Austen and Dickens worked magic here...

So this is love...da da da dahhh...so this is what makes life divine

I love England. I could live there, I know it. As soon as I set foot in the country...wow. The bus driver spoke to me and I was like, yes, this is it. This is right. Not to say I don't feel that way about Ireland! Because I adore Ireland and the Irish people and our lives. But I think it's because (esp since i'm not a James Joyce or Yeats fan, although I love Oscar Wilde) I feel like I connect so closely with the heritage of England...the literature and the writers and their work is what I feel so closely there. Okay, imagination and philosophy end here.

I arrived in the London Gatwick airport on Friday and took a bus to Oxford. The bus driver had two tattoos, one on each forearm. The one on his left was a bloody knife being plunged into a skull, and the one on his right was a naked mermaid -or at least as naked as a mermaid could be. Make of that what you will...I still haven't decided if it means anything.
Once we got to Oxford, I loved it. It was pretty late because Maria, Josh and I were waiting for two other friends to come for the night. We went out for a bit of a pub crawl Friday and I am slightly embarassed to say yes, I actually waited in line to go into a club called FILTH. Saturday was the real tour, we went to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Christ Church College where Harry Potter was filmed (Maggie Smith and I walked up the same steps...) and a general tour of the town. Bodleian was beautiful, although I liked Trinity better. They had an example book that was chained to the shelves there, because they are so old and valuable you cannot take them away.
The next day we went to the Eagle and Child, the pub where the famous Inklings gathered -T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien- and ate. I had a steak and mushroom pasty...it was scrumptious. We also went punting that day in the river. Apparently British people only go punting in the spring, but Josh and I definitely wanted to go punting, so we did. I was not too great at it..I wish I was but I had a lot of trouble. It is hard to push a boat along on a stick, I promise. We hit Magdalen College, where there is a deer park because there are no deer in England, I guess, and walked along the outskirts of that, which was beautiful and Josh and I had a lot of fun taking pictures that could embarass Maria, because "only tourists do that." That night we pub crawled as well with some of Maria's friends and I tried 6 different England ales. I think I don't like ale unless with a hearty meal, but they were very good. Quote of the night that I feel sums up English quotes:

(we are discussing a friend's dad who knocked out a horse)
"Bollocks! Knock out a horse? I wouldn't even know where to hit a horse!"

It was so English.

Monday Josh and I woke up super early and took an early bus to go to London for the day. I had never been, he had been once so we decided it was totally worth it. We sat on the upper deck and watched the sunrise as we headed towards London. Once we got there, we took the tube straightaway to the Tower of London and had a tour with a real live Beefeater. I can't believe they live there! That is crazy. It was incredible and creepy (like seeing the place where Anne Boleyn was beheaded and buried) and went into the armory, chapel, torture chambers, bloody tower, etc. We did not go to the crown jewels because the queue was SO long, so I missed seeing that. But it was okay, we had to move on we could have spent the entire day there. We ate lunch on the river Thames, right across from Tower Bridge. Then we went to St. Paul's Cathedral, toured, climbed the dome and walked in the crypt. Admiral Nelson and the First Duke of Wellington are buried there, and there are monuments to important people like William Blake and Florence Nightingale. I was embarrassed because my heart was racing so badly when we were climbing the steps to the dome...I guess I need to join the gym here.
Then we walked along the River Thames past the London Eye, Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and walked through St. James' Park at sunset, ending up at Buckingham Palace just as the sunset was fading into night. It was an incredible journey. Wow.
I feel so luck that I am able to do things like this...travel places and go see where all this history takes place.
I do have to say that the pound is SO EXPENSIVE, it's double the American dollar. So when I came back to Galway, it was great, because I thought, "Wow, everything is so cheap on the euro!"
What a lie.
I hope to go back one day and actually tour places like the Globe and Charles Dicken's house (I cannot believe Josh did not want to visit there). It was incredible...what a weekend.