The eastern hemisphere will never be the same

So we’ve finished another week of classes, except with the way the scheduling works out here it’s been more like 2 days of classes, and really not much time in a classroom. Except for Tuesdays, in which I spend my entire day at school, I don’t actually have much literal class time but will end up doing a lot of things around London that relate to the class material, which isn’t a bad way to learn if you ask me.

I had a lazy Wednesday morning hanging around with my flatmates before they left to spend four hours in an art gallery (better them than me) and I went Thames walking with my group. One of my classes focuses on the Thames and its influence on London and one of our assignments is to complete several walks along the Thames, focusing on a specific topic (ours is health and the Thames) some but just generally documenting what we see. I’ve really enjoyed the 2 walks we have done because it’s been a great time to get out of our flats and just wander with a purpose, something I’m finding I love. Our walk this past week was along a section of the Thames that is in Chelsea, so I was particularly excited to be in my neighborhood. It actually is very cute with some amazing shopping that I will probably drag some of my flat mates to at some point.

On Thursday our GST class took our first “field trip” to Greenwich, the home of the prime meridian. There are several ways to get to Greenwich and for our first trip we took the foot path…under the Thames. Yeah, we walked under a river. Greenwich was really fun, once I got over the walking under the river thing; we walked up the steepest hill ever to get to the Royal Observatory where they have the prime meridian marked. I did the obligatory standing in both hemispheres thing before we moved on to walk through a park and down the hill towards some museums. We had to read a book about discovering longitude and so seeing all the sights that I’ve read about was really cool, and Greenwich is a fun town to spend a morning in. That evening a few of us finally gave in and went out for some American food. It sounds so lame, but going to T.G.I. Fridays was such an exciting outing. And it was an outing; the service here is definitely different from back home, but it was really nice to hang out at the end of the week and eat some good food.

Tomorrow I’m going with a couple of people to Canterbury for the day, hopefully we will have many tales to tell (haha, Ms. Ferell).