Yesterday was dubbed Harry Potter Day. Amy, Tara and I went to all of the Harry Potter sight's we hadn't already seen. Our first stop was platform 9 3/4, which to our great disappointment, was closed. They are doing construction where the actual platform is, so instead they just had this dumb plastic wall thing outside King's Cross Station. Pretty sad. But we took pictures anyways, since it's the best we could do. The next stop was the street where Harry, Ron and Hermione apparate to in the seventh movie after the wedding. The cafe isn't real, but the street sure is and it's call Shaftesbury Avenue, just in case you were curious. While we were checking that out, we found this tourist shop that we stopped in and FINALLY found Kate Middleton engagement rings. I promptly bought one and fulfilled my souvenir wishes. The next stop on Harry Potter tour was the Ministry of Magic. We had high hopes for this because the building looks absolutely wonderful in pictures. The building they used was Great Scotland Yard and we only had partial directions of how to get there, so once we didn't know where else to go, we just started asking random people on the street. Tara went up to one guy and asked him if he was a muggle, to which he answered no. Tara relied with "Oh, perfect, then can you tell me where the Ministry of Magic is?" He couldn't, and walked away giving us pretty strange looks, which just made it all the more funny. Finally we found where everyone was telling us to go, but they all directed us to New Scotland Yard instead of Great Scotland Yard. So disappointing. We had no idea where to go, so we ended up back on the tube to go find Diagon Ally. We did indeed find it, but it's normally a market and it's only open on weekdays, so there wasn't anyone there, which was also kind of sad. So overall Harry Potter Day didn't go quite as successfully as we had hoped, but it was fun nonetheless.
After we finished all of our Harry Potter sights, we went to the Tate Britain museum. Tara and Amy had to go for their art class and I just went along because I hadn't been yet. It was not my favorite museum. There were some cool exhibits, like the ones that had real paintings of actual things in them (ex: the Romantic exhibit was cool). But most of the museum was more modern stuff and I'm not really a modern art person. There was a painting of Ophelia from Hamlet called Ophelia (profound, I know) that my high school teacher showed our class when we read Hamlet, so I was pretty excited about that because it's what I always picture when I think of Ophelia (because you know I think of her so often). That's one of my favorite things about going to all of the museums here. I get to see all of these paintings that I've seen pictures of but now they are just right there for me to see whenever I want to see them. But anyways, I didn't stay very long and came back and did some homework and tried to get my blog to post my Scotland stories.
Once Tara and Amy got back from doing the stuff they had to do at the museum, we went on a walk for class. This walk was through a bunch of London's parks so we decided to bike through them instead of walk. London has this great bike rental system, which I think it wonderful and every city should have it. Our professor has some family visiting from Lincoln, England and so one of their cousins, Jared, came on the bike ride with us too. I was pretty hesitant about this bike ride at first because the last time I rode a bike was a good 10 years ago. I was way out of practice and just kept picturing myself falling flat on my face. But I sucked it up and went along anyways. That's one thing I feel like I've done more in London than I ever have in my whole life. I'm pretty much willing to do anything here, including things I wouldn't have done back home. But it always turns out great...maybe that's a lesson for me? So we get the bikes and we head of and it's really true when they say you never forget how to ride a bike. I didn't have any troubles at all! I mean it started out a little wobbly but once I got started it was fabulous. I was pretty pro. Minus that I wouldn't go over curbs because I still thought I might die, so I just walked the bike over the curbs. haha
Once we had finished our bike ride, we went over to Trafalgar Square because it's one of our favorite places. There was a football game (soccer in America) yesterday between Manchester United and Barcelona. Barcelona won 3-1 and even though we're Manchester fans, we celebrated with the Barcelona fans in Trafalgar Square, just for the fun of it. And fun it was. There were police officer everywhere and fans were lighting up flares but the police just sat there and watched. It was great. There was just excitement in the air. The only not so great part was the couple who were basically eating each other because they were making out so badly. Gross.
Time to get the homework done...you'll have to come back to hear about today's adventures.
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