Harrow Hall of Residence

Northwick Park. My Tube Stop. Right next to Harrow Halls of Residence........ i mean- RIGHT next to me. Harrow is about 15 minutes north of the city by Tube. Althought I don't nessarily like that fact, I have gotten to get used to it. My dorm is where all the international kids live... at first that really freaked me out because- well, Indiana? Ohio? I live in all white areas. Suburbs. My university is 99.7% white. I'm a minority here! Crazy to think! But i AM an international kid, and thats what this dorm contains. NOOOO but honestly, after I met my flatmates I am totally cool with it. Nathan is british, Aleana is british, Seecum is japanese but british, and Tibo... oh Tibo, hes french. When he first introduced himself- no joke- i thought he said T-Bone. And for about 3 weeks I thought his name was T-Bone. Tibo... mysteriously always has 17 people at once in his small room. I came to realize it is because they smoke a LOT and a LOT of weed. All the time. My hallway always smells like weed. And they get the munchies a lot because they make a wreck in the kitchen.



BUT YEAH- My room is great. I have my own bathroom and the internet...
ANNND look how close the tube is to me!!! You can see it out of the window.
Those are pictures of Jude Law on the wall...on the right because i didnt bring any decor over, i bought a calendar of Jude Law and pulled out my favorites and put them up all artsy like. If you are special, i put you up on my wall in that little star of pictures---- lets see.... i got me, matt, michelle, adair, molly, cervs, julie, chase, ted, jt, katherine, sara, libby, katie, dom, pape, and josh lorenz... okay, i guess those are just my favorite pictures, maybe not my favorite people. :) But feel special if you are up there.


And i'm right next to Northwick Park which is just beaitiful... and right next to Wembley Stadium- the kick ass alien looking stadium that they are building for the 2012 olympics in london. Wooot!

Staying with a Hostfamily???

Okay, First of all i will admit, i was scared as hell to stay with a host family for a weekend. I was appeased by the fact that I would be with another student, which they told us we would be, and then i found out that i WAS ALONE! With a strange family!! Somewhere in England! Ahhh! Thats what went through my head... exactly.


They were The Tonks. Funky name. Cute house. I'm in Mamble, England. The father is a police man, the mother is a dog groomer (and has her business in the next door office), and they have two kids, Olivia (6) and Joseph (4) who are about the cutest things I've ever seen. I honestly want to bottle them up and drink them and gain their accent. The little girl Olivia has an entire pink room. Her walls are pink.... her bed is pink...... she has pink ponies....... and pink barbies.. pink everything. The little boy Joseph LOVES dinosaurs. I thought i knew a lot about dinosaurs from my awesome "DINOSAUR EVOLUTION" class, but no, i was mistaken. A four year old knows more than me. He has a GREEN room like grass, and watched jurassic park 3, seven times while i was there. The mom Caren said she's memorized the words of the movie.

We went to Ludlow for the first day. There is a castle there. How coolness. British Olly from Butler says he lives around there. Found that interesting. The town is so quaint!









I could almost picture the medievel times when the townspeople would have jesters and dump their garbage into the streets from the upper windows and wear cool old clothes... yeah. Well, this is kind of what the neighborhood looks like:

Pretty cool, huh?
















Here is the castle. Unfortuntely, it wasn't open in January- fricken A man. Would have been a neat thing to see though. I could have imagined more things.... like a feast with a giant pig being rotisserized and everyone drinking wine out of golden goblets and laughing about their jolly lives and watching court jesters!




Lastly, here is a beautiful cathedral that Caren took us to on the last day- everything is gold. I just wanted to take some of the gold and put it on my teeth and be Mr. T. But here is the alter. (oh and we also went to Worster Cathedral which is on the 20 pound bill! Whoooo! They had a crypt... creepy stuff. King Arthur is buried there too! Sneaky!)









This is boris the english cat.











Olivia rolled around my bag for like 20 minutes. I tell you, kids are amused by anything.










The Tonks

Numero UNO!

Hi!! Okay okay, so I kind of hate blogs, i think they are a little juvinile. Most people just write about their lives, how depressed they are at the time and their lastest with their significant other. Isnt that personal? Have we lost our privacy?? No, but I finally came to my senses, and just realized that I NEED TO MAKE ONE because, and this is why:

1) i'm in london and no one knows whats going on in my life besides me and my london friends...
2) i like to document and scrapbook things and this is kind of like that
3) it could be fun?
4) I LOVE EUROPE! and i want to scream it out to the world!

So. Okay, hi.

My name is jessie. This is me:


Okay, actually its a montage of pictures that my dad put together while i was leaving the cincinnati airport.





It was a long journey, that flight. Virgin Airways though, let me tell you, is great. I got to watch the inflight entertainment. There were 50 movies to pick from and 30 tv shows and then music and docucmentarys, ect. I watched Flight Plan and THE OFFICE, my FAVORITE SHOW, and a british show called "Little Britian" which I found to be quite marvelous. I tried to make myself fall asleep to some "relaxing meditation music" they had availiable. Didn't work. I think I got about an hour of sleep for the 13 hour flight. When I woke up from my 45 minute nap, i looked outside the plane window and saw this:

How beautiful!!! We were above the clouds. The sun was shining. Everything was happy. Ben Melchoirs and I ate a marvoulous breakfast that somehow came 2 1/2 hours after dinner came.














When we arrived, we looked like death. My eyes were puffy and my hair greasy (see picture) And after the chaos of finding our bags, the "coaches" (buses for you americans) came to pick us up off of our little feet, and take us to the one, the only- St. Giles Hotel.






St. Giles was rockin. It was right in Central London, next to Oxford Street and from there you could go basically anywhere. The rooms in St. Giles... haha, the rooms were tiny! Its this tiny room with two single beds connected to a tiny room with a table and two chairs, and then a funky bathroom. Its all crazy, but its kind of what I expected of london. There was this girl staying with me named Kristine. My hotel-mate. She goes to college at Colby-Sawyer and is friends with my cousin Greg! Small world huh??












Anyway, that night, was our first night at the pubs!! Even though we were exhausted, we decided to go out. Why not, you know?? I'm in london. We basically made a fool out of ourselves because we had no idea how to order a drink or how to ask for a drink or anything. It was pretty embarrassing. When I embarrassingly tried to order a drink, the bartender flat out said "you're new here"? Yeh yeah yeah. This was the first pub we attended: The Mortimer Arms. Kind of lame, lots of older people watching football. Not soccer. But it is soccer. But not football. Confused?

One thing that I would have wished that I had learned earlier, was that you think that if you wear another color, like red or pink or green, its not that bad... but then you actually go out on the town by yourself, and you see what all the locals are wearing. Black, brown, navy, blue.... dark colors. Well, one morning, my first morning there, when all the brits were going to work, i decided to put on my bright pink long sleeve shirt with my pink and gray puffy vest over top of it. Hmm. Lets just say that I stuck out... My friends, don't wear pink here.