What I've Been up to :)

The past few weeks have been a lot of fun, time here is going way too fast, I can't believe it's already mid March! I am trying to make the most of my time here by doing something  every second of the day, no lazy-days and no sleeping in. I can sleep when I get home in May!

Us meeting Chris from 'Got to Dance' 

Some big and exciting things that have happened recently include: Phantom of the Opera, Canterbury and Leeds day trip, going to the 'Got to Dance' live season finale, and a weekend in Paris (blog on that to come). We were given books about London when we first got here and I went to the 'London for free' section and saw that a lot of shows give tickets to live recordings for free. I applied for 10, and got 6...so we went in the rain Sunday morning and waited for our tickets, finally getting them at 1ish...on our way back to the tube station a red-headed guy with a pick in his hair got out of a car and these Londoners got out and started screaming and running over to him. We figured he must be famous so we decided. "hey let's take a picture with him!" We came home and researched it, turns out he's one of the member's in the duo that won last season, cool! The show itself was awesome, there were 6,000 people there! It was really neat to see how a live show recording works with commercial breaks and audience reactions. My favorite crew even won the 250,000 pound prize at the end!

The live set of the show

Even though I get to experience a lot of big and exciting things in London sometimes it's the small unique things that enhance my days here. For example, I got addicted to the Hunger Games books, read the first two in a few days, need to go buy the third one...but the movie is coming out this week, and it's premiering here...red carpet here I come! In addition, I found a YMCA while in line for church two weeks ago, and went in to see if I can work out there for free since I am a member in America. Turns out I can go 5 times for free, hey I'll take it. So I went last Wednesday to see what it was all about. It was like 4-floors full of workout equipment, a pool, sport courts, a cafe, physical therapy, and even a spa. It was much bigger and fancier than my YMCA at home, but I could still tell it was a YMCA. I wore a Central football t-shirt (had a football helmet on it), so I had a few people ask me if I was an American, didn't even think about that. Another thing that I didn't think about occurred in the free-weight room. Usually I do dumbbell side-bends with 45lb weights. So I went over and picked up a dumbbell that had '45' on it, not even thinking...turns out it was 45 kilograms, which is like 100lbs...dropped in, almost broke my foot, embarrassing!


I know that I am experiencing a lot of awesome things, but when I talk to my friends and family from back home I realize just how amazing this experience is. I was thinking about how I live in Denver, a big and exciting city, but I really didn't approach it the same way as I am with London. I hope that when I get back I can look at it with a new perspective and embrace every opportunity that I can. I don't want to leave with any regrets, I'm usually an active person, but lately I've been kicking it into over-drive, wanting to squeeze every opportunity that I can from this semester abroad.