Chillin in the city

Since Nikki and I only have about a month left here, we decided we need to start crossing things off of our grand list of "Apparently cool things to do in London." One of those things was to go to Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, where everyone stands on "soap boxes" (in our experience, it was a plastic chair) and are allowed to talk about whatever they want (apparently the UK is not as big about free speech as the US is), so we got up early to do that this morning. It wasn't as cool as I'd hoped. We get more people trying to tell you about their radical government/social policy ideas in Santa Cruz than here. But we wanted to do get the whole experience, so we stood around for a while with a handful of other foreigners in the cold England morning and listened to some religious dude condemn the war, and explain how it's not a Christian thing to be killing each other. It was a little awkward because he was so mad, and kept looking at all of us like we didn't agree with him or didn't understand why it was all so terrible. I really do understand though... I felt like I needed to go up to him and say "Dude, I totally agree with you, stop yelling at me."

Anyway, we didn't stay too long because he was the only guy there, and we were kind of over it. It was too early to go shopping as planned (stupid early openings on Sundays...), so we had an early lunch at a crêperie off a side street on Oxford street (Duke, maybe...). It took FOREVER to get food, but it was pretty good once we got it. Then we went shopping in a LOT of stores around/on Oxford Street looking for a dress for me to wear for my solo performance final... kind of stressful since we couldn't really find anything that wasn't a million pounds or that fit me right... but it was nice to get a chance to explore all the fancy shopping that comprises Oxford Street... Debenhams (where I bought my coat), Selfridges, Zara, Marks and Spencer's, House of Fraiser was cool, H&M, and, of course, Top Shop... I didn't really like shopping until I came here... they know what they're doing in London...

Living here is so fantastic. This is such an incredible city. There are so many exciting things to do here every day. I'm SO lucky...