I'm Baaack!

Well, I am officially a world traveler. I have made it safely back from England and lived to tell the tale. England is amazing, I loved being there. It was so new and exciting, I learned so much (seriously, every tour of a city or castle comes with an audio tape), and I felt so privileged to be there. I have so much to share, I hope people don't care if I post a lot of my pictures and share a lot of anecdotes from the trip. In many ways I view this blog as a journal and I really want to document as much as I can. So if you get tired of hearing me talk about England . . . send me a shout out and I'll come up with something much more interesting like Obama's foreign policy.

Before I get my pictures up and running (since they still need to be downloaded to my computer), here are some funny / interesting things I learned:

• The people of England LOVE juice. They don't drink water, they drink juice or fizzy drinks (soda). I thought it was funny especially because I love a tall glass of ice water. Another funny thing, they never add ice to anything. I would have killed for ice in my juice. I don't really like my drinks tepid.
• The building are all prehistoric old; the cars, however, are brand new. Such a contradiction. It seems completely reversed here in the States.
• I don't think roundabouts are as efficient as everyone's been telling me. Instead, I think they just disrupted the flow of traffic. Give me a street light anyday.
• Everything closes at 5 pm, much to my chagrin. Every pub, however, fills up after 5 pm. I just didn't get it, I would have thought that they would keep the touristy places open a little later. Apparently they do not. Sadly, we missed out on a few things because of this weird rule. What can you do?
• 5 American girls generated a lot of attention--more than I was expecting. We were definitely a novelty over there. I'll admit, it certainly was a boost to the old self esteem.
• The people over there definitely keep in shape by doing a lot of walking and running. We saw runners everywhere and you have to walk a lot just to get to places. I loved the walking. I kept thinking I need to walk more but really, it would take too long.
• Deep fried fish and chips are actually healthier than pizza or burgers. Funny, huh? They only had about 600 calories. Most of the salads at the Cheesecake Factory are AT LEAST that much. So I didn't really feel bad about eating fish and chips.
• The locals really love music videos. They really love Lady Gaga and Eminem, by the way. Their music was everywhere.

Anyway, I could probably keep going. Stay tuned. I took over 1000 pictures. I wanted to capture every vista before me. I don't think you can really do it justice with pictures, but it was so fun trying.