Saturday & Sunday June 26-27

On Saturday I woke up and went for a sweet 9 mile run at about midday. My friend Alex ran a marathon last yr and thus was able to point out some very good running loops for those longer distances! I really like running in the area..er should I say fields..surrounding Loughborough. Running in the country and not seeing any people nor roads really is so refreshing as opposed to running in the streets of Atlanta which is packed with people and bums shouting random and mostly nonsensical sayings. There are just SO many pretty trails here! It seems like every dirt trailis a public footpath leading to somewhere beautiful. Can I just transport this to Atlanta, please?! I'm sure my teammates would much appreciate it :)

On another note, I would like to somberly mention the sad loss of U.S to Ghana that ensued at 7:30pm on Saturday evening. Landon Donovan managed a goal for the U.S, but unfortunately it just wasn't enough. Ghana scored in overtime and then the game was over. Sad run for the U.S. I am not out of the pool at work :(

Sunday I woke and went to church at a cute little church about 1.5 miles away! I think there was like 30 people total in the congregation! I then talked to friends for a long while and watched the miserable England v Germany game at the student union. Absolutely devastating. Now that both my teams are out..who should I route for?? I dont care at this point!

Afterwards I played tennis for about two hours w/ Felix. Soon I'll be switching from GT cross to GT tennis ;) OK, maybe not! haha

All in all, an uneventful yet fabulous weekend excluding the football results!
Friday, June 25

Being that ALL of the students have left campus (sad), there is really nothing to do other than work, run, eat , sleep, watch football, and talk to friends. And the whole watching football and talking to friends is something I certainly do not mind! Tonight I went to a pub with Kristen, Guy,and Felix for a good bit of time. It was such a nice evening, and was very relaxing to just sit and talk for a good bit!
Wednesday, June 23

Today was a great day at work being that USA won the world cup in the 2nd minute of added time over Algeria. Landon Donovan did it again! England also had a victory against Slovenia. This means I move into the second round of our pool at work. I was nearly about to cry being that U.S had lost, but my favorite Donovan yet again pulled it out in literally the last minute of the game.

I was SO motivated by this magnificent performance that I decided to go on a run to Beacon Hill (~10 miles)...well,anyway, I didn't bring a map..so naturally I got lost and probably ended up running 13-14 miles. I was SO tired and dead when I got back. However, Nat was celebrating her bday at her place and was having a BBQ that i had to attend..only because I love her! The BBQ was great with just a couple of good friends-- Nat taught me some guitar, and I've decided I'm going to buy a cheap one off if EBay when I get back to Atlanta. Unlike the piano (which is very near and dear to my heart), the guitar is so much more portable, and once I learnmy chords I should be good to go. I know progressions fairly well from years of piano theory drilled into my brain! Alas!-- this year at Georgia Tech, our apartment is right beside the music department and beach volleyball courts, so I know I will have my fill of Vball and music :)


Monday, June 21st

Today is the day! WIMBLEDON!! We were woken up by the sunrise at approx 5am, and groggily got up after a poor nights sleep. Felix went to get in the queue to go check in our tent/ bags being that you obv can't bring those in to Wimbledon. We got in the queue at about 7am and received our wrist bands at like 8:30. The wrist bands represented what court you had a guaranteed ticket for depedning on your place in line. We were places ~650ish and unfortunately, guarenteed tickets to center court ran out at about 600th place. Oh well! 1st court will be awesome as well!


Also while we were waiting in line, a guy came around and had us write a poem about queing up for Wimbeldon tickets. He plans to publish the poems he collects in a book that he is going to end with the phrase I suggested...Wimble.DONE. Wohoo, now I will have a published poem!!

We were able to purchase our first court tickets and ended up getting the 4th row for 1st court!!!! 4th row!!! Eeeek. Wimbldeon Tennis Club is beautiful, and the day was grogeous..not acloud in the sky! We were the first line in queue behind the "officials" (AKA really really tall people they hired to escort the crowd for the opening of Wimbledon), and it was fun talking to them about how they got their job as "Line leader @ Wimbledon" haha.


Wimbledon in itself was just beautful. We saw a match betweenMaria Kirilenko of Russia and Stefanie Voegele of some other country on one of the outer courts. We literally sat courtside for this match on the bench just outside the court. The smaller courts have very limited seating, if any at all, and it was exciting for this to be the opening match we saw. Very exciting! Maria won..barely!



After this match we caught the tail end of Federer vs. Falla on Center Court from the main hillside at Wimbledon. Federer, the reigning champ, was suprisingly trailing for some time before picking himself up and winning the match!


From there we moved to our 4th row seats at First Court to see the match play out between Andy Roddick and Rajeev Ram, both Americans. We were SOOO close. It is crazy the speed at which they serve-- like more than 130mph crazy!

We also saw Venus Williams play!! She's a beast, as in you are sooo good at tennis sort of way. Both her and Roddick demolished their oppenents inthe least number of sets needed.



At the end of the day, a very kind lady and her husband gave us their center court tickets and we even got to see some of the match between Djokovic and Rochus!! What an AZMAZING day!!!
Sunday, June 20th

Today we woke up at like noon...maybe because we stayed up soo late playing SingStar (ey yai yaii). Anyway, we went out to lunch/ breakfast at a little pub nearby and then off we were on the Tube to Wimbledon!!! Even the Wimbledon tube stop had a mini- turf tennis court. Exciting!! Because we had planned to get excellent tickets, we decided we just HAD to campout the day before. Armed with a nice 4 person tent, some food, and a Frisbee, we set up camp in the middle of a big field and entertained ourselves with some quality converstaions, card games, and rousing games of Frisbee.Nearby there was a beautiful lake with a nice walking trail as well!



Saturday, June 19th

Although I stayed out quite late last night, Kristin and I woke up early this morning to catch the train to London. LONDON!! Felix invited me to go to Wimbledon this weekend and camp out on Sunday for the opening day (Monday). Kristen, the other intern from MIT, also came with us as did Rob. Rob was the guy who we went with to Bournemouth for the beach volleyball weekend (stayed at his house and sailed with his friends!)

Anyway, we caught the train to London at 9:20am and arrived at St. Pancras Station at approx. 11:03. Pretty good time, I'd say. The weather was slightly overcast and possibly even rainy, so we decided that the day would be a good day to go to the museums! So off we went to the National Museum of Britain! Err at least it was called something like that. Anyway, the entrance was free other than the star exhibit of Davinci's artwork. Kristen is really into art and drawing, so she paid to go see the exhibit. While she was being very worldy and artsy, Felix, Rob, and I saw stuff from Egypt, Rome, and Africa (wayy oo wayy o weii, wayy oo wayy oow weiiii wayyyy ohhh, oh Africa) good song btw :) Anyway, my camera ran out of memory like 7 pictures in, but Felix got some awesome shots of the three of us imitating the Roman statues and the wildlife of Africa. Reminded me of the movie Eurotrip when they go into the museum and do all sorts of silly things haha. When he gets those to me, I will post them up here!

After the museum we went to Notting Hill Gate (a very ritzy part of London where the movie Notting Hill was filmed...obv. enough). Felix's cousin has a flat there with a rooftop garden that overlooked the entire city!! We went to the park and played frisbee for a long while and then stopped by Tescos to pick up some burgers and buns..and salad of course. Although it was quite cold out, the sunset on top of the roof was unbelievably beautiful and we took wayyy to many pictures. The pictures that I will post are Kristen's, but Felix has a lot of really really good ones with his high tec camera. Like I said, soon to be posted!

After dinner we played quiz-bowl something or other on Wii and stayed up WAY too late playing Sing Star on Wii. Sing Star is like rock band but instead of playing instruments you sing and it matches the pitch to the pitch needed. I would say that we were all pretty evenly matched, and some of us lucky singers reached the highest level on the game! (w/ Piano Man by Billy Joel!). It was not until about 1/2 past 2 that we noticed there was a huge bus stop with a long long queue of people waiting...and naturally all of the windows were open and we were singing REALLY loud. I think they especially enjoyed my reaction when I reached SingStar Celebrity or whatever the highest level was. I was ecstatic!! Here is proof.

Friday, June 18

This was the last night that all my friends from David Collett were here, so naturally we all got together and had one last hoorah before everyone headed home for the summer.
Anyway, went to FND, and boy was it jam packed with students celebrating the close of term! SO FUN! I am seriously going to miss everyone I met SO much, and I had SOooOOoo much fun this past 1.5 months. If only I had done my undergrad studies here :P Thanks to everyone in DC for making me feel so at home-- I know most of you read this ;) Therefore, I am not going to list anyone's name because I don't want to leave anyone out-- every person I met just made me love England more :) Later on in the summer I plan to visit Ella and Becky and Kirsty and hopefully Chip in Cambridge! The fun is not over yet! Enjoy the pictures!





Sunday June 13-Thursday June 17

Hi all,

So this week I was pretty tired from the weekends craziness and did nothing too worthy of mentioning. I'm back on and in full swing with my training schedule for Georgia Tech cross country, so running/stretching/exercises/showering probably take about 1.5-2 hours daily. I wake up at 8ish, at work by 9ish, have fun all day, eat dinner 5:30-6ish, talk to friends from home/watch TV/ do nothing till about 7-7:30ish, then run till like 9ish..talk some more to friends and do nothing then go to sleep at midnight. I actually really enjoy it :)

At work Im doing some really cool things with really cool machines such as a robot, high speed cameras, motion sensors, and force plates. I would say more, but then I would have to kill you..and I wouldn't want to do that ;)
Saturday, June 12th

The World Cup was today!! USA v. England, 7:30pm. After waking up at noon, running, eating breakfast, we went to the market in town for a few hours, and I got a bucnh of stuff for about 10 pounds... woot!

Most importantly, though, was the World Cup game. We met up w/ Felix and Rob and Nathalie and Chris in the Varsity (a pub downtown). Luckily they got there pretty early to eat dinner first and managed to get a table with a good view of the big projection screen. The entire place was crowded to capacity (maybe above capacity?), and they were chanting English chants nearly 2 hours before the games started! I had USA written on the side of my face, but luckily no one bugged me about it!



My absolutely favorite player Steven Gerrard scored in the first 4 minutes, and then the US had a lucky goal near the end of the first half. The final score was a draw at 1-1, a good thing, too, after the banter from the English side before the game! Here is some video I took...


Friday, June 11

Today at work I helped with compression testing for running garments, strain testing for running shoes, and took artsy photos of my Frisbee thing :)

Tonight was the big night out at Friday Night Disco-- the "real" celebration of my birthday. I picked the fancy dress theme to be sailors v. pirates, and all my friends dressed up and went to the union as a big group! I have never picked the theme of a party before, and was really excited when more than a few people got dressed and went out on my behalf, for my birthday! I would say like nearly 15 people from DC and then Nat, her BF Chris, and Felix and Rob and the two other interns. How lucky am I :)

Anyway, there were some exceptionally good costumes, such as Hopps and Kirsty were pirates, Xav and Gehan were boat captains, and then Step, Lou, Coni, Sadie, Nat, and Kristen were sailors w/ me!! I absolutely loved it, thanks guys for a birthday to remember ;)

Wednesday, June 9th

Today I am 21!! Not that it means much to anyone here, but 21 is such a huge milestone in the U.S because you can buy alcohol. Not that I drink a lot, but just the mere fact that I can just walk into any store I feel like..in the entire country, is quite exciting :)

The day was pretty ordinary, apart from a bunch of people saying happy birthday to me! Even though it is my 21st birthday, I really don't see the big deal in celebrating a specific date. Everyday should be just as awesome as the next, so why wait 364 days every year to say 2 almost meaningless words as happy birthday? I definitely was very surprised how many people had known about my birthday, being that I had told very few people (along those lines that I don't see it as a big deal), but anyway, it made me feel pretty special to know that I have made such great friends here in just a month!

At dinner, a bunch of DC people had eaten at 5:30 just for me (usually everyone goes right t 5), and Ella and Step had a little birthday cake and a card!! They lit it was 21 candles and sung happy birthday to me in the dining hall :) I was SO surprised. And to think I was cool with people just saying happy birthday haha.

Anyway, because everyone is really busy with revision for exams, and a bunch of the STI people have their 1st year PhD papers due Friday, I decided that going out would be better for Friday night. Nathalie had some people over at her house to celebrate my birthday, and her and Chris had made a bunch of food, and Felix and Rob even made me a super sweet birthday cake that looked like a sailboat!! Felix got me a Loughborough Vball club T shirt and some other kit :) Pretty exciting, huh?! ANyway, we spent the night just chilling and playing cards, and all in all, it was one of the best birthdays :)

Tuesday, June 8th

Today woke up early and went for a run to outwoods in the rain (ewwww). All day I was in the ME building listening to 1st year PhD's present their first year research. Although a lot were incredibly boring, a bunch of them (especially the sports tech ones) were exceptionally interesting! I'm quite excited to start testing with Henry!

Night wasn't too exciting, but tomorrow is the big day! 21!!!!!!!!!!!
Monday, June 7th

Today I was pretty exhausted from getting back late last night, but two new interns from MIT arrived for their 1st day of work at Sports tech. Kristen just finished her 1st year and Gejan (sorry I messed up the spelling) just finished his third year, but also did an internship here last summer. His project dealt with the development of a track spike for a famous British Paraolympian.

Didn't really have too much to do at work, and looked up some stuff regarding the finite element analysis program Abaqus (sp?). I'm really interested in Henry's project dealing with the testing and design of new footballs (soccer), so I am reading up on some background so I can get up to speed when he begins testing next week!

If you remember me saying earlier that I had responded to a ad at the bus stop for a job conversing with Chinese students and helping them prepare for their exams. I met with two grad students ("Ted" and "Sharon") and helped them figure out some confusingly worded questions dealing with banking and finance. At the end he was asking me what would be a proper way to ask a girl out to dinner and for drinks. I got a bit worried there, bt no worries, I steered clear of a potentially dangerous situation ;) On another note, I got payed twice what I spend each week for groceries (I got paid 8 pounds haha), and I learned how to say hey whats up in Mandarin. Sounds like "Tzuay ztine de moy young" with an appropriate response of "hung hao", meaning good!

After work I went for a run with Kristen to Outwoods and then my internet wasn;t working, so we went to the library to go online and stuff. Skyped for a while with Ari and my parents then headed o sleepy sleep :)

Oh, and most importantly, CHIP showed Kristin and I where Lufts was. Lufts is the mini workout place they have for students to use that doesn't cost a fortune. Powerbase, the main weightroom for the athletics and stuff costs an outrageous price! And just if it wasn't clear, that was a personal shoutout to Chip...and I'll throw in Xav's name too becuase I know he was itching for a shoutout ;) You guys are great! Hopefully I'll be able to visit Chip in cambridge sometime near the end of July..would be sweet to see it with a good tour guide!
Sunday, June 6th

After quite an eventful day and night last night, we were all pretty tired but awoke early to get to the beach by 9am. Nat and I and Guy and his brother had planned to enter in a 4's open tournament (4 ppl on a team for vball), but we ended up missing the signups so we just watched Felix and Rob play! They had a pretty competitive quarter finals game, but ended up winning by a good margin. They then played directly after the first game and lost that game (unfortunate!). However that was the semifinals so they actually ended up finishing third in the tournament (out of 50+ teams!) Wohooo!




While the other games were going on we went to a retaurant on the beach to grab some food. I got some tasty chicken a delicious salad to match! Sam and Charlie (Rob's friend's we met last night) ended meeting up with us at the restaurant. We casually/ jokingly mentioned their promise to go sailing, and they were like, "OK, meet at the yacht club in 10 minutes and we can go". Nat and I nearly wet our pants. Sailing and being on the water is possibly my favorite thing in the world!







The yacht club was so big and the marina was HUGE! We went on Charlie's dad's boat (they are on the sailing team and restore boats, so naturally, they own a lot of them!). The boat was named Ruthless and was about 40-45 feet long! We were sailing just out of the bay area and Sam asked if I wanted to steer the boat! Of course I said yes..nothing like being Captain of a yacht :) I steered for about 30 minutes and didn't even come close to crashing haha (kind of hard to on the water, right?). We passed the house that John Lennon bought for his mom, which just happened to be right near where Simon's house is located (the guy who promised us a bday party ha). AKA, amazinggg! We sailed for a while then tied up to a buoy and just chilled in the boat. Sam had gotten Kerry a birthday cake, so we ate that and some other little snacks he found int he kitchen!



Tom and his girlfriend Victoria met up with us on the boat via Tom's speedboat!! They tied onto our boat and hopped over and just talked with us for awhile. Victoria is really cool and very accomplished-- she's studying acting in London (I think), and has her own variety show starring her and only her. She has performed over 400 solo shows throughout the UK (wow!). After a bit, Tom invited us onto his boat and we went for a rollercoaster ride. I'm not sure what engine he had, but it certainly was VERY powerful...we were flying! Victoria and I stabled (as best we could) at the stern of the boat while it crashed through the waves. Least to say my back and legs were pretty sore after that experience! Probably one of the most fun experiences in a very long time though, so it was alright :)







All in all, this weekend was one for the history book, and I think I came pretty close to meeting royalty :) GB Vball players...GB sailors...extravagant parties, yachts clubs...man, now I know what to aspire to! :) Enjoy the pictures!!