2 posts in as many days. This won't happen again.

I stopped paying much attention to American news sources a long time ago. Too much obsession with celebrity gossip (I refuse to call any of it news) and sports. BBC news is my homepage on the internet and I really only look at anything else if I'm looking for something specific or more facts. Today, however they are completely obsessed with the Royal Wedding. This is obviously completely understandable. I don't care about the wedding (though that dress was gorgeous) but I understand them covering it the way they did. The problem is that it's making me miss London very badly to see it plastered all over every time I open a new browser window.

I spent a semester there for school in 2004. Life has kept getting in the way and I haven't been able to go back since then. Sometimes the missing it is worse than others. I grew up a small town girl (there were 1800 kids in the entire K-12 district I attended) but I love the big city.  I've always been very much a home is where your family is sort of person, but if I was forced to pick on physical location to call home, it would be London (though not, perhaps, the exact place we stayed).

I love this picture, despite the blurriness.

There was a whole group of us from Ball State that went, and we lived in a wing of a hostel that had been set up as a dormitory for us. It changed ownership while I was there, and has apparently been closed for renovations over since. Either it's never going to reopen or they've gutted the entire thing. It wasn't a bad place, but it wasn't great either. We were, however, just a few short blocks from Hyde Park.

This the Google satellite view of our neighborhood. The red dot is the intersection we lived at. Number 1 Queen's Gardens. School was past Paddington, just off Edgware Road* and the touristy stuff was on the other end of the park. The mall, Whitely's, became more interesting later when I learned it had originally been one of the first department stores.

I hope to be able to go back before we have kids. Dustin has never been, and I'd love to be able to show it to him without having to worry about having wee ones be able to keep up. Had his boss's corporate contract not run out and so vastly changed our financial situation, we probably would go this summer.

This was actually not taken in London. It's York, actually. But it is the people I spent the most time with. Stephanie, my two roommates Sarah and Mandy, Debbie, Me, Jenny, and Kari. Debbie's the only one I still keep in contact with. Last I heard, Stephanie was married to one of the guys who went (they started dating there) and Kari was living in Germany teaching on a military base. I don't know about the others. I miss it. I miss them.




*Terrorism takes on a different face when they hit somewhere you know. I was through that station on a very regular basis.