A Not-So-Sunny Sunday

Today we experienced our first rainy London day! Kinda inconvenient though, trying to walk to church through the freezing rain. We didn't realize the tube would be so much faster, so we walked all through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park to get there. Beautiful, but wet and cold :) Church was really good - it still amazes me that the church is the same everywhere you go. On the way home I took my first ever double decker bus! Woohoo! I rode on the top level and everything. I love the buses - you get twice as many people on and they're just cooler anyway.

Today I took like a 2 hour nap while reading for my English class. It felt so good, and I'll totally be able to sleep tonight still, no problem. Jet lag stinks...We all just realized that we have to read and create a presentation on our Jane Austen books by next Monday. That's kinda soon. I'm not too worried though, since I'm way excited to read Emma. I love the content of the class, but sometimes the workload seems a bit steep considering our other class and all the fun stuff to do in London.

Today I felt kind of a revival of how amazing it is here and how fortunate I am to be here. I love it. I love walking through Kensington Gardens on the way to church. I love riding the tube everywhere. I love being 20 minutes away from Big Ben. I love hearing all the languages and accents around me. At the beginning I think I was too homesick to really appreciate all this stuff, but now I feel more excited to be here. I'm just a homebody that needs a good nap to adjust.

We had a fireside tonight with President Steven R. Snow of the 70 and an area 70 and their wives. They were all so amazing, and just what I needed to hear. Earlier today the Hyde Park Stake President also spoke to us. He said something really amazing - he encouraged us to take our time here to use our homesickness and our unsettled feelings to grow closer to God. He said that getting away from all things familiar is a great way to find out who you really are and strengthen your relationship with God. That was perfect for me to hear, and I began to realize that if i put my trust in God this semester, like I have before, that I will have time to do everything I need and want to do. I will be effective in my classes and also have an amazing time. Let's just hope that my teachers grade easier than they did last semester - everyone who was here then said that the classes totally killed their GPAs and were impossibly hard. Ugh...I'm too much of a worry wart. I'll be fine. :) Wish me luck!