Hey isn't this our song? That one time we were dancing?

This place is beautiful. I keep saying it over and over again in my mind. This truly is a grand adventure. Yesterday lasted for some forty hours or so. Micah fell asleep in the British museum sitting up somewhere in the Enlightenment exhibit. We saw the Jade masks of the Aztec empire, the ones that I read about as a kid and had been imprinted on my mind. The British Museum is awesome. And free. But mostly awesome. It spirals around a massive atrium that extends past reality and lets this incredibly white lite filter through. We saw the Rosetta stone encased in glass and holding every secret of hieroglyphics on it's sacred surface. I thought about crying when I saw it. I remembered the stamp sets with the ancient symbols and the books my mother got me for Christmas that recounted the time of the pharaohs. And there it was in all of it's massive glory. I thanked it before moving to the next room and hoped that the whole thought of crying bit was from exhaustion (If not, I'm queen of the nerds).
The vast amount of priceless pieces were breathtaking, and captivating, and awe inspiring and a thousand other words that could fill this notebook and my days for years. I haven't gotten used to looking right before left at the street corners. Last night Abby and I shopped at TopShop- just like Sienna Miller, sans the smoking and the skinny jeans. We all sat on the steps of the National Gallery as the night wore on, praying that we would catch the proverbial second wind and make it a little longer. Micah and Abby yielded to the pressure that sleep deprivation seems to put on ones body but BJ and I soldiered on, undeterred by the mere mortal need to rest. We bought a cheap bottle of wine, a smoked salmon sandwich, and found a quiet corner on which to relax and enjoy our first night in a new world. We watched the earth's shadow slowly blanket the moon in total darkness while men in cable knit sweaters and women in pea coats snapped pictures of the first lunar eclipse I ever saw. A man named Marion Plohgeski- I mean a very drunk man named Marion Phlohgeski engaged us in a very close, very loud conversation about coral gables, and sarasota, and flying planes. It was time to go and we headed back to the hostel and our bunk beads.

-Written the morning of March 4, 2007 at 8:00 London time.

There will be pictures to illustrate and more to come.