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.