I am hoping to send out a weekly update to you all on my different adventures while I am in England and here is the first installment. Sorry if this is lengthly, but I want you all to know all about it.
This is me excited about the awesome Victorian houses we are staying in. They are 4 floor houses, each with it's own kitchen. (floors that is) In this house where I live there are about 16 other students and in the other house is the other students as well as my professors and their families. It's pretty nice waking up and walking next door for class.
I guess I should have said that the flight was pretty good, not too much turbulence and a good selection of movies. I watched Snatch and Warm bodies. Mostly I was trying to sleep but was pretty unsuccessful. Anyways, we got to Oxford and walked around all day that day, it is a very beautiful little city and the clash of college kids and old buildings creates a really cool vibe.
On my second day we had classes and I am taking international business and financial management. Financial management is a pretty standard class and we have it from 8:30-11:30 every day, so it can be pretty exhausting at points. The weird thing is since we have such little time for this class, our "first quarter" exam is tomorrow, so I should probably be studying. Whatever. My second class, International business, I am very excited about. This class will hardly meet in a classroom and will mostly be focused on going places around England and meeting with different professors, CEOs, and other people in the business field. They will be teaching us all about trade and business here in Europe and it should be very interesting.
Later after classes I like to go downtown and find a coffee shop to do some reading and writing in. Another cool place I went is "the Eagle and the Child, a pub down the road where C. S. Lewis and Tolkein used to hang out and drink together! And the fish and chips were delicious as well.
Mostly this week I have been trying to catch up on rest and get used to the schedule, but on Friday that kind of disappeared as we traveled to Norway. I had really been stressing out about this trip because I hardly knew anything about Norway and I had never done such an independent trip without one of y'all being there. It was me and my friend Chris, pictured below, who wanted to go and we got our round trip tickets for 53 US dollars. Crazy good deal. Here we are on the bus we barely caught to the airport for our flight.
We thankfully made it to our flight on time and it was pretty easy. Once we got to Norway was going to be another thing entirely. We had looked at trains and buses and it seemed we would be arriving too late for everything, so our plan was to just sleep in the airport and make an early start the next morning. Here is the part where I think God was really watching out for us, because not 30 seconds after we made it through customs, Lars was right there to pick us up. I didn't even know I was going to see him on this trip! He took us to a youth hostel a few miles from the city and we stayed there that night, much nicer than the airport. I still couldn't believe it and had trouble falling asleep that night because I was so excited. Also, it stays light outside until like 12:30 at night and that threw me off as well.
So the next day, Lars again picked us up to take us around Oslo. Here are a few pictures which I will talk about below.
The first picture is an outside shot of our first stop: Holmenkollen. it is a ski jump that has been used in two separate Olympic games and is absolutely massive as you can see from the pictures. Something I wish we could have done but couldn't afford was the zipline that went down the entire ski jump. It looked insane!
The third picture is of the practice ski jumps that if you saw my Vine of you already know about. There were 4 smaller ski jumps that people were practicing on, something I had always wondered about. There were some kids like 11 or 12 already training for the Olympics here. It was crazy. Basically they just use turf instead of snow for training, but everything else is the same.
The fourth picture is the mountain/hill we hiked up for some lunch that was nearby to Holmenkollen and the view wasn't bad at all. We stayed up there for awhile and Lars told us all about Norway, it was pretty great.
The next place we went was Vigeland park. It was in more of the city part of Oslo and it was a really cool place. As you can see from the picture, there were hundreds of these amazing sculptures all done by one guy and they were everywhere around the park. My favorite was the giant monolith that looked like so many human shapes packed together, it was very impressive.
After that we drove to the city center and saw the King's palace and some other cool buildings, but my favorite part of the city was the harbor. In the last picture you can see all of the boats docked there and apparently there was a sail boat race going on at the same time. We walked around there for awhile and then went up into a castle that was by the seashore with an awesome view of the city.
The rest of our time we had dinner with Lars and talked with people in our hostel, but I will save that for another time. (like my run-in with an Egyptian man over bed sheets). I can't really emphasize how much of a life-saver Lars was and how much better him being there made the trip so much better. I hope one day we can all go there together and experience it all.
