…hopping down the bunny trail, hippity, hoppity EASTER’S on its WAY! Hello! I’m so excited because it’s finally starting to feel like spring, and I’m really looking forward to springtime and Easter in London! Even Easter really isn’t Easter unless I’m in Atlanta with Grams and Daddydon, I’m interested in seeing how the Londoners do Easter. I’ve already figured out that they’re fans of the holiday season/springtime, because this year they’re having “The Big Egg Hunt”! The City of London has placed over 200 huge ceramic eggs all around the city, and they are decorated by some of Britain’s most celebrated artists. This weekend, Sara Ashley and I set out around Chelsea and Kensington to find some of these eggs, and we found several! But before I get into the eggs, let me tell you about the rest of my weekend.
The Student Assistants took us on a tour of Olympic Park this past Friday, which we were really excited about since we’re in the host city of the Olympics. They’re building most of the venues from scratch, and they’re all located in the East End of London. Friday was a pretty dreary day, so the sky doesn’t look too nice, but SA and I took some pictures overlooking Olympic Park. The stadium building behind us is where the Athletic events will be hosted as well as the opening and closing ceremonies. After the Olympics, it will become the new home of West Ham United Football Club. Pretty cool! As you can see by all the construction equipment, they still have a lot of work to do to finish everything, and not a whole lot of time to do it! I’m sure that they will have it all finished by the time the Olympics roll around.
While we were waiting on our tour guide, Zaki and Ola (the Student Assistants) took us to Tesco to grab a quick snack. This Tesco was not the normal express stores we’re used to, this one was like a real grocery store! Sara Ashley and I were in awe. Zaki told us about a Tesco Superstore that’s relatively close to where we live, so of course we had to make a trip, since we had absolutely no food and were living off of spoonfuls of peanut butter. The Tesco Superstore was like heaven! It was two floors of everything you can imagine, and it’s open 24 hours a day! We stocked up and got most of our food for pretty cheap, which is good because we love finding bargains in the most expensive city in the UK. We also stopped by the Apollo Victoria Theatre on Friday afternoon to pick up tickets for Wicked! Sara Ashley was having trouble getting her ticket online, so we stopped by the box office and got her ticket there. The theatre looks stunning, and I can’t wait to check it out tomorrow. I’m so excited about seeing Wicked in London. This will be my fourth time seeing Wicked, and even though I’ve seen it before, I think I’m more excited than I was the first time! It really is one of the best musicals, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the London adaptation. I’m also planning to see Jersey Boys in a few weeks, so that will be fun too!
Thursday was our friend Natalie’s 21st birthday, and we were both sad that we weren’t there to celebrate. But, we got to Skype with her on Friday night for a long time, and it was great to catch up! SA and I both slept in pretty late on Saturday, and woke up to beautiful blue skies! Sometimes the weather in London is deceiving, and even though it might look like great weather, it doesn’t mean it feels like great weather. We’ve had lots of sunny days where the temperature is below 30, which is not my idea of nice weather. But, this day we got the nice weather and the warm temperatures. It was a lovely 60 degrees, so we headed out for the day to explore Chelsea. We decided that since it was such nice weather, it was the perfect day for egg hunting. There are clue maps online that tell you how many eggs are in your “zone” and gives you hints about where you might find them. There are 20 hidden in our zone, so we wanted to take advantage of the nice weather and find as many as possible. We ended up finding 9, and they were all really cool! Some of them are indoor eggs, but most are outdoor. We like the outdoor eggs better, because we can take fun pictures with them. Each egg has a special name, and my two favorite eggs so far are “Union Jack”, and “Seraphina”. I’m hoping to find a lot more before Easter gets here, and I’m excited that Mom, Dad, Sarah, and Peyton will be able to help me hunt some of them down too! This is definitely the most fun Easter egg hunt I’ve ever been a part of. The Londoners really seem to be getting into it too. We’ve seen lots of people egg hunting around the past two weeks.
Several of the eggs were in an area called Duke of York Square, which is a nice little shopping area in Chelsea. It’s also home to the Saatchi Gallery, which is a pretty cool art gallery. They were having a food market in the square on Saturday, so of course we checked it out. They were selling pastries, cakes, cheese, pies, and all sorts of other yummy treats. While we were wandering around, we stumbled upon Partridges, which is an upscale grocery store, kind of like the Fresh Market. Sara Ashley and I have been reading a blog called “An American Girl in Chelsea”, and the author talked about Partridges and how they have an American food aisle. Since we were right there, we couldn’t resist going in and checking it out. We were pleased to find every kind of cereal we miss in America, plus lots of other yummy treats we can’t find in Waitrose and Tesco. They have double stuffed Oreos for only 69p, which is a great deal! They also have Easy Mac, Potato Buds, Hamburger Helper, and Aunt Jemima pancake mix. We were particularly excited over the pancake mix, because the Brits think that pancakes and crepes are the same thing. I can assure you, they are not. We plan on making American pancakes in the very near future. Sara Ashley took a picture of me with all the comfort foods around me so we could show y’all all the treasures we found.
Sara Ashley’s cousins were in town on business this weekend, so she met them on Saturday night for dinner. I stayed in and made meatloaf and mashed potatoes with Jessica, which is just the ultimate comfort food to me. It was delicious, and we had fun cooking. After dinner, we watched Serendipity, which is such a good movie! I spent the rest of the night tidying up in my room and finally unpacking from Scotland, which is definitely something that needed to be done. Sunday was a miserable day. It was rainy and 27 degrees. Pretty chilly for the first week of March! So we stayed inside all day, and Skyped with my roommate Caroline and just had a lazy day. About 7:30, I decided I needed to get some fresh air and get out of the dorm, so I went to Starbucks and worked on homework for a few hours.
The big excitement of the weekend was that we have a new resident in our kitchen. It happens to be a mouse. Naturally, I am not thrilled at all about this. Our kitchenmates don’t seem to understand the concept of dishwashing, and they leave their dirty dishes in the sink for days on end. I can’t stand it, so I end up washing them a lot, but I finally decided to let them sit until the girls decided to wash their own dishes, because I wasn’t doing myself any favors by doing the dishes for them. Apparently they didn’t get the memo, so we had dirty dishes in our sink for like 12 days. I’m sure this buildup of filth is what attracted the mouse, so I had a come to Jesus moment with our kitchenmates, and I think we might have actually gotten through to them. The mouse wasn’t the last straw for me though, it was actually a few hours before we discovered our new friend. I was washing the dishes in the sink because I needed a clean utensil to eat my dinner with, and I accidentally dropped a plate on the floor as I was drying it off. The plate broke and I got a gash in my foot. I’m fine now, but I was not happy at the time. My injury combined with the mouse was just too much for be to ignore, so I had to confront them about it. I think they’ll try to do better about washing their own dishes now, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
I think that’s about all for now…I’ll be updating you again on Wednesday afternoon before I leave for Dublin 🙂 Cheers!
Song of the Blog: Here Comes Peter Cottontail
The Lost Girl 