And it ends here…

After a long tiring day in central London, the GLCM group ended the trip with a farewell dinner at The Abingdon. This restaurant was located close to The Britannia, our welcome dinner location, and so our trip ended in a full circle.

The majority of the students started off their dinner with a brioche salmon sandwich. Zach was the only one to try out the pumpkin soup for starters and he ended up adding mushrooms to the soup giving birth to a new recipe. For the main course, while some of us had the beetroot ravioli some of the others had the cod fillet.

Chelsea and Zach decided to share their meals to ensure their allergies are taken care of and to strengthen their ever-lasting friendship 🙂

For dessert, all of us either had the coconut sorbet or the sticky toffee pudding which marked the end of our meal. The last group picture was taken outside the restaurant where our instructor, Mr. EJ Ignacio, gave us a short speech to mark the end of this successful trip. He emphasized how the past 10 days have helped us become a close-knit group.

All the cultural visits and construction site visits have been a great learning experience for all of us. To celebrate this successful trip, some of us went to a pub nearby after dinner and some of the others went back to the hotel.

The next morning all of us traveled to our next or final destinations. Almost all the students from the class of 2019 flew straight to Dublin, Ireland from London in order to relax a bit before the next semester starts. The remaining students were flying back to Chicago. A group of six students along with Mr. EJ Ignacio left early for the airport in order to avoid the rush hour but ended up wasting close to 30 minutes in changing stations. All of us were excited to go back to Chicago and meet with family and friends. A few of us did some light shopping of duty-free items at the airport.

The flight was quite long but Darren managed to take multiple power naps throughout the journey.

We would like to thank The Abingdon for the lovely dinner and amazing hospitality. We would also like to thank CEPA for organizing our meals and day trip to Stonehenge and Bath. These memories will be cherished forever. Cheers!

Blog by Akash Jain