Kayla Tate is in her second year at Southwestern University. This semester she is studying abroad in London, and she will be writing a blog for SouthwesternPirates.com to give you an inside look at her experience. Below is her second post.

Previous posts:
• Introducing Kayla Tate

Hey Southwestern!

Our first week of classes just wrapped up here in London, and this week has been absolutely incredible. On Monday, our program went to tour Windsor Castle. Windsor is the oldest functioning castle in the world, and it is still used by the royal family today. Since I'm a huge history lover, I always have a blast touring old buildings and castles. For that reason, seeing Windsor was my favorite thing we did this week. Tuesday was a little bit hectic since it was our first official day of classes. For the academic portion of our program, we are either in two classes taught by SU professors and two classes taught by IES British professors, or three classes and an internship. I decided to not do an internship, so I am taking an intro level biology class with Southwestern's own Dr. Cuevas, and an upper level psychology class taught by Dr. Crocket. For my two classes taught by IES staff, I'm taking a British Life and Culture class, which is taught by none other than the great, great, great granddaughter of Charles Dickens. My other class taught by a British professor is Theater.

The coolest thing about classes here is that we will be doing a good number of excursions to fully emerce ourselves in British culture and history. For example, this week for my Human Biology Today lab, we took a trip to the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum. The main attraction of this museum is the actual room that Fleming discovered penicillin in.

It's amazing being in a city with so much history at literally every turn!

Another class outing we took this week was going to see the play "Breakfast at Tiffany's" for theater. We will be seeing nine theater productions for that class and I could not be more excited! Getting to take so many class related trips is nice because it really helps us to explore the city in ways we may not have thought of or been able to do. I may have only been here for a little over a week, but I can already say that London is one of the best cities I've ever been to. I can't wait to explore it more in the weeks to come!

- Kayla