Experience Fulbright

We had a smooth first leg of our journey to Uzbekistan. Our flight to London was uneventful and we even landed a half hour early. Still, an overnight flight is always a challenge for me. We spent our first day in central London exploring and just trying to stay awake until a proper bedtime here. My hope is to let my body adjust to London time (+6 hours from Minneapolis) over the 4 days we have here in the hope that the jet lag won’t be as bad when we arrive in Tashkent. (It’s +11 hours from MSP.)

One day 1 in London we mostly just did some sight seeing to stay awake. We took the bus to Harrod’s and wandered around the store for a hour or so before heading into Hyde park. It was sunny and dry in the afternoon so walking through the park was lovely. it was strange to see green grass again. Dillon wanted to walk past the Princess Diana Memorial playground (aka the pirate ship park) since it was his favorite park when we were staying in London 12 years ago. Its one of the few things he remembers from our time in London.

After the park we grabbed a bite to eat at Bella Italia near the Bayswater tube stop and then headed back to our hotel for a bit of rest. We managed to stay awake long enough for a proper British fish & chips dinner.

We spent our second day touring the Imperial War Museum which has an amazing collection of items from World War I and WWII. This was a very interesting, if not depressing, museum. We required a little pick me up after a day spent learning about the history of war, so we stopped into a little pub called The Tankerd near the museum. This was some of the best pub food I’ve ever had. One of my favorite British dishes is the Steak and Ale pie and this one did not disappoint. Although I could do without the mushy peas.

Our last day was spent touring the Harry Potter Studios. This was a spendy tour but well worth the money if you are a HP fan. We got to tour many of the actual sets used in the filming of the movies and learn all kinds of behind the scenes tidbits. The enormous model they built of Hogwarts castle was the most impressive thing we saw. The model is massive and all constructed by hand. It took 90 artists 7 months to create and was used for all the exterior shots of the castle. Its hard to tell the scale of it from the photo but it took up an entire 2 story studio.

In between all of these fun tourist stops, I’ve been communicating with the US Embassy in Tashkent about my arrival and the Ministry of Education about my schedule for next week. It looks like I will need to hit the ground running as I already have two full days of meetings set up with ministry officials and and a press conference. (Yikes!) I need to give a formal presentation of my project to a team of Ministry officials and about 15 reporters. So, I’ve spent time in the mornings and evenings this week putting the slides together for this. It was actually a great exercise for me to do before arriving since it required me to read over a bunch of research I had been meaning to get to. I feel more prepared now having this done.

It has been a nice few days in London and certainly better than an 11 hour layover in the airport. I’m glad that we split the trip up. By the time this blog posts we will be on our way to Tashkent.