London

On our way from Paris to Carlisle, we stopped in London for a couple hours.  We were hoping to get on a bus tour, but we left it too late and everything was all booked up.  Instead, we dragged our suitcases along the river.

First here's a view of the escalators up from the London underground.  It must be 4 stories or so long and those picture frames on the walls are actually vertical.

Here's a good shot of the London Eye.

There were quite a few cool human statues that moved when someone put money in their buckets.  These are the best ones.

Here's yet another self portrait of us in our trusty super bright rain jackets in front of the Thames River looking weary and well traveled.

We picked up our rental car from the London Heathrow Airport, and Leif had pleasure of driving on the wrong side of the road for the first time.  The motorways were pretty low stress and I got some nice shots out the window.

Wish you were here yet?!?!

People in Paris

We saw some interesting people in Paris.  We sadly missed taking pictures of some of them, but here's the best ones we got.

Sweet tights at Le Louvre.

We saw this guy from afar while inside Le Louvre.

Alladin-ish pants.

In the underground, this man was singing to the wall.

From our McDonalds viewing seats, batman messenger bag.

Spiderman fanny pack.

We couldn't get this guy from the front, but he looked so French!

Hilarious tourists.  I'm sure we looked like this sometimes too.

Balloon gaucho pants.

Paris

Paris was an experience.  Some parts were absolutely amazing but I can't say us and Paris ended as very good friends.

We made such good plans of how to get to our Eurostar chunnel train but we didn't do so well when it came to getting to our Paris Hotel.  First getting tickets for the Paris underground took forever and these young guys would harrass the tourists in the lineup trying to sell us tickets and then these army dudes came with huge guns and chased them away.  The underground map is very good and since our hotel was called Millenium Hotel Paris Opera, we thought getting off at the Opera station seemed like a good idea.  So we pop up for the first time in Paris with people smoking everywhere and we have no clue where we are.  The GPS Leif has doesn't work so well with all the tall buildings around so we followed it down a very narrow and very wrong street - with all of our luggage!  We turned around and finally got to the right boulevard and decided to go left because there was more road that way.  Big mistake.  We went about 10 blocks before the GPS decided to tell us we were going the wrong way.  We finally found our hotel hot, sweaty, tired, hungry, and grumpy.  Not a great first impression!!! The hotel did have cool elevators though.

Our first order of business was food.  There are lots of cafe looking places so we picked one and sat outside.  I'd heard crepes were delicious in Paris so I tried one of those and Leif decided to go with home comfort and order a cheese burger.  This was part of our view from the patio type area.

Since it was only about 2pm when we finished, we thought we'd make use of the afternoon and check out the Eiffel Tower.  This was the absolute best part of Paris for me.  These are some views from underneath the tower.

We decided to climb the stairs up the first two sections and then take the required elevator to the very top.  Our legs were burning by the end of 1021 steps!

The view from the top of the steps was better than from the very top.

After waiting in the huge lineup we finally got to the top.  As you can see, the wait was well worth it.  You can see the tower's shadow in the picture above and the second one below.

Best shot of the day.

On our way back to the hotel we decided it would be cool to buy bread and cheese and eat like the French.  We found a cheese store where the lady only spoke French.  My broken Canadian French didn't seem to make sense to anyone which was really frustrating.  We got what we wanted in the end.  Unfortunately she didn't sell bread so we had to go find another shop.  It was the same story in there and the lady wasn't very nice.  On the way back to the hotel we had more issues because my 2-day train ticket that we bought that morning wouldn't work.  We ended up walking to another station with an information window and the man let us through so we could go home and recover.

The next day started out very positive.  We found a McDonalds for breakfast down the street with an upper eating level.  People watching up there was so entertaining!  We saw so many weird things but as soon as we got out the camera the best ones all hid.

Our next stop of the day was the beautiful Notre Dame Cathedral.  I didn't realize this place is actually a working Catholic place of worship.

After going back to the hotel for a new camera battery, we headed off to Le Louvre.  This museum is GIGANTIC!!!  We turned up our cultured side for a couple hours and walked and walked and walked.  The highlight was probably seeing the Mona Lisa.  If you want to see more, I took 113 pictures there.

To complete the long day, we went shopping at the nearby Galeries Lafayette.  They have stores like Gucci, Prada, Louis Vitton, etc.  Very ritzy place.  For supper we found a yummy crepe stand and had one chicken and cheese and one nutella and banana.  So good.

We tried to go to McDonalds again for breakfast the next morning and people watch but they were closed even though their sign said they were open.  We ended up walking around for half an hour until Starbucks opened and we were so happy they had filtered coffee instead of the weird stuff we'd been drinkng!  We decided to take a taxi to the train instead of using the underground again.  Best decision ever.

And that was Paris.  I'm going to do another post of all the weird people we managed to take pictures of another time.

England Pictures Part 1

Our hotel in Paris has free internet!  Here are some pictures of the first leg of our journey.

Self portrait at the Calgary airport.

First views of England.  Love at first sight.  They have tunnels made of trees!!!!

Freya's show jumping run on Sunday afternoon.

We have no pictures of shopping in Tunbridge Wells because I wasn't a good tourist and didn't even think of bringing the camera!  This is the Hawhurst Library where we had an hour of internet time to make the last post.

Tuesday at the sea side in Eastbourne.  On the pier behind us was a glass figurine shop and the guy was making them.  It was so neat to see!

Eastbourne had a Next and we spied this long jean skirt for you Molly.  I hope you like it!

We made a quick stop at the ruins of Pevensey Castle.

And then arrived at Hastings, another sea side town.  This is a really cool tram that goes up the side of a cliff.

Another stop on the way back was at the Hawkhurst fish farm.  It was really sunny!

Wednesday morning we took a walk to the Hawkhurst golf course to see if we could play.  We weren't allowed to golf in runners so we settled for a couple pictures.

In the afternoon, David and Joan dropped us off to explore the Bodiam Castle.  It looks exactly like you picture a castle should be.  Complete with a very wide moat.

On Thursday we got up at 5am to get to London to catch our train to Paris.  This is at the London train station.

And now we're in Paris.  Lots to say about Paris so I'll leave that for another night.  We're getting up early to people-watch tomorrow morning before catching our train back to England!

We Love England!

We arrived safely in England early Sunday morning (or late Saturday night for us).  We were really tired but the beautiful scenery held our attention for the drive to David and Joan's.  Everything is super green and the roads are really narrow, sometimes like tunnels.  Joan made us breakfast before we hit our beds for a quick nap.

We woke up to a wonderful Sunday dinner and then headed out to watch their grand daughter in her horse jumping competition.  It was on someone's private estate and once again the views were amazing.  We have pictures but no hardware to connect the camera, so you'll have to wait for those.

Monday we slept in a bit - it's hard to get up at what feels like 3 in the morning!  Then David and Joan dropped us off in Tunbridge Wells and we had 5 hours to shop til we dropped!  They have completely different stores here and it was really exciting.  I might have bought a few articles of clothing!  We must have walked almost 10 kilometers up and down hills and the mall a few times.

Today we've hit up the local library for the internet (it is so weird with no cellphone and no computer!) to make some home contact and then we're hopefully going to the sea side with our lovely hosts.  Tomorrow we'll likely stick around town because Thursday morning will be extremely early to catch our train to Paris!

We'll try to find a cafe with internet so we can post pictures from there.
Til next time!

I could be a brick layer!

Earlier this month we did a brick laying lab as part of our masonry design class.  I was a little worried about getting all dirty and having to wear seriously unfashionable and uncomfortable work boots and having to spend 2 hours on something else right before a midterm, but it turned out to be so much FUN! We laughed so hard at our lack of skills and it was great stress relief.

We got into partners and built arches.  It's one thing in class for the prof to say the quality of the brick laying is super important for the strength development, but it's another thing to execute that!  I definitely have huge respect for brick layers now.

Here's Tim and I starting the arch.  It was pretty hard to get the mortar slapped on vertically and end up with the right spacing at the end for the last brick.

It's so pretty standing all by itself!

Some other group's much more curvy arch.

We watched this team load their arch.  They got a lot of bricks on there!

And here's Tim loading our arch. Getting dirty is worth it sometimes!

Belts and Forks

I've been pretty sick for the last week and in that time I think I've shrunk a bit.  We had a masonry lab yesterday (more on that in another post with awesome pictures) which meant I had to wear my jeans for the first time in a while.  And my belt was too loose to hold up my pants!  So half an hour before our evening midterm (great timing!), I asked around the homeroom to see if anyone had a belt hole puncher.  Of course, no one did.

But Amir had a fork!

And Trevor wasn't studying very hard right then.

So they found a hammer and mangled the fork (so sad I don't have a picture of that!) and made me a belt hole between two concrete cyclinders!

And I was able to write my midterm with my pants nicely cinched.  That's a success I'd say!  Thanks to my handy friends!

Grad Pictures

Here are my best three grad photos. They all look so official and stuff.  Based on the majority, I've ordered some prints of the hat one.  And since everyone has asked, no I did not take any pictures without my glasses on because I didn't even think of it.  Sorry!