Semesters of Love

Taking a cue from Katie, I think I'm going to break down the semester. I saw and did so many things, that this seems like the easiest way to sum up my semester in London.


London in ...
Days abroad: 118
Days in London: 102
Days in other countries: 16
Countries visited: 4
Shows seen: 21
Bill walks taken: 3
Tim Kidd walks taken: 1
Tube lines ridden: 11
Tube rides: I lost track around several hundred thousand ...
Times I cursed the Circle Line for being delayed: probably somewhere in the thousands, possibly even a million
School trips: 3
Night bus trips taken: countless
Newspapers read: too many too count
Visits from friends/family: 3
Photos Taken: 3,818 (seriously)
Mockumentaries participated in: 2
Friends made: countless
Memories: priceless


Things I'm not going to miss
The Circle Line
The — ahem — special toilet in our flat
The incomprehensible pictograms on our washer/dryer and oven
Navigating the sidewalks (uneven surfaces and Londoners that can't seem to walk on one side of the sidewalks)
Crazy cab drivers (I swear they were all out to get me!)
The gap
My coin purse weighing a ton all the time (seriously, I think I could knock a man unconscious with that thing sometimes!)
The cinema professor and talking about the "European aaaaht cinema" (European art cinema) all the time
Our landlord and the real estate agency we went through
Not being able to understand people's accents sometimes


Things I'm going to miss
The accents (I know that kind of contradicts the last list, but as cryptic as they were sometimes, I am going to miss the British accents ... all 200 of them)
The tube (except the Circle Line)
The pubs, particularly the Redan
The (free) museums
The double-decker buses
How tidy everything is
The fact that they use words like 'tidy'
How much people read the newspapers there
The close proximity to so many theatres
How well behaved the dogs are (most don't even need leashes)
The architecture
"Charlie Chaplin"/Jerry (AKA the mime I interviewed)
The London Center
Fred, the ICLC caretaker who always liked to play jokes on us
Bill, Heather and Sarah
Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens (so pretty!)
Walking along the Thames
Getting mistaken for an Aussie (this happened on at least 4 separate occasions)
Coffee and Free Croissants from Café Forum
Pret a Manager sandwiches and croissants
Fish and Chips, Bangers and Mash and Bulmers (though I'm going to do my best to find the latter in the states)
Going out to clubs and always managing to end up in Piccadilly Circus
Our flat and all its oddities (well, some of them anyways)
My flatmates
The places I went
The people I met




Idea for blog post © Katie Woodward