Back in London

Hello all. The group is back in London and it was a sad goodbye to Harlaxton Manor. Okay, so going day by day since the last post....
July 1- like I said, we drove back to London in the afternoon and had the rest of the day free to do whatever. The girls and I (Mathea, Cheshire, Anna and Katia) all had tickets to go learn some Scottish dancing! The event is called a Celeidh(spelled something like that) which is the Scottish term for party or gathering. How it works is that you go completely clueless of Scottish traditional dance and they teach you lots of them. There was a live band there with two fiddlers, a bass player, guitar player and a drummer. They sounded really cool! It was a blast. We may have sucked at the dancing, but it was certainly a good time. That basically did us in for the night, so we got back to the hostel and crashed. OH, about the hostel. It's an interesting place to say the least. It's located in a former prison...? Some of the rooms are even jail cells. It's kind of weird, but they've done it up so it doesn't really LOOK like a prison. The rooms are very very tight. My room is the room of 10 gals...it's quite an experience :-)

July 2- First of all, Happy Birthday to my beautiful mother that I miss so much. On this day we were scheduled for the Beatles walking tour around London. We saw a bunch of different Beatle locations on the tour that were pretty sweet. We saw where the roof top performance took place, so that was really cool. The tour ended at the one and only Abbey Road. I feel so bad for the locals that have to drive down that street and dodge all the pedestrians trying to get a picture in the middle of the road. None the less, we all did get some pretty good pictures. Katia also got me a sharpie and I wrote on the wall. I learned on the tour that they repaint the wall every 4 months. However, I also signed a brick that wasn't painted over. Maybe that one will last a little longer than the comment on the wall. It was super cool. Dennis and I wandered into the parking lot of Abbey Road Studio and took some pictures. Unfortunately a lot of it was under construction, so we didn't get to see the building very well. After the tour, we were free to split off and do whatever. I went with Mike, Dennis and Kim to see some other Beatle sites that we didn't cover in the tour. We saw RINGO's apartment that has a John plaque on it. It was the apartment that Ringo had let John and Yoko stay at for a while and it's also where they shot their "Two Virgins" cover picture. We also went by Jane Asher's former home and by one of the restaurants that was in the movie Help! The restaurant looked NOTHING like it did in the moving. In fact, it wasn't even a restaurant. It looked like an empty building, but it was indeed the location. After that I caught up with Katia, Cheshire, Mathea and Anna in a different part of London where Pride was going on. They had been there for a while, so Katia and I split off and did some shopping for the night. I bought super cool nail polish that you'll love, Ashlen. :-) We got back to the hostel and chilled with everyone for the rest of the night.

July 3- Today! So today was the Natural History Museum. It was really cool and HUGE! I know we didn't cover every room in there because it was so gigantic. It was very interesting though. We spent a few hours there and then were free again to split off. The girls and I went and got some lunch and then Katia, Anna and I all came back to the hostel because we were all really exhausted. After a little rest, a bunch of the group left to go to the Globe Theatre to see a Shakespeare play. Katia and I decided to go back into downtownish London and see what all was open and what there was to do. All the stores were basically closed, so instead of shopping we went to go see a movie instead! We saw Bad Teacher. It was very good....not at all what I was anticipating, but it was a good movie. The movie theatre...sorry...the Cinema was incredibly fancy too. It was fun :-) After that we walked around some more and looked around for something else to do. We found a bunch of really good souvenir shops and also stopped for a snack. While we were shopping, we also found another stand to get your feet sucked on by fish. Our feet hurt, so we did it. It tickled, again, but it was fun and it felt pretty good after I got used to the weirdness. We took the tube back to King's Cross and now here I am! We are both in the TV room at the hostel right now. It has really sweet chairs and it is less claustrophobic than the bedroom. I don't know what lies for tomorrow, but I will be sleeping in! WHOOO!! That's all for now. Cheers! I'll post more pictures soon.