Playing Tourist In My Home City

Happy weekend everyone! How are you? I hope you're all having a lovely one. This week just gone and next I'm doing a work experience placement in Hodder & Stoughton's publicity department. Halfway through it, I'm absolutely loving it and finding it so interesting. While it's amazing, I've been coming home exhausted and not had much time so everything's been a bit hectic and I'm very glad of the weekend to give me the opportunity to gear myself back up for next week!

Now that that mini summary of my week's done (you're welcome btw), on to the point of this post. Being at uni and living in halls with other people inevitably means you end up spending a huge amount of time with your flatmates - that is, if you get on well with them of course, which I very much do. Because of that though it's really odd to come home for the holidays and not see them all the time. To rectify that, three of the boys came to London to visit me and Ellie (Ellie lives in Surrey so we manage to see each other fairly easily over the holidays) and, given that the three of them aren't Londoners, it gave me an excuse to play tourist.

We went for lunch at Homeslice (which is my new favourite London restaurant), visited Hamley's and walked along Southbank where we stopped to take some classic tourist photos. The weather was great, albeit a little chilly due to the harsh wind, and it was so nice to catch up with everyone. It's not often I get to show people around even just a little bit of London who don't know it well so it was lovely to do that.

L-R: Tom, myself, Nathan

L-R: myself, Gus, Tom

L-R: Ellie, myself, Tom, Nathan, Ben (Ellie's boyfriend who we all love!), Gus

The boys often incessantly nag point out that I haven't properly mentioned them here and, while I'm very reluctant to give in to them, this lot have become some of my closest friends and a really big part of my life. When you think about it, it's so strange that when you go to uni you're just sent to live with a bunch of strangers and it's all pretty much left down to luck of the draw whether you get along with the people you're living with. Never in your life again (I'd imagine) would there be another likely circumstance where that would happen and I think your flatmates can really make or break the experience of first year.

I don't want to get too soppy because they won't shut up about it if I do when we go back to Exeter, but I really do feel so lucky to have this lot in my life. Even when they annoy me and leave the corridor in a state these guys (And Ali who couldn't make our day out in London) are pretty great and Ellie has become such a close friend - I honestly don't know what I'd do without her half the time we're at uni. I think it's important sometimes to appreciate and acknowledge the people that make everything a little bit easier and, since they've become such a big part of my life, I thought it was about time I documented that in this space of mine.