London was such a great time! How could it not be? The beginning of our London experience was a
bit rough because we got stuck in Friday rush hour traffic.. oof. Then we may have gotten lost. After 2 hours of driving in slow, slow
circles, we made it to the rental place to drop off the car. Once we got to the flat we rented, we were in
much better moods. The flat was cute,
very small, with many slanted ceilings in important rooms that being able to
stand in would have been nice, but we did enjoy it. Having our own place really made a
difference! We didn’t want to eat out at
every meal, so we cooked a lot of dinners at home. The flat was in a really cute neighborhood
near Notting Hill.
The first full day we went to Portobello Market, which was
cool to see. There were tons of vintage
clothing stalls, cutesy house stuff, and good food. Then we headed to the Big Ben/Westminster
area to do a walking tour. For the trip
we bought a Rick Steves England
guidebook which proved to be indispensable.
He put together these walking audiotour podcasts, which were
amazing. Basically we just walked his
tour with our headphones blocking out the noises from the crowds and
traffic. He also had a lot of
interesting facts that I never would have gotten otherwise. Rick Steves podcasts = highly
recommended! The Westminster walk took
us to Trafalgar Square, where we went to the National Museum. Then we walked around Buckingham Palace and
the parks and went home to cook dinner and watch Big Bang Theory (it is on ALL
OF THE TIME).
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| Mom engrossed in Rick's tour |
The second day was a day full of Ricky’s audio tour
podcasts. We started at the British
Library where we saw some pretty cool documents. There were first records of the bible, Da
Vinci’s science drawings, the Magna Carta, Jane Austen’s writing desk, Oscar
Wilde’s notes, the Bronte sister’s letters, and then a Beatles exhibit. It was pretty neat to see the evolution of
writing and words and books. And that
sentence right there may be one of the nerdier ones I’ve written. After the Library, we grabbed a cup of tea
and headed to a park to eat lunch. Incidentally,
we ended up at the same park that we went through on the post- high school
Europe trip, where we saw John Clease!
It was pretty cool to remember being there a few years ago. We sat in the park and enjoyed people
pigeon watching. Thank goodness for the
Stevester at the British Museum. I
enjoyed it way more than when we were there previously. Emma and I just synched our podcasts and
enjoyed his walking tour. Like I said,
it’s cool to hear things that you wouldn’t normally. Especially with about a billion tour groups
in your way.
Day three began at the Tate Modern. The last time we were there, we just played
around in the kids exhibit on the bottom floor, so it was interesting to
actually see the museum. Which was just
a bunch of modern art. Then we did
another of Stevie’s tours, the City Walk.
It took us through the “old London” which is now just a business
district. It was also where the Plague
killed like half of London’s population and the Great Fire destroyed the
city. Pretty cool! In the middle of our tour, we stopped at St.
Paul’s Cathedral for the Evensong, which is basically an abbreviated service
where a choir sings all of the prayers and psalms. The church was beautiful and good old Rick
had a podcast to tell us a bit about the church whilst waiting for the service
to start. Once it started, we got to sit
in the important people’s section (I don’t know what that means either, but in
relation to Princess Diana’s wedding, it was the main part of the aisle). After the service we finished the walking
tour on the London Bridge and headed to a pub for drinks and refuge from the
wind.
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| Gringotts! |
