Friday, May 11, 2012

oh hey London :)


FINALLY! I’m so sorry it has taken me an incredibly long time to update. I want to fill y’all in on my amazing two weeks hopping all around Europe at the beginning of April. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep track of what we did during this break by journaling about it, but my lovely roommate Laurel did. So, I’m going to steal a bit of her journal to fill you in on all the crazy happenings that went on during my travel break :) I’m doing individual posts for each place I visited, so first is LONDON!
On March 30th, we took a train and bus to get us to Stockholm, Sweden, where we flew to London. After getting a bit lost and confused by the intense metro system of London, we finally got to our hostel!
We decided to do a 2-day pass for the Hop On/Hop Off bus, which worked out really well because we got transportation to all the famous sites of London! The first day we took the bus to Camden, where there was a really cool market-place with clothes, scarves, a ton of jewelry, and a huge selection of food. I decided to get the traditional British meal of Fish & Chips, which was super tasty! On the way back we walked through the Regency Park, one of many beautiful parks we came across during the trip. Then, we got back on the bus and went to see a lot of the well-known sites: Big Ben, London Bridge, Tower Bridge (much nicer than London Bridge), Parliament, and the Tower of London. Although we didn’t go into any of these landmarks, we did our fair share of picture taking from the outside. For dinner, we ate at an English pub where I ate a delicious Steak Pot Pie :)
Our second day in London, we walked through Hyde Park and then it was time for the Harry Potter tour. Now as most of you know, up until a few months ago, I had never picked up a Harry Potter book. So before then, going on this tour would have been quite useless. However, since coming to Europe and opening my eyes to new things, I have started reading them and am currently in the middle of the 3rd in the series. So now I could actually look for forward to this tour and know just a bit of what was going on. The tour was great; we saw a lot of scenes from the movies, inspirations for the books, and our tour guide (a true Potter fan) even told us a ton of historical facts about the city. After the tour, we peaked inside St. Paul’s Cathedral, a beautiful place to see, especially so close to Easter. After dinner we visited Buckingham Palace. Of course, since it was night, the guards weren’t out, but it was great to see the building at night, very different than the traditional picture of it.
Our third day we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum: a very interesting museum which was free and right down the block from our hostel! Then, we spent quite a few hours in Kensington Gardens – the home of the lovely William & Kate. We told them we were waiting for them, but for some reason, they never showed up… Then we went to King’s Cross Station (again, now I know the importance of this place!). Of course, we got our pictures next to Platform 9 3/4. Then, we walked to Camden Passage, but unfortunately a lot of the stores were closed; it was still a neat area to walk through though! Lastly, we had dinner at CHIPOTLE! For those who have never been, please go. This Mexican restaurant has become a staple for me at college, so seeing one while traveling was a glimpse of home :)













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