SIXTEEN.

While trying to think of new ways to procrastinate, I realized that I could return my attention to the world of blogging seeing as I'm behind a couple of weeks. So what's been happening over here?

Well, the weekend of Thanksgiving I was lucky enough to have my mom and two brother visiting me from Wednesday- Monday. I stayed with them in their hotel which was really nice and awesome because it was bilingual in French- tres chic. We had a jam packed weekend filled with tourist bus tours, the tower of london, countless pubs including the dickens inn and the george inn, a christmas carol, oliver, the british museum, greenwich, the hyde park winter wonderland, and of course shopping. I loved having all of them here it was the perfect way to break up the semester and give me just the amount of home I needed to get through it! Even though we would have loved to have Thanksgiving back in New Jersey, all that really mattered was that we were all together! I'm not sure about how the pilgrims would feel about us having Thanksgiving dinner in a British pub, but hey, at least we were celebrating.

Starting right after they left came the dreaded rush of work for final projects, papers, and exams. As stressful as it's been it's definitely worth it considering the little amount of work I had during the rest of the semester...I also keep reminding myself of the little grading system called pass/fail which means...I don't have to try quiet as hard as I think I should.

The following weekend my flatmate Emily and I went to Venice, Italy for a long weekend. We left Thursday night and didn't get to our hotel until about midnight but it was worth it not to have to wake up early on Friday to catch a flight. All day Friday it rained which was kind of a bummer but we explored as much as we could and figured out really fast how small Venice really is. We also experienced first hand how Venice is really going to sink because of all the massive flooding that happened because of the rain. All of Saint Mark's Square was under over a foot of water...all of the shops had to close and risers were put out so people could walk through. Friday night the rain let up enough for us to venture to the Rialto Bridge where we had dinner in a Blues bar/restaurant which was veryy entertaining. The entire ceiling of the place was filled with dangling bras...Im assuming most of which were donated by American girls. There isn't much nightlife in Venice so we kept it pretty low key on Friday night...even though we may have shamefully stopped in at the Hard Rock Cafe. Saturday was jam packed with loads of wandering and siteseeing...mostly churches and buildings that we didn't actually know. What we DID know was Saint Mark's Square and the Basilica (part of which was still flooded from the day before) and places like the house where Marco Polo lived and the two oldest buildings in Venice. We took a gondola ride lead by a wonderful guy named Mark. He chatted our ears off and gave us loads of fun facts about Venice like that there are 420 bridges. He also sang Born in the USA to me which made my trip complete. We spent the rest of the day wandering without direction...but never actually getting lost. That's the great thing about Venice, just when you think you've ventured into the most desolate alleyway you find that it's really leading you to just where you wanted to be. Sunday was great because we were able to sleep in and not rush to catch the water taxi to the bus stop. Everything was timed perfectly and we made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare for some duty free shopping and lunch. We were back in London before we knew it and lucky for us were greeted by loads of papers and projects.

Well, I guess that is enough procrastinating for now. Next time I need a distraction I'll be back writing about Paris : round two!