In two times at once.

Jan. 10
I discovered that I can take notes on my camera today. As in, I can take a few pictures, pull up the "drawing pad" and jot down what the names of the places were, and save that. This will hopefully help improve my recall for what, exactly, I was taking pictures of, though not in the frequent case where I take a picture because I think it's pretty or artsy.

I got to get up very early and meet up with some of the BC girls who are here at Queen Mary, and then we met up with the Minters and some other BC students out front of Parliament. Since it was frigid, they paid for us all to get coffee (I decided on extra chocolatey hot cocoa plus espresso) before we got on the boat to cruise down the Thames to Greenwich.

I had the best, most alliterative burger of my life there... the Bishops Beefburger with bacon, bluecheese and chips. It was good. Wow, just thinking about it is making me hungry again. After lunch, we split into two groups, so I ended up with QM girls, Liz and a kid at UCL with her, Paul and a girl at King's with him. Norman, our tour guide, gave us the brisk walking tour (since it was frigid out) with the longest amount of time indoors we could spend. The Royal Seamen's Hospital is huge, and gorgeous. From there, we went up to the Royal Observatory, which was really cool (we got to straddle the Greenwich Mean Time Line).

Not as cool but still entertaining were the two guys who went to the top of the hill, one with a unicycle and one with one of those hardcore rugged terrain skateboards, and took turns taking the skateboard down the massive hill, wiping out, and limping after the board since it skittered well past where they'd fallen off.

I lost the QM girls halfway through the museum, so Paul, Liz and I meandered through the city to find a way to get back into London, and finally Paul and I made it to the Natural History Museum and took the most roundabout route possible to get to the mammals area to meet up with my friends. I was a super creeper and just sort've shoved in with them and followed along a couple of cases without saying anything, until finally Vanessa noticed that I was the obnoxious person who'd invaded her space. Caitlin and UF Kevin still almost missed out on it despite the laughter. We moved on to the invertebrates area, where we started choosing our "favorite of the case." I almost lost twelve more cool points for saying "Oh, that'll be so hard, I really like mollusks!" when asked to choose my favorite mollusk. Somehow I did not, though. (I still can't fully remember what I've lost cool points for thus far.)

We grabbed some very yummy dinner at Cafe something down the street from the Natural History Museum (pretty close to Harrods), walked back to the NHM to get on the tube, all of the entrances were closed, walked all the way back past Harrods again (freezing the entire way) and finally got on the stop there. Kevin, Caitlin, Vanessa and I stopped at Budgens and bought some cake on the way back once we got off, and USC Kevin and Hilary came over to help us eat it; we spent a long time drawing "bull" puns (you draw a bull in some context, and it'll be things like "able," "integrable," etc) and then watched Men in Tights.

It was a fun, cold day.