Hellooooo London!

Ok sorry this took so long, but I finally got it all done! My first day in London was pretty busy! We left Edinburgh at 10ish Thursday night and took the night bus to London. It was not that much fun, we barely slept. The seats were so uncomfortable! It was about an eight or nine hour trip. Once we got into Victoria station we headed to the tube to get to our hostel. The tube was pretty fun! It’s a very dog eat dog world in London, especially down in the undergrounds. It’s the survival of the fittest. You have to literally push your way on and off the tube to get anywhere. A few times we traveled on it, we got lucky and we could actually sit down, but other we were packed in there like sardines! It was crazy!

Once we got to our hostel, we freshened up a bit and chilled out til our free walking tour. We had a pretty cool tour guide named Pip, and he took us all over central/eastern London. Our first stop was Buckingham Palace where we got to see part of the changing of the guards. It was neat because there was more to the ceremony that day since there was a prince of south Africa I think that was there to meet the queen. They had special flags hung around the palace for this event too. We didn’t get to watch all that much of it cuz I guess the ceremony takes over an hour and we had other places to go. It was a really cool place though. Right next to the Palace is another super big house, it kind of reminded me a little bit of the White house, but this was where Prince Charles lives, and they raise special flags when the royal family are staying here and when the Queen is at the Palace and both of these flags were raised so it was neat to know the royal family was like right there!

After that we got the classic pics taken with guards. One of them looked a little freaky, he had a really good glare going on. I felt kinda bad for them having to put up with silly tourists taking pics with them all day long. We continued along with the tour where we stopped at the national art gallery where they had a pretty sweet looking church right next to it and this really pretty fountains with a bunch of different statues surrounding them along with great big lions at the front of it. Lots of people were climbing on them and it looked like a lot of fun, but we had to keep going, so on we went. We ended the tour around the houses of Parliament which was also right next to Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. A lot of really cool buildings all right next to each other! The architecture on Westminster Abbey was gorgeous! Pip said that you can get inside for free when they have their choir practices and I was thinking about going to that, but never actually made it back for it. But next time I get back there, that will be on the to do list.

Once the tour was over, me, Megan, Sara, Jesse, Chris, and Spencer were feeling super hungry and went off to hunt down a China buffet. So we walked up to China town and ended up settling with one after a while of looking. It was a little pricey, and it was the most packed in little place I’ve ever been too. The food was real good but the main thing I didn’t like was that you had to pay extra for any desert and I had really been counting on feeding my sweet tooth when we were looking for this place, so I was a bit disappointed but oh well.

While trying to navigate our way back to the hostel, we ended up getting a little lost, but that’s ok cuz we got to see more of the area. When we finally found it we all got showered and dressed up to go see the Lion King!!!! This was probably my favorite part of the trip. The singing was so good it gave me goose bumps throughout a lot of the show. Little Simba did a really good job, and had such a good voice for a little kid! It was funny too, cuz he had a very British accent. Rafiki was also played by a woman but her voice was incredible! She sang the opening song and a lot of other ones, and they all sounded sooooo amazing! Big Simba was a little bit high pitched for me, but he was still pretty good. What is it with all these European guys being so femmy? Anyways, after the show, we went back and went to the hostel’s pub for a few drinks and some dancing before bed.

Sat.

Today was our free day to do what we wanted to do. So we got up and ate breakfast around 9 and then headed out. First we stopped at platform 9 ¾ and we were a little disappointed that it had been moved cuz of construction but we still got our pictures taken. Then we hiked for an hour or so to Sherlock Holmes’s house on Bakers Street and stopped in the little museum they had. Then we continued on to Abbey road and got our pictures taken crossing the famous crosswalk while nearly being hit by honking cars. It was a very busy area. After that Megan and I found this cute little market street and I bought a new shoulder bag for 5 pounds that I love! Megan bought a little luggage bag for only 9.50 which was a pretty good buy also. We were getting hungry by this time, so we stopped at Tesco and bought some lunch and continued on to Hyde park. We saw some people play football and wanted to watch a little but nature was calling and we were on a desperate search for a bathroom. Bathrooms, by the way are really quite hard to find in Europe! A lot of public ones you have to pay for even, it’s a lot different from the states. Eventually we asked someone to lead us in the right direction and ten minutes later we found it, and this one was even free! We ate our picnic lunch at the Italian Gardens in Hyde Park. It was beautiful and decent when the sun was shining; it didn’t stay out too long after we had started eating so we got a little chilly. We hit up the Peter Pan statue next and took some pictures, met an angry swan, and then headed back to the tube to drop megan’s new luggage at the hostel. After we had done that we booked it back to the tube and rushed to the Tower of Lonon to try and catch the last tour, but we missed it by a couple min. It wasn’t a total loss tho, we walked around it and there was a little boardwalk that led you to Tower Bridge from there. So we walked along there and got some good pictures. We wanted to see it all at night too, so we walked across the bridge and found a little coffee shop on the other side where we had some hot cocoa and warmed up, cuz we were freezing by this point. After we had warmed up we walked back across Tower bridge, took some more pics from there of London Bridge and the Tower of London. We also got more pics of Tower Bridge, the London Eye, and Big Ben.

Once back to the Hostel, we changed and walked to an Irish pub a few blocks away from the hostel with a little group. We met an English guy there and chatted with him a bit. We wanted to find some places to go dancing but they were a fifteen min walk away or so, and it was cold and a lot of us were wearing heels. So we had a drink at the Irish pub and headed back to the hostel’s bar and stayed there for a while.

Sunday

Today we got up at 7 and left about 7:45-8ish to head back to Victoria station and head back to Edinburgh. We waited at the bus stop for about an hour and right as we were about to board the bus they told us we were all at the wrong platform and that the bus we were supposed to take had left a half hour ago. So we waited while Drew talked to some people and got us booked for the next available bus that left at 11:15 that night. The bus company was really nice and let us exchange the tickets for free instead of having us buy new ones, so we got a whole extra day in London! The hostel let us store our luggage there for the day so we headed back there first to change and drop our stuff off. After that Jesse, Spencer, Chris, Megan, and I went back to Tower of London. Only me, Jesse, and Megan went on the tour, the other guys walked around a bit. I don’t know if the tour was really worth the money. It was pretty cool but everything there was renovated and a lot of it wasn’t very much how it used to look. I know it can’t really be completely how it used to be but a lot of it just looked like any other museum from the inside. We did see the crowned jewels though and they were pretty neat. The white tower looked a lot like a museum. We got to see where Queen Ann Boleyn was executed. Oh and St. John’s cathedral was really cool, but we weren’t allowed to take pictures of any of the really cool stuff like that.

After that we met back up with Spencer and Chris to take the tube up to Camden market. We walked around there for a while. It was super crowded! We walked all through the different shops, the guys were trying to talk me into buying this crazy thigh high pink stiletto boots and wear them back to Edinburgh! They seriously were ridiculous! We had fun though and saw a ton of really different looking people. We headed back to the hostel after a while to rest up a bit, we were all exhausted by this point. My feet were hurting like they’ve never hurt before! Every step took effort…ouch! We changed back into our sweats and left after chilling at the hostel for a while, got back on the bus, and left for Edinburgh. We got into Edinburgh around 8ish in the morning. Another sleepless night on the bus, but actually I prolly got a little bit more than I did this time cuz I was so drained…still was not enough tho. Patty had us take taxi’s back to the house and we missed our first class but we were all ok with that J We showered up and some of us got an hour nap or so, but then we had our four hour Scottish globalization class to get through! I think we all slept like rocks when we went to bed that night! So overall London, was crazy, and super busy, but a ton of fun. It was a weekend well spent.