Pretend it's still Friday.

I completely forgot to mention in my birthday post that my dress arrived in the mail that afternoon! I am wearing it for our trip to London today. in love.

I couldn't fall asleep Wednesday night (even though I had been exhausted all day!) and got to bed pretty late.. You can figure that I slept in considerably on Thursday morning. More like, Thursday afternoon. Becca's family was in the kitchen when I walked in, and it was so funny not to have college students on our floor. They're in town for her birthday, which is today! Happy birthday, Becca! :]

Katie told me I had a 'surprise' downstairs, which Cailee so kindly dropped on my doorstep. A package from my family! I love seeing my mom's delicate handwriting when I get mail. I didn't have scissors in my room, and was too stubborn to search for some. I broke a pencil in my valiant attempt to open the package, but it worked, after a bit of a finagle. Inside were some birthday treats, streamers, balloons, a birthday poster and card, and a bottle of maple syrup! Oh, I was ecstatic. I don't even use the stuff THAT often back home, but I miss it, and it's ridiculously expensve in the UK.. Probably because they have to ship it from Canada! Definitely going to have pancake night sometime soon. It makes me feel so special to be thought of, and all the emails, texts, and facebook wall posts made my birthday just wonderful.

For thursday's run, I was curious and wanted to experience the city outside of my normal route. So I ran until there was no more Oxford to be had. Down Woodstock, St Giles, Cornmarket, and forevermore until I hit the roundabout directing traffic to Abingdon, turning around to pay another visit to the beautiful Christ Church meadow.

On the way to St Aldates college night, I passed Anna Popplewell on the sidewalk. Totally recognized her, stared, and she shied away as to deflect attention. I freaked out trying to tell Allison who we had just walked past, and Cailee (walking about 50 feet behind because she had waited for Kelly) recognized her too! If you aren't familiar with the name, she plays Susan in the most recent Chronicles of Narnia movies. She was much smaller in person than I had expected.. Makes me wonder how large I would look compared to her on the silver screen if I had expected her to be 'normal' sized! Then again, a large majority of the girls here are shorter than me. At least I'm easy to pick out in a crowd if I got lost!

What anther fantastic college night. Kelly, Allison, Cailee, and I sat a a table with some strangers and got acquainted, and even invited one of them to our Sunday night devo! Worship was awesome, and I loved the talk about being willing to follow after God, harkenig back to our childhood memories of mom asking if you'd jump off a bridge if your friend did it too. Great thought- Jesus doesn't want us to dawdle or make excuses, just trust. I know that I can certainly find area for improvement here. Let's do it!

When I got back to the house, my Italy group got some flights and a bus ride booked, and I am much less stressed about the entire thing. The group is Becca, Katie, Ben, Jacob, Grant, and I- it'll be wonderful!

Left the house this morning at 7:30 for London, catching up on blog posts by typing on my iPod notepad as I fight the urge to nap on the 'coach' (bus) ride. Trying to fix my 'mental' (there's some british vocabulary for you) sleep pattern.

Back again. Lloyd's was really cool- and by that, I mean interesting, over my head, and at times bland. We walked up to this great glass building and took the lift up to a ninth floor conference room for some tea, coffee, cookies, and introductory session. With the exception of lunch, the rest of the morning up to 1:30 pm was spent broken up as three separate groups floating between 'the floor', a session about credit, and a crash course on the British vs American banking systems. The floor was definitely cool. It was a huge workspace filled with stations of 4 computer screens, stock rates and breaking news scrolling on the tvs overhead. Each of us was paired up with an employee, who explained the whole thing, answered questions, and let us listen in on phone calls that they receive. Cailee and Grant both ended up getting the same guy that I did over the course of the afternoon. I told him that I wasn't actually a business major, even though I was on the trip, and I think that confused him a bit. Kinda an awkward experience, but the 45 minutes didn't drag on too slowly.

Reloaded onto the coach to go to Parliament. We were literally on the exact street of our destination, and all of a sudden, traffic was at a standstill. Upon closer evaluation, we saw a huge demonstration being escorted by countless policemen, along with their cars and horses. The South African president or ambassador (someone important, I know those are extremely different positions) was in town, and these people had something to say about it. Once the mess broke up, we had a few minutes to walk around the Westminster/Big Ben/Parliament area. It was so much prettier now that I wasn't occupied with being so cold, like last time! The tour of Parliament was pretty snazzy.. No pictures allowed, and that was so unfortunate. Many of the ceilings and walls were gilt in gold, with intricate paintings and impressive sculptures. The oldest part of Parliament was a hall dating back to 1097, the whole ceiling carefully constructed solely of wood, with the use of wooden dowels rather than nails or screws. It was the only part of the building salvaged after a fire burned a large majority. Sick.

Not much else happened tonight, just came back home and watched the Dark Knight for our Bible class. Still trying to get caught up on blog posts, hang in there!