On Sunday I went down to London to meet all the other JETs and go to the Pre-Departure Orientation. It was a bit confusing getting out to Brunel, but I met so many lovely people while I was there! On our last night, we raced across town in the pouring rain (2 busses, a taxi, 3 tubes and a run!) to the Embassy. It was so lovely to be in the Ballroom at the Ambassador's house! Lots of champagne and sushi! We will do the same in Tokyo and I just cant wait!
The sun came out (making everything look beautiful) and Claudia and I went and sat in one of the college gardens. I dont remember which one it was, but you couldn't walk on the grass or sit on benches on the grass unless you were part of that college! We found a bench by the origional wall of the city, it was really nice and the flower gardens were great!
I love that Oxford had so many beautiful traditional lanterns, one of my seriously favourite things to photograph! We went to Christ Church, which was full of so many tourists, mainly because it happens to be where Harry Potter was filmed!
Cambridge has always been a beautiful place, everything is this lovely yellowish colour stone. It is almost like Bath stone. There are all these cute carvings all over the walls. One of the colleges had birds carved into the world. I took these photos at Christ Church College - I thought they were really pretty! I had a great day taking photos, and it was grand because the sun was out!
I went down to Oxford to visit Claudia last Thursday - a really spur of the moment thing, which was grand as I'm not usually that compulsive. I found the park and ride (after the first one was full), and caught the bus into town. We had a lovely day, with cream tea, and college visiting, and lots of lovely chats! Oxford is such a pretty place. The colleges are all beautiful, even the tiny ones!
Dave and I had dinner near Picadilly Circus, but wandered over after to M & M world, which had just opened last week. It is 4 floors of super fun things, bright colours and lots of statues! I found out that there were 5 different M and M statues around, and got my photo with all of them. It was a bit like Disney, someone dressed up as a Peanut M & M - hence the cute photo because those are my favourite!
Kew has an entire section dedicated to Japan. It's quite a trek from the main entrance, but it is lovely out there. We grabbed a nice San Pelegrino Orange and set out on our walk. There is a great giant pagota and a lovely Zen garden. I really liked it there, and I'm going to be seeing a lot more of this type of thing in the near future! By this time it was a lovely sunny day, really getting warm. It would have been a lovely day to have been at Wimbeldon, but we had an equally good time at Kew!
