To London and Beyond

Wow, What a trip! Sorry for the delay in relayin you all the crazy info, but I needed some time to regroup and refresh myself before i began to inform you about the interesting and crazy time of the trip. First... pros and cons of the trip:

Pros:
- Amazing weather the entire time!!

- Fun talks and time with students

- ... that's about it.

Cons:

-stupid travel agency

-stupid tour guide ("umbrella lady")

-always late everywhere

-not enough time


Now let me tell you about the experience we had there. So, to start off, we left on Wednesday at about 230pm... wait... scratch that... the bus was 3 hours late, so we left closer to 6. About 4 hours into the trip, we had a problem with the engine. One of the belts broke. And had it not been for one of the adults on the trip who had a nice flashlight, the drivers woulda never fixed it i believe. Thus, we missed our 530 am ferry time and instead hit the 1030 one up. And therefore got to london at about 130ish. Fun times. We saw all the fun sights. Quite briefly though. Nothing of significance to note about though. We saw most of the fun stuff I suppose.

We were 2 hours late meeting our British families so some of them were a bit perturbed, but that's ok I guess. But there were some arguments between our teachers and the British people, so that was fun to watch, the next night was even better. The British speak with an accent (no problem for me to understand, but a bit of a problem for our English teachers at times I thought) and especially our tour guide to understand. To state it simply, our tour guide couldn't really speak english too good. Therefore, Whenever we had to communicate with British, whether it be for tickets or anything of that sorts, I would make sure and be there just to make sure everythign was understood and that they understood us. Big point to make: Our guide could speak English a bit, but even me, when i tried to speak in my teacher voice (nice and slow and simple), she usually didn't understand, so i stopped speaking English cuz she was just too stupid. My students asked me "why doesn't she speak to you in English?" That's simple, cuz I knew she could understand me when i spoke Czech and of course I understood her Czech, no problem.

Second day we spend in Stratford where Shakespeare was born and we spend 3.5 hours looking at his grave and the business of his sister's husband's business and then we went to the grand city of Okford and spent there less than an hour. That's good planning if you ask me :) More problems ensued with the British families after a long traffic jam along the highway.

The next day we visited the Tower of London and then headed to Paris. We got to our hotel at 10pm because apparently, our tour guide said that that was the time that this 24/7 hotel stopped having receptionist services (good job stupid). We got there in time instead of having time to stop by some store and pick up some good food for the following day.

Next day we spent in Paris. Beautiful day and great weather. Lots of great times, just long. from 9am to midnight. Wow, long day. I think everyone was ready to go home, but it was nice. Back home was 13 hours and a really relaxing (not) bus ride. I tried to sleep but always woke with a bad neck cramp. Ah... what a way to bid farewell to my InterEuropean travels. We got back about 2pm and I had to work from 4-8pm. Monday was a beautiful day :)