London day #2

Yesterday was a pretty good time as well. Chad took me around, and we blew through the British Museum in about 20 minutes, then headed to the National Gallery and saw some neat paintings. From there we walked about 200 feet to the Notre Dame London center, which has an unreal location. Apparently Notre Dame outbid Germany or some comparable country (maybe France, I can't remember) for the building. It is very nice, way better than JCU.

Then Chad and I went to this War Cabinet museum that also has a Churchill Museum attached. That may have been one of the neatest museums I have ever been to. The War Cabinet museum is this underground bunker that Churchill and the rest of the War Cabinet made a bunch of their war plans during WWII. It is apparently essentially exactly as it was. A lot of the stuff down there was left by those guys after the war ended, and they restored the rest. Very cool. The Churchill Museum was also very impressive. It is only a couple of years old, and has recently won a bunch of "best museum" awards. It has this long, interactive computer (about 30 feet long) that has all the years of Churchill's life on it. You choose a year, and all the months pop up. You choose a month, and there's practically a fact on what he did at least half the days of his life. Ridiculous amounts of research must have gone into that.

We essentially skipped lunch. It was 3 PM by the time that we got out of the museum, and after walking through Hyde Park (and seeing the Peter Pan statue!), we were back at the apartments around 4. We chilled for awhile, and then a couple of kids from ND that I kind of know showed up from Oxford and Dublin. We ended up hanging out all night last night, and it was a really good time. First we ate some stir fry that Chad cooked up (eating out here is ridiculously expensive... and the dollar continues to make it even more expensive. Jeez, it's 1.49 right now to the euro! Pretty soon my card won't let me take out 200 euro at a time even if I wanted to. Ugh.), and then we went out to some pub. It was packed with ND kids, because some student was having a birthday. From there we went to another pub (the London kids here drink a lot, more than our program. I think they need the energy from drinking, because the food ain't so hot here), and then we went to a hookah bar. We stayed there for an hour and a half, and then walked a few blocks back to the apartments. It was really, really cold last night, so when we finally went inside, it felt fantastic. One of my new friends thinks I have some kind of syndrome or something that she said she has because my hands and feet were whiter than snow by the time we got in. I think I just have low blood pressure. Whatever.

By that point it was pretty late, and we started a movie, but after about 15 minutes I was ready to pass out (and some other kids were already asleep), so I went upstairs. Perhaps the most important moment of the night were those 15 minutes I was sitting there watching the movie, because in front of me was a Physiology book. I was flipping through it, and the only thing I could think of was "my God, I have no interest in this at all." So, yeah, maybe medical school isn't for me after all.