Day 25

I haven't been blogging as much because we have been doing a whole lot each day this week. It has mostly been homework and class and eating gelato…

On Thursday for our London Walks class we went on the Olympics Walk. An old police officer for east London was our tour guide and he was hilarious. Our walk was two hours long. I honestly wasn't very impressed with what London had done to get ready for the Olympics...maybe they will do more as it gets closer, but I couldn't help but think they were cutting it kind of close. East London has typically been known as the slums of London. They thought that having the Olympics there would give them a chance to fix it up. Total they are spending 12 billion dollars on the Olympics. There were a few interesting things that we learned. London was not planning on doing the Olympics and seemed pretty obvious that France would win the vote. However one of the French representatives voting on where they Olympics were said that nobody would want to have the Olympics in Britain. They said that other than Britain the only other place with worse food was Finland. The Finnish voters were standing behind him and ended up voting for London. Also, during the last five years everyone has been issued new Visas. The last number on the Visa card is a number indicating how "attractive" you are. Those with the highest number will be in the honeyshots for the Olympics. The stadium was ok and I honestly didn't see anything that particularly impressed me during the walk. The swimming pool was amazing. It had this crazy dome shaped roof. However, after they made it they realized it didn't have enough seats so they extended the building and added risers. Now you can't see the roof... I am sure London will pull it together more by the time we get to the Olympics. 

On Friday we went to this church called St. Martin in the Fields. We went to a baroque concert put on by the Festival Orchestra in London. It was all by candlelight and the building was beautiful. They played Vivaldi’s four seasons, Mozart, Bach, and Pachelbel. I wish I could have gotten a program. The best part about it was that they had a harpsichord instead of a piano and it was so neat to hear it played in that building. It was a really neat experience.

This morning we toured Parliament. It was a beautiful building. It was really interesting to learn how their government works. Most of the things they talked about I had learned in my history class. I love all the things I am learning!

Not much happening right now! More tomorrow and then we leave for Northern England and Scotland!