Olym-pics

Hi!!! Yesterday we went to the olympics!!!!!!! They were super amazing. We saw artistic gymnastics. Here are some pics!!! 

 

This was the stadium. It was super big! It was really pink too. We had a really good view considering how high up we were.

 We got a suite!!!! We didn't use it much, but it was still exciting!!!

 It's kinda hard to see in this picture, but this is the Pommel Horse.  See the person doing a handstand on there? Really cool to watch!

 

Ok, so this picture was hard to take because the people on the high bar were always going too fast, so if you look closely then you can see the person on it. He's wearing blue. The high bar was probably my favorite out of the 6.

This was what the score board looked like. The two letters on the left are which exercise they are doing. Floor exercises, Pommel Horse, Steel Rings, Vault, Parallel bars, and High Bar. The 3 letters after that are the countries. And on the bottom of that are the stats of the countries for that rotation. We got lucky, because we got to see USA compete :)

USA ended up getting 1st place! So they get to move up into the next round! Yay America!

I just realized that if you look below where it says Great Britain, you can see the athlete on the Steel rings!

That's all for now!!! I'll put more pictures up when I see more olympic events. Thanks for reading! --Laurel :)

Olympic pics

Hi! I'm going to post some more pictures in honor of the olympics (which start tomorrow).

This is Wenlock, the olympic mascot. There are 80 statues like this one around London. Here are a few of them -->

Big Ben Wenlock-->

Underwater Wenlock-->

Some other random Wenlock -->

This is a bridge with the olympic rings on it -->

Ariel with "the olympic torch" at Madam Tussauds. -->

We saw the real torch come through our city two days ago. It was a lot like the 4th of july parade with all the sponsors coming to advertise along side the torch. It was pretty quick (the torch runner). It was like, one minute he's there and then after one picture hes on to the next street already! I guess it has to be that way or else the torch might not get to the stadium on time!

This is the official olympic countdown clock. -->

We took this picture a few days ago so by now it probably says something like, "0 days, 19 hrs, 36 mins, 12 secs." Or something like that.

This concludes the olympic portion of this post. The olympics start tomorrow! And may the odds be ever in your favor.... ;)

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Here are some left over pictures. These are pictures that I've probably already told you about, but haven't been posted. Enjoy!

 

These are from the airplane! -->

This is our Oxford house. We get to move stuff in tomorrow!!! -->

This was probably the most disgusting meal I've ever eaten! Bangers and Mash. bleh. :P -->

The contents on the plate are mushy peas (very popular in England for some reason), Sausages (they were vegetarian but I still didn't want to touch them), mashed potatos, and bread. Now at least, I can compare my food to this when I don't like it. Nothing is worse than this!!!

To end on a lighter note, yesterday I saw les miserables (i don't know how to spell it though). It was pretty good. It was dark, but it had good songs. And to end on a (whats the opposite of a light note?) heavier (?) note, yesterday we went to the most boring museum of my life! It was the westminster abbey. We got these tour phone things where you put in the number and it tells you about the statue or whatever you're standing near. But the tour guy had the most depressing voice "tooo yourr leffft yoou wiill see thhee tombb of kinng heeennryy thee eighthh." And it even came with depressing music too!!! My favorite part of the tour was definitely the gift shop :D. So that's all for now! Thanks to everyone that actually reads my posts! -- Laurel :)

picture update!

Hi! My mom just uploaded the pictures from her camera so I thought that I should post a few to make this blog more colorful.




This is when we first arrived in London --> -->

       

    

We went to see the changing of the guards at buckingham palace. We waited there for 40 minutes to see it. There were like a thousand tourists there with us so it was wayy too crowded and squished. We got some nice pictures but other than that I'm not sure if the wait was worth it. -->









Me with a random police person at Buckingham palace -->

Buckingham Palace -->

We saw big ben (that big clock in the middle of London). It was big. Yeah. -->

We went to Madam Tussaud's. It's a big museum filled with wax famous people. It was really crowed and the people looked more realistic in the ad we saw for it, but it was pretty cool. I recognized a few of the wax people there like Miley Cyrus, Daniel Radcliff, the Twilight people, Obama, and the royal family. Here's some pictures -->

Yesterday we went on the London eye. It's a big famous Ferris wheel. We got in it and were in it for half an hour along with about 15 other people. It had lots of space and places to take pics. So yeah, I would go on again! -->

 That's all I'm posting for now! I hope you enjoyed the photos! Bye! -- Laurel :)

Oxford Trip

The past few days have been really busy!!! On tuesday we took a train and a few buses to Oxford. I really liked the double decker bus we went on. It had wifi! ;) When we got there, we had lunch and then met up with my dad's friend Steve. We went to his house and had dinner. I think we did other things there like play on the wii, but I was too tired so I slept for most of the time. The next day we took a bus to Headington so that Ariel could visit the school that she is probably going to. While she was at the school, I saw the house that we are going to live in in a month. It looked pretty nice. We also visited my school and met the principal. My school isn't in session right now, but it was good that we got to talk to people there. I'm really glad i got into this school (Doverbroeks) because it sounds really fun. 

After we picked up Ariel, we got on a bus to go to the city (i think). We had about 2 free hours so we decided to get off and walk around. After we got off the bus, Ariel realized that she left her bag on the bus!!! The bag had her phone, shoes and borrowed books in it!!! My dad and Ariel started chasing after the bus (which I found pointless because buses don't stop for you here and they werent going to catch it anyways!). They didn't catch the bus. So after about 5 minutes of complaining about it, we decided to call the bus station. They said that they would try to find it but probably not until tomorrow. My mom had the idea that we should call the phone and hope that some nice person would pick up and do something. So I spent 20 minutes calling the phone repeatedly. Nobody picked up. The bus station told us that the bag was most likely on bus # 219 so for half an hour we waited looking for bus #219. Finally someone picked up the phone and I told them to give the phone and bag to the bus driver and he said that he would. When bus 219 finally came, my dad ran onto the bus and asked if the bus driver had it. Well guess what?! He didn't. Yay. We just waited at a bus stop for an hour an a half for nothing! We started to walk away when suddenly another bus came and I told my dad to run and see if maybe the bus had it (cuz by then we were desperate) and thankfully it did! :) After that we went to my dad's friend's house for dinner. We had bangers and mash (in other words, disgusting sausage and mashed potatos) and I pretended to like it. They were a really nice family though even if the food wasn't great. 

We then took 2 busses, a train, and a taxi (because we couldn't walk the half a mile from the train station to our house at 1 am) and went to sleep. And this is why we are having a low key day today and doing nothing! Thanks for reading! Pip pip! Cherio! --Laurel :)

Finally

We finally arrived in London after a 10 hour plane ride. It was exhausting! The airplane was really nice though. It had footrests, and TV screens on the back of every seat. Plus, you didn't even have to wait for the food or drink cart, you could just order from your seat on your touch-screen TV! Anyway, we are at the Donnely's house right now, the family who's lending us their house for a month. After we got off the plane, we took a car to our house. We got a little confused in where we were supposed to meet the driver, so it took us about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be. The taxi driver was apparently really upset that he had to wait for us so all the way to the house he was just telling us about how much luggage we had a saying things like "When I said meet me on Level 2, I meant Level 2 of the airport, not Level 2 of Terminal 1!" Eventually I just put on my headphones that are supposed to block out all other sounds, but they didn't block out his jabbering. I'm still getting used to the different time zones here, because last night I went to bed at 12:00 pm California time, and woke up at 1:30 am London time. It's so confusing!
                                       
                                                                             Ariel

Just saying ;)

Just to make things clear, the post below (titled, we made it to London!) was posted by Laurel. I accidentally made it blue (which is Ariel's color). --Laurel :) Haha. this wasn't worth posting ;)

We arrived in london!

Hi!!!! We made it to London! I am SUPER jetlagged which is why im wide awake posting this at 2:30 in the morning! When we first got to the airport and we were checking our bags, they had to be 23 kilograms (50 pounds) or less, so our bags weighed like 22.6 kilos, 23.0, 22.2, etc. Then we did a bunch of boring things like security, and buying food and charging our electronics. Then we got on the plane. It was a really nice plane. It was one of those that has the screens on the backs of the seats so you can watch movies and play games and even order room service! It was all free, so I watched modern family for about 6 hours! After, that my mom said i needed to sleep so I slept for about 2 hours and went back to watching movies. In the morning, we got breakfast on the plane, which was disgusting but I didn't expect it to be good. We got to London at 11 am (so I think thats 3 am in CA). Luckly, all our luggage made it (which was good because we had 12 pieces of luggage). (Ok so heres where the story gets interesting)... So we couldn't find the person who was supposed to drive us to the house and my mom kept calling him on the phone trying to clarify where we needed to be. But, clearly english was not his first language, so half the time we couldn't even understand him. Then my mom decided to let my dad talk to him. Then for the next 10 minutes my dad stood in the middle of the street yelling into the phone. My dad got so frustrated so hes like, "Here I'm giving the phone to this police officer and HE will tell you where we are!" Finally, we found the driver and he was not happy at all. The whole ride home he kept yelling at us about how bad we were or something! I tuned him out with head phones, but I remember him saying things like "And I call you and you say 'im on level 2' so i go to level 2 and theres nobody there so I drive 10 milez alzee way out here and the you call so I have to turn alzee way around to come find you and blah de blah de blah de.....". And we had to listen to that the WHOLE WAY HOME. I swear we apologized like a thousand times, but that wouldn't stop him from venting. He didn't talk with all the 'zees', but decided to change his accent to make it more interesting. Well, we made it to the house and Woww my post is really long........... I wajt to thank everyone who actually read this whole post! I would tell you about the rest of the day but i think I'll do you a favor by not making this longer. So to sum it all up we made it and we are fine! Ooh guess what, I'm getting a phone tomorrow! Okay, I'm done posting. I'll post more later! --Laurel :)

Farewell Party

We had our farewell party today!!! Thanks for everyone who came! We have 3 boxes of leftover pizza! Anybody want some? :) Laurel