This weekend, Abby, Katie, Erik, and I went to London. We left Friday evening and traveled by train (underwater!). After we got off the train, we had to figure out how to get to our hotel. They have an underground system, and since we are familiar with Paris’s Metro, we decided to use that, It turned out to be way more expensive than we thought, but it seemed to be the best option. We arrived at our stop, and immediately saw the stereotypical phonebooth. For dinner, we went to a little Italian food restaurant near our hotel. It was a relief to be in a place where the first language was English. Saturday morning, we explored a grocery store, and I found Mountain Dew! For those of you who don’t know me very well, I used to drink at least one Mountain Dew a day. This was the first one I’ve had in a month. We went to breakfast at a local cafe. Unfortunately, the service there was terrible, and it took us two hours to order, receive our food, and eat. But now we can say we’ve had a “full English breakfast” with tea. Using advice from people at CEA, we decided to prebook a 24 hour hop-on/hop-off bus tour that would take us all around the city. We got on the bus around 11:30. I took a lot of pictures of random buildings that I thought just looked cool. The first stop we got off at was Baker Street, where we took pictures with the Sherlock Holmes statue. Our tour guide reminded everyone multiple times that he is a fictional character (apparently, people still write him letters). We also saw Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, and we went in a gift shop where I took a picture with a fake guard. At about 1, we got off at a stop that was supposed to take us on a Harry Potter walking tour. The tour didn’t start until 2, so we killed some time by walking around. After about 20 minutes, we realized that if we went on the tour, we wouldn’t have time to finish the bus route, so we went back to the bus stop. We were informed that because of West End Live, which was going on right next to the stop, the buses had been rerouted, and we were given very confusing directions on how to get to a different stop. We ended up getting slightly lost, and got to go on an adventure for about 40 minutes. We finally found a stop at St. Paul’s Cathedral. We were very relived to get back on the bus. We drove over the London Bridge, where we got a great view of the Tower Bridge, and then vise versa. We got off at the stop at the Tower of London, where we joined a boat tour along the Thames River. We got to pass by the Globe Theater, the Shard, Cleopatra’s Needle, and a bridge that was in Harry Potter! We got off at Westminster Pier, right by Big Ben and The London Eye. Of course, we took time for some photoshoots. We then got back on the bus, and rode to Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, we were not able to take pictures with the guards there, but we took pictures with the palace, the gates, the fountain, and the park. Then, we got back on the bus, and it returned us to our hotel. For dinner, we had fish and chips, which was not as good as I thought it would be. Sunday morning, we ate a quick breakfast at Burger King (we had learned our lesson). I got some mini pancakes and a Belgian waffle. Apparently that is served with ice cream, so I had ice cream for breakfast. We then got back on the bus, and got off to see the horseguards. We ended up getting there right in time to see the changing of the guards! After that, we got on a different bus route that took us to Kings Cross Station. We of course took pictures at Platform 9 3/4 (from Harry Potter). We ate lunch at a Portuguese restaurant called Nando’s. I had a Portuguese barbecue chicken burger that was very good. After lunch, we had a few hours to kill with little options (because of the cost of transportation, and our 24 hour bus ticket had expired). We hung out in a Burger King for a while because they had wifi. Then we caught the train back, and immediately had to do our homework for today. I apologize for possible repeated pictures, it was very difficult to upload this many at once.