Amy embarks! (a.k.a. TOO TIRED TO BLOG. What a great first entry.)

Me, in front of Kensington Palace, lookin' gooooooood.

I feel like today was the longest day of my existence. (It was.)

Got on a plane at noon, Florida time, Wednesday; arrived 7am, London time, Thursday. Slept all of three hours(ish. I wouldn’t really call it legit “sleeping.”) But my dad said not to take a nap when I got in or I would be tired for days and days with Jet lag. So I am still awake.

So let me give you a nice summary of my day(s) so far.

Plane ride to New York (three hours) was fine. Three hour layover in NY was fine. (Although, Wendy’s put bacon on my Caesar salad, and we all know how I feel about bacon. Plus, I’m veg, for the time being and foreseeable future.) Flight to London was fine.

On the super-boring, eight-hour flight to London I did several things:

• Chat with the English dude next to me (for about five minutes total.)
• Ate surprisingly good airline food (mmmm…. Individually wrapped dinner rolls…)
• Watched Changeling, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
• Fell semi-asleep while slouching with my head on the window, leaving my spine in an S-shape for the rest of the day.
  

And all this traveling was accomplished while carrying a 30-plus-lb. backpack.

So, anyway, all that nonsense was over and I had to go through customs or immigration or passport shakedown or whatever it is they call it now. I’ve never had a bored British thirty-something man question me so hard before. I seriously felt like they were going to put me in jail for something (“But officers, I’ve done nothing wrong! I can’t help it that I’m criminally adorable!”). But they did not, and I went on my merry way to the airline shuttle.

Lesson learned today: I need to stop blushing when someone with an accent speaks to me. It’s like, oh, you don’t sound like a honky-tonk American? Fluster fluster fluster.

On the way, got some ££ out of the ATM. Almost squealed with excitement at the funny alien money. Which brings me to…

Thing #1 I love about Britain: They don’t just have old dead men on their money—they have old, dead, heavily mustachioed men on their money.

Suck on THAT, Benjamin Franklin.

Anyway, took the shuttle to the house/apartment/dorm thing I’m living in for the summer. Found out I had the very last room at the very end of the hall on the very top floor. Elevator only goes up to floor right below it, so I had to lug my suitcase up a very narrow, winding set of stairs. Only broke two fingernails.

Discovered I am in a QUAD for the summer. Yes, that means for FOUR people. But, the room is actually huge and has its own bathroom, unlike the other girls’ wing in which nine girls share one bathroom with one shower.

So I got into the giant room, picked a sweet bed tucked away into a nook, when one of my roomies came in with her mom. Her name is Jaime. She and her mom invited me to breakfast, but I had to go buy a plug adapter for my laptop, so I declined. But, we exchanged phone numbers and she and her family called me a bit later for some sightseeing.

We walked around Kensington Park for a little bit. Now, I am not 100% sure what this park is famous for, but what was remarkable about it for ME was my…

Thing #2 I love about Britain: There are PUPPIES. EVERYWHERE. ALL OVER. YES YES YES CUUUUUUUUUTE PUPPIES.

Okay, so I DID take pictures, but only of SOME of the puppies.

Seriously, like half the people there had tiny dogs that were running around, rolling on the grass, wrestling with each other, and so on. I had to resist the urge to snap a picture of every cute puppy I saw, and it was the freaking hardest thing I’ve done in just about forever.

Sexy uniforms of long-dead British men.

Kensington Garden is actually part of Kensington Palace, which we toured also. The area was a special “private palace” for the king and queen of the time; also, Princess Di lived there. It is now a museum about the fancy dress of society (which was pretty neat) and it houses a bunch of Princess Diana’s gorgeous dresses (jealousssss.) Did you know that to do the elaborate embroidery on women’s dresses in the olden-times, the palace would hire adolescent girls, keep them in a room with low lighting to not fade the fabric, make them stand on their feet all day, and literally worked them to death?

Surprisingly, not the cruelest thing done in the name of fashion.

Gorgeous dress worn by Princess Di that I wish I could wear/own/fit into.

Gorgeous King's room in the palace.

Anyway, took tons of pictures, then Jaime and I left her family (who were just visiting for the week) to go back to the dorm, where we met our other two roomies, Kelsi and Liz. The four of us, plus three other kids from the trip, ate sandwiches in the park, then walked for miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers) to find a drugstore (for toiletries) and a grocery store (for food.) We found both of those things! Sadly, no one thought it through enough and we were forced to lug absurdly heavy plastic bags back over a long distance to the building. I have killer calluses on my hands right now.

Had to go on a mandatory tour of the neighborhood block with the FIE people, then went to another grocery store, but this one was more like a supermarket and I could finally buy a bath towel!

Then, roomies and I ate dinner at a little café thing, then ate gelato. So now I’m back and trying to do some schoolwork/blog before I pass out. Oh, also, the internet is too slow for my computer phone to work, so I must solve that dilemma soon.

I know there was more I wanted to say than this, but this blog post has been long enough so I will just leave it at that.

Love,

AMY!


P.S. This woman is NUTS! (hahahaha, bad puns.)