First Official Week

Ok, so I finally have some pictures of the neighborhood I'm living in and my dorm building (I'm slacking on the pictures, I know)! We live in Kensington, which is an extremely expensive area in London (which is saying a lot considering everywhere in London is expensive). It has some of the most expensive flats in all of London, and probably some of the nicest cars I've ever seen parked outside. You see Range Rovers and Mercedes on every street, not to mention the occasional Porsche, Aston Martin and Ferrari...it's insane. Not too far from us is the Kensington Palace, where Princess Diana used to live, which is located in Kensington Gardens, which leads you into Hyde Park. It is a crazyyyy expensive area, but it's a given that I will never be living here again, so taking advantage of it now is amazing. 

 

The surrounding neighborhood

Atlantic House, home for the next four months!

I finished my first official week of classes on Thursday (no Friday classes woowooo!). I'm taking 12 credits, so four classes total; three history classes and a communication class. I wanted to take a management class over here, but Pamplin (the business school at Tech) wasn't having it and I wouldn't have gotten credit. Classes are a lot different over here! I think my biggest class has about 30 people in it, which I'm not used to at all. All of my professors seem pretty interesting, so hopefully that means an interesting semester. Two are British, one is Colombian, and one is French...a little different from back in Blacksburg.

A couple of us stayed in and had a movie night in our common room on Thursday night, but last night we headed out to Camden Town. We went to a club called Koko, and it was definitely one of the coolest places I've been so far. A fairly inexpensive cover in comparison to some others, and the venue was incredible. I looked it up online, and apparently it used to be the Camden Palace Theater, and was later turned into The Music Machine, a live music venue for a lot of punk music in the 80's (Camden is associated with a very "alternative" style and culture). For anyone in Columbus, this place reminded me a little of the Newport, but wayyyy nicer and a lot larger. All the architecture of the old theater has been kept in tact and it was beautiful!

 Hard to tell, but this is the view of the stage from a few floors up

 Some of the boxes 

We did some creeping...it was locked.

So overall, the first official week was a success! About 20 of us have planned a trip to Edinburgh this upcoming weekend (look out Scotland....), and are taking the Megabus up there and staying in a hostel for a couple of nights. We'll be on the bus headed back to London during the Super Bowl, so I'll miss watching the Patriots lose to the Giants once again, but how many times am I going to get to go to Scotland? It's going to be awesome, we're all so excited! And the weekend following, we're headed to PARISSSS!! I'll keep you guys updated on everything!