London...yea baby!

Well another successful trip is in the books, both historically and my checkbook! Overall we had a fabulous weekend and saw much more than I think any of us thought we would. London is a beautiful, but very expensive, city even with student discounts.

We started our trip early Friday morning, since my normal Friday class was canceled, on a bus ride to London. For the first time since I have been here, I had a comfortable bus ride, the seats had extra leg room reclined to an almost flat position! After about a four hour journey, we arrived at Victoria Station in London. We were quickly confronted with a bus/train station about as big and busy as Grand Central Station in NYC. We made our way through the crowd following the signs to the Underground, or Tube as it known. Let me take this moment to just say that this is one thing England cities do fairly well, although they may not have adopted the idea of obvious street signs, on every corner it seems there is post with arrows pointing to every possible point of interest with in a 3 mile radius. This makes a stressed, confused, and lost traveler (ME!) very at ease when you are fumbling with your map that does not show a single street near you, if you are lucky enough to find the name of it. Anyway, we made it to the tube station and were greeted by 300 tourist/travelers, in a space made for 50, all trying to buy tube passes, lovely right? We finally got through the queue and bought our 3 day rail pass so would not have to go through this mess again. At last we were on the tube headed in the general direction of our hotel. When we emerged from the station I realized I had no idea where our hotel was and every map we had did not have a close up of this region...so we began to walk in the general direction arriving about 15 minutes later. (We later found out that we were only maybe 5 minutes away and just walked in a giant circle!) Upon arriving at the hotel, we found out that check-in was not until 2, which they conveniently failed to mention to me, so we dropped our bags and found some lunch at the local KFC. (If you are following my posts, you are beginning to see a trend) By the time we ate it was about 2 and headed back to the hotel to check-in. The room was perfect...4 beds for 4 people and a 13 inch TV hooked up to the gutters outside if I were to guess. We quickly dropped our stuff to head back to the tube, the quick this time, and start checking off the tourist sites while we had some time. It was really one of the most breath taking things, to walk out of the tube and see the London Eye and Big Ben right in your face. I don't know what I was expecting, but let just say that Big Ben is really big! We quickly snapped some pictures and headed to Westminster Abbey. It was unreal to be standing in the same room where hundreds of Kings and Queens have been crowned and buried. I am talking about things that are older than the discovery of the Americas. It was hard to process how important that place is to English history. Unfortunately, they do not allow pictures of the inside, so I guess you will have to just check it out yourself. After walking through the crowded rooms of the huge, beautiful abbey, we made our way to Buckingham Palace through one of the many beautiful parks of London. You think at this time of year, that the parks would be dead and quite, but quite the opposite was found. Flowers and people were everywhere along with tons of wildlife! But we finally arrived at the most popular of the Queen's homes. I must say, I was expecting more than there was, but it was beautiful none the less. It was more of a let down to find out that she only spends about 2 days/week there, she is old and it is loud in the city, so I guess it makes sense. Once we had taken several pictures of the palace and the guards (not dressed in red!) we moved on the Piccadilly Circus, which is not a circus with elephants or anything, but rather a large shopping area similar to Times Square in NYC, but not nearly as big and flashy. We did not stay long and jumped back on the tube to Bloomsbury, the borough which hotel was, and met up with Dan, a friend from high school, who was studying in London. We walked around the city awhile with him looking for a place to eat and found our selves in Chinatown, thinking we could get some good and affordable chinese food...oh we were WRONG! Possibly the worst attempt at chinese food I have ever had and at £10 it was not cheap! But lesson learned and we headed back to Dan's flat to chill out and spend the night catching up and comparing stories.

The next day we woke up early to catch breakfast, which was a major plus to our hotel. They served a full English breakfast, which we had not experienced although seen advertised in every window. A full English Breakfast is fairly standard in that it has some form of eggs (we had a choice of fried, scrambled or boiled), bacon, sausage, baked beans, a fried tomato, toast and tea/coffee. I must say I really enjoyed it. I would have never imagined eating baked beans for breakfast, but it complimented the eggs and meat very well, not to mention the benefits on a cold day or crowded train ;) After breakfast we headed took the tube to the Tower of London, which I thought was a tower...nope...its fortress/castle. It is famous as being a prison and where many kings, queens and other traitors were housed before being tortured and/or being executed. We took an hour long "Beefeater" tour, which was quite fun and interactive as well as gave us a great history into the tower. After the tour we wandered around the grounds and saw the Crown Jewel of England, which was amazing! They are kept in a vault on the grounds that you can walk through. They have the worlds largest and most perfect diamond, as well as hundreds of other gem encrusted crowns, swords, rings, and any other thing your could imagine covering in gold and jewels. They look fake because they sparkled in the light so brilliantly. Once we had sufficiently walk the grounds we walk along the river for what seemed like days till our feet hurt so bad we had to find a tube station. We then made our way to the Globe Theater, the same one that Shakespeare preformed. It was beautiful with its thatched open roof. I would have loved to seen a play, but tickets tend to be at a premium. At this point everybody was about to fall over, so we walked some more to what we thought was the closest tube station, it was not, and headed back to the hotel to rest before dinner. It was a much needed break, especially since I got to watch the rugby game, even though England got slaughtered by Ireland. After the game we headed back over to the Tower Bridge area to meet some friends, from Wolverhampton who were in the city as well, for dinner. We wandered up and down the same street for at least 45 min being turned away by the extreme prices, till we finally settled on a small Italian restaurant that we first looked at. We all ordered pizza, which was very good, and relaxed for awhile till we headed back to the hotel for the night.

Sunday, our last day in the city, was reserved for checking out some of the museums in the city that we had heard good things about (not to mention they are free!). We started at the Imperial War Museum, which was maybe the best museum I have ever been in. It had all sorts of British, German, and American tanks, planes, bombs, missiles and everything else, and this was just the lobby. Once you enter the exhibits, organized by conflicts, you were over whelmed with all the different items they had on display. My favorite exhibit was called "The Children's War", which was an exhibit dedicated to the life of British children and families during WWII and the way they had to live. It offered a completely new perspective to me on life during WWII and really humbled me to see what families had to go through. It is something as Americans we don't learn about, because we did not see it on our homeland. I could not imagine the feeling of have your entire country bombed and fearing more could come at any time and living through that. After walking through all the major exhibits for about 3 hours, my feet were hurting worst than they ever have. So we decided to head back to Bloomsbury to grab some lunch and meet up with Dan to see the British Museum. This is the biggest museum I have ever seen! You could spend 3 full days inside and not see it all, luckily after about 2 hours it all starts to look the same. It is a museum filled with artifacts and relics from all over the world that Britain has taken during conquests and other trips to these countries, some of which is still very controversial. The coolest thing we saw, which I did not even know was there, was the Rosetta Stone. It is unreal to see the one thing that allowed us to understand ancient Egyptian writing as well as other languages. After about 2 hours we could hardly stay on our feet so we parted ways with Dan and found a place for dinner to relax until our bus home.

Overall this weekend was a great taste of London, but I was ready to get back without question. I must say that my feet have never hurt so bad and I did not know a city could have so many stairs, sometimes we took stairs down to go up. I think they just thought that would be funny. Anyways, although it was expensive, it was worth every dime we spent. Please check out at my pictures, but I am sorry to say that they are in no particular order, because that is how they got uploaded. As of right now we have no plans for next weekend, but that does not mean we won't through in a day trip, but we are trying to save a bit of money for when our friends from Keene visit in two weeks and we go to Edinburgh, Scotland. Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope all is well!

Cheers,
Justin