British St. Patty's Day and Visitors!

So I was about to sit down and attempt to completely update my blog on the past month..BUT I reconsidered rather quickly as writing for hours and hours sounds extremely unappealing to me at the moment. The past 5 weeks have been epic to say the least. To view pictures of my trips to Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome, check out my Facebook for now. Eventually, I promise to have blog posts about all those adventures and much more information about London, of course.

Meanwhile, I thought I would give an update about recent happenings in my hometown, London!! Before leaving for Rome, Keetin, Alexa and I decided to be a bit touristy in our own city by going to climb the tigers at Trafalgar Square. Built in the 1800s, Trafalgar Square is seen as a center of democracy and protest- rallies, promotions, demonstrations, and various other activities take place here each day. The square has two beautiful fountains and has stairs leading up to the National Gallery, a beautiful art museum in the heart of London. It's somewhat of a tradition to go and climb on and take pictures with the lions that surround the center monument in the square. Little did I know that climbing up to the statues was much more difficult than anticipated...after nearly straining all the muscles in my legs and getting hoisted up by Alexa, we had a random lady take a gazillion pictures of us. Since the National Gallery was open for about 45 more minutes and we had extra time on our hands, we went in and wandered around for awhile. I had no idea that the National Gallery had SO many famous paintings- Van Gogh's yellow sunflowers and Mozart's bridge over the waterlilies just to name a few. I will definitely be making a few more trips back there since I barely had time to cover 1/3 of the museum.

This past weekend was a HIGHLY successful one. Luckily, my best friend in the entire world Michelle Anne Weisz was able to come visit from Brussels. Her entire Journalism program came along with her, so basically the entire weekend was a huge Missouri School of Journalism reunion. On Friday night, all of the Mizzou London and Brussels kids had a dinner at O'Neils with their professors, which I so kindly invited myself to. It ended pretty early so a huge group of us decided to go out to the O'Neils in Picadilly Circus, aka the huge one with three floors. Alexa, Jason, Nick, and some of Jason's U of I friends met us there, and it was an absolute blast! We danced for about five hours...only stopping when we were completely starving and needed to find some sketchy street food (one of Alexa and I's expertise after our Amsterdam excursions).
The next morning, Maggie (whom I discovered was my long lost soul mate after our amazing time in Rome together) and I decided to take Michelle sightseeing around London, hitting all the main tourist spots. Unfortunately, about HALF of the tube lines weren't running due to construction, so we ended up taking the most roundabout way possible. It ended up working okay decently, as we were able to wander through Hyde Park and finally see the famous Peter Pan statue. Michelle insisted on taking cheesy pictures with her umbrella in order to recreate scenes from Winning London- I pretended I didn't know her (though secretly I was somewhat jealous). We finally made it to Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and Parliament, which Michelle was really excited to see. We took a nice stroll along the Thames up past the Tate Modern museum for Michelle to see Millennium and Tower Bridges. I'm pretty sure she was most thrilled about Millennium Bridge since its guest appearance in the latest Harry Potter movie.

Sunday morning, Michelle and everyone else sadly had to leave pretty early to head back to Brussels. Strangely enough, London celebrates St. Patrick's day a few days before the actual holiday, and there was a huge festival and parade happening near Trafalgar Square. Of course, I grabbed my favorite adventurous friend, Matt, and headed to the area with all the action. We walked around the square for awhile where a bunch of booths were set-up selling Irish themed food and booze. There was a stage set-up where a variety of different musical artists were to perform from 11 am to 6 pm, entertaining the throngs of people that stopped by to celebrate. Keetin and her parents (who are both in town visiting) joined us to watch the parade. It was really fun to see authentic Irish dancers, bands, and bagpipers walking through the streets of London.
Even better, it was an absolutely GORGEOUS day in London- I am starting to get my hopes up that the weather is going to finally change to actual springtime weather...

Anyway, I have a few pretty exciting weeks ahead- including a visit from my favorite person in the world- KEVIN in just 10 days!! I'll also be making a visit to Brighton, as well as attending my first ever English football match! But as usual, I will try and blog again as soon as possible in continued attempts to make up for lost time and fill you all in on my life. Cheers!