It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

That's the Mr. Rogers song by the way. First of all, I added pictures to the previous post so check those out. They are really sweet. Next up, sorry about the whole no post thing yesterday. It was a busy day (like all will be for a while). But it is 2:27 am back home so I guess I just missed the cut off. Time to catching everyone up on what I have been up to since Thursday. Let's do it.
After I finished the last post, I went into our common room and laid down on a couch for what I thought was going to be a couple minutes. That turned in two hours. Then I went up to my room and went to sleep. I ended up sleeping about 12 hours straight. Probably the most glorious 12 hours of sleep I have ever had. While we are on the subject of my room... I share a bedroom with Mo and there is another bedroom connected to us which has Nick and Dan in it. The four of us share a bathroom. So it is like my apartment from last fall except no kitchen and no living room. It is pretty nice. We probably have the biggest bedroom out of our group as far as square footage goes. I like that aspect of it. A picture is to the right. I sleep on the left by the way. So after sleeping 12 hours, I was plenty rested.
Thursday morning I got up at around 7 and went into the dining room area and read some of "The Hatchet". I ate breakfast and just kind of hung out with a couple other people until we had to leave for our next orientation thing at 10. The orientation thing was basically us sitting in desks while two people told us a bunch of information that I felt I had heard before. I made sure to grab a window seat and I just looked out the window whenever I would get bored. After that I went back to Metrogate (the name of the building I live in). I ate lunch and sat around again. Our next orientation thing was a walking tour of our neighborhood (thus the name of the post). I live in a neighborhood called Kensington. It is a very affluent neighborhood. The row houses across the street from me sell for around 1 million dollars (£500,000). That is incredible. It is a very nice neighborhood to walk around and it pretty safe at night. The picture to the right is not of the street I live on but it is very much like all the streets near where I live. They are so cool and a lot of them are made out of red brick and they are awesome. So we walked around our neighborhood and saw Kensington Palace which is a 10 to 15 minute walk from my flat. We walked down High Kensington Street which is very similar to Michigan Avenue in Chicago, busy street with a lot of shops. We walked by T.S. Eliot's former residence. It was a very enjoyable walk, mostly because it wasn't raining and the sun popped out a couple times (more on that in the future sometime).
After the walking tour, we had the night to ourselves. I went back to High Kensington with Rochelle, Vanessa, and Amy. We went to a couple stores and then walked back to our flats. After resting up for a little bit, Peter, Amy, Kristina, Vanessa, Mallory, Rochelle, and I went out to eat. We found a fish and chips place. Nothing interesting about it, fried fish and french fries. It was sweet to eat them in England though. After that we just kind of walked around aimlessly for an hour or so. As we were walking, we talked about a myriad of subjects. It turns out that 5 of the 7 have a significant other (everyone knows which group I was in). We ended up making a big loop around the Kensington neighborhood. We walked by the Natural History Museum. It was dark so the picture is kind of blurry but you get it. The building is incredibly awesome and to the right in the picture they had set up an ice rink. It was kind of sprinkling when we walked by it so it was disorienting to see people skating while it was like 40 degrees out and sprinkling. There were a lot of people there. I suppose it is a novelty here. Another thing to mention about my neighborhood is that I am about 10 to 15 minutes from the Natural History Museum, Science Museum, and Victoria and Albert Museum. All three are awesome and all three are FREE. Can you believe that???
After walking around we stopped at an Italian restaurant and got tea. We ended up spending 3 hours there talking as a group. We went around the circle and told a mini version of our live story. It was really cool and fun just hanging out and talking. Then we came back to our flats and continued the conversation in Kristina's room. I got into bed at around 2 am. Ugh. Then I woke up at 6:30 this morning and couldn't fall asleep. So I got up and ran from my flat to Westminster and Big Ben. AMAZING. I didn't bring my camera but seeing the sun rise in the middle of the London Eye and reflecting on the Thames River was magical. In 45 minutes we're taking a bus tour so there will be MANY pictures later today or tomorrow. Till then, toodles!