blackpool competition, day three

Amateur standard went...not that awesome this morning, but we made it back to the next round anyway! This means that I'll be doing this to my hair again tomorrow:

which is highly painful for some reason by the way. The crown of my head seems unable to handle hair pins. I will also be nail gluing an earring to my right ear lobe (realized after I got here that the whole clip on piece was gone, leaving just a hunk of rhinestones). Ouch.

I think it's sort of funny because my appearance has been altering between really, really done up for competition and then really, really disastrous after I'm done and showered. This is due to a fried straightener because plugs in England look like this:

so in order to use appliances you have to have a) a converter to even get the plug in and b) a transformer to change voltages, because the voltage in the walls here is 220 V (or maybe 240, can't remember) whereas in the US it's 110 or 120 or something lower like that. Anyway, I put the transformer on the wrong setting the very first day we got here, and it hasn't turned on since. I've been going all natural on the hair, which is to say terribly frizzy. Alas. Twas a necessary sacrifice to the gods of European travel.

Next on today's agenda:

watch standard team win the formation event
watch professional latin
party on
!!!!!!!!!!

blackpool competition, day one

So blogger/slow internet is really, really annoying for uploading pictures in posts. I've taken over 100 photos in the past 2 days, but within this post you will find maybe 8? which is still a lot...but not fully representative of the exciting adventures I've been having!

Yesterday we went to Preston, England and visited a few church history sites including the River Ribble, where the first people were baptized in England, the obelisk where Heber C. Kimball and his companions first preached the gospel in England, the house where I can't remember who...probably Heber C. Kimball and a bunch of other people were staying and they cast out some demons (it's the house in my header picture), and the oak tree President Hinckley had planted to commemorate missionaries in England. We got to have sacrament meeting in the park right next to the river, which was really cool. We also went to the Preston temple, which was very pretty.

This photo is to prove to Aaron that brightly colored doors are adorable. So many of the houses in Preston (and pretty much everywhere else actually) have them and I love them! So cute!

the River Ribble...more proof that England is absolutely beautiful

obelisk! aka location of preaching (it's also right in the middle of a carnival, which was interesting for us to parade through in our matching clothing-long black skirts and nasty plastic brown jackets with leopard lining, Alex said we looked like Jehovah's witnesses, we get the weirdest looks everywhere we go)

Afterward we went to this uber picturesque little village called Downham, which is exactly what you'd expect an English village to be. I couldn't stop myself from taking a million pictures of sheep...or posing in front of rustic stone walls, wooden doors, wheelbarrows, etc...

my future home

posers.

sheep! this place was better than a petting zoo

beautiful stained glass window in the little church (a warm up for France, yeah?)

me in front of said church

Today was my first day of dancing at Blackpool. We competed in Amateur Latin...which was scary...and kind of fun...

and....

we made it back to the next round!

So tomorrow I'll be dancing again! And that is all I expect to dance, haha. I never expected to make even one round, so this is quite exciting.

me and Mike after dancing, love the makeup

Once the dancing was over we went shopping. Love, love, love Primark, Next, and New Look. The shopping is great here! I got a pencil skirt at Primark for 7 pounds. BAM. And I also bought a couple of Cadbury chocolate bars. And a couple postcards. (Side note: I was so excellent at picking out the correct amount of coins to give the salespeople. I am so pro at paying in pounds/pence.)

Today is probably pretty representative of what the rest of the week will be like. The next round of amateur latin is tomorrow, then the standard formation and amateur standard are on Wednesday, and latin formation is on Friday.

I look forward to more shopping (I've got to get myself a British world cup shirt), more dancing, and more wandering around Blackpool. :)

Cheers!

jolly good!

(So this post is sort of a combination of three posts I've been writing since we got to the SLC airport yesterday morning at 7:00 AM)

Greetings from Blackpool, England!

Our flights went smoothly from SLC to JFK to Manchester and

then taking a "coach" (that's a bus for all of you Yanks) to Blackpool.

I learned that I do not like rye bread, airplane dinners are pretty good (or I was too tired and hungry to care), I can handle jet lag pretty well thanks to a semester of chem 391 (no sleep for weeks), free wifi is too much to expect from most of the world (except for the SLC airport and the bed and breakfast we're staying at), Delta's biscoff cookies are so delicious, fish and chips is tolerable (I ate fish!! This is momentous!), and what Pugeot and Renault symbols look like on cars.

stormy English countryside...our first view of the country!

confusing pence pieces at the fish and chips shop, huzzah for English currency!

eating fish and chips! yum!

And now...I just got back to the hotel from watching the team match competition.

Oh. My. Gosh.

Dream come true. The top couples in standard and latin in USA, Europe, Great Britain, and Asia going head to head, dancing. We watched Eugene and Maria, Riccardo and Yulia, Michael and Joanna, Franco and Oxana, Victor and Anastasia, and Arunas and Katusha. Wow, wow, wow. Another cool thing we got to see was Eugene and Maria announcing their retirement (they're retiring! I can't believe it! They were the ones who choreographed our latin medley and have been working on it with us).

the beautiful Spanish Hall where we got to rehearse today (standard team's in the photo)

watching the team match competition!

team match! so many incredible dancers!

Tomorrow we're off to Preston to see some church history sites. It should be really cool.

Until then...hope your Sundays are great!