London Part 1

WOW! London is such a blast! And though I am so grateful to have gone, I am definitely so happy that I chose to attend Edge Hill over a school in London because it is so packed with people there! Going to London is most likely going to be my only trip whilst I am over here because I’ve found that travel costs more than I wanted it to and I am trying to live here on a budget (why I don’t know, but it’s too late to go back now). 

I found that it’s always better to travel with a group so me and some friends found a deal online to get our train tickets to London for a total of £30 round trip through The Great Escape. Tickets outside of that range didn’t even start out at that price so I recommend looking around in order to find the best deal for traveling. We left on Friday evening and the train ride took almost four hours (something we were not anticipating). One of us read the tickets wrong so we figured that we would be there in about 2.5 hours, and our gurgling stomachs and aching butts hated us at about hour 3. So another tip, be wary of the distance you are supposed to travel. Double-check times of everything!

If you haven’t noticed by now, we really just winged the trip, thinking that it would be easiest. In some respects this worked, others not so much. We had booked our hostels the week before we left and found out that they fill up really quickly. So, we could only book them for one night, causing us to have to carry our bags with us throughout London on Saturday in between our check-in times. Additionally, as we travelled so late to go to London, We didn’t arrive to our first hostel until 11:30 PM and someone was sleeping in one of the beds we were supposed to have. Awkward when they turn on the lights on six strangers to figure out what’s going on.

When we woke up the next morning we didn’t really know what we wanted to do, so we set off to find an information which passed us by this large museum. It's called the Cutty Shark, and beside that I don't know much about it apart from it's massively beautiful. Right near it though was a tourist information center and they were kind enough to help us figure out what tickets we would need for the Underground and the trains we would need to go on in order to find ourselves in Central London. 

Which I promptly messed up. #oops. Good thing someone else in the group could navigate our surroundings. In the long run it did help us kind of figure out how the Underground worked, but it took us just a bit longer to get where we were going. In the end we came out where we were supposed to at Westminster and right before our eyes was Big Ben and the London Eye. 

Kind of a shock when you're expecting to have to walk everywhere in order to find someplace to go. After mountains of pictures we kind of decided to just walk around in order to find other places in the city. Lucky for us on our way to find Buckingham Palace we stumbled on a free tour of London and decided to just tag along since we had no idea what we were doing. This turned into the best idea any of us had during the trip. So although they say don't talk to or follow strangers, if you see someone carrying a large orange umbrella near a statue of Winston Churchill in Central London, take the chance because you will see a lot more than you would've even thought of in the city!

 I'm going to end this post here only because the places we saw on the tour will take us some space!





Cheers!