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Today was another busy day, this time with at least a little more sleep!  We’ve had beautiful weather so far.  Everyone keeps commenting that we must’ve brought the sunshine with us, because they’ve had rain for weeks straight this summer.  It hope it keeps up.

We had the standard group introductions to the college this morning.  We registered and had to get our King’s ID cards, etc.  We had our first class, which was mostly just going over the course expectations and schedule for the next three weeks.  The course is called “The Olympic City: Global Games, Local Impact.”  It seems like a well-balanced class, and I really liked our teacher.  He is from the U.S., North Carolina specifically.  It was surprising having an American teacher, but he seems great.  He went to Cornell for undergrad, then did his master’s in the UK, and is now a PhD student.

As part of the course, we have two major assignments — a group presentation, and a 3,000 word paper.  We were divided into groups for the presentation today.  There are two students from China in my group, then four American students.  In my class as a whole, there are students from various parts of the U.S. (Hawaii, Texas, Chicago, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee), as well as students from China, Singapore, and Scotland.  The diverse group should make for an interesting classroom.

The other five Fulbright students are from the following places: Victoria is from Indiana, Danny and Laura are from New York, Jenny is from Chicago, and Lindsey is from Tennessee.

After class, we were taken on a tour of King’s, and we went to lunch.  The only major highlight of that was seeing the Round Reading Room of the Maughan Library, where Dumbledore’s office was filmed.

After getting a little coffee in my system to keep me going, we went off to find Buckingham Palace.  When we found the “London Visitors’ Centre” along the way, we quickly got sidetracked.  We decided we wanted to see a musical, but we debated what musical we should see for probably an hour and a half.  I have as much trouble making decisions here as I do at home apparently.  We finally went with Lion King at the Lyceum Theatre; we’ll be seeing that Wednesday night!

We finally made it to Buckingham Palace – beautiful!  We walked through Hyde Park, and found a pub called Taylor Walkers’ where we decided to get dinner, since by this point we were all starving.  I have a feeling that we are going to do really well rationing out all our food money.  If we eat just granola bars or cereal for breakfast and have small lunches, we’ll probably even end up with extra at the end, which I definitely wouldn’t mind.  Most people decided to try the classic fish ‘n’ chips, but I went with a veggie burger and a strawberry & lime cider.  After dinner, we walked through an area that we kept calling London’s Times Square.  We passed the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, several casinos, comedy clubs, and theatres.  We passed their China Town too! We wanted to go on the London Eye, but it closes at 9:30, so we postponed that until tomorrow.  We still walked to see it, and Big Ben as well! By the time we’d done all that sightseeing, it was after 11:00, so we decided to head back.  Another full day to look forward to tomorrow 🙂