First Day of Classes & everything I missed from the weekend!

This is a photo I shot from my view out my dorm window :) Saturday night we had a Presidential dinner in the long gallery.  It was a classy affair that got everyone dressed up in their very best.  The dinner was an imitation of a "high table" dinner like they still hold frequently at english universities such as Oxford.  We had assigned seating so that we could get to know more students.  After the dinner Amanda and I decided to spend our Saturday evening in back in Grantham.  We met a couple of english boys (they prefer "english" to "british" btw) who showed us some cool places to go and let us ask silly questions about life in England.  It was interesting to listen to their accents and try to understand the jargon they used.  I woke up Sunday morning bright and early to make it once again into Grantham for a church service at the Reformed Methodist Church.  The building was rather large but sadly quite empty.  Everyone who attended was very welcoming though and I quickly caught on to their traditional style of worship.  Other than the two other Harlaxton students that were with me, there was only one young person in attendance (who happened to be the organist).  I arrived back to the manor and was able to eat lunch and pick up my textbooks in preparation for our first class day.  Amanda and I spent the greater part of the evening planning an independent trip for this weekend to Germany.  We plan to leave thursday after class to catch a flight out of London to Berlin where we will stay in a Hostel and spend Friday visiting the sites.  We then hop on the railway from Berlin to Hamburg to spend both Saturday and Sunday until we must depart back to London to return to the Manor.  It was crazy, but we booked it!  It might not be the most conventional trip, but we planned it ourselves and we are still learning :)  This morning I got up early for breakfast before our schoolwide lecture for British Studies at 8:30 a.m.  From there I attended my seminar class for British Studies and also a literature class called "The English Novel."  So far it seems like we are going to be in for a lot of work, but I think it will be a good semester.  Oh and this morning Amanda and I were brave and tried black pudding.  Yuck!  I won't even say what it is made out of, you'll have to look it up yourself.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding  I am glad we did it because for some ridiculous reason it is part of english cuisine, and afterall I am in England!