That Other Post I Meant to Post

Due to EXTREME weather conditions, the London Underground has moved up your update schedule to provide you with the best possible service! A list of line closures will follow. All lines will be delayed. Your regular update service will continue as soon as the rails are cleared.

SO! In case anyone has a life and isn't following the London weather reports, the city is COVERED in snow! And they have NO IDEA what to do with it!!! After living in Boston for a few years, it's actually quite funny to see a whole city shut down because of 4 or 5 inches of snow. People were rushing around, woefully underdressed, disoriented, and completely unsure of how to proceed with this strange white stuff falling on them from the sky! They all seemed to be expecting some public service announcement explaining that the snow was just a blip in the system and Parliament would like to apologize for any inconvenience and to please return home and stay indoors until further notice as we're not sure what sort of effect this strange whiteness could have on the human body!

Classes today ended up becoming kind of optional, due to the fact that the teachers couldn't figure out how to get into school, so I walked to school and went to my first class in spite of wanting desperately to just ditch it and go explore the snowy city! After an hour and a half of not really doing anything for fear of getting so the people who couldn't make it to school wouldn't be behind, I decided that since I was kind of dying being inside... I SKIPPED A CLASS!!!! I know, shameshameshame! We sent you there to learn something useful, not to just go gallivanting off into the snowy wilderness that is London being covered in more frozen precipitation that it's seen in Years, BUT!!! I HAVE NO REGRETS!!! IT WAS WORTH IT!!!

I grabbed a muffin for lunch, hopped on the nearest working train, and headed off to find Buckingham Palace! Then I found St James' Park! And the Houses of Parliament! And Big Ben! And the London Eye! And St. Paul's Cathedral! And tons of snowmen everywhere! I even got my picture taken by a professional photographer in front of the fountain outside Buckingham Palace because she liked how bright my coat was (and we swapped e-mails so she can send it to me and if you want to see it go to katenoblephotography.com)!!! And I took tons of pictures, including some for other tourists walking around! It was truly truly beautiful and honestly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity unless global warming continues to mess with the established weather patterns and it snows this much again... But I probably won't be in London for it if it does, so clearly this WAS once-in-my-lifetime, and I'm SO glad I did it!!!

I'm going to have to figure out some way of putting up pictures so that you guys without facebook can see them if you want to... Anyway, after the profusion of picture taking, I decided it was about time for another bus adventure, so I picked the first double decker that came along and hopped on it since my feet were absolutely frozen! It worked out very nicely, as I got a nice little tour (pretty much free since on Friday I bought a week long rail pass! It's already paid itself back considering my 6 rides already today) and I ended up at a nice little pub called the Globe that was near the Moorgate tube stop. One of the best pieces of advice I got before coming to London was that if you ever needed to find pretty cheap, decent food, just go down a side alley until you find a homey-looking pub where the conversation is louder than the music if there's any music at all and you should get a good meal and a pint under £10; nothing fancy, but always solid fare. Today's special was Gammon and Eggs with "chunky chips" aka potato wedges and YES! To all who know my eating habits, the eggs were cooked properly and eaten properly and I got to do my gooey egg yolk dance, but I did it very subtlely so as not to disrupt the general populace!!!

After a good lunch I stopped by Picadilly Circus to check on a book at Waterstone's and then to check on a silly apron I'm planning on getting, but the stall I'd seen it in before was closed and the book was out of stock, so I headed back here only to find my 6 o'clock acting class got cancelled along with my Physical theatre class tonight! All in all, I got an INCREDIBLE day simply by being a bum and skipping one phoenetics class. And I only bought a REALLY cute warm hat and a pair of incredible, thinsulated, fingertip-less adult sized gloves for a total of £4.99! What a smart and stylish shopper! Alright, since the building is closing early today, I'm off to go back to the hostel for some good old-fashioned homework-time! After I load the pictures on to my computer of course. ;) Loving you all and missing you!

[as a foot note, I found a pub that has free wi fi and big couches and is large enough to not care that I've been sitting here for hours! It may be some hours more too...]