Spain Part 1: Flight Cancelled

That's right. Our flight which was supposed to leave Thursday night for Madrid was cancelled due to an air strike in France. This meant that no one was watching the air over France and therefore it was unsafe to fly over. I guess being stuck in London is not as bad as dying in a fiery crash over some random part of western France. However, it wasn't exactly fun standing in a giant line waiting to get to customer service, while also struggling to get through to a customer service person on the phone, and calling our hostel in Madrid to cancel our reservations. We finally managed to get a person on the phone and Alex and I had transferred our flights to Saturday morning, when Alex's phone ran out of money and she got cut off leaving Adam, Lauren, Beka, and Mike looking for another route. By the time we reached the counter, EasyJet (with whom we were flying) only had flights on Monday. So the other four found a flight on British Airlines that went to Barcelona late Saturday morning. Our original plan had been to get to Madrid Thursday night, hang out in Madrid Friday, then fly to Barcelona on Saturday. Alex and I will be flying to Madrid, hanging out at the airport for a few hours before flying to Barcelona while the four will be flying straight there. Hopefully. But although all of this majorly sucked, we all had each other for company and managed to keep a positive outlook on things, especially Adam, who I now call Mr. Optimism.

So....as we are not ones to sit idly by (this excludes the guys of course), Alex, Beka, and I went off exploring in London today, determined not to think about how we should be in Madrid. First, we went to the Sir John Soane Museum which is probably the coolest museum I have EVER been to. It is this guys house and all the random junk (like paintings by Turner and Hogarth and a ring with a lock of Napoleon's hair) that he collected. He designed his house so it could kind of be a museum, mostly for all of these marbles (as in blocks of classical buildings) he had. But he also has paintings, books, a sarcophagus, furniture, statues, and much more. All in a house that is in a line of houses along Lincoln's Inn Fields. In other words, this house is not one of those grand country houses you see in period drama movies; it is a city house and if it wasn't a museum, each floor probably would have been divided into flats and sold to multiple people. Needless to say, it is squishy. I had to put my large purse in a provided plastic bag so I wouldn't accidentally hit something, which I totally would have. It is the weirdest, yet coolest museum I've ever been to and I would highly recommend it to anyone who visits London.

After having lunch at a cute pub that insisted on playing 90s pop music along with the accompanying music video, we went to the British Library. I've been once before, but as my mother will attest, I wasn't all that enthusiastic. I was 14 and there really wasn't much that captured my interest, especially not a bunch of old books. Now, as an English major, I think it is a requirement. They have Beowulf, Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Hardy, Wordsworth, and a special display of a collection of many editions of Alice in Wonderland, including sketches of some costumes appearing in the new Tim Burton version (coming to a theatre near you soon!). But what I loved the most was the illuminated manuscripts. I wish they still made books like this because I would have 5 million of them, and I really don't need any more books. The illustrations are sooooooooo beautiful especially the ones from Asia and India; the European ones just looked pathetic next to them. And, I had a very English nerd moment when a tour guide near us was talking about Sir Philip Sydney, who introduced the sonnet and she couldn't remember how many lines were in a sonnet. She and the group decided on 12, but I turned to Beka and said, "Wrong. There are 14 lines: 3 stanzas of 4 lines plus a 2 line couplet." But I didn't tell the tour guide this as I didn't want to embarrass her in front of her group.

So cross your fingers for us that our plane leaves tomorrow! We have to get up at 4 am to make a 7:35 departure, so they better not cancel it again so I will be most seriously displeased.