Moms and Pops are coming to London!

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Highbury and there are two girls from Minnesota here!  What are the odds? Just reminds you how small the world actually is :)

Life has been insanely busy lately.  I've been frantically dress shopping (with no success) and frantically house hunting (also with no success).  There just are not enough hours in the day for everything to get done!  And I've obviously been completely ignoring my dissertation so that's not going anywhere.

Although I have just taken a break from reading about how to analyse interview data using phenomenological analysis and discourse analytic method.... trust me.. it's just as exciting as it sounds :)

On a happier note, MOMMA AND POPPA KEYS WILL BE HERE TOMORROW! EEEEEEKKKKK I'M SO EXCITED! Hoping Pops doesn't wear his bright white tennies and Budweiser shirt like he kept threatening to do. I'll have to "accidentally" lose him on the tube!

The wedding planning is slowly but surely progressing.

That's all I know. Need to get back to reading!

Just one photo to post.  Mat and I went for drinks at SushiSamba in the Heron Tower the other night with two of his friends who were up from Brighton. The view was incredible!  Here's the Gherkin (or as I like to call it, the Egg Building).

Volleyball and stuff.

Holy cow I didn't actually think it was possible to be this stressed out!  Turns out writing a dissertation, planning a wedding (in less than 6 months), apartment hunting, and being really poor all at the same time can be a bit overwhelming!  But we'll survive :)  Wedding planning is coming along nicely.. it's a good thing I have Momma Keys in America or this would be so much harder!

My dissertation is not coming along so nicely because let's be honest - wedding planning is so much more exciting than dissertation writing!  I suppose it has to be done though.

I've also been playing in the All Nations volleyball tournament.  It started last weekend and ends this weekend.  It's a tournament open to everyone in London.. you enter to play for your home country.  Unfortunately, there weren't enough Americans to make a team this year (come on America.. the Canadians managed to make a team!?).  So I'm on a team called Oceans - which is basically a group of people from countries who didn't fit into other categories.  We also got the ugliest coloured jerseys - orange. Honestly. It's good fun though and I'm happy with my team! GO OCEANS!

My team :)

Pretending to keep score.. we were really just chatting!

Me serving :)

That's all really.  My final thought is that British people really like naming places after body parts.  I thought it was just Queens and Kings (Queen's Head, King's Arms, etc.) but then I found this place in Bank...

Pope's Head Alley.  So weird.

Back to emailing 6 million wedding photographers :)

Sketch

Been a busy busy busy week!  I finally got my ring back and it fits beautifully and is perfect :) 

I also started both of my summer jobs (both just nannying part time) and have been frantically working on my last essay, which is due on Wednesday.  We had our last class last Wednesday - yes my last class of my Masters!  If only that was actually the end of the degree.. we still have that 16,000 word dissertation looming over our heads all summer!

Mat has been working A LOT of hours so we've hardly seen each other this week.  He finally had a day off yesterday so I took a break from my essay writing and we had a day out!  It was the Real Food Festival on the South Bank, which is basically an amazing food market with amazing food stalls.  We ate a lot.

We were especially excited about Barbecoa's stall because we love Barbecoa.  They were doing pulled pork sandwiches and frankfurters with sauerkraut.  Both amazing! We also bought some Scotch eggs (Mat bought a Black Pudding one - sick), sausages,  and chocolate.

Then we found this sign :)

Then we came home, caught up on some TV, I forced Mat to do some wedding planning (he's sick of it already!), and then we went out for a fancy dinner to celebrate our engagement!

So dapper :)

We went to a restaurant called Sketch near Regent Street. We ate in the Gallery part of the restaurant.  It was amazing.  The restaurant has a sort of mismatched theme.. every piece of cutlery is different, every glass is different, every napkin is different, even the light fixtures are all different!  The result was a vintagey lovely restaurant with amazing food!

These were the bathrooms.  They were all little pods with toilets inside. And they had staff dressed as maids who cleaned the pods as soon as you came out.  And there was a person playing a harmonica on the stairs leading up to the toilets.  Honestly... just google it and look at pictures. Sketch London. If you're ever in London you should go!

Right, off to the library to put the finishing touches on my essay!