Week one is almost over....

It's hard to believe that my first week in London is almost over. They say that the time will go by fast and it kinda is but sometimes it doesn't; you know what I mean.....Thursday was the first day I actually didn't have to be ready to go by 9 a.m. I didn't have to be at City until 2 p.m. and that was the only required thing I had to do. It was really nice to sleep in. When I finally got up and around my room mates and I got ready and went to get some lunch. We ended up eating at a place called Tuk Tuk Thai Noodle Bar. I ordered Phad Thai with chicken and it tasted really good. The food was pretty inexpensive but I had to pay extra for the take out box(which is called a take-away box here). When lunch was over we had to practically run through the tube stations to make it to City. We were running late and it's about a 45 minute tube from Notting Hill to City. The home-stay briefing meeting ended up being really boring and hard to stay awake through. The teacher was talking about how we needed to go about writing our homestay paper and he was also giving us backround information about the "family." After that was finally over I headed back to Palace Court with my roomates. Amy and I decided that we wanted to spend the evening walking and reading in Hyde Park which is right up the road from our flat and Stephanie, my other room mate decided she wanted to go take pictures. We changed into warmer clothes and headed up the street to Hyde Park. It was the first time since I'd been here that I got to walk through Hyde Park during the day time. It was absolutely beautiful! There were people everywhere walking, reading, riding bikes, having picnics or just laying in the grass relaxing. We never did sit down to read at all but just walked all around the park and took tons of pictures. Some of the cool things we saw were the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain , The Albert Memorial , the Peter Pan statue and the Italian fountains. After walking around the park for a few hours we headed back towards Bayswater road which is the main road that Palace Court is off of. We were getting pretty hungry by that time so we decided to find a place to eat. We ended up going to this pub called the Black Lion which is right on Bayswater road. I ordered fish and chips and it was so good!! I ate almost all of the fish and gave the last part to Amy to finish. She had never tried fish and chips before and ended up loving it!!! After dinner we decided to do some shopping down Queensway which is another street off of Bayswater road. This is the road where most of the shops and grocery stores are located. Our plan was to get some food for breakfast in the morning but we ended up going into a ton of souvenier shops instead. Buy the time we made it down to the grocery store we wanted to go into it had already closed. We ended up having to go to a store that did not have a good selection of food and had to buy some granola bars that didn't taste that great the next morning. But we had a ton of fun in the souvenier stores and I bought several gifts for my family which I hope they will like :-). Well I better sign off for now since it's getting late. Homestay is tomorrow so I don't want to be tired. By for now.....:-)