Day 1

The past two days have flown by but seem like one really long sleep deprived day. Probably because it was. The time difference meant we arrived here at 5 am my time but noon in England. Luckily I am blessed with the ability to sleep anywhere and got some sleep on the plane and therefore at least was able to walk around and realize I was in England. The most memorable part of the plane ride was the little 12 year old girl named Diamond I sat next to on the flight to New York. I could tell she thought she was pretty awesome and much too cool to have the "unaccompanied minor" bracelet on. After we'd talked for a little bit she asked me how old I was. I told her 20 and she looked completely shocked. She said "I thought you were 15! I thought it was kind of weird that you were studying in England all by yourself." At least she didn't tell me I sounded like I was 30. Anyways, our plane was about 5 hours late but we finally made it to our cute little hotel room that fits a bed, a desk and nothing else. But it’s right downtown so it’s perfect.

We didn’t really have any plans for the day so we decided to ride the train to Wimbledon and see what we could see, hoping we could at least see a sign for the tennis tournament or something. So we got off at Wimbledon Station, which is about a half an hour walk from the actual tennis courts. We walked through Wimbledon, shopping and looking at the pretty houses and trying our best not to get lost. We only missed one turn and even then we didn't walk too far out of our way. When we finally found the tennis courts we started following this sign:

We walked I think around the entire tennis facility before we saw a mob of people in a line (or 'queue'). Little did we know that this was the tip of the iceberg. We followed them back to a field that was filled with lines of people and just followed the people ahead of us until we were in line ourselves. (The people ahead of us in line were a bunch of little kids with their moms and the kids had the cutest accents. Okay, I know, everyone has accents but I'm still getting used to it.)

At this point we decided we'd wait a little while but had no real hope of ever getting in. The stewards had said the wait was probably about 2 hours and it was already 5:15 pm. But while we were sitting there the stewards handed us a "Queue Card" which would allow us to get in and ensure that no one "queue jumps."


I was excited to have evidence that we queued at Wimbledon and was about to suggest that we head out in 15 minutes when I got distracted by an ice cream truck (and no, ice cream trucks do not play music in England).

So I join the queue of kids in front of the ice cream truck. I was waiting patiently when suddenly I saw people moving and I realized that that was our queue. I was not going to run away from my ice cream so I proceeded in line to get my ice cream as I tried to keep track of mom in the mob of people.

I have to go, so I will finish later. I'm sorry that these entries are long, I'm keeping this as my journal and so I'm sorry for the boring details. Pick and choose what you want to read.