A Day of Rest (?) And Yet Another Walk Through The City

First, to catch up: Yesterday was Sunday. Our group got split up into 6s (ish) and sent to different wards of the Wandsworth Stake. To get to church, us six girls took a tube to Victoria Station, and after some confusion and a missed train, made it down to the Wandsworth Common train stop, where we walked for a few minutes through a really pretty townish area to get to church. Travel time: about an hour? I don't know, we'll have to see next time if it takes us as long to get there.

Church itself was a neat experience. Most of the wards in the stake are actually made up of those with Caribbean-African descent, and around 80-90% of the members are converts. Pretty different than home. An adorable 11-year-old Black boy with a British accent named Lawrence sat by me during Sacrament Meeting. We got callings: I am the Relief Society Pianist. I'll update more on the ward as I get to know it better each week.

So the whole ordeal ended up taking quite a bit of time and energy, so we didn't do much else yesterday.


Today: Second day of class. And I'm still pretty excited about class, even though it is kind of painful to do homework when you could be exploring London instead. I have class from 9-11:40, and then it's free time until 4:45. Me, Lizzy, and Steve set out to do another walk (but first stopping for lunch to get Falafels at a little restaurant near us called "Kebabs-Falafels" or something along those lines. Haha. We decided on the "Walking Through The City" walk. Here are some things we saw:

•We got off the Tube and started walking on Cheapside (which I swear I recognized from Dickens' novels or something
•The Mansion House (this awesome old building from the 1750s where the Lord Mayor of the city used to live. We stopped in to see if they had tours (closed 'til September) and they had some of the highest security I think I've ever seen here so far)
•The Financial District (this is the Royal Exchange)

•I can't remember what this building was, but it was in the area of the Financial District. Look closely at what is topping the building

•a bunch of cool buildings with really neat modern architecture that I didn't manage to take pictures of, like Lloyds and Minster Court
•The Church of St. Michael Cornhill (Mendelssohn's practice organ is in it. The Church was built in 1040 but then was rebuilt by Christopher Wren (who seemingly built everything in London) after the Great Fire


I just love the history of everything here. Ancient, old, and modern are all combined into this bustling, incredible city. You could spend hours and hours in every little piece of the city, and the city is huge!

(PS- I'm trying to be better about taking pictures... sometimes when I'm walking around I kind of hate to because I like just looking around everywhere, trying to process everything that I'm seeing)

Being here is exhausting, but definitely the coolest thing that I've ever done. I'm so glad I have as much time here as I do, even though I know it's going to fly by.