Second day! I’ll be honest, I was super nervous to be jet lagged while I was adjusting to London time, but it wasn’t that bad. I think the way we timed our plane out made it really easy to fall into the day because we arrived in the morning and just started our day.
The breakfast at St. Giles Hotel is fanaminal. They have cereal, eggs, sausage, toast, bacon, juice, yogurt, and so much more at their free breakfast it’s unbelievable. I also locked myself out of the room this morning, so I really loved that for me. I was proud I got up before noon though if I am being completely honest. At around 9:45 a.m. we met in the lobby to go to our first media visit. We took the tubes for the first time (Similar to New York Subways) this morning too! They were way easier to navigate than I thought. I wish Pittsburgh had something similar, but I know it’s not big enough. I love it though!
Back to the media visit. We went to Regent’s University which is a university we partner with for our study abroad program, so it was cool to get a taste of what the campus looked like if we ever wanted to study abroad. We spoke with Jason MaKenzie who is a works at the university to talk about how media is widening or narrowing our everyday perception of the news. The consensus was that media has to ability to widen your perspectives as long as you are aware that it is setting you up to narrow them. We also touched on how it is hard to remember the original source of a story when platforms publish news articles, and looked at a few different London newspapers like The Daily Paragraph, Financial Times, Daily Mirror, The Times, The Metro, and The Guardian. Jason also gave us his thoughts on where technology is headed with virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence.
Jason was an awesome speaker. He made us all feel really comfortable, and was really interactive. He also explained how it was being one of the people that really enjoyed using technology to advance in communications when it first started getting popular in the 1990’s. So, it was cool to really get to know him in a more personal way. He also followed us all on LinkedIn, which was really awesome.
After that, it was about 2p.m and we had the rest of the day to ourselves. I stopped and got lunch at a Chinese restaurant back by our hotel, and walked around the city, looking throughout all the shops. It is really just the most beautiful city I have ever seen. The architecture is everything. I think I will probably say something about it in every blog not even on purpose but because I think that every time I walk outside. I stopped at Primark which is very similar to our Forever 21, but its honestly much better. It’s like going to a clothing mall, but in one store. There were 4 floors. They also have a store called Boots which is similar to our CVS or Walgreens, but also much better.
I stopped for a snack at Honest Burger and noticed they had Heinz ketchup and started talking to our server about Pittsburgh. It was really cool, and they even had the glass bottle. They have an “American Candy Shop” store on every block, and the first thing I always see in them is a wall of Poptarts, and it cracks me up every time.
After adventuring for that little bit, I walked back to the hotel to freshen up, and venture over to Waterloo to catch the view from the London Eye (a huge Ferris wheel that gives you the view of the whole city). We met up with a few of the others from the group at a cute pop up outside bar venue called the “Underbelly Festival.” We stayed around there until about 11 and decided to head back to the hotel because we had an early morning ahead of us. Finally, when we got back, I stopped at the 24-hour restaurant attached to the hotel because I was starving, and then I finally had gone to sleep.