Easter Weekend

Easter is a huge holiday here, its equivalent in the states would probably be Christmas. The schools get two week vacations during Easter and most people travel or spend time together during Easter weekend (Good Friday and Easter Monday are both bank holidays so people don't have to work). Since everyone was gone this last weekend, the underground closed down some of the lines in order to do repair work. They worked on the lines 24 hours a day those four days while I attempted to figure out the bus system in Harrow. I was somewhat successful, but the tube seems a little bit more reliable (I waited entirely too long for a bus that never came). I was incredibly happy when the tube started running again on Tuesday.
Apart from tube delays and closures, the weekend was fun. On Friday my friends and I went to O'Neills a pub, it was really fun, we ran into some people from the semester group and hung out with them the rest of the night. Pubs are a great place to meet up with people and hang out, and at O'Neills there's dancing later in the night. Sunday, we decided to go to Thorpe amusement park (and just because it was Easter Sunday didn't mean that people weren't at the park). Like I said before, Easter is family time, so people went to the park to spend time with their families. The lines for the best rides were huge, but the majority of them were worth the wait, the best 1.4 minutes of your life :) One of the rides, Saw (based off the movies) had a wait of about 2 hours, then while in line, got shut down for repairs. After three hours of waiting, we finally got on the ride. It was nice though to get away from the city and culture for a day of of meaningless thrills.
A nice thing to do in the city, especially when the weather is nice, is going to a park. You get a momentary break from running around in the city and being around people all the time, plus the parks are really pretty. Yesterday after class I went to Kensington gardens with Darby and Becca. It was a nice day and the park was pretty, we just sat down by the pond and enjoyed being away from concrete and cars.
Between classes today, Becca and I went to Westminster Abbey and walked around inside. It was beautiful and just really neat to see. I was really excited for poets corner, it takes up the entire South end of the transept. There were commemorative plaques to all sorts of people, plus graves, likes Chaucer's. My English Lit/Art History soul was singing with pleasure. Tomorrow it'll be doing the same thing when the program goes to Oxford! I'm looking forward to tomorrow's excursion.
I'm still loving that classes take place in the city and museums. Art is so much more interesting when you're learning about it as you stand in front of it. And reading a work like Great Expectations is great when you actually recognize the places that Pip talks about. One of the characters in the book was educated at Harrow school which is just up the road from where I'm staying, I was really happy when I read that part. :)