Spring Break

I've just returned from a self-created Spring Break in London and Amsterdam with Amanda, April, and Andy (i.e. I skipped a week of class to go to London and Amsterdam with Amanda, April, and Andy). To begin at the beginning: 7 am the morning I leave Florence, I realize that I don't know where I'm going. I have no idea where we're staying in London. When I called Amanda and she gave me the address of the Astor Museum Inn Hostel, I got very excited. "Astor Museum Inn"? Sweet! Anyplace with "museum" in its name must be awesome. (That was not sarcasm but a very accurate representation of my thought processes.) And, in fact, it was a pretty cool place. Here I am in our very brightly-colored room:

Getting there was a bit of a mess involving an overweight bag (yes, for 8 days; Ryanair doesn't have a very generous baggage allowance), maps with inaccurate representations of streets, "tube" stations without escalators, and not being able to use my phone to call and say I would be late. When I finally made it, we went to a BBQ restaurant to watch the basketball game against Connecticut, which Georgetown won (and then they won again, and then again, and now they're the Big East Champions!). Here we are at the bar:

That night, we went to a floating bar with Maddie from the Villa, her friend John, and his friend Mark, who's British, and who, in fact, was the one who brought us to the floating bar. On the way, we stopped to take pictures in a phone booth.
Apparently, we don't care about looking like idiots in public, or trying to be cool in front of the local kid. London really is a big city, and as we followed Mark to this bar on a boat on the Thames, we marvelled at how ridiculously crowded it was at night. Then we realized that it was 7:30 at night, and crowds aren't really unusual when they're still being supplemented by 9 year-olds who aren't in bed yet. The floating bar was nice, but very empty, because it was 7:30. Here we are with our new British friend Mark at the floating bar, where they don't make cocktails:
We swore we were going to go see him play "football" the next morning, but it required getting up much earlier than we were capable of, despite having gone to bed by about midnight. Instead, we went to Hyde Park that morning and saw the Speaker's Corner. It's a corner of the park, and I'm sure you can guess what happens there. People speak, about everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and wanting strong children, to Heaven and standardized testing (that one was a 15 year-old in a suit, who was obviously doing a final project for debate class). We also noticed a race through the park in which all the runners were dressed up. This was the sumo wrestler:
We walked to Buckingham Palace, and took some pictures, and even saw the guards step out of their little houses, and then step back inside! Oh, the excitement!

You probably can't tell, but that's Andy and I in front of the gates to Buckingham Palace.

And that's April and Amanda, right across from the gates to the palace.

Oh, good, a picture you can see. That's a guard inside his box.

After that we met up with Maddie again and went to Oxford to visit Peter. Oxford is a lovely but very cold, very, very wet college town about an hour and a half from London:
Peter gave us a tour, and we stopped at a souvenir shop where we bought Oxford clothes, so we could be warm, clean, and relatively dry (I don't think anyone is ever completely dry in England):
That evening, Peter snuck us into the formal dinner at his dining hall. We had to wear robes, which was appropriate, because scenes from Harry Potter were filmed at one of the dining halls at Oxford.
There was a three course meal, served by waiters, that included tomato soup, chicken with potatoes and vegetables, wine (red or white, your choice) and a chocolate souffle to rival any dessert I've ever tasted. With the help of the talented chefs at Oxford, I made the best of having Sunday off from a Lenten chocolate sacrifice.

More to come: The Rosetta Stone, gay bars, an even smaller world than when I last left you, and, of course, Amsterdam!

[All the tiny pictures that you can't see were taken from Amanda's facebook]