London

About a week ago, while Emma and I were talking to James, he casually invited us to come stay at his family's house just outside London, and we ended up taking him up on the offer!
Since we only planned this trip 6 days before leaving, there were limited affordable options for getting to London. We looked at trains, planes, and buses, and our only option was the overnight bus. We bought the cheapest bus tickets and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, paying so little (in comparison to the other, ridiculously expensive ways to get to London) made the trip possible. On the other hand it was very uncomfortable and I do not recommend it. At least Emma and I are young and can get little to no sleep two out of three nights and still be somewhat functional.

It does amaze me that it's cheaper to fly to Ireland or Norway than it is to fly to London, but I won't dwell on that too long.

Monday night, we left at 11pm and got to London at 8am. After getting off the bus, we found a bathroom and tried to feel human again. We changed, freshened up, and found coffee before tackling my to-do list.

Since Emma has been to London a few times and James practically lives there, they let me decide what we did the whole two days, which was so great! I made a list of things I wanted to see in no particular order and we just kinda showed up and planned the day over our coffee.

The way I wanted to see London was just to walk around and see things - just to get a feel for the city. I have a better idea now of what I would go back to, where I would spend more time, and where I would actually get a tour or go inside. I can't really say much about a lot of these places, because we didn't spend much time there. We walked a lot and saw a lot of the city, but we didn't go inside any of the museums (except one) or tourist attractions.

We decided to first go to Buckingham Palace, because it was just a 10 or 15 minute walk away from the bus station.

Buckingham Palace is guarded by a unicorn - the national animal of Scotland!

From there we went to Green Park. By then I was getting a hint of some iconic landmarks.

Then we found Trafalgar Square.

We were meeting James around the time we were at Westminster Abbey, so we headed over to Big Ben to meet him.

We walked out onto the bridge to get a better view of the Thames-side and we also walked all the way Westminster.

We took the tube down the Thames a bit to the City of London, where St. Paul's Cathedral is.

We crossed the Thames on the Millennium Bridge.

On the other side of the Thames is Globe Theatre. I'm sure it'd be much cooler if you got to go inside or better yet see a show there.

We stopped to eat lunch and afterwards I saw a sign for Borough Market, so we took a quick detour there.

We crossed the Thames again at London Bridge and I annoyed everyone with the nursery rhyme. Then we walked along the Thames in front of the Tower of London and around it a bit.

From there we crossed the Tower Bridge and took a break opposite the tower of London. We realized we had to take the tube to get to the next place we wanted to go, which meant we had to cross the bridge again. On the way back, while we were in the middle of the bridge, an alarm started sounding and we realized the bridge was going open up and a boat was going to go through, so we watched that.

We walked to the tube station and made our way to the British Museum. My priority was seeing the Rosetta Stone, which we learned about in Linguistics this year (it is also the name sake for a language-learning program I was forced to use in kindergarten).

We went into the exhibits about China and the Islamic world so Emma and I could try to read Chinese and Arabic respectively. We didn't have much luck.

My favorite exhibit was about the Aztecs, Mayans, and other ancient civilizations in Mexico. Because I was in a Spanish immersion school, we mostly studied the history of Latin America and of course learned lots about the ancient civilizations there.

Our next stop was Emma's request - Foyle's. It's a giant bookstore. When I say giant, I mean giant. It has 5 floors of books on probably everything. I'm so jealous of people who can go there whenever they want. We just went to the language section (of course), which was the whole floor. They had a whole wall of Chinese books and they had a whole aisle for Spanish. They had smaller sections for other languages, and they really surprised me with the range of languages they had resources for. They even had Esperanto!

We continued down that street and accidentally came across Chinatown. I spent the whole time trying to read the signs (with a lot more success than I had with the ancient Chinese artifacts).

Just down the road is the West End, where all the big shows are put on.And just a block or two away from that is Piccadilly Circus, which is the Times Square of London, though I will say it is nothing compared to the insanity of Times Square.

We hopped on the tube at Piccadilly Circus and headed over to Hyde Park.

We sat down for about 30 minutes to give our feet a rest and then walked around a little bit before taking the tube back to Victoria Station. There we met up with a pen pal of Emma's, who she's known for 5 years, but had never gotten to meet because Emma lived in Finland and Teegan lived in Australia. We were all in the same city at the same time, so we all went out to dinner together.

After dinner, we started making our way to High Wycombe, where James is from. We took the tube to Marylebone, where we got a train to High Wycombe.

I have a note about the tube - it's not really worth it to get a day pass. If you stay in zones 1 and 2 on the tube (which covers most anything any tourist would want to see), you can use your oyster card to get on the tube unlimited times in one day and it will cap the amount it charges you at 6.40 pounds. A day pass costs twice that. We saved so much by not getting a day pass, and I'm hoping that information helps someone.

Anyway, by the time we got on the train, we were so relieved to sit down and relax a bit. I looked at the pedometer on my phone and it said we had walked over 12 miles!

James offered us the option of taking a bus, which we'd have to wait and pay for, or a 25 minute walk. We decided to walk. This was a horrible decision. It turns out James has no concept of time because the so-called 25 minute walk turns out to be an hour-long walk up a massive hill. When we finally got to his house, I looked up the distance we had just walked and it was 2.3 miles! Our total distance for the day was over 15 miles!

Obviously our feet were killing us and we were exhausted and sleep-deprived from the bus, so we slept in the next morning. We hung around James' house until about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, when we walked into High Wycombe. He gave us a bit of a tour and then Emma and I took the train back into London. We knew we only had a few more things we wanted to do in London, so we got into town at about 6pm. We ate dinner on the train and when we got off, we started exploring again.

Our first stop was a pilgrimage to 221B Baker Street. We are both massive Sherlock Holmes fans, so we walked by that building.

We looked at a map and realized the only thing between us and where we wanted to go next was Regents Park, so we decided to walk through the park. It is an impressive park. It's massive! At one point, we stopped to sit on a bench and look over one of the huge fields, which was covered in people playing all kinds of sports. We watched the evening sky and reflected on how it didn't really feel like we were in central London.

Once we made it through the park, we arrived shortly at Camden Market. It's a really cool area - all the buildings have funky facades and the whole area seems pretty hip.

From there, we took the tube to King's Cross station. I wanted to see what it looked like, and I also knew there was a place where they had a trolley in the wall and a Platform 9 3/4 sign on the wall as a tribute to Harry Potter, so we walked past that.

Our last stop was Oxford Circus. We decided to go inside Lush, which is the largest one in the world, as a shoutout to Jen, who loves Lush.

We didn't stay long and we headed back to Victoria Station to sit down in the food court and use the wifi and kill time before we caught our bus back to Edinburgh.

The bus ride on the way back was just as uncomfortable as the way there, but when we got back to the flat, I got take a shower and lay down in my own bed, which felt so amazing.

Later that day, I was meeting someone for coffee in New Town and I got some cool pictures there and in the National Portrait Gallery, which I got to explore for the first time. I didn't really know what I was missing there! The way it's laid out and the way it illustrates history with just portraits and text is pretty cool.

After walking around Edinburgh, I did conclude it was good to be back and I'm glad I don't live in a city as crazy as London. Additionally, I love Scotland too much to live there now. In my last post I talked about some stuff I've done around Edinburgh recently and I think I'm falling in love with Scotland again. Showing visitors around and going away are two things that make me love it here any more and I hope I can find time the rest of the summer to explore Scotland even more.