The Travel Adventures of an Ex-Culinary Major

Deep in the suburbs surrounding London City is a quiet mansion neighborhood where huge houses stand in lines mere meters apart. Located at the very end of the street is a chest high brick wall and a large iron gate. This is the entrance to Eltham Palace, once a Tudor vacation palace turn 30’s millionaire home, now an architectural, design, and historical marvel for tourists and locals alike. Your first steps onto the extensive property are over a long, massive, stone bridge that once would have allowed passage over a mote but now serve as a viewing point for the gardens below.  The house itself, even from the outside, looks to be a conglomeration of the medieval and the modern. The entrance into main living space has the look of a 30’s building with it’s combination of brick and granite but if you merely look to your right you see stained glass arches reaching up to the sky like a church and what is left of the original ballroom. Before laying a foot past the threshold we wer...

Arriving in London began an entertaining and tiring adventure. In the first 48 hours my first impression of London is that it is a city of dichotomies. Between the old and new, traditional and untraditional, wealthy and impoverished. Quite unlike any city you might find in the USA. Admittedly, the first day was pretty rough. We all had jet lag and just wanted to eat and sleep but it was a very good thing that we didn’t as we would have thrown off our sleep schedules for the entire week.  It began at the airport. After getting off the plane I began to notice the differences in quality expectations in the city. The bathrooms were nicer, the hallways were cleaners, and the employees had a totally different standard for polite service. In contrast restaurant service is fast, to the point, and no questions asked. Probably the easiest opposition to notice is the contrast between the old and new architecture in the city. It is important to note that many buildings in the city are at ...

Holy crap guys! My class leaves for London in two days and I'm already exhausted just thinking about it! Going into this blog I wanted to offer you all an excited and upbeat explanation of what I am expecting to get out of going to London, but that just wouldn't be real. Because right now, i'm tired, frustrated and pretty stressed out. Now, those negative emotions are not all stemming from this trip but they are currently effecting my outlook on it and my expectations. I think everyone has been in this situation when they are about to go on a vacation, business trip, or study abroad. It can be very stressful planning, packing and going with the flow, especially if your like me and want to be in control of the entire process. So today, I'm gonna keep it real, and walk us all through how I handle being the little ball of stress that I am by sharing the way I find the things I am excited about for any given trip, specifically this London trip, in order to put myself in a...