Sightseeing London-First Day

When you live in hostels, you never know what you are going to get. I guess I actually ended up hitting my head on the top bunk 3 times that night-ouch. Each hostel room above the bar had 12 people in each..and about four rooms altogether..so with 48 people in close capacity and only about 5 showers..we had to get up pretty early to get ready for the day. We had some strange roommates too-one was talking to himself-just in the hallway all by himself. The Steam Engine provided a pretty good breakfast-toast w/ jam, peanut butter, or butter..a choice of cereal, hot coffee/tea and juice/milk. In the mornings we always met someone different. One morning we met a girl from Australia and another girl from Oregon.

The girl from Oregon was quite interesting, in a different way. She wore bright eye shadow and overall a lot of eye makeup-long pigtails from either side of her head. Whenever she could get money to go travel (through student loans or any other way), she would just leave her college, hop on a plane and leave. Adventurous yes-but we all had a bit of concern of what her future would look like since she was spending all her money on traveling. Don't get me wrong-I love traveling and want to do more of it when I graduate from college, but school is one of my top priorities. Once I graduate, have a better idea of exactly what my career is/get a job-then I will plan on traveling.

For that morning-we went to Hyde Park. I was really excited to see the park since it's where the Live 8 concert in London took place. It was really pretty with plenty of trees, ponds, and friendly critters. The squirrels there are quite well fed by passerbys and are not the least bit shy. In fact, they tried to climb on us for food. Ken was all game for it, but I really was not. This went on for at least 10 min. of Ken trying to coax the squirreles) to climb up his leg to try to get a picture of it.

Hyde Park would be the perfect place to go for a run-when I'm back in London someday, I definitely want to go for a jog through it. After the Hyde Park squirrel fiasco, we made our way to Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guards. We were right by the gate, but had a couple of people in front of us. It was like a concert, you had to nudge your way to the front to get a good view-especially when it started to rain. It was only sprinkling, but people put up their umbrellas anyways, ruining our view. It's only a bit of water, and it's London-what else should tourists expect?

That day, we also saw Big Ben in day time along the Thames River. We went to The Tower of London-and had an awesome tour guide. I loved every minute of being in London and seeing all of the history that has happened there. We also saw all of the famous bridges-got the chance to walk across Tower Bridge-it was cold so we also bought roasted chestnuts-sooo good and they really hit the spot. Walked across the Millennium Bridge and all I could think of was how it was featured in Harry Potter and that made it all the more exciting for me.

We saw the outside of the Globe Theater, but came back another day to see more of it. We saw the outside of the HMS Belfast on the Thames River, one of London's naval ships. We could take a tour inside, but we decided not to do it.


I can't remember what we had for lunch that day-I remember seeing a fish and chips vendor so I might have gotten that...either that or we probably stopped at a grocery store and bought some sandwiches. For dinner we ate at a restaurant near our hostel called The Three Stop. Some of the people sitting near us had gotten done with a competition-I cant remember what sport it was..I think it was coed..futbol/soccer..rugby..maybe just running? either way they had medals on and were celebrating something. A lot of the items on the menu, we had no clue what they were but as we were discussing, some nice locals helped us out. I ordered Mackerel with kale, rice, tomato jelly, and chips.

Semana Santa-First Night in London, England

Finally found my journal! I thought I had written/finished 2 of my journals but I only found one so far. It took quite some time to find it. I searched my room about 3 times and was considering looking in our basement and attic for it. But finally found it today as my mom as organizing a shelf in our living room. She had picked up a container from a sweet shop in Toledo which once held marzipan and told her she should look through it. She said, "Okay, but it's my stuff." However, after shuffling through, what did we find? My small tan journal!

What I had written was about the trip during Semana Santa (or Spring Break) that I took with Kristin and Ken. We went to England and Italy. I kind of wanted to see the Easter Sunday events that take place in Valladolid, but missed out on it this time. I had been talking to a friend of mine Raquel about it and she told me she had only been to the festivities once in her life which really shocked me. If I lived in Spain, I would want to experience it every year like any other US Holiday. Here is some more information on Holy Week in Spain:



For our trip, I had written down everything before we left to be organized. Scheduling out this trip, finding the best deals, and suitable hotels was quite the headache. I wrote down what hotels we would stay at, directions to hotels, flights, metros, prices-anything to cause the least amount of stress.

So the first part of our trip to London, England started on March 26, 2010 and we stayed at The Steam Engine Hostel until March 30, 2010. The airport was far away from the city and we had to take a bus to it. I thought this would be a very short trip, but it was not. It was quite long but along our way we saw the construction for the 2012 Summer Olympics and that was neat to see. We arrived early at night, but late enough that some restaurants we starting to close. We were starving so we ended up eating at an Indian restaurant and I had fish curry for the first time. It was pretty good! The place was very tiny though and a little sketchy looking, but all we cared was that we had edible food to eat. Throughout the rest of the trip, we were picky about where we ate so we could save some money which resulted in tiny meals.

That same night we did a lot of walking around the city to get the most out of our first night. We walked along the Thames River and saw the House of Parliament all lit up. It was really beautiful. I especially liked all the detail put into the benches and walkway-I remember that there was fish on either sides of the street lamps. We also walked to the other side on the House of Parliament side. Saw the London Eye all lit up in the background-took lots of pictures of us with the London scenery in the back. At this point, it was getting quite late so we walked back to our hostel. The rooms were located right above the bar of The Steam Engine and it was a tiny room with 4, triple bunked beds. I took the bottom/the floor bed to sleep on. We got along ok with our roommates while there and it changed every night.

One night we had some Chinese students who I don't think knew much English..another night there were two German guys who we ended up watching Lord of the Rings in German on one of their computers. I can't really remember their names, but they were really nice. We also had a brother-Alberto and sister-Marta who are originally from Salamanca, Spain as roommates and spoke a lot with them. We even went out for dinner once with them (being the Americans we are, we were craving some greasy burgers and went to a fast food place with them..looking back I wish we had gone somewhere else,but we were on budget and hungry and it really wasn't that bad) and got breakfast the next day was well.

Because The Steam Engine is a bar, we didn't always got the best sleep. That Friday, it was Karaoke night and though we got back late to our hostel, people kept on singing. As you can imagine, it took me some time before I could fall asleep but eventually did. I can't remember if it was that first night, but during one of our nights at The Steam Engine, I had a nightmare. I was sleeping on my back and all of a sudden sprang forward and hit my head hard on the bunk above me. Ouch. Being exhausted and a slight headache, I was able to fall quickly back asleep.