.:Tuesday, June 29:.

..:Heh...:..

Reporting from Lodon here

Day 5 of the Girl Guide Trip









Still the Prettiest.

V. Happy.




Okay, been a couple of days since I last had acess to the internet, so I'm gonna start from day three and work onwards from there.

Okay, the day after my last post was also our full day in Paris (sniffles) it was really fun though. As you can probably tell, this blog has become my version of a journal for this trip as I am too lazy and most of the time too tired to write in a journal at night. Sorry, really I feel sorry for you if youre actually reading this. Okay, so for day three the big thing was going to the city and palace of Versailles. So amazingly beautiful. Okay, so the day starts out and we hop on the tube to get to Versailles and our leader gets us all lost. Again. For the eigth time in three days. Ingnoring all our directions on how to get unlost (which turned out to be right by the way) We wandered around the subway system of a country where only 2 of us speak the language passably. Whee.

When we finally did get on the right train it was an hour and a bit ride to the town. Luckily there was a very nice( and VERY hot) french guy willing to talk to us. As we were kinda making small talk he asks us what our impression of Paris is so far. Quite innocently Keri pipes up "Well everything is smaller in Paris." Now Keri meant the drink sizes and breakfasts and stuff, but aparently the guy took it the wrong way. He gets this amazingly hurt look on his face and says quietly that we can't have "seen" much of Paris yet. We were all laughing our asses off because Keri didn't get it for the LONGEST time.

The palace itself was amazingly gorgeous, had a v. yummy lunch and headed back to the hotel after an afternoon among beautiful gardens filled with musical fountains and statues of great Roman and Greek mythilogical characters. The indoors was even more beautiful, I wanted to go home and just sketch some of the stuff we saw because the outfits of all the different emperors and empresses would make for the most beautiful character sketches if I just remembered them all.

We all trooped back and had a diner of cheap but extremely yummy chinese food while sitting on our balcony belting out showtunes and disney songs at the top of our lungs for all of Paris to hear (and complain about.)

The next morning was our last in Paris, so of course we chose that morning to sleep in past our alarm giving us a half hour to pack what had previously taken many hours to organise. We then got on the Eurostar and went through the chunnel to London. The ride I expected to be fairly boring but it was actually really fun. Me and Rose, the girl I was sitting with, shared the headphones for her CD player as mine had died a horrible horrible death that results from starvation due to lack of battery juice. We spent the whole trip either talking about books, doodling some rather amusing blurbs and sketches in my sketch book and figuring out that we like the same music. A train ride goes much faster when accompanied by J-pop, David Usher and the Barenaked Ladies. Brilliant.

When we got in we crashed at Baden Powel house,( kinda like a youth hostel for girl guides and scouts worldwide while they're in London) We then went off to do the Jack The Ripper tour of London. It was BRILLIANT!!! We got on the bus, and drove to a stop to pick up our tour guide. He comes up into the bus looking like a fairly normal guy, golf shirt and all. He takes our dinner orders and then goes back to his office to place them. He them comes back out looking like he was straight off the streets of London in the time of Jack the Ripper. He was HILARIOUS!!! He spent the entire time between famous sites alternately swearing, singing and making fun of Canadians. The entire tour was great, he's a professional Ripperologist (He actually has a degree) and knew SO damn much about both London at that time and of all the theories of the time of "Who is Jack the Ripper?"

Today was our second day and we did the hop on hop off tour of London. First stop: the london dungeon. God that place is SO damn brilliant!!! I loved it, but I spent quite a bit at the gift shop.... bad me. Then we went to the London Eye where I chickened out while everyone else went on. (Sorry, spent the first time on it hiding in the centre and not looking out at ALL, didn't want to spend another 12£ doing it again) We went past Westminter Abbey and got some brilliant pics of the London architecture which I will drool over when I get home. We then did something incredibly geeky but so damn fun: We went to platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross station in London. All it is is a photo op but it's still fun.

So now I sit here, with blister the size of my thumb on my feet, my wallet considerably lighter and having the time of my life on this trip.

This is Meredith, signing off.

Meru at 4:22 PM