London. Oh my goodness. Such an experience, both rewarding and difficult. For one thing, I had underestimated just how huge of a city London is. I’ve been to Paris, New York, Boston, Washington DC, and other big cities, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how long it would take us to travel across London. It took at least an hour to travel anywhere, and that included the tube, the bus, the train, and cabs. Soooooo much traveling. It gave us all a few gray hairs, I think, especially when we found out that several of the key tube lines and stops were closed over the weekend and that our last hotel wasn’t accessible by any method of transportation except for cab. Ughhhhhh, so many lessons learned.
Aside from the stressful experiences associated with traveling, we had an amazing time in London. Here are the highlights!
On Thursday night (February 16)
We (we being Becky, Claire, Katie and me) flew from Cork into London Stansted airport (an hour outside of the city) and arrived at around 8:30 that night. We immediately started freaking out at the reality that we were in fact surrounded by real-life British people. Immediate fascination aside, we took a bus into London. I called my awesome PC friends who were hosting us, Michael and Alex, and told them that we were on our way, and this is how our conversation went:
Me: Hey Michael! We’re on our way into the city and the bus is going to drop us off at Baker Street. Where should we meet you?
Michael: We could just meet at Sherlock’s house, that’s 221B. Is that okay?
Me: *flail* I WOULD LOVE TO MEET AT SHERLOCK’S HOUSE.
Literary (and tv show and movie) fangirl-ism aside, we met Michael and Alex on Baker Street and they took us back to their dorm, which was on the Southwest edge of London, which meant that we got to know the bus system really well during our stay. It was SO GREAT to see some familiar PC faces. Theirs were the first familiar faces I had seen since January 1. It’s kind of incredible. It was great to get to share some experiences together and talk about how we’d each reacted differently to living in another country and how much we had already changed and learned. Having the PC family abroad is such a blessing.
So anyway, the four of us girls crashed in Alex’s room (which he kindly gave up for the three nights we were there). Sleeping on the floor wasn’t the most comfortable experience I’ve ever had, but I slept like a rock the whole time, thanks to the amount of walking and energy exerting we were doing.
So what did we do on Friday? We started off by going to Buckingham Palace! We saw the changing of the guard (and the thousand or so people who were also there to see the changing of the guard) and then went skipping around St. James Park on our way to Big Ben and Parliament. Literally skipping. No judgement from you readers, thank you very much.
We happily and American-ly waltzed around Westminster Square and then onto the Thames on our way to Trafalgar Square. Let me tell you. You know those lions that are guarding the monument in Trafalgar Square? They are dang terrifying to jump down from. We were taking pictures, but when it was time for me to get down, I kept thinking I would surely fall to my death. Thankfully, I only fell to a bump on my knee.
Anyway, we made our way into Piccadilly Circus (taking like 5,00o pictures along the way) and went to the National Portrait Gallery!! I absolutely loved this place. I think I might have enjoyed it more than the others, and I felt kinda bad taking them along with me because even though they said they were enjoying it, they weren’t the ones whisper-yelling “YOU GUYS. I FOUND SHAKESPEARE.”
So I had an absolutely brilliant time gazing at the originals of portraits I had seen pictures of my entire life, such as the Queen Elizabeth portrait that’s on the cover of the English Norton Anthology. Yeah. That’s how I remembered it, too.
My favorite portrait, nerdy as it is, was of Samuel Johnson. I was so excited to see a portrait of the man I studied for about 9 months last year!
After some more English nerd outbursts (such as “OMG. That’s William Congreve! He wrote my favorite Restoration play from the year 1700!”), we moved on to a very exciting, but depressing part of our Friday: shopping on Oxford Street. It’s SO expensive, but it was fun to shop around anyway! While we were in the area, we went and made reservations for admission to the London Ice Bar for that night. If you don’t know what the Ice Bar is, picture a bar made entirely out of ice (except for the floors and the chairs), filled with people holding drinks served in ice blocks and wearing thermal capes that made you look like Harry Potter. It was awesome. You had to pay an entrance fee, but the fee included your ice glass and one drink, which the barmen made for you on the bar made out of ice. It was pretty awesome. So awesome in fact that I took about 30 pictures.
A pretty unique London experience, I’ve gotta say!
So Saturday!
Saturday had its ups and downs. Its ups were that we got to tour the Globe theatre and the Tower of London! I loved the Globe and got some awesome souvenirs, such as a magnet that says “Exit, pursued by a bear” in honor of my PC Shakespeare class. The Tower was really cool! So much has happened behind those gates. Lots of bloody and gory stuff. Yayyyyyyy, English history! I saw the Bloody Tower where historians think Richard III imprisoned his nephews, and I also saw the gate where prisoners from Anne Boleyn to William Wallace entered to their doom. Also, we got to see the Armory, which was REALLY cool. Saw a lot of Henry VIII’s armor, and also got to see some structures that were left from the Norman age! It’s really incredible how old everything over there is. London’s age is completely incomprehensible when compared with the age of most things in America. I mean, my lovely hometown of Largo was only founded in what, 1908 or something like that? That’s only like 900 years after the Tower of London was built…so mindblowing.
Anyway, the downs were that it poured down rain, the wind blew furiously, Alex and Michael came to meet us downtown and both of them got soaked and Alex lost his iPhone. Additionally, we went to this thing that advertised itself as a “London Bridge Experience” consisting of a dramatic history of the London Bridge with the druids, vikings, etc. It was actually a glorified haunted house, and regardless of the fact that I hate scary things and tried to talk myself out of it, I still agreed to go with them when I saw what it was supposed to be. The people selling the tickets said that the first part of the thing was all historical and not scary at all and that if you were afraid, you could leave before the second half. Well, it had literally NOTHING in it that had been advertised. No history at all. The pamphlet the ticket guy gave me had all these pictures of things that WERE NOT THERE. It was really quite scary. I started shaking and crying and got to leave, but it kind of put a damper on things. We were all pretty irritated at this place for ripping us off AND we were irritated at our guidebooks for advising us to go here.
Things got better though, because we found a delicious Italian place to have dinner! The four of us girls and Michael (Alex went home because poor guy, life had been hard enough on him for one day) went out and had a much-needed gorge fest on Italian food. We went out to this great bar for drinks later and then came back to his dorm and watched Anchorman. A good ending to a mixed bag day.
I’ll return to this later! Since so much happened, I wanted to make sure I got through it all and it takes a while to get through everything!
maryellisgoestoireland 