WALES

This past weekend me & most of my roommates went on a trip with IFSA-Butler to Llanberis, Wales! It was our "Adventure weekend," which is a pre-planned weekend for all the IFSA students to go on and it was super outdoorsy. The bus ride was about 6 hours and we left Friday morning and got there Friday around 5/6 PM. We stayed at a pretty nice hotel and after dinner me & Jess holed up in our room and watched Titanic....me + Jess + Titanic= so many tears

Saturday, we woke up so early to go hiking on a slate mountain. It was absolutely freezing since the sun wasn't out and it was so, so windy, but after we started the hike it wasn't so bad :)

A Welsh castle -- Dolbadarn Castle

 view from a window -- the lake area stretches out to the sea I think

 The castle used to have different floors and a ceiling but I guess they've all collapsed

I went on the half day hike so we were only on the mountain for about 3 hours. The walk up the mountain was pretty much all rugged stairs and it was a slightly hard, quad burning, mostly reasonable, hike up.

 The mountain we went up used to be a big slate mining place & these are the small villages where some of the slate miners would live. I think he said these were used in the 18th & 19th centuries

 Fireplace-- the whole thing was made of slate like this

 piles of broken slate

 view from about halfway up

Apparently Llanberis is right at the foot of Snowdon, which is the tallest mountain in Wales, but only the full-day hikers got to climb it & I'm definitely not cut out for a full day of hiking... and it ended up being too windy and cold for them to get to the top anyways 

 This is as high as we would go, you can see another house and behind it, an old slate transport system going up the mountain

 View out to sea

 Even with the clouds, there was still a great view :) These last couple of pics were taken out at a viewing platform that was experiencing hurricane winds...it was so loud it was hard to hear people talk and you could lean so far back because the wind would support you

We also browsed around the town Friday evening and calling Llanberis a town is being generous. There was one main street, almost everything was closed since it was the off season and there was NO ONE around and very few cars

 Welsh sounds funny

Then, Sunday morning we went to Llandudno, which is right on the northern coast of Wales. We walked along the pier, saw some crazy sheep dogs, got lunch & headed back to London.

Next: Barcelona on Wednesday! 

Midterms, sorta

I haven't posted much since Stonehenge and honestly it's because I haven't done anything super fun and school has just been tedious. The next two to three weeks are my midterm weeks, but all my midterms are papers and I have one presentation. So I've been reading and preparing and outlining and researching and all the fun stuff that has to do with papers.

I'm also 2 months away from my MCAT date, so I've increased the hours per day I've been studying for that as well which leaves me little time to go out and explore :(

We're all going to Wales this weekend though! It's another IFSA-Butler sponsored trip and we're going to Wales for the weekend on an "adventure weekend." Fun is about to come back to my life :)

PS I am SO SO SO jealous of all my friends back at Vandy who are at Mardi Gras right now... this year it finally lined up with the beginning of our spring break and I'm missing it.. more importantly, Hugh Laurie is the Mardi Gras King and I can't believe I missed that!!!!

Stonehenge

On Saturday, I went to the IFSA-Butler sponsored trip to Stonehenge with Laura. This was right after the night out for Jess's bday, so that was a fun morning... I woke up to Laura pulling on my sheets at 8:50 AM and telling me to wake up and that we had to make it to the Butler house at 9:30 AM and SOMEHOW we made it :)

Me and Laura were the only 2 people from Praed to go, everyone else was either too hungover (lol) or hanging out with their families.

A bunch of people told us Stonehenge was boring which is why they didn't want to go, but I've felt a personal connection with Stonehenge after I made a model replica for my 5th grade class (and got an A:) It was also a beautifulllll day out, which is rare for England, and so being out in the country was breathtaking.

We stayed around Stonehenge for 2 hours and then went to the town of Salisbury where England's highest church spire is located and Laura took control of the cam so there are some pretty cool non-plebe pics

 Idk, I thought the country was pretty. I clearly don't see enough of it in my life haha

 SHEEP

 approaching

 The worst part of Stonehenge b/c stones are missing/fallen

 On the tall skinny stone you can see the nub on top where the horizontal stone would have fit!

 The lone stone in the middle is the middle stone of the inner U shape

 admiring from afar :)

 walking to the best preserved part where the outer circle is still intact 

 The whole of Stonehenge is roped off so this was the closest we could get to its good side :(

 the weather was AMAZING and now here are a few artsy pics Laura told me to stage

I def have way too many pics of this up but... I think they're really cool and I just can't get over how lucky we were to go on such a pretty day

Then, we played around on top of "barrows" aka the English version of a pyramid aka there's dead people under there...

Salisbury- adorable town, we only spent about an hour in it with a guided tour and then a mad dash for linner before we had to make it back on to the bus

 s/o to Laura for the pics. This spire is 404 feet tall and the tallest in England! The whole church also only took 38 years to build. In the year 1200 something. At that rate New Kissam should've been done in like 6 months

 the walkway around the center garden

 what a beautiful, well placed tree

 Inside the church itself

 so cool!

 war flags

holy water