Being Breh-ish in London Town

London Bridge

 After we were in Dublin for a few days, Clarissa, Eric, and I decided to go to London for a day and a half. We took an early flight, around 6:30am, meaning we'd be landing in London from Dublin around 7:30am. We had planned to have the entire day, but an unexpected 1.5 hour bus ride from London Standsted Airport to Central London delayed our plans slightly. After finally getting to the area of London located near our hostel, we took the better part of an hour looking for our hostel. We did finally find it - Phoenix Hostel - near the Edgware Road Underground Station. After we finally got on our way, we tried to go to King's Cross to be huge Harry Potter nerds. We totally failed at this too. First, we went to platforms nine and ten, and a random worker tells us that its on platform one. Ah, our dreams are ruined. Then we can't even get to platform one because our tickets don't work. Dreams ruined again. Fail.
After that, we found ourselves at the Tower of London, where the crowned jewels are held. We also had lunch here - an English specialty, fish and chips. It was cool to see, though I'll definitely have to go back to London to go inside all of these places. The day overall was pretty gloomy and foggy, which is probably pretty standard for London.

Big Ben

 After we visited the Tower, we walked along the Thames River heading toward the Globe Theater, Millennium Bridge, and eventually, Big Ben and Parliament. We also made a stop at St. Paul's Cathedral, where there was a dance group dressed in Santa costumes. They were pretty good, and they were dancing right next to an Occupy London camp. It truly is all over the world. At the end of their performance, they were photobombed by two guys in Guy Fawkes masks... pretty awesome if you ask me.
The next thing we decided to do was to see the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. We walked there, though it took us a lot longer than we thought it would. We ended up unknowingly going through the back entrance, so we ended up bypassing the Rosetta Stone (which was smack in the center of the museum) and looking all over the entire museum for it. We did eventually get to see it, and it was pretty awesome to look at. We also saw some Egyptian sarcophagi and the London 2012 Olympic medals. Wasting tons of time looking for the Rosetta Stone wasn't all bad. Next on our power trip through London was finally Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye, and Westminster Abbey. As I said before, next trip to London I'll be going inside at least Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the Tower of London. This time we just didn't have the time or money. British pounds really screw over the American dollar.

Red telephone box

We decided to grab some dinner after this. We stopped back at the hostel and eventually found a bar down the road (about 20 blocks) that had actual English food. We happened to be in the area of London that mainly had hookah bars and kebab places. Fail. I had bangers and mash with a Strongbow for dinner, which was pretty delicious. We ended up calling it a night pretty early, but we were ready to go the next morning. Our first stop was the Doctor Who store that Eric had found, which was all the way out past the new Olympic stadiums that are being constructed. We were able to see them from a distance, along with one of the observation towers. Before stopping at the store, we had some English breakfast, which included eggs, ham, chips (fries), and beans (essentially baked beans) with of course, tea. It was a good way to start the day. Then Eric and I were total nerds in the Doctor Who store, while Clarissa pretended to know what we were talking about. It was interesting to see parts of London that aren't the main tourist areas, however unintentional many of these excursions may have been. Our next stop was looking for the Tardis, from Doctor Who, which is essentially an old 1950's police box still left in London. We got off at the Earl's Court Underground station, and the website I looked at said it was right by the Underground station. We couldn't find it anywhere. It was King's Cross all over again. London just didn't want us to be nerds this trip, I guess.

Our last stop was Buckingham Palace, which was right near Victoria Station where we had to catch our bus to the airport. The queen was at the castle, as the flag was up. We missed the changing of the guard, so we didn't see the guards with the fuzzy hats. We did see some of the guards patrolling, though. The guards with the fuzzy hats are no longer stationed outside the main gates of Buckingham Palace, probably because people kept tormenting them. So, after we went to Buckingham Palace, we made our way to the bus we needed to take to the airport. We wound our way through the train station and through all of these different bus depots. By the time we got to the bus, we realized we were really cutting it close for our flight. Of course, as luck would have it, we missed it by about fifteen minutes (I know, right? Figures.). Luckily, there was a flight about 2-3 hours later, so we jumped on that one (for a fee, of course. thanks, RyanAir.) We at least got to relax a bit, get some food, and do a little bit of souvenir shopping. The most interesting store I saw was for the Olympics. If only I could get to London for the Olympics...
We did finally make our second flight, and made it back to Dublin in an hour. We totally bombarded Julie and Ed when we got back with our misfortunes. Despite our bad luck, I really enjoyed London and really want to return. It was interesting comparing it to America, as they're both English-speaking countries and one kinda exists because of the other. The English say "Way Out" instead of exit, first of all, which is a bit odd. They use both the Imperial and metric systems. They use the Imperial for length and metric for temperature, mass, and most other things. It seemed to have a lot of quirks and was just a really interesting place to be in. You could probably spend a year there if you wanted to, and I probably really would have considered studying abroad there had I had a choice.

Next blog post will be more of Dublin and Ireland. Paris, and the rest of Rome are coming soon too.
Stay tuned. A presto!