Well, I made it to England. It was quite the adventure getting here though. The flight took less time than we expected and luckily our flight was one of the first in that day so we only had to wait in line for an hour to get into the country; the poor people behind us probably had a few hours of standing around before they were admitted. After that it was a chore dragging hundreds of pounds of luggage to the train station and then onto the tram - I actually fell throwing my 50 pounds suitcase onto the tram car and still have a bruise...ouch! Our sheet said the hotel was a short walk from the tram station we ended up at so, we decided to walk. what a dumb idea! it took about 30 minutes to drag all of our luggage there and we were so sweaty by the time we arrvived, i think the girls at the reception desk had a good laugh at us. and then once we got there we couldn't even check in for an hour but they nicely held our luggage for us and we walked around town trying to find something to eat since we had had two meals of airplane food which wasn't terrible but not quite satisfying either. we had these great sandwiches, chicken with stuffing and the bread was amazing (maybe an exaggeration considering how hungry we were.) so then we got back to the hotel and dragged our stuff up to our room. which looked pretty cute! the view outside the window was also very nice :) (check out the nice pictures! haha)

So, then we showered and I made the mistake of laying on my bed and really wanted to go to sleep but we were determined to stay awake at least until it was dark outside. Walking around Eccles was nice, we got some tea/coffee and wandered about the area going into little shops and such, getting lost but not really, we eventually found a restaurant, the hope something, and I had a steak and ale pie and it was absolutely delicious. on the way back to our room we stopped at a wine store and bought a bottle and were thoroughly dissappointed when they didn't ask for our IDs. After getting back to our room we had some of the wine, ate some peanut M&Ms and fell asleep even though it was only 7:30 and wasn't even dark yet.
After about 13 hours of amazing sleep we got up and took the tram into the main part of manchester and explored around there for awhile. It was neat! We had some delicious sandwiches for our brunch I guess you'd call it, and checked out the Manchester art gallery which was free and really neat to walk around, they had some pottery there and I enjoyed looking at that. One of the pieces was this gigantic pineapple all made out of clay so I bought a postcard of that since I found it really interesting. We also checked out the Manchester public library since we thought they might have internet access and they gave us a guest pass for 20 minutes of computer use so that was great, got to send some e-mails to people so they would know I was alive and doing well.
We checked out the malls around there and just walked around for a long period of time and by dinnertime the place was getting pretty dark and it didn't seem like the best of areas so we decided to get out of there and get back to Eccles (a suberb of Manchester). On the tram back there were some very obnoxious teenagers, and they got off the tram at our stop but maggie and I were so relieved that they were gone that we kind of forgot to get off and had to get off at the next stop and get onto another tram to get taken back to Eccles. How stupid of us haha. Then we decided we might as well check out the pub scene in Eccles - why not, right? It was kind of an awkward scene if you ask me. The first one we went into was clearly a gay bar, we stuck out...a lot. The next place wasn't so great either, the last one was having a birthday party for some girls and we're not even sure if we were allowed in but we went anyways, whoops! This old man, probably about 70+ decided to befriend us, he had two watches on and told us he "had a lot of time on his hands" oh boy. We finished our drinks fast there and headed out back to the hotel...where there was a wedding party going on! So we went to the bar at the hotel and watched football (soccer) with the people who work at the hotel, what fun. Next morning we checked out and made our way over to the Manchester train station where we took a train to York to come to school!