Well, I’ve made it here. We left Monday evening and arrived Tuesday morning. It was a long plane ride that for me personally was hard to sleep on.

Once we landed we started touring immediately. Our first stop was Windsor Castle. Though everybody on the tour was half awake, we still enjoyed seeing it. The first thing I had a hard time adapting to was being on a bus that we had to call a “coach” and the driver being on the other side of it.

After all of the touring of the day we arrived at the university where we are staying. All of the dorms are single-man dorms with a common hallway and a shared kitchen. Seeing all of the Scouts from the Northeast and Southern regions there was pretty cool. We then had dinner.

The next day we woke up at 6:30 and ate breakfast and took a tour of London and went to places such as Westminster Abby, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace. It was really cool seeing all of these places, especially the guards with the big hats who had to stay still.

On the final day of touring we went to the Tower of London and there we saw Scouts from Belgium and Germany. We all got into deep conversations and spoke as much as we could to understand each other. We took pictures and had a great time.

We then went to the National Maritime Museum and it was cool thinking that I was in the center of the world at that point.

When we arrived at the Jamboree site, it wasn’t as hot as it was at National in 2005. We took an extremely long walk with our heavy bags to our site, and when we got there, we were assisted by the United Kingdom Scouts to set up our sites and tents. We were very grateful because that was a very good deed of them to do. Plus since we have a common language it was easy to communicate with each other.

Yesterday, day two of Jambo, we had opening ceremonies, and let me tell you, was it huge. Each subcamp had its own, then there was the big one. My site is in Jungle Subcamp. At the big opening ceremony, seeing flags and different cheers from all over the world was probably the greatest thing I saw because the pride of each country was just so large and it was amazing to be in a common place with each other and to be very peaceful with one another.

I had the pleasure of going to a Greek Restaurant last night because I am of Greek descent. It was nice talking to them in Greek as well. Today our activities were canceled due to major rain last night but walking around the Jamboree has been so much fun so far.

Gregory Gounardes is submitting blog posts from the World Jamboree in England. He is from Troop 715, Brooklyn, N.Y.