Weekend, Days 4&5

So here comes the first weekend in Europe, what does it hold for me?  Well it help a bunch of nothing too exciting!  The past couple days were so filled with adventures and many miles of walking around both Emily, I and Jay were too tired to adventure too much.  We spend saturday morning just relaxing around our flatt.  I tried Subway for lunch since it is only a block down from the flatt!  It wasn't as good as America, but it fulfilled my craving! The street that we live on was just PACKED with people today.  It was ridiculously loud and the two pubs we can see from our apartment were just packed!  Traffic was jammed on our street for most of the day.  Another reason we thought we wouldn't go out; every tourist and commoner would be out roaming around because it was a goregous day!  One of the pubs down the street that we can see had police baracading it in and all the people were chanting something.  Either a futbol game or rugby game was going on, not sure but they sure were having a good time!  Around 4 in the afternoon my time, 3 of the girls knocked on our door to see what we were doing.  We really didn't have plans except for the idea to head to Regents park, which is the park a block away from us.  That was why they had come to our door; they were going to head to the park and were wondering if we wanted to go.  We decided it was time to get moving and go out so we agreed to go with them! 


What to tell you about Regents park?! Well, I can say for a fact that I will be going back there!  It was a sight that was breathe taking!  So many people but such a huge area to roam in!  There was a Green Fair Festival going on in one part of the park.  It was all about energy saving ways and food from different areas of the world.  It was quite interesting!  We spent some time there and decided we needed to check out the rose garden part of the park.  I can't even begin to explain how big this park was....it felt like it was endless.  To have so many parks in one town the size that they are is mind boggling!  It's like putting a bunch of the large parks throughout the US into NYC.  I guess for those of you who have been to time square it is about 2-3 times the size.  There are more than just this park in the London area!  The rose garden area, which is called the Queen's Garden was breathtaking.  I really wish my G-baby could have seen it because she is the flower master and would have gone head over heals for all of the different kinds of roses and flowers!  I am going back to find out how many different varieties they have but it has to be over 100 for sure!  I took lots of pictures!  There were fountains and lakes in this park, even a water fall.  I can't even describe how gorgeous it was.  We walked around different parts of the park and then had to leave because we were meeting up with most of the group to have dinner. 


We got to the place we were meeting up for dinner, which was the pub I talked about earlier that was packed and had the police around.  We soon found out that the pub was shut down for the day due to police licensing and police restrictions.  My guess would be something like they were at capacity and couldn't get enough people out, so the "fire marshal" shut them down.  Anyways all 13 of us decided we needed to find a different place to go.  Here in Europe, it is not a normal thing to go out with more than 4 people and if so you need to make reservations.  You get looked down on if you have more than 6 people, so we decided to split up.  I went with the group of 8 and the others went a different direction.  We picked a random spot where we could eat and we started out with 4 and 4 on each table outside.  We ended up being able to combind the tables to form one big one.  We looked at the menu and soon realized we did not pick a good spot!  The idea of this place was to share with everyone on your table and the servings were small so for two people you should order 3 things off the menu.  We decided we would just get some appetizers since it was expensive and nothing looked that good, but we were hungry!  I tried some tiger prawns with some hot chili sauce, it was very good!  However I only got 2 prawns and it costed me 8 pounds.  Our total bill came to 82 euros, which in dollars would be about $122.  So there were 8 of us, everyone had one alcoholic drink and 5 people had appetizers; spendy much?!  YES!  So then we were of course still hungry so we went to Tesco's, the local grocery store and bought some pre-made sandwiches and ate those! 


We then decided we were going to drink and go out for the night.  This is where things got very interesting.....add being in a foreign country+people who are dating people back home+the stress of not being able to talk much+cute people on the trip=a whole lot of drama and things Emily does not care to see!  Let's just say I was the least bit impressed by some people's actions during this night.  That is all I will say about that.  About 10 of us went out and that was a mess to organize everyone.  For those of you who know me well, I have never had a hard time making friends until I went to St. Thomas.  I have always said that everyone is very clicky and stick with people they know/went to high school with.  Well that is how it is on this trip.  I am trying my hardest to become close to some of them, but it really sucks when you don't feel like you belong.  It took a lot out of me to feel that way, and I am a bit discouraged, but I am a strong individual and I will continue making an effort to fit in with those around me.  I am not going to quit and I'm going to continue trying to fit in and make friends.  It just frustates me!


So that brings me to today.  I spent the day in by myself in a chance to regroup my head and thoughts.  Half the group went to stonehedge, which I really wanted to do but you had to pay in advance and since I'm not one of the group, I wasn't there to give my money in advance to go.  The other half just walked around London in the rainy weather we experienced today.  I can say that I'm ok with having this laid back day.  A lot has been going on the past couple days and there is a lot to come.  Tomorrow brings about a trip to Cambridge.  I am quite excited about that!  I know this blog may be a bit of a downer, however I promise this next week will be filled with excitement and lots of adventurous stories!!!!


<3 E