Life is Beautiful!

Wow being back in Utah is great! It's crazy how much can change in six weeks. Life is amazing! Being away has made me really made me re think life and I have a renewed energy to really live life to the fullest. A problem I've always had is not fully appreciating things as they are happening. In highschool I remember just thinking that I couldn't waite to graduate and life would be so much better as a college student then in college thoughts of I hate all this dating crap I just can't waite until I'm ready to get married so I don't have to worry about it and with my job I love it but would have the thought that things would be so much better if they would make me a manager. Lately I've slowely began to just see the bigger picture. . . life is short and there will always be something you want and you should just enjoy life for what it is.

I am still not a manager at Chuck E. Cheese's and they're even taking away the team leader position so after years of hard work I will just be a normal employee again. But I came to the revelation that I love my job. (Most days) I am excited to go to work and have a ball making magic for all those kids. Being a manager would be great fun but I'm not a manager and if they decide to make me a manager it will be great but if not I am having fun just being an employee and how many people can say that they love there work?

I'm in college and it's a blast single or married. One, I'm not even ready to be married and dating doesn't have to be stressful. Life is so much fun!

Anyone who is reading this can probably attest to how bad my procrastination is. If something needs to be done I prefer getting it done at the last minute and for things that don't necessarily have to be done it can be a really long time before I do it if it ever does get done. The same is true for things I want to do, for example since I graduated I wanted to go on a study abroad. I always had a reason or something holding me back from actually doing saying to myself that I would go on it later, but what I realized is that if you waite for things to happen they will never happen, why not shoot for the stars now? The same goes for several things like piano pieces I have wanted to learn, getting those abs I want, etc. but why wait? What was I waiting for?

So in case you where wondering the piano piece is in progress along with those nice abs and though I've only had this new found drive for a couple weeks I'm thinking it will stick!

Goodbye London!

Today's my last day in London and I cannot help but to reflect on the last six weeks. I had wanted to do a London study abroad since I graduated highschool and one day almost a year ago I got up and decided to apply which turned out to be one of the best desicions I had ever made. When the day came to leave Utah and a home I loved so much I was extremely nervous but excited for the adventure that laid ahead of me. I remember when I first glimpsed England from the plane and how beautiful it seemed and how happy I was to be here.

Luckily my roommate was an amazing girl who made my time here much funner than it would have been otherwise and the friends I have made have felt more like sisters than girls I have only just met. We had so many adventures and saw so many beautiful things.

When we first arrived the president of the stake we are in came to talk to us. He told us to use this time to come to know ourselves better and to come to know our Heavenly Father better. This advice proved to be one of the major themes of this trip. I have grown so much closer to my Heavenly Father and have come to know myself so much better. Since graduation I have always lived within ten miles of my family with frequent visits home. This has been my first significant experience being away from my family and though I wish I could have shared these experiences with them I really came to know myself as an individual and found strength that I had not known was there before.

Do You Want to Go See a Show Tonight?

So being with the theatre group I have seen a million plays (well only 19) and I thought I would keep a list of all the plays! What's really great about London is they have student concessions which pretty much means if you're a student they will give you the best seats they can find for 20 pounds so for plays like Wicked and Phantom we where right up like fifth row center it was SO SO SO AMAZING! So my favorites have been Wicked, Les Miserables, and Peter Pan but I've seen:

1. Wicked

2. Les Miserables

3. Peter Pan (in Kensington Gardens oh yeah you should be jelous!)

4. Phantom of the Opera

5. Mousetrap

6. Alphabetical Order

7. Time and the Conways

8. Waiting for Godot (with Patrick Steward and Ian Mckellen)

9. War Horse

10. Cherry Orchard

11. Carasoul

12. Romeo and Juliet

13. Much Ado About Nothing

14. Comedy of Errors

15. All's Well that Ends Well

16. As You Like It

17. Winter's Tale

18. Twelfth Night

19. Lion King

They where all (for the most part) AMAZING!

Oh yeah that's Ian Mckellen signing my ticket!

My Adventure in Paris!

Despite all my protests that blogs where for married people I decided to start one! So as you probably know I'm in London now and have been for about 6 weeks for a study abroad for BYU but in May we had a travel weekend so a group of us decided to go to Paris. Paris was absolutely beautiful words cannot explain how gorgeous it is. The buildings are stunning (they blow England's out of the water!) We saw so many beautiful places like Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Arc Du Triumph, the opera house (which inspired Phantom of the Opera), St. Chappel's cathedral, and of course the Eiffel Tower. We got to ride the elevator on the Eiffel Tower to the top and the view was stunning! This is also where I learned I had a fear of heights but I soon got over it when I could see all of Paris below me. The Louvre was gorgeous just the architecure of the building was amazing and the building was the biggest building I have ever seen. Just the walls on the outsides where covered with statues and embelishments and every little detail so precise. It was absolutely beautiful. St. Chappel's was also gorgeous with 2 story high stained glass windows serving as walls for the chapel.

The third day we where there about half of our group wanted to go to Disneyland in Paris. Getting there was a stuggle we where planning on leaving pretty early but a lot of little things happened that made us about an hour late which then made it so we had to stand in a line that took about an hour just to get into the park. After we had gotten our tickets one of the girls didn't need to get a ticket because she was a Disneyland employee so she could get free entry. Unfortunately in order to get free entry she had to go wait in another line which took about a half hour. After several hours of agitated waiting we where finally inside the park and thrilled to pieces that we where in Disneyland Paris, at this point we decided we wanted to get fast passes when another girl found she had misplaced her ticket. So again we had to wait while she went into another long line to get a new ticket. We finally got going and got to go on several rides and it was a lot of fun. They have several rides that other Disneylands don't have like Space Mountain Mission 2 which has loops and barrel rolls in the rollercoaster and is a lot more intense then the original Space Mountain. We had a ton of fun and wore ourselves out by the time the park closed. After it closed we learned that downtown disney was still open so we decided to stay and get some souveniers as well as some dinner. This took longer than we thought so we didn't end up leaving until a little bit after midnight. To our dismay we learned that the trains closed at midnight. I don't know how many of you have been to Paris but Disneyland Paris pretty far from the main city and takes about an hour by car to get to. So here we where 6 american girls who didn't know any french, stranded at Disneyland with no idea how to get home at one in the morning. Luckily we where able to get directions from a security gaurd who knew some english and got onto a night bus that took us into the heart of Paris. A couple of hours later we made it safely to the heart of Paris by this time it was about three in the morning but when we got off the bus we had no idea were we where and none of us could read the maps at the bus station because they where all in french plus we didn't know the adress of our hotel and only the metro station it was by and unfortunately the metro was also closed for the night. By this time the only people around where shady frenchmen but luckily we found a security booth where they spoke engligh and could direct us onto the right bus to bring us to our appartment. After a lot of walking we finally made it back to our hotel at about four a.m. and I am so grateful we made it home safely!