let me begin this post by saying that if you have never been, you should visit london some day! there are hundreds of things to do and see--we just did not have time to see everything.
briefly, here is what i did:
FRIDAY:
lunch at chiquito, british museum, phantom of the opera at her majesty's theatre
SATURDAY:
open-top double decker bus tour (saw big ben, parliament, buckingham palace, the queen(!), westminister abbey, hundreds of naked people in hyde park-stood in my bra in public just because i could, the marble arch, trafalgar square, millenium bridge (featured in harry potter), london bridge, tower bridge, tower of london, london eye, cleopatra's needle, shakespeare's globe theatre, and many other sights!), boat ride down the river thames, then finally to yates bar to watch the england verse usa world cup football game. watching the game was my favorite part of the day! the energy in that place was incredible! hundreds of people packed into this bar--almost everyone clad in red and white england flags. music was playing, and everyone was singing english bar songs loudly. "FOOTBALL'S COMIN' HOME!" i wish i had known the words because it would have been so much more fun had i been able to join in. a few girls and i felt weird standing around with no england gear, so we left the bar and ran down the street to a little souvenir shop, and we bought england flags that we draped over our shoulders before we returned to the bar. england scored their first goal in the first four minutes, and everyone in the bar went nuts. a little while later, england's goalie, green, let the ball slip right through his fingers and into the goal. our small group of american students cheered and cheered. we ended up meeting a man from dearborn michigan in the bar, and he hung out around us for the rest of the night. the game ended in a draw (the most favorable outcome for our safety). we then walked around the city looking for a club to go to, but ended up getting lost somewhere near covent garden. we stopped a couple and asked for directions. they had american accents, and we ended up talking to them for a while. the woman was from canton michigan originally! two people in one night from so close to home. small world!
SUNDAY:
hillsong church, lunch at pizza express, walked around and shopped in covent garden and piccadilly circus. but...hillsong! months ago, when i first found out that i was going to london, my first thought was that i wanted to go to hillsong london. i didn't know where we were staying in the city, and i wasn't sure if anyone would want to go with me, so i dropped the idea for a while. once i got here, however, i found out that a few girls actually wanted to join me! i then got our address for our flats in london, and i looked up the address to hillsong. 9 minute walk (travel time could have been nearly an hour on the tube, depending on where we were in the city). total God thing! anyways, hillsong united was finishing their month-long tour by playing as the worship band this day. AMAZING. they sounded so good! there was no sermon-it was basically just a free hillsong concert interrupted by church announcements-, and i would have liked to hear one to see what it's like there, but it was incredible getting to hear hillsong live. i loved it. without a doubt, going to church at hillsong has been my favorite part of the trip thus far.
we returned to liverpool sunday evening.
on monday morning, we returned to northway primary school, and allison and i got moved to the recession classroom (aka preschool, where the children are 4 and 5 years old). we basically just played with the kids outside all morning, and we listened to them learn phonics at the end of our time. phonics in the uk are much different than in america. the children learn the sounds of letters and letter chunks based on the way this program jolly phonics say they sound. when a student said "the letter 'c' can also sound like ___," the teacher flat-out told him "no, we say it the way jolly phonics tells us to." this, to me, is not the best way to learn phonics because certain letters sound different in different situations (such as 't' in nation versus tiger or 'c' in circus). the children also know the sounds of letters, but they have a very hard time saying the name of each letter. it is a very interesting thing to watch and listen to. we will be in the reception room all week because the year one pupils are testing.
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