A Few "Firsts" for Us

With all the drama revolving around the presidential inauguration, I was pretty set on remaining neutral and not watching it. I know, I'm still an American citizen, but I kind of felt like I was off the hook since I was in the UK. And I had never watched one before, so why start now? But the Pace University students in Jordan's law program felt otherwise... in fact, they threw a party. Neither one of us being one to refuse free food, we went. :) Quite honestly, I'm not that into politics and I flat out refuse to argue about them. It's not that I don't care; and regardless of who you or I voted for, I just felt a little odd watching a celebration for our new president that seemed more like a celebrity rockstar bash. It is crazy to me that the whole world was watching. Even over here they showed on the news how all the elementary school students were learning about it. I never once remember learning about the inauguration of another country's leader. Why is that?! At any rate, it was a first for me!

While I'm on the subject of political matters, we have been lucky enough to be in London at a time where their currency, the pound, has been dramatically falling in comparison to our US dollar. When I came to London during college, the pound was about 2.1 in comparison for 1 US dollar (which basically means everything was twice as expensive!) This 2-to-1 ratio has remained the common currency exchange rate ever since; however, the UK suddenly has a suffering economy like we do, which, as bad as it is for people here, has been AMAZING for us! The pound just dropped yesterday to 1.37 in comparison to 1 US dollar. Needless to say, that saves us a LOT of money. We celebrated by buying a few of our flights out of London. :)

We see this sign in a shop window on our way to the gym every morning. Did I really just say "on our way the the GYM every morning?!"

On another note, we have been trying to come up with fun ideas of things to do in January since the weather isn't great, and since we are saving a lot of our trips and "tourist activities" for better weather and for when friends and family come to visit us. Jordan happened upon a website that talked about going fishing, and the next thing I knew he was online reserving fishing poles for us. :) Interestingly enough, the store we went to to pick them up was like an old-fashioned catalogue store. First, you pick (or reserve like we did) your items out of a huge catalogue, then you pay for them, then you get a number and wait in line until they get your items from their warehouse and bring them out to you. A whole new experience for us! Little did we know... 

Yes, you're seeing the picture above correctly. If you could have seen it in person, you would have died laughing. The poles Jordan ordered online were the correct ones for the type of fish you catch around here, only... they are literally 12 foot long fishing poles!!! We were "lucky" that they were both packaged in halves, but still, walking around the crowded streets of London with these HUGE boxes in our hands was not exactly part of the plan. We had taken the tube (the underground subway) to get to the store, but we were a little too worried to try and take the poles back home on it, so we decided to walk. How far could it be?

45 minutes, 4 freezing hands, and countless awkward stares later...

Here is one of the poles put together. Note that it barely fits in our tiny flat. :) Honestly, I was standing at our front door and Jordan was at the back wall by the window, and he could almost touch me with it!

That same night, we had planned on heading down to London's big movie theater in Leicester Square to try and catch the red carpet premiere of Valkyrie with Tom Cruise. Living in Spokane, we don't get very many opportunities to see big events like this, let alone famous people, so we figured it would be a fun experience. :) Last week when we went and saw Defiance, we were able to get the guy at the movie counter to tell us when all the big premieres took place. With the whole fishing pole incident, we were a lot later than we had planned on, so we didn't get a great spot, but it was still fun to be amidst all the excitement and energy!

We did end up seeing Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, but we were nowhere near as close as we thought we'd be. Also, we were a little bummed because we were at the far end of the red carpet and we thought for sure the stars would get dropped off there and walk the whole carpet. Rookie mistake on our part! Tom and Katie (do you like how we're on a first-name basis now?!) got dropped off at the far end of the red carpet near the paparazzi and then just went inside. :( We were a little disappointed, especially after we'd seen a picture in the paper recently of Will Smith taking pictures with the crowd at his last premiere.

We did manage to get a couple pictures of them though, even though you can't really see them. In this one they are right below the big flash. You can actually click on any of the pictures, and it will make them bigger.

The funniest part was that we recognized Tom Cruise because of Katie, and how much taller she was than him. :) Again, this one their backs are to us. Click to enlarge the picture!

After all was said and done, the whole thing was a little anti-climatic. It was definitely cool to be there, but as we walked away, Jordan and I kind of laughed at all the hype... I mean, they're just PEOPLE. Right?!

On a different note, we have some super exciting news of another first for us!  No, I'm not pregnant. I know some of you were thinking that... well, stop! :)  From the moment we first started planning our trip to London, Jordan has wanted to see a big soccer game over here. The only problem was that once we started looking into tickets, we discovered that they are outrageously expensive! I'm talking like one-month's-rent expensive. Not really doable for us! He had pretty much conceded to watching the big games in pubs over here, which is still a lot of fun, but nowhere near the real deal. 

Well... yesterday he was sitting in class, and his professor announced to the students that she and her husband have season tickets for Manchester United. For those of you who don't know, that is probably the biggest and BEST team in the UK, and probably in the sport of soccer in general. Sorry, it's actually called "football" over here, my mistake! Anyway, she offered her tickets to the students on a first-come-first-serve basis for any game that's during the week, as her and her husband usually go to the weekend games. The stipulation was that the students had to email her once class was over for the dates they wanted. Although he won't admit it, I'm pretty sure Jordan sprinted home, dodging traffic and pushing innocent people out of his way to get to his computer. :) It paid off though! We got tickets to a Monday game, February 2nd, vs. Everton. Manchester is actually a couple hours away, but we managed to find train tickets even though it was such late notice... it's amazing how it all fell into place! We are so stoked!!

P.S. Our flights to Ireland and Scotland for the first week of Jordan's spring break are officially booked! :)