Now that Dad the master blogger has left the country, the task falls to me to keep our blog hits up in the UK. I hate to blog right in front of John's and Dad's fantastic posts, but I just can't put this off longer.

The program is going really well. Many fun things have happened, so I'm just going to post pics and give stories to go along with them.

I've become pals with Nick Mason's kids (he's my professor and mentor over the past few years), and offered to babysit while he and his wife went to a play the other day. We went to Hyde Park to watch the Tour de France (which came to England for the first time this week). Here's a picture of us at the race. Mukoo (Michael) is on my shoulders and Sam and Anna (Katheryn) are standing beside me. They are the cutest kids!


This is a picture of the group right before we went into the Tower of London. That's Lynn Elliott's (the program director of the trip, and the head of study abroad) son and daughter. The Elliott's are an adorable family, and the most amazing travellers ever. They are here with their six kids ranging from age 2 to age 16--and they are so much fun. Lynn and his wife Andrea are super, and they are so good with their kids.

This is Elisabeth and I in front of Blenheim Palace (Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet was filmed here). The tour guides here in the UK have been really funny. I was walking through the tour with Nick and Stacie (his wife), their kids, and some of the other students. After we saw the downstairs, we thought we'd also give the upstairs tour a try, as none of us had been up there before. It turned out to be this fruit cake "virtual" type tour with lots of wax figures looking into "mirrors" where lowbrow BBC actors gave in-character soliloquies about the history of Blenheim. We decided to move quickly through the tour rather than wait for each soliloquy to end, but got stuck in a room with a real tour guide who was very upset that we were going through the tour without listening to every word. She started grilling us on the history of the Palace: "What year was the Battle of Blenheim?" "How many French troops were there?" "How many English troops were there?" etc. She asked if we cared about history at all, and even accused Sean, this great student we have on the program, of not caring about anything. It was so funny! Luckily Nick was with us and knew all of the answers. Once we got past her room, we kept going really fast through the tour. The grounds are amazing. Good times!