This morning, our breakfast was moved forward by an hour to 7:00am as our coach to London was leaving from Oriel College at 8:00am. As luck would have it, today there was a huge strike in London and the underground train system (the Tube) wasn’t running for the day. This meant high traffic on the roads, leading to the highways looking more like carparks! The normally 100 minute journey took almost three hours. This obviously threw our schedule out of whack and the organisers at CBL had to change plans.

We went on a short legal walking tour of London, where our guide managed to pack in a whole heap of information. The tour commenced in Temple, which is an area of London renowned for its legal history. The guide focused on the tertiary requirements to become a barrister or solicitor in the United Kingdom and it was interesting to hear how different this process is compared with that of Australia.

While the others continued on to the Royal Courts of Justice, our walking tour was cut short as a small group of us were heading to Lloyds of London. There’s no building like Lloyds in the world! Firstly, the design of the building is unique in that the pipe network and the stairs are located on the exterior of the building. But more interestingly, Lloyds is the world’s specialist insurance market as it provides the area for insurance underwriters and brokers to meet and insure a vast range of items such as energy and aviation items.

Lloyds is actually based upon Edward Lloyd who, 327 years ago, operated a coffee shop where ship captains would insure their ships. Nowadays, Lloyds still has a strong insurance background. It was the largest single insurer for Hurricane Katrina. I was extremely fascinated by the whole concept and definitely learned a lot.

We met near the London School of Economics around 4:00pm for the coach ride back to Oxford. Traffic on the way home was even more horrendous, and we only reached Oriel College at 8:00pm. The worst traffic, by far, was within the city centre of London. Two hours into the journey and we were still in Kensington!

We were so exhausted after the long day’s activities and transport delays. We had a quick bite to eat at a nearby pub and headed home for an early night.

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