A much fuller day in many respects than I had thought it was going to be, but still fun and moreover productive. To begin, I had to wake up fairly early, to be at the STA office at 10:00, and looking back on it, I was fortunate because it was rainy out and noone was there, leaving for a very full discussion between the agent and I. Talking with her, we first tried to establish what I will be doing after I get out of school this semester oddly enough. Basically here is the deal as I now understand it: I am most likely going to be going to the southern part of Africa for a month or so, providing that I work out my budged and find an excess to do it with. It is a really high possibility and I would be going with a travel group from Johannesburg, South Africa (leaving on Christmas for me and meeting up with them on 29 December), and we would spend about 29 days together leaving from Nairobi, Kenya, so I would most likely finish on 28 January. I would then fly back to London, maybe stay there a few days or weeks, depending on if anyone wanted to travel out and see me, namely my brothers and so forth, providing I had the money I would most likely remain for an additional week (probably at Hyde Park Hostel). After this point, I would probably fly back home to Denver (so in early February for those of you wondering). After discussing this, I was and am still very tempted to do it, in fact, I reserved a spot for the place and the airline tickets, but I can cancel by Monday, so essentially Monday is the day I need to know by, and of course it is all a matter of money as always, but I do have the other two factors going for me (time and place) so we’ll see and know by Monday.
The next and actually more pressing topic we discussed was my mid-term or Autumn break... we worked it out to where I am now going to be going from Venice to Berlin... and I am pretty excited for it, it still has a little planning left, but otherwise it is looking really good, here is how the route will work. I will be flying to Venice and staying there for two nights. I then will go from there to Vienna for three nights, following that I will go to Prague for another three nights. I will then finish by going to Berlin and staying there for the rest of the time, I think three more nights, and then of course back to London. So, we’ll see... all in all it took us three hours or so to discuss all of this, by which point quite the queue was building up behind me, they only had two agents working that day, so I felt fairly guilty by the end. After leaving there I went to school to get access to the internet, as mine wasn’t working, I updated my journal, paid for a photo-bucket membership, as I had just reached my capacity, so there was another $25, but oh well. After doing all the stuff on that, it seems to have taken about another three hours or so, so my plans for the day of going and seeing the member branches of the British Museum fell somewhat short. But after finishing there, I did actually go to the National Gallery, which was quite exciting and before getting there I saw a cool looking pub called the Sherlock Holmes, which I plan to revisit some day soon. Sitting on Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery has some really cool stuff in and outside of it. On the outside on either side of Nelson’s Column, there are two statues with mermen and fountains beneath them... but I really like the intense stares they both give. There was also, much to my bemusement a statue of George Washington outside of the gallery, of all the presidents to put there, I would think he would be one of the least desirable for the British to erect a statue for, since he was considered a traitor to his King and Country (England). Inside, I saw many really cool pictures, including William Hogarth, and Van Gogh’s chair... and I really did not get to see everything so I definitely plan on returning back.
I left the British Museum and headed back to make it just in time for a thing the school was putting on for an organisation called Host UK, which is a thing that allows students to go and spend a weekend with a British family throughout the UK. The school pays for everything but transportation and a £20.00 fee, so I figured that sounded really fun, and signed up with hopes to go to primarily the Lakes District, followed by Cornwall, followed by Wales. After this, I returned home. There we all watched the Aviator, which I have always maintained is a great film, or at least one that I think was excellent. And then I fell asleep during part of it, and just went back and crashed on my bed.