When I started reading back over this, I noticed some things that just weren't quite right: details missing, names misspelled (sorry Geanna!)... heck, I even left out the entire first day of the trip. The following pages are an attempt to right the wrongs, fill in the gaps, and give me another chance to relive the memories.
18/19 May 2004 (25 March 2008)
Man, today was a long day. Since my flight left SeaTac at 6:00pm (whoops, there goes that whole military time things... that should have been 18:00) and they recommended showing up two hours early for international flights, we decided to leave the house about 11:00. Which got us to the airport shortly after 14:00. But since I had never flown before, it was probably a good thing. I got my luggage checked, then sat down to read for awhile until they started the boarding process.
In the departure room, I actually ran into Erin & Rachel, a couple of the other students on the study tour. Erin had done the semester-long version awhile back, and was a huge help through the traveling process. She was in line quite a ways ahead of me, [but] we found out that we had ended up with seats right next to each other. What are the odds of that?
If you ever have to fly internationally, British Airways is the way to go. Coach class is never pleasant, but they came quite close to it. It was a 10-hour straight flight from SeaTac to Heathrow, but it had the following benefits:
- A "care package" of sorts, with a light blanket, some of those eye-cover things, and a travel toothbrush with a really small tube of toothpaste [also some socks and cheap headphones]
- Two full meals--a breakfast & a dinner (not in that order), with several choices for each
- Free drinks; this included alcohol if you were 19+, but I didn't take advantage of that
- Free in-flight movies (apparently some airlines charge for them? [as of 2010, Air Canada does]). There was a little screen in the back of each seat, and you had a choice between several movie channels, a shopping channel, and one that showed the progress of the flight: location over the earth, distance traveled/remaining, elevation, flight speed, and an up to date (maybe updated would be a better word) ETA.
The flight landed in London right about 12:00 local time. I thought SeaTac was big, but Heathrow was massive; we actually had to take a mini subway/train thing back to the main building so we could go through customs and immigration. I was fairly nervous, but it wasn't too bad. They checked/stamped my passport, and asked a few questions: where are you from, what are you here for, what do your parents do for a living, do you have a source of funds if you run out, etc. I think they were trying to make sure I wasn't going to stick around and become a welfare bum or something... but if that had been my intent I could have just lied, and they never would have known.
After that, Rachel, Erin & I got back together and hopped on the subway (Tube, Underground... whatever you want to call it) to the Russel Square station, which was the closest to the hotel we were staying at. We actually took a shortcut across the University of London campus, where I'm sure we must've made an interesting sight.
At the hotel, we found most of the rest of the group, who had come across on earlier flights. Rob (the only other male on the trip) and I ended up in a room on the second floor; which, since they start things out on the ground floor, was actually three stories up. Once everything was settled in, we had a short meeting in the rose garden out back and went out for a walk in the city. We went down through Trafalgar Square to the Thames, along the river for awhile, then along Drury Lane (no sign of the Muffin Man, though) to The White Hart, the oldest licensed pub in London. Dinner was Bangers & Mash (aka sausage & mashed potatoes) with a red onion gravy; a very good and very filling meal. On the way back to the hotel we saw one of the dragons of London. London proper is apparently only one square mile [ed: I think maybe I was actually referring to Westminster here?] ... all the places I would think of as districts (Gloucester, etc.) actually started out as individual cities/towns that were eventually absorbed into London. So anyways, on one major road heading into the city from each direction--north, south, east & west--there's a statue of a dragon set on a short column, originally intended to ward off evil spirits.
I spent the rest of the evening unpacking, chatting in the lounge, and hopping on the internet so I could email home & let them know I was still alive. Bedtime, for me at least, was 10:30, at which point I had been up for roughly 30 hours--not a record by any means, but a very long day nonetheless. That's probably the only reason I slept as well as I did. The only cover on the beds were thick comforters, so we had to keep the window open--which let all of the street noise in--to keep things cool enough to sleep.
For the rest of these, I'll probably just use bullet points under each day. They aren't as pretty as paragraphs, but given the variety of things I'll be correcting/adding, an actual narrative would be very difficult if not impossible.
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