Tara Lawrence and Sasha Rumberg

A typical day in the London house goes like this: Waking up and walking down a flight or two of stairs to our classrooms. During breaks, running like crazy down to the basement to get a soda or a meal, especially getting to the toaster.

Museum visits are weekly for Dr. Gary Hart’s Humanities classes — attending the National Gallery, British Museum, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert, and others. After classes, figuring out what to do for dinner.

On Monday and Wednesdays we have our group meals where we eat together at a certain restaurant. Da Marios and Wagamamas seem to be the favorites of the house.

After dinner, students will either go out and catch a show in the West End, go out to Southside, go to a club, or just hang out in the student center watching movies.

Students also enjoy running in Hyde Park or just walking through the area enjoying the spring weather that has begun to arrive. The flowers are blooming and the London students are happy to see the sun.

Right now, the London students are hopefully enjoying their Travel Week. I am in Rome typing this. We have students all over Europe this week.  Some are in Italy enjoying the Italian culture, visiting friends in Florence and soaking up the rays on the Italian Riviera. 

Others are in Spain renting a house for the week. Some are starting in Spain, going to Portugal and spending time in London, while the rest have decided to stay at the house as family and friends visit. As you can tell, we are taking advantage of our week off and trying to find some sun.

This semester has been incredible for the London group. We had an amazing educational field trip to Greece, walking among ruins, seeing things talked about in our Humanities books, swimming in the Aegean Sea, riding donkeys on the island of Hydra and just enjoying the warmer London weather.

We also enjoyed an exciting visit from President Dr. Andrew K. Benton and the Board of Regents in early March. We then took off for our educational field trip to Wales.

Not only did we get to visit castles and cathedrals, attending an Even Song in Bristol, England, but there was a huge cinema next to our hotel where we frequented during our free time in the evenings.

It was a very exciting addition to our trip as the tickets were only £3, normally £8 in London. The Wales trip also proved to be a quite relaxing and enjoyable trip, just as Greece was. 

Then before we knew it … Travel Week crept up. Basically, Travel Week is a week that we get to go where ever we want from the Thursday classes’ end through the entire week to Sunday, 10 days in all. Since it is a bit harder to get places from the UK, we get the entire week, unlike long weekends the other programs get, like a Spring Break.

When we return to London, we have one more week of classes and then finals. We will be returning home to LAX on April 10 at 6 p.m.

Many of us are excited to see our friends and family, but are upset that we are leaving an experience that will merely be a memory in a few weeks.

The students are still enjoying London, attending lots of plays in the West End, hanging out at Southside and just trying to take it all in before we finally have to go home and snap back into reality.

March 28, 2002