The Return

:o) I'm back from London. Actually, I have been since Mon afternoon.

It was an awesome trip! The first day, MJ and I just explored on our own--we only had three days there, so we decided to do the try-to-cover-everything sorts of things. We took one of the tour busses, went on a walking tour, walked around and explored on our own for a while (point being to just see what London was like), and went to the Tate Modern. Then on Saturday Yuya came in, and showed us EVERYTHING! :o) It was superfun. We got to see the Rosetta Stone (among many other things), the veryawesome British Library (I've no idea why there aren't more people there), platform 9 3/4, the Nat Hist Museum (which was great!), and then we finished up with a quick trip around Harrods (where I bought scones) and had the best hot chocolate EVER at the hot chocolate place there. Sunday (or last day), we began by going to church by Hyde Park, and then took a bus out to Oxford where Yuya again showed us around (and again, did an excellent job of it). We saw cricket players and lawn tennis players and croquet players and punters on the river.... we saw beautiful parks and beautiful buildings... we saw the Blackwell's bookstore my dad always told me about... and we saw two super-cool museums, one of which is arguably the most unique museum I've ever seen. It was made from some well-to-do guy's collection that he assembled from all over the world during his travels (1800s?), and was all organized by function of the objects involved. Very cool. Then we went back to London and went to bed so we could wake up at 4am to catch our flight back here.

And after a delightful time in London, on Mon PM Ab and Alain arrived, and we have been having much fun ever since. :o)