For Good

What a weekend.

Well after a long Thursday night, we all got our beauty rest and headed for tkts (something similar to ticketmaster where you can get theater tickets) and bought our tickets for Wicked! The rest of the day I couldn’t contain my excitement because this is a musical that I have been wanting to see since I heard the song Popular in like 4th grade and was very obsessive over it and wanted it as my solo song for dance, but that’s besides the point.

So the hours passed and we got to the West End of London which is their “Broadway” essentially. We arrived 10 minutes before the show started and our seats were pretty good! And the show started and it was everything I knew it would be. I probably sound like the weirdest, girliest, musical-loving nerd but its true, I teared up multiple times. As with all things, the ending got me where Alphaba and Glinda sing For Good together. Emma Hatton played Alphaba and Savannah Stevenson was Glinda and they were wonderful. I went back to my dorm after and listened to them on YouTube and teared up all over again. I could watch it again and a again; I really can’t put in words how much I enjoyed this show. But as all things, it came to an end and now it is just another memory from this trip that I will cherish forever.

Friday came to a close and Saturday quickly arrived and my new friend Hayley (shout out if you’re reading this) and I decided we wanted to go to St. Paul’s Cathedral. So we tried to navigate our way through the Tube and ended up at the wrong stop because we are the most directionally challenged people in the group apparently. But outside of the tube stop was a Starbucks, and they have wifi (to find our way to the right area) and hot drinks (because it was a bit chilly) so we went inside to figure out where we were going. Well, once we got our chai tea latte and caramel machiatto (we are the poster children for America, we should really be on a billboard at US customs and the border) we ended up having great conversation and talked for two hours (honestly give me coffee and I could talk forever). Time flew by as we got to know each other better and once we realized what time it was (2:00 p.m., a bright an early 9:00 a.m. for those of you reading this back home) we decided we better get on our way and make it to St. Paul’s before it closed at 4:00 p.m. After asking store owners and Irish security guards where to find the cathedral, we finally made it to the most grand church that I have ever laid my eyes on.

Of course I’m that cheesy girl who grew up on Disney and loves all things magical, so this really took the cake. I love Mary Poppins and when I saw St. Paul’s I couldn’t get ‘Feed the Birds’ out of my head. We walked into the main entrance to see the inside and realized that to get farther than the entrance we had to pay 16 pounds for a tour, but we only had 40 minutes to look around before the cathedral closed so we decided not to pay the money. A worker also invited us to stay for 5 p.m. mass but unfortunately we had a tour (a Jack the Ripper tour, how christian of us, right?) at 7:30 across town and wouldn’t have made it back in time so we decided to attend mass the next morning at 11:30 (and everyone knows that’s the slacker mass that all the lazy people go to).

On our way out we decided to get a few pictures on the steps of St. Paul. We saw this grand door that reached the top of the second floor balconies and decided it was a great picture opp (we consider everything a picture opp here tbh). We took turns taking pictures and taking pictures for other families, and I had this great idea. You see, when I was a senior in high school and competing in dance, our senior year lyrical large group was to a song called The Bells of St. Paul (bet you know where I’m going with this one). And with this grand door and the thought of dancing to that song, which is about the bells of St. Paul (which really have no rhythm to them when they’re ringing, but they are still amazing to hear), I decided to take a dance picture while we were there because.. why not?

And while I was reminiscing and thinking back to simpler times of dancing and my high school years, I thought of something. Someone once told me that they couldn’t wait until college gave me a wake up call. I remember reading their tweet (lol teenagers) to me and thinking, right because I’m the one who needs a wake up call. And since then I have finished 3 years of college at a decently respected school, and have made the Dean’s List and all the things that make a parent proud (hi parents), and have made friends that aren’t from my home town (and even some that are), and have held a position in my sorority which has a philanthropic partner of an organization that helps children taken from their homes go through the court system with a ‘guardian’ or sorts, and the list goes on. So you know, I never got the ‘wake up call’ in which this person was describing because my life has only improved since high school and I don’t expect it to stop. But in this moment at St. Paul (where this whole last paragraph starts making sense), I had a ‘wake up call’ of sorts. I realized how big this world is and how small I am, but if I make something of myself and leave my handprint behind in this world- then everything I have done up to this point and everything I do after this point will have been for something, but only God knows what that something is. I looked around the city of London, and the steps of St. Paul, and got a ‘wake up call’ and started wrapping my head around the fact that I am in a different country, experiencing different things, meeting new people, and I am so lucky… and grateful. So thank you for wishing for my wake up call, because it’s here and I appreciate it very much.

Anyway, back to things less insightful… after our pit stop at St. Paul’s Hayley and I headed back to Regent’s to get ready for our Jack the Ripper tour, which would be in the East End of London (quite the opposite of the Upper East side of New York). Majority of the study abroad group went and we were all in to learn about this psycho (which no one knows if he is actually named Jack because the weirdo gave that name to himself in a letter to the press). The tour was a little over an hour and was led by a Northern Ireland woman who was very enthusiastic about Jack’s killing spree. Locals of London scoffed at our poor taste of a tour, but its not like you can go to London and not take a tour about Jack the Ripper. We actually saw original buildings of the East End that were still standing in 1888, that were also lurked around by Jack the Ripper (whoever he really is) himself. The place this lady (Amy, she gave us her name so we’d give her good ratings on Trip Advisor) works at (she calls it headquarters, but how can you have a headquarters dedicated to Jack the Ripper?) actually made a sketch of what they think Jack the Ripper actually looked like and she showed it to us. He actually looked like Machete Cortez from spy kids:

So I doubt how accurate that actually is.

So after our tour (which I will not be reviewing on Trip Advisor(but we did get to see the alley way that inspired JK Rowling to write about Diagon Alley so that was cool)),

we went back to the dorms, as always, to prepare for our night out. Long story short, Hayley and I walked around in heels for awhile because we could’t find exactly where the bar we wanted to go to was and we didn’t want to look lost (or American, I’ve actually decided to start talking to strangers in a British accent because they’re less interested in you that way) so we decided to go back home before things got too out of hand.

To end the weekend, we went to mass at St. Paul’s Cathedral this morning and it was breathtaking. I really have no other way to describe it. It was truly one of the best experiences thus far and I will definitely be going back. The boys and mens choir accompanied the sung eucharist and it was all music to my ears, literally.

*insert bad experience at Brunch afterwards*

After our bad experience at Brunch, we headed back home to get out of our Sunday best and got into more casual clothes so we could head to Abbey Road! It’s actually only a 4 minute Tube ride from the dorms so it was really convenient.

Of course once we got to Abbey Road we had to take pictures! And it was hilarious, everyone there was there to take a picture obviously, but there were still cars driving and they were beeping and honking and swearing because these bloody tourists were in their way! And guess what, none of us cared because it was a good photo opp! So after about 30 minutes of picture taking and watch other people get pictures of them doing the signature Beattle’s walk, or lay on the ground, we headed over to the Beattle’s Coffee Shop (which is literally the size of a closet.. Harry are you in there?) and got some postcards and beverages.