London Reflection March 22-24
Okay so the arrival of Spring Break on Tuesday has made it very difficult for me to keep up to date on my blog. I am very sorry about that! I am doing my best to catch up! This post is going to be about my trip last weekend to London.
Last week, Kaitlin, Catherine, Taryn, and I ventured to London. Kaitlin and I had a flight out of Milan that left early in the morning which required us to stay the night in Milan the night before. Taryn and Catherine were able to get a flight out of Bologna. And with our half hour flight delay we were able to land at approximately the same time. We met at the airport and were ready to head into town. But then all that happened was we found ourselves waiting in line at Customs for over an hour, because there was only one employee behind the desk! It was so ridiculous and demoralizing that it just made the rest of our day so exhausting. We then waited in line for about 20 minutes for a shuttle to take us into the city. This shuttle lasted an hour. Are you seeing a theme here? To even get from place to place a lot of time was spent in line (or “in a queue” as they say in Britain). However, these lines were totally worth it!
We started off the day by making our way to the hostel. It was in Zone 1 of the subway system (or the tube as they called it). This means we didn’t have to pay very much for tickets throughout the whole week, which was very nice. Plus, everything was in ENGLISH! So even during the times of complete confusion on our trip, asking for directions was quite easy because the citizens spoke perfect English! (We were in England after all…) So we wandered around the city for a while. We wanted to find the London Eye and just look at some cool things. We stumbled across this place that had really weird acoustics. I don’t know what it was called or what it was supposed to be, but it was very interesting. There was this nice British woman there with some of her friends and she was explaining to them how it all worked. You could talk quietly on one section of the building and another person could hear you from the other side of the structure. It was really neat! And this nice British woman gave us some tortilla chips, just because people in London are nice apparently! After this, we wanted to find a restaurant at which we could get fish and chips, since it was a Friday during Lent after all. Plus, it was London! How could we pass up fish and chips!? However, we had a hard time finding a place that was not super duper expensive, but at the same time not like a take away place, since it was raining outside. We eventually found this place called “Fishcoteque.” It seemed kind of pricey but the portions were huge! And for those of you who know me well, you know that I don’t really like fish. But I ate a lot of the fish. The chips were kind of dry. I was actually really disappointed in my London fish and chips experience. But, no matter, we continued exploring the city and had a smashing time doing so!
The next day we got up early to make it to Hyde Park where we would be given a free tour around a lot of the highlights of London. (Our tour guide worked for tips and he was the most fantastic tour guide I have ever had by a long shot.) We learned a lot about the history of Hyde Park and saw a lot of the cool statues and hear the history behind them. The pictures I got were minimal, because the rain was really terrible. In fact, the rain caused the ground to be extremely wet, muddy, and slippery. This combination caused me to fall flat on my back. It hurt really badly. Our tour guide laughed at me, and I ended up getting mud all over my back. Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for the rest of the world, nobody snapped any pictures of me during or immediately after the fall. But that was an unpleasant experience. However, that was the lowlight, which is positive! We walked on Constitution Hill on the road toward Buckingham Palace. Constitution Hill is not a hill at all nor did anything constitutional happen there. It is only called Constitution Hill because one of the kings or queens or something had his/her “constitutional” walks on that path every morning. Silly name in my opinion, but that’s okay! We then saw Buckingham Palace after our walk on Constitution Hill. It looked pretty cool, but it wasn’t as extravagant as I thought it would be. We then got to see some of the guards. But, because of some stupid tourists in the past, we weren’t able to get up really close to the guards. They only allow people to do that on certain days, and in certain areas. Afterwards, we saw a lot of cool sights in the city. The rain became very distracting, but I saw a lot of cool buildings, heard a lot of cool history, and saw where they played sand volleyball at the London 2012 Olympics! That was very exciting. One thing that I thought was very interesting about London was that they have surveillance cameras all over the place. Our tour guide, Rowan, told us that there is one camera for every 20 citizens of London. People are very upset about this, and really think this is an invasion of privacy. I am inclined to agree with this. After seeing those sights, we continued our tour by getting to see some guards on horses. We got to pet them (the horses not the guards). It was the first time Kaitlin got to touch a horse that she can remember! We then walked to Westminster Abbey and Palace. We learned a lot of the history behind the palace and heard the whole story of Guy Fawkes. The whole history of London is super interesting! The tour ended, but our tour guide showed us the cool pub where we had a great lunch! After that, it was time to find all of the places we wanted to see!
First of all, we went to the only remaining police box in London. This is some sort of reference to Dr. Who, a show I plan on watching in the very near future. So, even though I didn’t appreciate the reference now, perhaps someday I will thank myself for going to this place. Afterwards, we navigated our way to King’s Cross platform where there was a sectioned of area of the Platform of 9 ¾, a reference to the Harry Potter films and books. The queue for this was quite long, but there were workers there keeping the line moving and giving us scarves to wear like the characters from Harry Potter. Catherine picked Slytherin because she is sly and cunning and just wanted to be in Slytherin. Kaitlin picked Ravenclaw because she looks good in blue, and Catherine said she was smart and Ravenclaw people are smart. I picked Hufflepuff, because nobody likes Hufflepuff, but I like the name. Taryn had never seen/read anything Harry Potter related. So the worker picked Gryffindor for her, plus it was the only one left. We then wanted to go to mass, but realized that the church we wanted to go to wasn’t Catholic, and we were late. So we decided to go to mass in the morning instead. So afterwards, we wandered around London some more and went on the London Eye. From the top of the London Eye we could get a really good view of the entire cityscape of London. It was absolutely breathtaking. It was an incredible experience, albeit a little overpriced. We then went to Baker Street which is the street on which Sherlock Holmes lived. But more importantly, we ate Chipotle! It was so good and hit the spot. We were so happy to get the taste of some American food! It was a really great time.
The next day proved to be the most eventful. We went to mass IN ENGLISH, which was a nice change of pace. Then we got on a shuttle to get back to the airport to take our 1 o’clock flight back to Milan. Or so we thought…. Turns out our flight got delayed an hour, which wasn’t in and of itself a problem. However, once we boarded the plane we sat on the tar mat for another hour and a half. This ultimately caused us to land almost 3 hours late, which means we were going to miss our train to Florence from Milan. But we hurried our way to the train station and talked to the Italo Treno people. The unfortunate thing about being four Americans all under age 21 is that nobody takes us seriously. They wouldn’t let us refund our money, nor transfer the money we had already spent on the tickets to new tickets. So we ended up spending more than double our money to get the train back to Florence. Then we had to take a taxi to get back to the villa, because the buses had stopped running by the time we got back. It was really unfortunate and a downer. But, it was a great weekend nonetheless.
We had one day of classes on Monday and then Tuesday morning Kaleigh, Jessi, Monica, Kaitlin, and I caught a train to Naples for our Spring Break. I will talk about that later. For now, Ciao!
-Joey
