London

Day 4: May 16, London

Note: the following should be read in a British accent.

We made it to London! We took the plane from Reykjavik in the morning and various buses and tubes (we totally passed by 221 Baker Street it was really exciting) to our airbnb accommodation in the city. They are a really nice couple named Hayley and Hilton and they have a darling two year old daughter named Ella. They are all blonde and have awesome South African accents and their house is this cute Victorian row house with about three rooms total, we stayed upstairs in the spare room.

London is beautiful! We took a walk around Westminster and when we came out of the tube station BAM there was Big Ben. He's quite majestic. Then we walked by the London Eye, there was some sort of festival going on with music and drinking and an auditorium disguised as a giant upside-down purple cow. It was mildly uncomfortable for me. We walked across the Jubilee bridge and over to Trafalgar square, where we stood in line to take pictures with the giant lion statues. I’m not entirely sure why we were all doing that but hey, we’re tourists. The evening was very pleasant and the nice thing was it didn’t seem that urgent to see everything because it felt like I would be back there someday, or maybe tomorrow.

Big Ben

The London Eye

not sure why this is appealing

For dinner we wandered around the Parsons Green neighborhood (near the house we stayed at) looking at the various little shops and restaurants. We settled on a Turkish barbecue/kebab place, the first of many such meals on the trip.

Yay for kebabs!

Day 5: May 17, London

In the morning we were in the awkward position of wanting free breakfast but not wanting to eat all of the hosts’ food, but we got over that fairly quickly and had some English muffins. Or maybe just muffins, since we were in England. Funny how that is.

Tourists all over London this weekend were very disappointed to find that the District line, a tube line that goes straight through many of the major sites and has a stop right by our accommodation, was down for both Saturday and Sunday. It wasn’t even all the way down, actually, just the part that we wanted to use. This made sight-seeing a little more interesting, since we had to take various buses and tube lines to get to our destinations. Oh well, we’re here to have an adventure, aren’t we?

Our first destination was Leicester Square (pronounced Lester, don’t ask me why) to find some tickets for a show on the West End. We had heard that the cheapest tickets could be found at the tkts booth in the square, and it certainly seemed to be right, since all of the knock-off booths charge exorbitant fees. We ended up getting tickets to The Pajama Game for 19 pounds each, which we were both pretty happy about. It’s one of my favorite shows anyway, so I was doubly excited.

Then we wandered around a bit trying to find the British Museum, passing by Chinatown and Cambridge Circus (of course we took advantage of the photo opportunity) and getting a few souvenirs on the way. That whole adventure took the better part of the morning, so we stopped for lunch at a nice little Italian restaurant across from the Museum. Tasty.

Man, I love that the British Museum is there and free and awesome. We wandered around for a few hours, actually, and since both of us had taken some type of archaeology/relevant history class in the past year we were pretty happy. Like, we saw the actual Elgian marbles, how cool is that?! Unfortunately the Standard of Ur was getting repaired or something. We also nearly missed seeing the Rosetta Stone, good thing we wondered what all those people were doing taking pictures and stopped by to look. That would have been pretty lame to go all the way to the British Museum and not see the Rosetta Stone. We resisted the temptation to buy a Rosetta Stone laptop sleeve and took funny pictures with the Chessman displays, then headed on our way.

 

 At this point we had a few hours until our show and no real plan, but we decided there were a few more sites we wanted to see in person: St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Globe Theatre, and Buckingham Palace. The first two were not too far apart from each other and were only a subway stop or two away so we headed there next. We tried to feed tuppence to the birds, made a few Shakespeare references, wished we were part of the royal family, and headed on the subway to Picadilly Circus.

St. Paul's Cathedral

Oh soft what light

But we'll never be Royals...

Um. I know Circus is supposed to refer to the fact that it’s a roundabout, but I’m pretty sure it actually just means that it’s a madhouse. It was legitimately frightening to be in traffic over there. There are so many people in London! Saturday night was probably not the best time to be there either. But we made it, got some McDonald’s for dinner, and meandered down Shaftesbury Avenue until we found our theater. We magically got bumped up a level since the theater wasn’t very full and watched a very nice show, although I totally heard her caricature American accent slip once or twice. Man, we sure are lucky to have seen a show on the West End for only 19 pounds. Lucky indeed.

Circus

To go home we decided to risk taking the bus, a crazy ride made even more stressful by sitting in the very front of the top level of the double-decker bus. How do they not have accidents all the time? It was very frightening. We made it though, without any major mishaps, and got home and in bed to get ready for our last morning in London, planning to go to church at the Hyde Park building and then head to Dover to take the ferry to Calais.