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
• Experiencing London

PHOTO CUTLINES
COVER – From left to right – Parker Rankin (men's lacrosse), Alex Brown, Anna Schneemann (women's tennis), Madison Godleski (women's lacrosse), Quinlan Kubacak (cheerleading), Kayla Tate (women's lacrosse)
INSIDE – From left to right – Madison Godleski (women's lacrosse), Parker Rankin (men's lacrosse), Kayla Tate (women's lacrosse)

Hey SU! In the name of honesty, I decided to write about a few of the things that haven't gone exactly as planned on our trip, since I've so far only written about the things I've enjoyed and been excited about. As much as I love being here in London, it has not all been biscuits and crumpets! ?

Incident Number One: The Notting Hill Carnival
Just a few short days after I arrived in London, I started hearing things about a carnival at a place called Notting Hill. Because of the word "carnival," and because of the cheery way in which people talked about it, I was picturing the standard ferris wheel, arcade games and fried food image that I have come to associate with the term. Adding to this false sense of what to expect at the carnival was the fact that it was "family day" at Notting Hill. On our way to the carnival, I started noticing large piles of beer cans and other alcoholic beverages on the street. At first, I wrote it off as just part of living in a large city, even though I found it a bit odd considering that London is a very clean city for how massive it is. As we got closer to the carnival, the size of the beer can piles on the side of the road started to increase drastically, as did the  BAC (blood alcohol concentration) of the growing crowd around us. Needless to say, this was not the type of carnival we had imagined. There were people in crazy costumes, people completely covered in chocolate, and, much to my surprise, people "dancing" with police officers. If I had one word to describe the Notting Hill Carnival, it would be "CHAOS."

Incident Number Two: GPS Mishaps
This next incident, unfortunately, happened on our first day of classes. The Human Biology Today class that I'm taking here has two hours of lecture and two hours of lab. For our first lab, we were taking a field trip to the Fleming Museum to learn about the discovery of penicillin. Because we had just gotten out of class, we all left the building together to go to the tube to travel to the museum. However, three of us got separated from the rest of the group and missed the train the rest of our class was on. We didn't really think this was a big deal at first, but our GPS took us 20 minutes in the wrong direction! Once we finally got to the station closest to the museum, but not really near it, we were running almost an hour late. This is when our second mistake happened. We decided to try taking a bus to the museum to save time, which in reality cost us even more time because we got off at the wrong stop, and had to walk an extra half mile. By the time we finally arrived at the museum, our class was wrapping up, so we only got a very condensed version of the tour (and disappointed ourselves and our professor!) The moral of this story is stay with your group at all costs, and never only rely on your GPS.

Incident Number Three: The Wrong Dates
One of the best things about being in Europe is how easy it is to travel between countries. With this being said, my roommate and I decided to plan a weekend trip to Poland to visit one of my family friends. We made sure to double check all of our program dates so we could avoid any conflicts. However, once we got to London, I realized in a panic that we had accidentally double-booked ourselves, since we only had half of our program dates when we planned our trip. The program calendar we received when we arrived had an excursion to Buckingham Palace on the Sunday of the weekend we were supposed to be in Poland.  We had just been told that any unexcused absences would result in our final grade dropping half a letter, so I totally panicked. I immediately went to talk to the woman who had just dropped this bomb of bad news on us, and asked her what I should do. She then proceeded to tell me that I would have to talk to my British Life and Culture professor and that we would be at her mercy. The next week when classes finally started, I went to explain our situation to my BLC professor. She explained to us that the excursion was actually not for her class, and that we would receive no penalty from her for missing the excursion. Confused, I asked her who we needed to inform that we would not be attending the excursion, and she then directed me to one of the head staff members at IES. Once I spoke with the IES staff member, I learned that the excursion was not specifically for any class, and that we would not be penalized in any way for missing it. I was absolutely thrilled that our trip was officially going to happen, and I went back to the dorm room to look over our travel plans. It wasn't until then that I realized I had completely remembered our travel dates wrong, and that we were actually going to Poland the weekend after the Buckingham Palace excursion. I was (and still am) completely mortified that I made such a big deal about our trip to so many people when I completely got the dates for it wrong. We're scheduled to go to Poland on Friday this week and (thankfully) we will not actually be missing anything!

– Kayla