The Weekend

We have spent our first weekend in the UK.  We started Saturday with a flat viewing in Brockley, south of Goldsmiths  a little, where we saw how much more space we could get for the same price as right close to the university.  The tough choice is to decide if we want to live farther away and pay for transportation, or live closer and have less space.  Everything is expensive here or it seems that way to us because we have not paid rent in the last 3 years due to our deal with working for St. Matthews Church.  Most flats are going around £800 and if we want to share a house, it's around £600.  One thing that hit us hard is that most places want you to pay 6 months in advance if you do not have a UK guaranteer.  For those of you bad at math, £800 x 6 is 4800 that they want us to pay at once.  Looks like we are going to be getting jobs so we can do all the fun stuff we want to do this year.  I bring up the housing talk because we felt like we were spending all our money already.  That brings us to our weekend.

We looked at free things to do in London and boy are there a lot.  We have a 7 day pass for the tube so we can travel as much as we want.  Saturday afternoon took us to London Bridge and Tower Bridge.  London Bridge is nothing special, except that it's not "falling down."  Tower bridge is what everyone thinks of when they think London (that and Big Ben).

We stopped into Cafe Rouge because Emily wanted a proper meal and got breakfast food at 11:30.  We continued on across the bridge and walked around the Tower of London. 

It is interesting to note that this building was built in stages beginning in bout 1100AD (that's almost 1000 years ago!)

We hopped on the tube and decided to go see if the queen was around :)  We headed to Buckingham Palace and viewed from the outside.  

Sunday began with a trip to see the Imperial War Museum which was only 1 block from our hotel.  We saw how Britain dealt with WWI and WWII.  We also saw a very nice Holocaust exhibit.  The Museum was free.  Lunch came next and then we headed in to the heart of London again to go to the British Museum.  We managed to find 2 geocaches on the way. 

At the museum we saw the Rosetta Stone and the actual stones from the Parthenon (when we were in Athens, GA this past summer, we went and saw a copies).  Sorry, no pictures as it was drizzling outside.

We have noticed the weather changes really fast here.  It started sunny and clear this morning, went to cloudy by midday, and rained this afternoon.  We are getting used to the cloudy, wet, cool weather, but it is not ideal. 

Tomorrow we are taking a ride on the Eye, going house hunting/visiting school, then off to meet people in the evening.