Okay, okay, I'll get a blog

I give up - you win, my girlfriend was right, I should get a blog.

Now I have to think of things to write.

Okay, here we go - London.

I have now been in London for just over a week and so far it has been a really positive experience - the weather is cool (albeit rainy), the people are nice (minus the cyclist who almost ran over us) and the beer is good (no exception to this one).

Yesterday our group went on an excursion to Stonehenge and Bath - I was quite excited to see this international landmark and pleased that it looked just as good in real life as it does on all the Windows XP background photos. While there we took a plethora of pictures and listened to these tiny walkie-talkie like devices that gave an audio tour of the place.

What a trendy audio tour!

Kristi and I at Stonehenge...it was a little chilly

If you notice a semi-pained expression on my face in any of these pictures it's because the weather was rather chilly and I had donated my sweater to one of our trip participants who forgot to bring a sweater. Nonetheless I survived the ordeal in good form, wearing my thermal long-sleeve shirt and citing my Canadian heritage as making me near weatherproof. All that aside, Stonehenge was an incredible sight to witness - the sheer magnitude of the rocks and the fact that they have existed there for over 2000 years fascinating.

The girl in orange has my jacket, you can't see my arms because they have fallen off due to frostbite.
Or maybe because I'm in the back row. One of the two.

After Stonehenge, our group hopped back on the bus and toddled our way over to Bath (a rather famous little city). Basically Bath was an ancient Roman city established when Rome invaded Great Britian back in like 64 AD. They set up a city in Bath because they discovered a naturally occurring hot spring that piped mineral-rich water into a variety of pools. Thus, the Romans being smart folks, created a bunch of public baths there and built up a city around it.

Nowadays the Roman baths are used as a museum (although some of the baths are in use as part of hospitals or spa's nearby) and we were able to wander through and witness the ancient Roman architecture and restored pieces they had excavated from the nearby area.

To bathe, or not to bathe...

I think I will dive right in! (I can't imagine this would end well)

Outside of the baths in Bath, Bath is also a very fun touristy area (sorry for all the "bath"'s in that sentence). There are a lot of little shops (especially chocolate shops - which is absolutely okay with me), and places to sit and admire the architecture (most of which is neoclassical). Bath also boasts some celebrity credit, being the home of Jane Austen in her later life, Jane Seymour and at times, Johnny Depp.

I stole Kristi's hat. I think it's very fashion forward.

chocolate lion!

After a long day of wandering and sightseeing, we headed back to the bus and departed for London. Once we arrived back in the city Kristi and I decided we wanted to find some food to eat and didn't feel like cooking. After a long journey to find pizza (Google maps lied about location) we decided that our pocketbooks didn't meet the needs of our appetites so we retired to the flat to cook a meal for ourselves. We ended up cooking a large spaghetti meal and splitting a bottle of wine (which is extraordinarily cheap) and then retiring to the couch to watch, ironically enough, The Jane Austen Book Club (a rather cute movie, all told). 

Since this is my first blog - I had Kristi send me a bunch of pictures so that I could give a pictorial representation of what has being going on. Some of these photos come from our first day(s) in London when we took a trip over to Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. Chances are I will be back that way again sometime in the next 3 months, so I will write more about it at that point.

Tower bridge!

Alright - enough blogging for today, I have to go start the dryer again and attempt to make it dry my clothes. Apparently European appliances just don't agree with our American clothes.

:)