This post is a continuation of our vacation saga. The second city on our trip. My favorite city we visited overall. So let’s just dive right in.

We arrived in London in the morning, went and dropped off our bags at the hostel, and then went out to explore the city. Our first stop was Westminster Abbey, which was a really massive church, which was cool, but since we’re still poor college students we didn’t want to pay the money to go inside. After wandering around Westminster Abbey for a minute, we started to head over to the London Eye when we heard a guy giving a tour. He sounded like he had a lot of really fun, interesting things to say (he did say a lot of fun, interesting things), and he also informed us that Big Ben was UNDER CONSTRUCTION. This was ultra-disappointing considering the famous clock in Prague was also under construction while we were there.

 

One more thing I forgot to mention: Since the moment we stepped outside in London, it was raining. And not just sprinkles. LOTS OF RAIN. Which made being outside without an umbrella or rain boots kind of miserable. My shoes had literal puddles in the bottoms of them. So we decided to go to the Tower of London (thinking it was inside) and see the crown jewels. Despite it being outside for the most part, it stopped raining once we got there, and the sun was even shining for part of it, so we still got dry. The crown jewels were amazing, too. Who knew there was a diamond bigger than a golf ball in the queen’s scepter? I didn’t. I also had no idea that the cables on Tower Bridge are blue. So seeing all that was really fun.

 

We went to dinner at Hard Rock Cafe when we were done at Tower of London, and after dinner we went to Mamma Mia on the West End. I was afraid that I wasn’t going to enjoy seeing a musical in London because it wasn’t Broadway and everyone was going to have a British accent which wouldn’t go with the storyline. Luckily, all of my expectations were FAR EXCEEDED. Seeing Mamma Mia was probably the highlight of London. It was brilliant. The music was great. And at the end the cast did a sing-along of all of the best ABBA songs. (I’m actually not sure if it was meant to be a sing-along, but I sure did have a lot of fun singing along.)

The next day we got off to a much better start since the sun was shining and we weren’t soggy and wet. We got up and went to Buckingham Palace because we wanted to see the Changing of the Guard. Apparently they don’t do it on Thursdays, so we didn’t get to see that, but we saw some soldiers ride past on horses so it was something, at least. Then we walked through Hyde Park, which was beautiful, and then we took the metro to Abbey Road. While we were there, a random girl asked me if I would take a picture of her so I did, and then she took a picture of us, and then while we were standing there for a minute she came back up to us and said, “Would you take a picture with me since there are three of you and one of me so that there will be four altogether?” So we did, and now we have that picture and that’s a fun memory.

 

The rest of the day we went to Trafalgar Square, took a double decker bus to St. Paul’s Cathedral, went and saw the Rosetta Stone (which was really neat for me since I love to study languages), we ate fish and chips for dinner and it was surprisingly good, especially considering I don’t really like fish, we visited Platform 9 3/4, and we got ice cream. That’s about all that happened in London. It was amazing, I loved it, and I’ll write about Paris soon!

 

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