My Day With Liz
Okay, so full disclaimer, the title of this post may be a little deceiving. I may not have spent the whole day with her, and I definitely didn’t call her Liz, but I actually did 100% see the Queen of England today. So as I’ve said multiple times in my last few posts, right now I’m living in the UK going to school at the University of East Anglia.
Last week everyone at school got an email saying that the Queen was coming to visit the Fijian exhibit that our visual arts center is currently putting on (also as a side note, that same building was used as the kind of Batcave of the Avengers at the end of the last movie, so check it out).
Anyway, we all got this email, and reasonably the hype around campus this week was extreme. It was strange, though, hearing the opinions of so many British people in regard to the Queen, as she is someone who they all grew up learning about so closely. In Canada she just always felt so far away.
We were told that she would be coming on Friday (today) but for security reasons we weren’t told exact times. So here’s how my day ended up going down.
I woke up, checked my email, and found out that she would be at school around noon, so if we wanted to try and see her, we should be there around eleven. I had class from 9-10:50, so I had exactly 10 minutes to get down to the art building if I wanted to get a spot that wasn’t on the other side of the city (but to be honest I’m sure that people had started to go down there before eleven exactly).
My friends and I were able to worm our way through the crowd and actually managed to get a pretty good spot. We stood outside in the cold for probably about two hours, my boots got so muddy somebody could have followed my steps all the way home, and my fingers were so cold I’m still defrosting them almost ten hours later.
BUT was it worth it? You know it.
I saw the Queen with my own eyes, and with the lens of my camera, even if she only looked like a magenta spot in sea of police officers.
There she is, in all her colour-coordinated glory.
So there you have it, my day with Liz, at least that’s what I’m calling it.
