Our Tale of Two Cities

Our last day in London was a complete whirlwind! We woke up super early thanks to a lovely British wake-up call and made our way down to the hotel's continental breakfast. With the prices of food in the city we tried to eat as much as we could to get us through the day (and stole a few Babybel cheese to tie us over). In search of Internet we made our way to Starbucks for some WiFi but were disappointed when, after we purchased our drinks, we realized that they actually charged to use WiFi there. We chugged a good portion of our drinks down and made our way to our favorite restaurant Pret-A-Manger. Appropriate because we should know French but we are embarrassed to admit we actually had to look up the meaning.. ready to eat. It smelled delicious, as it always did whenever we walked in (although we had never actually eaten there before so we really had no idea what the food was like). Marissa was able to Skype with her sister, Brianna, and was so excited to be able to talk to someone from home! We did our daily family emails confirming the fact that we are both still alive and well.

An hour later we were on a bus with tour guide Nikki who told us all about London. We rode in the coach with her for about three hours as she told us all kinds of interesting facts about the city. Unfortunately we only got off the coach at a few places for only a few minutes... just enough time to snap a few pictures with an extended arm, hoping to get some of whatever was behind us in the photo so we could prove we were actually there. The tour was a perfect way for us to get acclimated to the city. We saw many of London's historic landmarks--Big Ben, the House of Parliament, West Minster Abbey, St. Pauls Cathedral, the Lord Mayor's home, among many other sites. It was interesting to see how parts of the city was rebuilt after the war, however there was one cathedral that had been partly destroyed by shrapnel during the war but never recovered to remain as a reminder of the great war.


We passed Fleet Street and heard tales of the demon barber, passed a cathedral whose spire influnced the tiered wedding cake form we are used to today, a pub called The Hung Drawn and Quartered named as such in reference to the punishment many were given like William Wallace (Mel Gibson) in Braveheart, and our favorite, a pub named after Prince Albert who thought it fashionable to pierce every orifice of the body including his own personal jewels (now referred to as the Prince Albert).

We ended our city tour at Covent Gardens, an outdoor/indoor market with all kinds of artisans, shops, and food. This was the very place that Henry Higgins found his favorite pupil Eliza Doolittle working as a flower seller. After roaming through the market we decided to go back to Parliament Square as the tour never actually made a stop there. We took countless touristy photos and then took the audio tour of Westminster Abbey. We were blown away by how ornate the abbey was. It was truly breathtaking! The amount of money that kings and queens spent on tombs was outstanding. Henry VII had a tomb built for him and his queen that cost the modern day equivalent of £500,000!

Because we felt like we had become familiar with the layout of the city we decided to walk from Wesminster Abbey back to our hotel only four tube stops down. With no map and no real sense of direction in London we ended up one tube stop from our hotel..... two hours later! Needless to say we were exhausted at this point in our day so we quickly packed our things in our room and went out for a fish and chips and a pint at the Gloucester Arms, a pub just blocks from our hotel.

Tired and full we went back to our hotel and proceeded to make ridiculous video blogs--coming soon! As it was our last night in London Sophie came over and took us out to her favorite bar/club The Roadhouse. Unfortunately we were both completely unprepared to be in the same room with more attractive guys than we had ever seen in our entire lives and tried to avoid contact as much as possible because of the hobo-esque look we were sporting. Naturally we look forward to returning to London very soon to husband shop. It was a great way to say goodbye to one our favorite cities.

Nine hours later we were on a plane to our home destination. We landed in Nice and took an autobus to Cannes, about 40 min outside Nice. We were glad that London acted as a buffer for the culture shock that we experienced once we landed in France. I mean for one, they speak French here. Everything is in French. We did our best to try to read road signs and bilboards as we made our way to Cannes to refamiliarize ourselves with the language we haven't studied for quite some time now.

After our orientation meeting we were helped to our rooms by guys who were either French and spoke perfect English or American with perfect French... we are determined to find out there story and will report back soon. Our room is quaint and orange. Very orange. We don't know much about our classes or the program yet (meeting about all that is tomorrow) but we do know that we need to carry around our 4x6 student ID cards at all times as well as our Medieval-Hogwarts style keys and are not allowed to miss class (which we have five days a week... doesn't leave much time for weekend traveling). Those things were made very, very clear.

After all the excitement of the past few days we are looking forward to a quiet night in. Look forward to more thoughts on Cannes coming soon.