I’ve been in London exactly a week now and. I. LOVE. It. Londoners are probably the nicest people (after Canadians), and they make their city so easy to get around. I really appreciate that the underground stations color coordinate each train line and have maps of every stop for every line. It makes navigating your way around the city a lot less stressful. And their subways (tubes I should say) are so much cleaner than New York’s- I haven’t seen any cat sized rats running around yet.

The first couple days in London our school had an orientation that consisted of touring the Westminster Abbey area where Big Ben and other notable landmarks are (I’m really bad at remembering what all the buildings are called because I’m too busy trying to take all the sights in). London has a ton of beautiful parks including St. James Park which is right next the River Thames, giving a great view of the London Eye next to the river.

I think what I liked most about the tour (and London in general) was being able to see all the old buildings like Parliament and the surrounding houses where writers like Yeats and Dickens lived- it’s just a reminder of how much history England has.

Reality set in Sunday night when I remembered I had classes the next day…kind of forgot for a while that I’m in London for a little thing called school. Luckily British professors are hilarious and I could listen to British accents all day. My history teacher throws the f-word around like nobody’s business and told us Queen Victoria was “bloody stoned out of her f-ing mind the last 10 years”- I think his class will be my favorite.

Somehow I was able to schedule my classes Monday-Wednesday, leaving me with 4 day weekends so today I explored the Tower of London. I got to see where the royal family used to live, along with their insanely HUGE armor and extravagantly decorated swords (why someone needs diamonds encrusted on their sword I don’t know but it looks nice). Right next to the Tower of London is the Tower Bridge. The bridges in London are very Medieval and nothing like our bridges in the U.S.

Now, the Tower of London was cool and all, but it was slightly overshadowed after my friend and I were walking under the Tower Bridge and she saw Flava Flav. Long story short, she spotted him, yelled his name and ran, leaving me confused. I ran over to her, figured out she saw Flava Flav, who was still standing under the bridge watching us freak out and look at him. When we finally decided to go get a picture with him he was already walking over to us and, well, we got our picture, clock and all (dude has a full gold/diamond grill and is SHORT. Super nice though).