Full of fantastical; the wedding, mannerly-modest

Okay, so I know what you all really want to hear about is the Royal Wedding, which was not very modest at all (in the sense of modest versus opulent).  The wedding was the second day that we were here.  The third day for some people.  Lorraine and I got to the center at nine thirty at night. We were the last ones there and everyone was in bed.  Our director was glad to see us; I guess that they hadn't realized that we were coming from France. Everyone else was sound asleep, completely zonked out from jet lag, while we had the advantage of actually coming from an opposite time zone.

Yeah, anyway, the next day was Thursday and we started it off right away with class!  Breakfast was at 8:00 and the first class (which I'm not taking) was at 8:45.  So I got up for breakfast and then went back up to my room to unpack and record everything that we did in France.  Pretty uneventful.  Then I went to class, first my history class which is going to be primarily based on lectures, and then there was an hour break for lunch.  The center doesn't serve us lunch, so we had to go buy some.  We went to the Waffle Palace (based on a recommendation from someone) and I got a Belgian chocolate waffle.  However, I think seven of us was too much for them, because they forgot three of our orders, and we had to request them at least four times after we'd waited a half an hour before they got them to us.  It was pretty annoying.  It was delicious though (SO much chocolate!) and we had to take the last waffle with us, because we were late for our next class.  We snuck into the back about two minutes late and helped Emily finish off her white chocolate waffle (later that day we found out that we weren't actually supposed to eat in this area, whoops!)  during our Fine Arts class.

Then that afternoon we all did business sorts of things.  We went to the Tube and got our Oyster cards (basically a month's worth of Tube rides) and then it was dinner/meeting time, and then we had more meetings afterwards.  It was a rules of the center meeting (be nice, be polite, clean up after yourself, and no food outside of the kitchen areas) and then we got our ward assignments.

I was assigned to the Spanish branch.  Needless to say, I was fairly panicked about it because I really don't speak Spanish all that well.  Or like at all.  We'll get back to that in a later post.

Okay, and NOW we can talk about the wedding.  In the interest of sleep and NOT getting up at five in the morning, I left with a group that went off to find a place to stand at 8:15.  We stationed ourselves outside of Buckingham Palace on the recommendation of a nearby policeman who said we'd get a "cracking good view" of the kiss, which was probably the best we were going to get given where we were and what hour it was.  So we saw the kiss and the balcony and everything (we did have an amazing view) and got to drink in the excitement of the crowd for several long hours.  We heard some of the service over the loudspeakers, but nothing too spectacular.  The crowd was fun though.  It was like a mix of the Fourth of July and New Years Eve all combined.

Yeah, so this is my in front of Buckingham Palace after William and Kate came out on the balcony.

It was pretty cool, mostly because I was there and there was the whole atmosphere and all that stuff.  It was an awesome way to kick off my London experience, and is definitely one of those things that I'm going to remember all of my life!  More coming soon!