Tag Archives: Windsor Castle

I met The Queen of England and I know you won’t believe me.

Decked out in a royal blue coat and a matching hat, the Queen of England strolled down the gravel pathway outside of the Royal Chapel in Windsor Great Park after the church service. I met her. If you do not believe me, I have about 25 other people who can verify this information, but no pictures because the Royal Guard and Interpol made sure that was impossible. This was the topper to one of the best weeks of my life.

This past week was pretty incredible. To start off birthday week, it was Felipe’s birthday! We went out to the Monument Pub for his 21st celebration on Monday. We had a pretty festive night but didn’t go too hard because classes would resume on Tuesday morning.

I was anticipating Tuesday being exceptionally lame and was mostly right up until 23:00. I held off on drinking the entire day so I could say that I had an “American” 21st and had my first legal drink at midnight. Much to my delight, I ended up joyriding around the city of London on Barclay’s Cycle Hire Bicycles! We rode around until midnight and stopped at the monument in Trafalgar Square. The city lights look so much better while sitting outside on a beautiful night on top of a monument. You should try it some time.

Wednesday, October 12 was incredibly entertaining. The night started with a rousing trip to Tesco! Stefan, Paula and Felipe came to my room and we had a drink or two before heading out for the night. My fabulous suite mate Reeya hang out for a little bit also and she lit my birthday cheesecake! The big 21. We started our pub crawl by going to one of my favorite pubs, The Maple Leaf Pub. This Canadian Pub has a really down to earth vibe and definitely a bit of a home feel, as they show American sports on everyones favorite ESPN.

On our walk away from The Maple Leaf, we strolled into Lyceum Tavern for a couple of pints. It was a fun little random pub. One of my favorites that we stumbled upon was the Cellar Door. What would appear to be a possible tube stop from street level turned out to be a really unique and epic pub underneath. Definitely a place to check out if you are ever in this great city. Rowley bought me a scotch while we were here and it was one of the most incredible vibes I have ever gotten in a tiny pub. The night would end up exactly the way I wished it to, at The Kinghts Templar. This pub has very quickly become my favorite place to hang out because of the incredible and inexpensive food combined with a great selection of cocktails and brews. £5.99 for a burger, chips and a pint of beer. You can’t beat that deal anywhere in London. Not to mention the fact that every Thursday is Curry Night where you can get a bunch of food and a pint for £6.59. I love The Knights Templar so much. To conclude the night I hung out with Jack (http://jacksavarese.wordpress.com/) for a while and listened to a bunch of random music while talking to his suite mate about the chips vs. crisps and the lack of pretzels, gold fish and peanut butter in this country. This was my most successful birthday to date and definitely one to remember.

Thursday and Friday don’t really matter because nothing exciting happened, so I’ll skip over those. What started on Friday, though, was the trip to Cumberland Lodge. The food was exceptional and house felt like my home in NC. There was an incredible bathtub that made my day in the bathroom and creaky floors as well. The theme of the weekend was the 2012 London Olympics and there were several speakers throughout the weekend that generated conversation on everything from transportation to the correlation between happiness and social policy. Paula was my roommate and I absolutely loved that fact because I love Paula! We went to visit Windsor Castle in all of its splendor on Saturday afternoon also. On the final night, after all of the lectures and discussion, free time and fabulous food, we had the General Course Pub Quiz! My team (Speed Monopoly) managed to snag second place, even though we should have won but two of our answers were disqualified! We won GC coffee mugs, mine of which came in handy this morning for my 9 am lecture. On Sunday morning, we were able to attend a church service at the Royal Chapel (as stated earlier) and got to meet the Queen of England. Queen Elizabeth II is absolutely adorable and one of the most poised figureheads, in my opinion. If you really do not believe that I met the Queen because there is no picture evidence, check out the handout from church that states she was there. IT REALLY HAPPENED AND I REALLY TALKED TO HER.

On a more academic note, today has been one of the busiest days during my time at the LSE. It started off with my EC210 (Macroeconomic Principles) lecture in Peacock Theatre at 9, followed by a pick me up Açaí smoothie in the New Academic Building (NAB) before my MN203 (Social Science Research Methods for Management) lecture. After a bit of a sprint to make it to Tower 1 for my MN201 (Economics for Management) class, we spent an hour creating the biggest and most complicated decision tree you will ever see. I met up with Steve, Stefan and Jon at The Knights Templar for a bit of lunch and then moseyed on back to the British Library of Political & Economic Science (aka the LSE Library) for 3 hours of STATA work for the problem set due for MN203 for my class at 17:00. After THAT I walked back to Bankside and took a momentary break for some dinner and then went to Fitness4less. And here we are… I am back in my room and ready to copy Appendix B and C from Wooldridge’s Introductory Econometrics, read 4 chapters of Macroeconomics, and 3 chapters of Understanding Poverty. I have no class or lecture tomorrow so this can be spread out a tad bit, but I also plan on whipping up a vlog from Cumberland Lodge tomorrow.

Expect lots of things soon.

Cheers!–Kerry