Ivory

[ivory000]

June 19

Our last day in London is today and it honestly is surreal. We got back from wales at around two and we had a few hours to do what we wanted until our goodbye dinner. For the majority of that time I spent it with Andrew,mason, and Khalil. We walked around went to a couple stores and did some last minute site seeing. I had a lot of fun on this trip but what made it better were all my new friends. A little cliche but it’s true that it’s the people not the place. Hopefully I’ll get to do something like this again because I really had fun.

[ivory000]

Day 6!

Today we had a lecture on a lot of different things like how biased the news is nowadays, the economic state of the world and politics. After that we got lunch at the cafe inside the university. After that I went to the top of a mountain in a trolley and took a picture that won’t really capture what it looks like in person in my opinion.

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Day 5

On this day we got a tour of the entire university of Aberystwyth. We started out with dinner in the student dining hall and I had some fish pie is what they called it and it was pretty gas. From there we then got to see the gym and some of the different buildings that were associated with their corresponding subjects like math and computer science etc. we also got a tour of the National libraries of wales and we got to go into the “restricted” area with the staff and see some of the cool stuff they have archived like books and movies.

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Day 4

We got to go inside the British museum and I got to take pictures of a really cool cadaver of a man that was alive around 2330-2130 BC. Inside the museum there was an Egyptian exhibit an African exhibit and an exhibit about india. All of them had things showing different materials and tools from human history dating back thousands of years.We also got to ride a 5 hour train ride to the town of Aberystwyth in wales kinda boring but it was worth it bc the views in this town are amazing.

[ivory000]

Day three.

Today was pretty interesting. Ivo showed us the inside of Westminster Abbey. Going inside made me realize how boring architecture is today but I also felt dumbfounded as to how it was built without what we use today. Everything inside the church was very detailed and there was a LOT of gold. We also got go inside the house of parliament. Sadly we weren’t allowed to take any pictures inside of the building but it was cool to see the rooms. One of the rooms I was able to see was the House of Commons. It was really interesting to see it because Mr. Cronrath showed us a video of the shenanigans that go on when the members of parliament discuss important matters inside the room.very heated arguments.

[ivory000]

Day two!

Today we explored a lot. We first went to grab breakfast at the hotel and then we were off to do a lot of shopping. I probably spent over $100 on hats but it’s okay I was excited to do it because I collect hats. I got the hats from this little underground shopping center I almost got lost in. It was like a labyrinth of cool stores with some stores having a very unusual style of outfits. We also got to ride the tunnel system by ourselves but it felt odd without our tour guide Ivo.

[ivory000]

In the beginning of our trip we departed from Jacksonville to Boston and from Boston to our destination… London! The picture I have shown is one of the pictures I took from leaving Jacksonville to boston. I thought it would be a cool way to start the blog with a cool picture of a sunrise. We met our travel guide Ivo at the Airport when we landed and he gave us a blue card called the Oyster card. He explained how it can be used for any transportation system in London(bus,boat,tunnel system etc.). The first thing we did when we got there was use the tunnel system which is how we got to a place called Russel Square. This was the location of our hotel The Royal National. We checked in our bags but our rooms weren’t going to be ready for a while so Ivo just told to grab some breakfast at the countless places there are to eat here. I chose to go to a place called Prets which is if I were to compare it to anything in the U.S, I would say it is the European equivalent to Wawa. So we ate there and it was 🤌. After that the first thing Ivo showed us as our travel guide was the 7 dials statue. Around the 7 dials stayed there are multiple shops surrounding and Ivo explained to us that the shops used to be pubs and they were all connected by an underground passageway that was used by criminals that needed to hide or getaway from the police. After he showed us that we walked around a bit to explore the sights and we saw a ton of statues that around the city of London way to many important figures to count. Fast forward to about 1 o’clock we used the hour before we had to get back to the hotel to eat lunch. I wasn’t hungry so me and Khalil just got some milk shakes from 5 guys (kinda lame I know) but after that we were finally able to get to the hotel and take showers before going into the boat ride we had planees for the late evening where we saw little Ben and my personal favorite thing we saw the bridge from Harry Potter that was destroyed in the half blood prince ( The millennium Bridge). After that we ate dinner and headed back to the hotel for some much needed rest.