Leaving London Town

Last night in London! I'm surrounded by scattered bags and scattered girls. People are taking off one by one today and tomorrow. I have mixed feelings, but all of them are good. Here are the last of my London pictures, just a few random shots to show you the girls I'm going to miss!

The Louvre

Not a posed picture. They're trying their best :)

The soccer team shot of the group!

Sun + Exhaustion

Janna is teaching me how to be Asian since no one knows what race I am. Especially here, I get that question way too often.





Janna carries me when I'm injured :) Even when I'm laughing and trying not to let her.

Love those girls!

P.S. My SISTER is here! She's out on the town while I'm trying to pack...lame. But I love her! We're heading to Italy early in the morning for a few days, I'm excited to go get lost there.

Finishing up...

...one of my last London goals.

Best part of the experience: Either following a random lady across the road to make her our fourth Beatle without her knowing (the picture didn't quite turn out, we were laughing too hard in it), or hanging around and watching all the tourists try to get this shot while angry London drivers practically aim for them.

Thinking of you, dad!

J'aime Paris!

My last week in London has been pretty crazy! Crazy busy, but the good kind. I'm trying to make time for all the things I want to do before leaving, so I've had tosacrifice some other things in life...like sleeping and blogging. Now I'm finally getting around to at least one of them!

Paris was a blast, I don't really know how to even explain it...so I'm just going to overload you with pictures!

Boarding our early morning train ride through the chunnel! It's not very exciting. Just dark.

First we went through the Musee' D'Orsay. The paintings were beautiful! This was one of my favorites. If I had a little more blogging patience I might show you more :)

Chrysanthemes - Monet

The museum used to be a train station.

Our first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower! That's when we felt like Paris was Paris.

So we went to find it! I love finding tall things, it's nice to find something without getting lost.

Next was Sainte-Chapelle. It has over 1,000 stained glass images. It taught me that something literally can take your breath away.


Notre Dame! No Quasimoto. That movie scared me when I was little, I think I have bad feelings towards the place that I didn't discover until being there.

Up the hill to see Sacre-Coeur. There were dozens of painters trying to capture the view of the city.

We heard Moulin Rouge was close by, so we went to get a picture of it. Walking there was quite an experience, the neighborhood made the Strip seem like nothing. Pretty scandalous...but here it is!

We watched the sunset from the top of the Arc de Triomphe

Climbing the Eiffel Tower first thing in the morning! It's cheaper if you take the stairs to the middle of it, then everyone has to take a lift the rest of the way. The stairs are conveniently numbered because counting all 700 steps makes it easier. This is not true.

View from the top!

Cool shadow :)

The catacombs underneath Paris were creepy. Lots of bones. Soo many bones.


The sun!! Power nap in Luxembourg Gardens.

Most of us took a trip out to Versailles. Here's the Hall of Mirrors where the peace treaty of WWI was signed.

Rowing around the gardens of Versailles! This got a little contentious; we had some back-seat rowing and different theories about how to turn the boat. When we finally got going we realized the boat was technically going backwards. Sometimes you just can't be picky.

The Gardens of Versailles

My new favorite museum! Musee' de Rodin.


I didn't know Rodin was my favorite artist until this trip. Now I know. Here's The Thinker.


This was my favorite Rodin sculpture, The Waltz. If I'm ever wondering what I should do with all my money, I think I'll buy it. In 62 years.

We went to the Eiffel Tower every night to watch the light show.


I went to Pere Lachaise Cimetiere to find Chopin's grave. Looks like I have the same favorite as plenty of other people -- his grave was one of the most decorated.

The Louvre was huge. Here's Mona! Still smiling.

Winged Victory. Still broken.

Everything in the Louvre was amazing, but I'm not gonna lie...pretty overwhelming.

Every night in Paris ended with a crepe and the light show at the Eiffel Tower. Every hour it kind of...sparkles? for 5 minutes. It's beautiful.

Au revoir Paris !

Lea Valley Sundays

London Centre students used to attend the single's ward in the Hyde Park chapel, but a few years ago the presidents of the two London stakes decided to switch things up. Now we're split up into groups of 3 or 4 and spread out across the wards in London. I go to the Lea Valley ward, up in the northeast corner. I work in the primary there, and I love it!

I've never had a boring Sunday in London. These kids are so much fun! Here's Alyssa and me doing our latest sharing time about families.

We had everyone take turns dressing up as a member of a family while we sang the song. It started out how it was supposed to, a couple girls wearing the back pack and high heels for sister and mother, the boys in a baseball hat and work gloves for brother and dad.

Holly was determined to be the mother this time, she's the one wearing high heels that are about as tall as she is. She has the best little accent, be sad you can't hear it. Tico is the 'brother' in the blue hat, and if you can't tell by his pose, he is hilarious. He always brings me a joke after primary. Here's my current favorite (read it with a british accent): "Why did the toilet paper roll down the hill? .... Because it wanted to get to the bottom."
Yeah, love him. :)

After singing the song a couple times with a pretty traditional family up front, they started to get a little more creative. Here's Nathan putting on the high heels and Carl with the pink back pack. They both wanted the heels though.

Here's a real family this time: one sister, two brothers, no pretending. Adam's the little one, he's supposed to be in nursery but he's already discovered that primary is way cooler. He comes in 15 minutes into primary and when a leader asks him why he isn't in nursery he says, "Oh...we've finished in there." Pretty sure he gets his snack then heads to primary. Smart kid.

Leaving London is going to be hard for a lot of reasons, and my ward is high on the list. I only have one more Sunday here because of General Conference this week. It's been so fun to get to know families and serve in a ward; going back to a single's ward will be hard...I don't think God ever really wanted wards to be made up of one age group. He knows every ward needs a Tico.

Saturday Habits

I love the markets in London, especially when the weekend hits and they go crazy. The atmosphere is an almost stressful kind of exciting. My favorite part is the way the smells change every few steps because of all the different stands pushed together. This is Camden Market, I could spend hours here. Well, I do :) I'm so glad that Ali gets here on a Saturday (less than TWO weeks!), I'm going to love dragging her to all my markets while I convince her that she's only imagining jet lag. What are sisters for?

Lights Out

London is busier than usual these days. The G20 summit is bringing in both world leaders and protestors, and security is getting tighter everywhere. Our professors are glad they chose this week for us to go to Paris, they get nervous. It's like they think we're 40 slightly naive girls or something...... :)

It's been interesting to read the news and follow the events of the meeting. A lot of protests have been happening right next door in Hyde Park. One of the articles I read on Saturday talked about Earth Hour--landmarks all over the world turned out their lights that night, kind of a baton-passing effect as each major city shut down lights at 8:30 pm local time. Vegas, Australia, Sydney, Moscow, Dubai...over 3200 cities. I was excited to see Big Ben and the houses of parliament on the list so that I could see it for myself!

Here's the typical London shot at 8:20 pm on Saturday:

Then Big Ben played it's little 8:30 song, and the lights went out. London doesn't look like this very often:


Here are all the girls I convinced to come with me. I think they thought I was making it up for a little while there, but when we got off at the Westminster Tube stop and saw news cameras, we figured we would see something cool!

No sign of Obama yet. I'm keeping my eye out.