cheers! brilliant! mind the gap!

My first thoughts when disembarking the plane in London, England - "I can see my breath!" Yes, Spain has turned me into a complete wimp when it comes to cold weather, and I wasn't exactly prepared for the 30 degree temperature drop that awaited me after 9 months of mild to extremely hot weather.  The fact that we could see our breath thoroughly amused us for awhile, until it became a longer and longer wait for our bus to take us from Gatwick to central London.  
The tourist buses in Valencia look like these, so it was weird thinking of the double-decker as a normal bus in London.

London Eye

Our hostel was interesting to say the least- we were literally sleeping above a club/discoteca (which luckily we couldn't really hear), and there was also a window that refused to close in the room so it was kind of like sleeping outside temperature-wise.  I'm always impressed by the fact that we are able to actually find our hostels in places like Rome, London and Athens.  We never had any major issues with being lost for extended periods of time.  

The first thing I saw when walking out of the tube (the awesome, idiot-proof underground system in London) was the London Eye.  I had no clue that the London Eye was basically a ferris wheel, I'm not even sure what I thought it was.  It is definitely more impressive at night when the entire thing is lit up with blue lights.  Apparently it takes about half an hour to go all the way around, so you can't even see it moving.  Right across the river from that is Big Ben, Parliament, and the Westminster Abbey- future location of Prince William's (or Principe Guillermo as they call him in Spain for some reason) wedding. 

One little detail that I had forgotten about England- they like doing things completely backwards like driving on the left side of the road.  This freaked me out on our first bus ride, because every time it turned I thought we were going to drive into oncoming traffic.  It's also pretty dangerous (as we soon discovered) being a tourist and having to cross streets all the time.  Fortunately, England expects to have to deal with situations like this and kindly wrote which direction to look for traffic at literally every intersection. If it weren't for these messages I most definitely would have gotten hit by several taxis and/or buses.  There were still some close calls. 

Our next stop was Buckingham Palace, where we arrived just in time to see the Changing of the Guards.  I can't believe they do this entire ceremony every day...I really want to do some research about the daily lives of the British palace guards, like what they do outside of standing out in the cold all day.  Now I can say that I've seen this ceremony in two different countries- except that I preferred the Greek routine which lasted about 10 minutes to the English version which was drawn out for close to an hour.  We did get to hear several songs played by the guards with their instruments.  They do have pretty awesome hats as well. 

Day 1 ended with a trip to the Chinatown area of London, which was pretty neat to see.  There were so many Japanese, Chinese, sushi, and Thai restaurants to choose from.  We were craving something with substantial flavor/spiciness, since those are pretty much non-existent in Spain. Oh and of course we had to take our phonebooth pictures as well :) 


The land of HARRY POTTER :D  I loved part one of the final movie, and of course I cried at the end of it.  It seems perfect to me that after being obsessed with Harry Potter for the last 12 years of my life I had the opportunity to see one of the final movies in London, where there are so many Harry Potter references.  Chelsea and I are complete Harry Potter nerds and loved pointing out anything and everything that had the slightest connection to the books. We walked across Millennium Bridge, which was "destroyed" in one of the movies by the bad guys, and of course paid a visit to King's Cross station and the famous Platform 9 3/4.  Apparently we looked pretty lost while trying to find this platform, because one of the workers asked us "are you looking for Harry Potter?" in his awesome British accent. 

We're going to Hogwarts!

Day two started out at the Tower Bridge, which was one of the coolest bridges I've ever seen.  I can't decide if I like this one or the Golden Gate more.  We also went to St. Paul's Cathedral, Tower Hill (which is where they used to hold public executions), and Traitor's Gate where criminals would sneak back into the city.  London has so many different types of neighborhoods, it's hard to believe they are all located in the same city.  I have never seen anything like Camden, London before.  It was basically one gigantic outdoor market and the rest of the buildings were tattoo shops.  There was a really neat section of the market that was completely food stations from a huge variety of countries- Poland, Brazil, Pakistan, Mexico, Peru, France- pretty much anywhere.  It all smelled delicious and I couldn't resist buying a Brazilian churro filled with homemade chocolate and rolled in cinnamon sugar.  It was the best churro I have ever eaten and now I'm craving more when I go to Madrid next week :) 


Overall London was my favorite city that I have seen so far (except Valencia, of course).  It just seemed a lot more mellow than Rome, cleaner and less noisy than Athens, and they spoke English! Too bad the exchange rate makes me want to cry, otherwise I definitely could have spent more time there.