Ice, Ice Baby

You never think the spontaneous and generally unplanned weekends are going to be the best ones until you're at the end of them. A little voice in my head (one of many) told me that this would happen, but I didn't give it credence until we were halfway through the weekend. Long story short, this weekend was pretty sweet.

Every now and then, the weekend needs to start early. Thursday night, Luke and I were victims of a lack of tickets to one of London's best shows: Billy Elliot. The British Pop Culture class went and took Mary and Mallory with them, but sadly we were unable to obtain tickets. But that's okay because when you're as awesome as we are, you don't need tickets to see a 14-year old dance and sing his way around a stage for three hours. What do you do when you can't get into one place? Why, you go somewhere better, por supuesto! After reading for about a half hour, the boys of Flat 95 put their heads together and came up with a smashing idea: Below Zero London, also known as the Ice Bar.

For those of you who have been unable to witness the sheer joyous splendour of the Ice Bar, it is a bar/nightclub entirely constructed of ice. The walls, ceilings, seats, bars, stools and even the cocktail glasses are made of ice, imported from Sweden and sculpted probably by some insane laser technology that you have to go to a special school in Slovakia to study. After paying the £15 cover charge to get in, we donned these coats that were a cross between fur-lined parkas and metallic blue radiation suits (but looked awesome regardless) and went through some hanging animals skins and a glass sliding door to the bar itself. It was about -5 degrees Celsius in there, so the coats were well needed. Luke and I each grabbed a cocktail from the bar, which ended up being mostly filled with an overly-sugary mixer. After our 40 minute session was over, we slid our glasses down the bar and tried to hit each other's glasses...or in this case, wouldn't they be ices since glasses are made of glass? Anywho, I smashed his ice-glass and it was fine because it was only frozen imported water. After that, we met up with Dan at the International Students House for karaoke night and ended up back at the flat around 12:30 or 1.

The next morning, we all woke up early for a Saturday because we had decided a couple of days before that we wanted to go to Dover for the day! After snatching up some cheap train tickets, we took a two-hour train ride to arrive at the coastal town of Dover. Dover is famous for three things: Dover Castle, its White Cliffs and being the closest point to France in England. We toured Dover Castle, which was spectacularly filled with cannons, weapons, high walls/turrets and one of the most magnificent views of the Channel that I have ever seen. The white of the cliffs bordering the chilly, ice-like blue of the waters was only added onto by the gentle browns of the stones on the beach separating the cold little town from a aquatic gateway to France. Seeing that and harsh, darkening clouds bringing rain toward us was pretty darn picturesque. We took the train back a little earlier than expected due to the rain and lack of open restaurants to eat in.

Sunday and Monday were worth mentioning too, I guess. After getting out of church, I made a bee-line straight ot Marble Arch, where the Olymic Torch relay passed by!! It was really exciting to see the torch itself, although being surrounded by Tibetan protesters didn't help the experience much. Monday is worth mentioning solely because I took a trip after class to the British Museum. It's filled with tons of art and artifacts and architecture from various civilization, my favourite of which has to be Assyria. The massive Royal Lion Hunt hieroglyphic stones were incredible, not to mention this big block of rock with writing squiggled on it. I think it was the Rosetta Stone, but I'm not sure.

At any rate, I've got some internship writing to do. It's crazy to think that this semester only has a few weeks left; we picked classes for next semester today!! But the rest of this month will still be amazing, that much I know.

p.s: Pictures for the Ice Bar and the Dover trip are below.
The Ice Bar/Dover