourist attraction (very expensive), but worth going to once, and it ended up being a fun night. Yesterday (tuesday) morning I had my internship interviews. I'm still waiting to hear and decide, but they went well. One was in this area called Camden, which I had never been to before but it was really cool, even though it was really early in the morning. I'll have to go back sometime. Then Jason and his friends got here and my friends cooked an amazing Italian dinner for everyone, which was delicious and nice and fun to all eat together like a little family. Then Sarah, who had lost her phone while out for a jog, had to go claim it. Naturally, I went with her and helped her claim it. We had to take quite a tube ride out into Brixton, an area that is literally on the end of the map. It was kind of fun to go on a ridiculous adventure like that. Then we met everyone at a pub (for a change).

Classes started this week. I'm taking British film, British Censorship, British Youth Culture, and London Architecture. I was going to take a class at City University but with the internship and general length of classes I thought it would be waaaay too exhausting. So now I'm taking London Architecture instead. Anyway. Classes here are a lot different, starting with their two-and-a-half-hour length. This is somewhat grueling, but not as bad as I'd expected (so far at least). I'm excited about the subjects too so hopefully that will make the time go by a little bit more quickly. Anyway, I'm sitting in the lab at the IES building writing while I wait for my next class to start. Hopefully it will be tolerable.

Sorry so short, just figured I'd check in quickly because god only knows what my schedule will be for the rest of the week, but hopefully it will calm down a bit after everything is more familiar.