Turkish Cypriots

Eek far too far behind on blogging. Which has something to do with all the lovely people who’ve been visiting me and a great deal to do with the papers and presentations professors have been assigning essentially spur of the moment. Oh, why not lets have a twenty minute power point due next week. Sounds like great fun. No, don’t mention it at any point in the past few months, that’s alright, it would take the excitement out of it!

Anyways, the student council pub night went well. Friday I met up with the Milavecs for a meander around Picadilly and dinner before they saw Billy Elliot, which to my great disappointment they were disappointed by. Anne and I were going to just hang out at their hotel with a friend of hers from Denmark but she hadn’t seen Buckingham Palace, so we asked the concierge how long it would take us to walk there from Kensington. He told us not to try and that it would kill us and offered to hail us a cab. The concierge staff is excellent about hailing cabs, but of course we walked anyways. Barely an hour each way!

Times I have now walked obscene distances across London to Buckingham Palace for the sheer hell of it: twice.

Saturday we walked down Billionaire’s Row to Notting Hill Gate and wandered through Portobello Road market for a bit before heading back to Harrods again. Our attempts at dividing to conquer the girls swimsuits (Aunt Bonnie and Anna), men’s stationary (Uncle Stan and Julia), and souvenir shop (Anne and I) left us with extra time before we were supposed to reconvene, so we rode the Egyptian escalator all the way to the top of the store where we discovered that the eerie opera music we’d been hearing was not prerecorded but rather being sung live by a woman in a red bedazzled gown on one of the balconies.

Sunday I bid the Milavecs adieu as they caught their plane back to Philly and went to go meet up with the delightful Christy, my Pittsburgh roommate who is currently studying in Florence. We attempted to view the Victoria and Albert Museum but she’s sick of Renaissance art by now and I never cared for it to begin with so we settled on just catching up over tea for a bit before seeing the Tate Britain, which was really cool. Later we got Cadbury Cream Egg McFlurry’s (a true cultural phenomenon) and other British junk food and made grilled cheese and talked for hours.
So that’s some brief catching up for you. Now I return to contemplating the architectural significance of Westminster and the political implications of the admission of Cyprus into the EU.