Last night I visited the FOURTH tallest structures in London. I'm talking, of course, about the London Eye! As part of the Art History study abroad program, our group was given a ride on the Eye! It was amazing - the whole trip took about a half hour from bottom of the wheel around. The view was spectacular! You could see the Parliament building, Big Ben, St. Paul's cathedral, Buckingham Palace and almost every other London attraction right from the wheel!

After leaving that view behind (which was not easy, by the way,) Katie, Elise and I decided to go to the Victory (a pub) to have a few drinks and relax. On our way there, we spotted a few other girls from our group (Megan, Traci and Jackie) and two guys staying at Nutford House (Michael from Bolivia and Yosef from Oman.) We ended up inviting all of them to come with us and we completely took over the bar! I like to think of it as OU students taking Court Street international! I had two Long Island Ice Teas (part of a buy one/get one deal) and got to meet some really great kids who've lived in my dorm in past years.

This morning, however, started off as what could only be described as a total waste of time. I woke up early, couldn't find my meal card, missed breakfast and went back to bed. Apparently I was more tired than I realized because not only did I fall asleep, I slept until about 2:45 in the afternoon.

Deciding that this was a tremendous waste of my time in London, I immediately attempted to make up for the lost morning. I dragged myself out, returned my $10 network cable cord that wasn't even right to begin with, bought two little notebooks for class and set off to find some coffee.

I discovered this fantastic coffee place that is basically Britain's equivalent to Starbucks. (They have Starbucks here but only American tourists frequent them.) Costa's serves the greatest iced latte ever and it's right on the corner of Edgware Road (the busiest street in my neighborhood.)

While I sipped my vanilla iced latte and people-watched, I wrote my journal entry for the Buddhist/Hindu sculptures my Asian Art class studied yesterday at the British Museum. They're really wonderful works of art, and because of their age and cultural displacement, I found my mind wandering. What I was wondering was what the artists of these works would have to say about their sculptures being displaced to a British museum, thousands of years after their creation, to be viewed not as religious icons/symbols, but as relics and art devoid of religious or cultural significance to most of its viewers. Deep right? Not really, I was just kind of picturing a Back to the Future thing actually (haha.)

After writing my journal entry for Asian Art Studies, I headed back to my dorm for dinner and then, the best part of my evening happened. I convinced Kaitlin (my next door neighbor at Nutford House) to take a little walking trip to the Abbey Road studios where the Beatles recorded the Abbey Road album and posed for the famous cover shot! I was proud, I found it on the map myself and figured out directions! It's not far (about a 20 minute walk) AND we discovered a great little restaurant we're going to eat at later this week.

Once we got to Abbey Road, we were so excited to see the crosswalk on the cover of the album, we almost got hit by all the cars whizzing past! Apparently this is really common among tourists. I guess every Beatles fan shows up there to take a picture at some point while in London. There were at least three groups of people trying to get pictures while we were there. A really nice man offered to take our pictures as we walked through the intersection, so I have a little memento from that side trip. I also wrote my name on the wall outside the studio! (Don't worry though, I read that they paint over the wall every month because there's so much grafitti.)

Interestingly enough, Ben Harper is recording his next album at the studio and we watched a few of his roadies load his stuff into a van outside! Very cool.

Tomorrow I'm off to Stone Henge with the group for a day of historically interesting site seeing. I will make sure to write all about it when I get back!