quand en france

Wow, long time no post. It's been an eventful few weeks here. We had our winter break all of last week and so we (Elea Geerlings, Will Lutz, Matthew and myself) decided to hop up to London to visit the other Covenant students at Oxford and to SIGHTSEE!

Traveling in Europe CAN be cheap - but you have to know what you're doing. For us, we had a little of both. So Saturday morning we took a train into Nice where our flight would leave from. The cheapest train ticket was a 6am to Nice and the cheapest plane ticket out of Nice was at 9:15PM. Needless to say we had the entire day to explore Nice (with hefty backpacks - and a suitcase for elea). It was beautiful and we were pumped 1) because we were exploring Nice but 2) because we were leaving for LONDON!

Some of the things we did in our entire day in Nice included but not limited to: taking pics at the mediterranean, eating at "ah-ha!" chinese restaurant, the boys explored a waterfall while elea and i grabbed a quick café americain, saw all of old nice AND new nice, saw the set-up for the Nice Carnival, walked the entirety of the boardwalk, etc etc.

We arrived at the airport about 2 hours early worn out and ready to go to London. So I could make this story into a dramatic, pitiful, truthful story about how we were miserable and had no idea what was going on and when our plane was coming, but I'll cut to the chase and say that we had a 4.5 hr delay. Which if you do the math correctly, put us into London at 2:45am. Yikes. So our options were to wait until the public transportation started running again at 6am or hire a private taxi for a lot of money. After spending over 24 hours traveling, we decided to splurge for the taxi. Now this wasn't just any taxi, this was entertainment + ride! We got in the car and after a few minutes Will asked "so, how ya doin?" and that opened the floodgate! This guy did NOT stop talking for 45 minutes! I'm not even exaggerating. He had a stereotype for every single ethnicity including pakistani in which he said "no matter what country you go to you can find a pakistani taxi driver". He proceeded to go into ALL of the comedians he knew and listened to etc etc. Wow.

Well, we got into Tooting Bec at 3:45am (where Will had hooked us up with housing through his cousins who live in London, but their flat isn't big enough for 4 people, so they found 3 guys from church who had a bigger flat and agreed to let us crash). Lauri woke up and walked us to the flat we'd be staying in at 3:45am! He was so generous, and he told us there was a big jug of milk and cereal for whenever we got up - we are SO blessed! So we crawled into bed after a long journey and SLEPT!

Sunday morning (after our large bowlS of cereal) we met Ken and Guy who were our hosts for the week. They were so generous and wonderful showing us the map, inviting us to church, leaving 4 umbrellas for us (it's London ya know). We decided to hit up "speaker's corner" which is a hundred year tradition of dialogue between different opinions at High Park. BYOS(bring your own soapbox). This is the essence of freedom of speech. It was way cool and a little stressful if you don't really like distress and loud "dialogue". But overall it boiled down to Christians talking loudly with Muslims. Fascinating!

That night we joined Ken and Guy at their church service which was absolutely delightful! It was a small church plant that met in a school gym. Every single person introduced themselves to us I think, and we had to explain how we "knew" ken and guy and it was quite a night! After church a group of people usually went to a pub for a little fellowship - naturally we went along!

Monday was our day to Oxford! We found cheap tickets and rode the Oxford tube out to see our friends! It was such an incredible feeling to see a familiar face in a foreign place. When we saw Kate we didn't really care what we looked like, we just hugged and laughed and hugged some more. We bought some lunch food and headed back to their ginormous house and cooked a big meal together, Kate, Al Gore, Hannah Vanbib, Laura Hutton, Will, Matt, Elea, me. After lunch they gave us an AWESOME walking tour of Oxford, we just kind of went everywhere. Finally that evening we met up with Hunt (who had been studying hard all day) and all went out for dinner together! It was just an encouraging time and it was so good to see all those people and be all in the same place even just for a day.

So Tuesday and Wednesday were our big London days. Tuesday it was raining ALL day and kinda nasty, but we powered through and even were joined by some of the girls from Oxford who came out to London for the day! We saw Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Westminster, the National Gallery, and more! That night Elea, Matt and Will went to see Vampire Weekend in concert and Hannah, Laura, and Kate joined me at my flat for pizza and we watched when Harry Met Sally. Basically an all around great day!

Wednesday it was GORGEOUS outside! We walked the entire south bank. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and it was just a great last day in london! We saw the changing of the guard, big ben (this time in the sun!), London Bridge and the tower bridge, London Tower, St. Pauls etc etc. Amazing day.

And now we're back! Getting ready to celebrate Eleas 21st birthday (which is today!). Classes start back up - I can't remember if mine were canceled today or not, so I'm not sure what the plan is for me today. And yea, that's life. It was really good to be "home" in my own bed and having a few more options for clothes. And it was definitely good to be back in wifi range :)

So that's London; here are some pictures!