Hollywood

When the weekend came, it was time for even more excitement—my sorority sister Molly, who is studying in Seville and I traveled to Paris with—came to visit me in London!

Tom, Alex & I stayed up late on Wednesday night to wait for Molly's arrival extremely late (or early, if you like to see it that way). After blowing up Jess's air mattress and getting far too little sleep, it was time to go to my Austen class early the next morning. Thanks to me being a kind and generous friend, Molly treated me to a large mocha the next morning from the coffee cart, which was definitely a necessity.

Off to Hogwarts!

After getting out of class, we scoped out the quintessential London sights—Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye and the Thames. Then we headed over to Oxford street to do some shopping for the afternoon at my favorite London stores. Exhausted from our early start, we headed back up towards Hampstead, making a quick stop at King's Cross Station to take some pictures with Platform 9 3/4, a must for any London visitor/Harry Potter fan.

Stopping at Sainsbury's for some groceries, we came back and took a nap before making burritos for dinner! That night, Mel, Molly, and I headed to Piccadilly Circus to give Molly a glimpse of "London's Time Square" at night.

Up early again to go to class, we headed to Gregg's after to grab some cheap sausage rolls (yum!) and went over to Waterloo to catch a train to Hampton Court, famous as Henry VIII's palace. The palace, about thirty minutes outside of London, was a pretty interesting look into the life of the Tudors, one of the royal families most featured on television and film.



We saw Henry VIII's apartments, kitchens, grounds, as well as apartments and galleries from later royal families.

 At the end of the day, we even tried out the hedge maze in the gardens of Hampton Court (a little unnerving, but we finally managed to find the center and our way out!).

This hat is HUGE in pers

Back to London, we met Mel at Waterloo and headed to the V&A Museum to check out their latest traveling exhibit, the Hollywood Costumes display. This was definitely one of my favorites out of all the museums and exhibits I've been to in the past few months. We saw the iconic costumes from Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, Marie Antoinette (a favorite), Titanic, Wizard of Oz, Sherlock Holmes, and another of my personal favorites, Cecilia's green dress from Joe Wright's Atonement.

After the V&A, Molly and I went to meet my roommate from last year, Ali, who was in town from her study abroad program in Scotland. After a night of pub food & hard cider, it was back to bed for Rachel, who at this point could no longer keep her eyes open.

Britishness

Finishing up my last midterm paper (the welfare state versus the Church in 20th c. Britain) basically overnight Sunday to Monday, I rested for a couple of days and decided I had had enough of all of this foreign travel nonsense and decided on a purely British Wednesday to respect my adopted country.

Setting out with Mel, one of my best friends here from Leeds (who has recently be inspired by my tourist tendencies), we made the journey to Wimbledon to check out the famous tennis arena. After a few transportation woes, we reached the village of Wimbledon, a high-class shopping district and plenty of beautiful expensive homes. Walking through the neighborhood, the arena appeared almost out of nowhere.

Brit Andy Murray v. Roger Federer

American Serena Williams v. Agnleszka Radwanska

As we had already missed the last tour of the day, we got reduced price tickets to go to the museum and see center court. So straight to center court we went! It was pretty cool seeing the arena where so many tennis legends have payed throughout the decade. The last match's players names were even still up on the scoreboard, which gave the feeling that it had just happened.

After seeing center court, we headed to the Wimbledon tennis museum, which was a pretty cool homage to the sport. We learned about the beginnings of tennis (beginning with Victorian lawn tennis) and the evolution of tennis, especially through the famous arena.

As we were the only ones in the museum that afternoon—traveling in the off season definitely has it s perks—we got a private screening of a 3D movie highlighting a "behind the scenes" view of Wimbledon and its most famous players. From there, we saw an exhibit featuring Wimbledon's role in the 2012 London Olympics as well as a general background of Olympic tennis.

We also saw an exhibit on the apparel of tennis players throughout the century (including the Williams' sisters HUGE trainers), including the outfits that some of the most famous contemporary tennis stars wore when they won major championships, including Nadal, Djokovic, Federer, and the Sharapova, and the Williams sisters.

Last and most exciting, we got to see the two Wimbledon trophies, complete with the most recent winners engraved on them! Along with decades of names, there was definitely a lot of history there.














After a quick stop at the gift shop that sold a myriad preppy, strawberries and cream laden items, we headed back into the city to meet Alex and Brian to see the latest Bond film, Skyfall.

Two-for-one Orange Mobile movie tickets and giant pop corn & soda in hand, we went into the theater only to be met by no less than THIRTY FIVE minutes of "adverts." Yes, apparently here in the UK, they don't just have previews, but at the start time of the movie they also play a bunch of commercials for things like Coke, shoes, etc.

I must say, it was pretty cool seeing Skyfall IN London. Not only was I used to all the big sites in the movie like Big Ben, Parliament, and Westminster Abbey, but the tube station most prominently featured in a chase scene between Bond and the villain is the one I use EVERY DAY to get to the Strand Campus.

Am I an official Brit yet?

Florence

After a long day in Tuscany, Bria and I continued the theme and got up early on Saturday morning to try to make the most of our last day in Italy and our first day truly in Florence.

Grabbing our breakfast at the hostel (an odd buffet including tomato pasta and tiramisu for the first meal of the day), we headed out for our first glimpses of the city.





Very different from Rome, Florence definitely has a more old-world feel that feels much more like the iconic Italian countryside town, while still offering enough excitement to be a thriving city.






Our first stop of the day was at the Academy museum, home of the famous David statue. We bought tickets online for the second available time at 8:30am, and walked right in to a pretty much empty museum, which was great. No photos of David allowed, but it was quite a sight to behold. The statue is much, much bigger than I had pictured (taking up a whole portion of a high-ceilinged hall) and unbelievably realistic. It was one of those rare pieces or artwork that I could definitely look at for a while without being tired of it.

We also saw plenty of Jesus paintings (for lack of better description), a hall of full of hauntingly-realistic sculptures, as well as Michelangelo's prisoners—a handful of statues not finished and still carved into massive blocks of stones.

Florence's Duomo

The food & wine market we came across

After the museum (which now had a line at least a couple of hours long, go us), we headed to Florence's famous duomo. As I had, at this point, seen about a million cathedrals, I lit a candle and found a bench to happily wait as Bria and Claire snapped pictures throughout.

From there, we meandered through town and came across a food market with the most amazing cheeses and meats, which I took the liberty to sample at great lengths. With a Italian pastry in hand, I continued along the Ponte Vecchio, the most famous bridge in the city. All of the colorful houses along the River made quite the beautiful backdrop to our morning in Florence.

This is what you get when Rachel gets up early 4 days in a row.

We wound our way through more shops and markets (one of my favorite past times), and Bria and I bought matching Pashmina scarves and we all picked up some Christmas presents for our families. By about noon we were pretty hungry and decided to head to a small family-owned restaurant that Bria had researched the night before.

This was a great idea—not only did I finally get to have some authentic Italian lasagne, but we had delicious bread and olive oil and wine, all served by the sons of a man who began the restaurant something like fifty years ago. What an authentic ending to our Italian adventure.

Apparently if you rub this boar's snout, you'll come back. See you soon, Florence!

After lunch, we started making our way back to the main part of the city when—alas!—a leather jacket called to me through the window of a leather boutique. Seriously, it was one of those magical moments where angels are singing and light magically breaks through the heavens. Even better? A sign on the rack read "special prices." Knowing it was still probably out of my price range, I decided to have a look anyways, because, hey that's what I do and I like that self-torture moment all of the over-zealous brides on Say Yes to the Dress enjoy when they try on $20,000 dresses they can't afford.

The boutique where I bought the jacket of my dreams!

Anyways, I wondered in, and it turned out the jacket, one of the last left from their summer collection, was on sale! While it was still pretty pricey, I had been toying around with the idea of splurging on something I could only buy in Europe, and Florence is THE leather capital of the world. Also considering I'll get VAT (tax) back when I leave the UK, it was quite the steal for a beautiful leather jacket hand-crafted in Tuscany.










The woman working at the store, who has run it with her husband for decades and has a lot of repeat customers, even used to work with someone who now lives in St. Paul, MN and showed me all of the Christmas cards and letters they send to each other each year. How cool is that?!

Because our Italian trip would not be complete for one last (and seventh) trip to a gelato shop, we picked some up on our way back to the hostel. Finishing up the last bit of our wine from the vineyard the day before, we headed to a bus to the Florentine airport. Low and behold, we ended up seeing an Australian couple that was on our tour—Sandra kept telling the man he should be on TV because he was good looking—and chatted with them in the long passport line on our arrival to Gatwick.

From there, we hopped back on the train to get into Victoria, successfully using 2 planes, 4 trains, and 3 buses in our travels to Italy. Fantastico!

Tuscany

From the Rocca in San Gimignano! Beautiful views.

Greetings from the land of no internet and a million papers! You guessed it, I'm back in paper-writing zone, and currently have no less than 4 papers to write, averaging around 15 pages each. Joy. To make things better, there currently is no internet access at Hampstead due to some wide-spread outage in Camden village, so that makes both working on my papers—and procrastinating—rather difficult. Hears to hoping it will be back on by the time I return from campus this afternoon.

Beautiful Tuscan Hills

I know, I know, I've been pretty atrocious at updating the ole blog lately, but I'm going to do my best at getting caught up before I leave (11 days...what is this madness?).

Last time we left off, I committed an atrocious crime by not finishing up my Italy trip. So here goes nothing.

A little taste of Britain in Italy

Once we got into Florence, we headed straight to our hostel while playing the "how long does it take to find a McDonalds or Disney Store" game, which has become our constant companion this trip. It took us all of about 5 minutes (epic score) to find the Hostel Archi Rossi, where we were staying for two nights. It was surprisingly nice, with re-creations of famous paintings creating a huge mural on all the walls of the hostel and a courtyard in the center. We even got our own closets, electrical outlets, and Wi-Fi access in our rooms. Sad to think how exciting these things are when hostel-living.

Our home for the day

The next morning we got up bright and early (hello, Italy at 7am!) to catch our tour bus for a whole day tour of Tuscany. As Bria and I have been pretty thrifty spenders during our travels, we thought it would be nice to splurge on a one-day excursion of the Italian countryside, full of locations we would have never made it to on our own. As the #1 tour of Tuscany (out of thousands) on TripAdvisor, we booked the Walkabout Florence Best of Tuscany Tour, which I would highly recommend if any of you are Italy-bound in the future.

Knowing that our bus left at 8:30 and how close we were to the train station, we of course got there at around 8:25. Little did we know our tickets also said to arrive about 20 minutes before departure time. Oops.

The (huge) duomo of Siena!

Luckily, we made it on the bus just fine and even got the last two seats next to each other, settling in for a full day of playing tourist. As we headed off, our local tour guide Sandra gave us background on the Tuscan region of Italy, with a lot of historical and fun facts. It was a definitely an odd feeling to be traveling on a bus with 50-odd American tourists (and a few Australians thrown in). In a way, it was like being back in kindergarten, all being led around by someone who knows what they're doing.

Anyways, we headed to our first destination of the day, Siena, and already got a glimpse of the breathtaking Tuscan countryside. Really, with all rolling golden hills and dark green olive trees, it was just spectacular. Italy has to be the most beautiful place I've visited thus far.

Piazza del Campo

The clock tower in the Piazza del Campo

The oldest bank in the world

Upon arriving to the medieval city, Sandra handed us off to another tour guide local to Siena for a guided walking tour of its yellow-ochre buildings, terracotta rooftops, and green shutters. We saw the world's oldest still operating bank (that's how Siena made most of its money back in the day because it wasn't on the water) as well as the Piazza del Campo, the site of the city's famous 600-year old horse race, which both of our guides insisted we couldn't properly appreciate the mystical-ness of without growing up in Siena.

Our tour concluded with Siena's Duomo, famous for the tiling on its floors (which people walked on for hundreds of years, go figure) that is supposedly world-famous among art historians. With a little free time to explore the main square, we were off again—this time to lunch.

One of the famous floors of the Siena duomo

With about an hour drive, we were shown a documentary on Siena's famous horse races, but, as the champ you all know I am, I slept through it.

Perhaps one of the most exciting stops of the day, we disembarked the bus at at an organic, family-run wine estate in Chianti. Overlooking some truly stunning views of the vineyard and the hills beyond, including the town of San Gimignano in the distance, we started lunch with a wine tasting of the vineyard's red and white wines.

Eating with two sisters we met who worked in financial and technological consulting in New York City in town for a wedding, our meal included bruchetta with fresh olive oil, a garden salad, fresh homemade pasta with meat bolognese, cured salami and prosciutto, local cheeses, and Italian almond biscotti dipped in desert wine. YUM!

After taking time to snap some pictures with the gorgeous views and of course grabbing some goodies to go from the shop, including the red wine from our meal, we were headed back on the bus to our next destination: the hilly town in the distance, San Gimignano.

Our view of San Gimignano from our lunch at the Vineyard

Truly one of the best lesser-known towns in Tuscany, San Gimignano was nothing but a treat to spend the afternoon in. Our first stop? Not just any gelato shop, but the WORLD CHAMPION of gelato shops, decided on in some kind of official contest from 2006-2009. Seriously, this place was unbelievable. According to Sandra, this place doesn't just test for flavor, but also exact consistency and temperature. Now that's some serious gelato.

After that, we took some time to shop the leather and fine goods shops (Bria even found a man-scarf perfectly suitable to her hard-to-shop-for Dad) as well as the medieval squares around the city. Perhaps the highlight of the city, we then climbed the Rocca di Montestaffoli, a fortress built in 1353 when the town submitted to Florence. Beyond the turrets, we saw one of the best views of the day, overlooking the squares of the city and more of the rolling countryside. We were hoping for a sunnier day for our travels, but what can you do? After Amsterdam, we were thrilled just to be dry.

A store front in San Gimignano

With a few hours in San Gimignano under our belts, it was back on the bus, which at this point had really become our second home for the day. It was now off to our final destination of the day, Pisa. That also meant a 1.5 hour scenic country drive, which for Rachel, of course meant nap time. I think the same was true for everyone else, because they shut off all the lights and sounds of the bus for the drive. See what I meant about Kindergarten?





Around 4pm, we arrived in Pisa, got off the bus, and transferred to a little free-driving train that would take us into the heart of the city which of course meant the tower of Pisa! Seeing as the town is a bit out of the way and there's not tons to do there, I definitely didn't think that the tower would be included in this trip, so I was more than thrilled to find our tour company.

Love you too, Tower of Pisa

 Sandra of course gave us some tips on taking cheesy pictures with the tower (a must-do) and we spent about 45 minutes in the square—plenty of time—as the sun began to set. At this point, Bria and I were pretty exhausted and happy not to have chosen to fork over another 20 euros to climb the tower. Cheesy pictures in hand (or on memory card, to be exact), we headed back on our little tour train which was pretty hilarious, and took another 45 minutes or so to be guided around the town of Pisa, also home to the famous University of Pisa where lots of famous people studied/taught (Galileo I think) and a river winding through the city.

Not bad for {free} hostel pizza

More than exhausted, we were back on the bus headed back to Florence, where Bria and I were thrilled to find that our hostel served free dinner until 10pm. With some homemade pizza and wine in hand, we had a nice low-key end of the day. We even met up with another one of our Northwestern classmates at King's, Claire, and went to go find some gelato before sleep.