Day one in London, fresh off the plane from Baltimore, we hit the ground running. All 16 students and our 2 professors followed our tour guide through the streets of London, on the tube, on and then off again of the bus. All of us hungry exhausted and ready to go back to the hotel and pass out, we had one last thing on our agenda before dinner. The speedboat tour on the Thames River. As we walked towards the London eye, I must have heard 5 people complain about how they did not want to get on a speedboat in the cold and have to listen to some random person talk about the history of London and have to act interested.
Almost instantly as we set foot onto the dock the whole group's mood changed. One of the crew members, with a lot of energy and excitement in his voice, began to hand out extra jackets to keep us warm and dry. The jackets were a little too big for most of us, unless you were fortunate enough to actually get your size...my usually medium sized self got an XXXL. We all looked like big red penguins waddling around with our over-sized jackets on, laughing snapping photos and carrying on.
The whole group seemed to get a second wind and were excited and ready to go on the boat! We split into two groups, by classes. The Art class on one boat and the English class (the one I'm in) on the other. Our tour guide, Craig, was absolutely hysterical. He started by offering to take photos of us, and proceeded to pretend to throw one of my classmates' phones into the water. While snapping the photos he flipped the camera around and took a selfie with the group as well. After the photo shoot he explained some safety stuff. He made sure to tell us how silly we'd look if we accidentally inflated our life jackets while still on the boat. He introduced us to our captain, Nick, and we were off.
It was a slow start and Craig pointed out a few of the bridges and other landmarks. But once we passed the police boat our speed and the music volume increased. We began to zip around the river in a zigzag pattern to the sound of different feel good music like "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". I felt my heart race as the boat leaned closer and closer to the water on my side, I was so close if I had reach out my hand it would have been in the river. My adrenaline kicked in, as I'm sure it did for others on the boat, but I just enjoyed the feeling of the wind on my face, the sound of the music, and the occasional spritz of water that hit my glasses. When the speed boat portion of the ride was over Craig gave us the option to just listen to music on the way back, or to have an actual tour of London, in which he would show us around and give us some history. Being the intellectuals that me and my classmates are, naturally we picked the guided tour... but it didn't hurt that Craig made it fun. His high energy really engaged us as a group from beginning to end and made the experience a memorable one.