Well this post is a bit delayed,
it's been a busy week! London was an amazing city, it was a great change to be
somewhere that we could understand people and be understood. I would definitely
consider moving there at some point in my life, but only if I could get a job
that pays well because it's incredibly expensive! I went with Laura, Danielle,
and Carolann, the three girls that also went to Paris. We stayed overnight at
the airport hotel and caught a flight to London at 7:40am. With the time change, we
arrived at Stansted Airport at 8:00am and had no trouble with lines so we
exchanged our Euros for Pounds, and caught the Standsted Express train into the
city. We switched to The Underground, or The Tube, and headed to King's Cross
Station where we got pictures at platform 9 and 3/4, from the Harry Potter
books.
We then caught a double decker bus to another tube station, and then
headed to the hostel which was on the other side of the city. We walked through
the largest mall in Europe which was directly across from our hostel, and
finally found the hostel. We couldn't check in yet so we put our bags in a
locker and grabbed lunch at a Thai place across the street. We headed back
towards the downtown area, the girls headed off to the Harry Potter studio tour
outside London, while I took the tube to the center of the financial district
where I walked around for a bit and climbed The Monument, a memorial to the
Great Fire of 1666 during which the city burned to the ground. I had a great
view of the city, Tower Bridge, London Bridge, The Shard (the recently topped
out tallest building in Europe), The Gherkin, among many other things.
I then
walked along the River Thames to the Tower of London, one of the most
historically significant parts of London, where I paid to go in, and had a tour
by the Yeoman, commonly known as the Beefeaters. After the tour, I went into a number of the areas not
covered on the tour, including the building housing the crown jewels, White
Tower, the first building on the site which contains a number of different
exhibits, and I entered the dungeon where torturing took place, including the
torture of Guy Fawkes. My memory card decided to stop working just before
entering the dungeon, and I was thinking I had lost all the pictures I had
taken. It wasn't until I was back here in Germany that I was able to determine
that I could still access them, but I don't think I'll be using that card
again.
I caught the tube back to the hostel where I was able to move all our
stuff from the locker into the room, grabbed a shower, and a new memory card,
and headed to Oxford Circus. I walked down Regent Street, much fancier than the
Regent Street in Fredericton, to Piccadilly Circus, where I wandered around a
bit, saw where all the theatres are, and kept walking to the next tube station
at Leister Square. I got back on the tube and took it to meet up with the girls
at another station. We then headed to Covent Garden where we located The Maple
Leaf, a very busy Canadian themed pub that serves Canadian beer (Moosehead and
Sleemans) and poutine. We had a great time enjoying a little piece of home and
chatted with the people at the table next to us, a CTV production crew in
London for the Olympics. We headed back to the hostel around 11:30pm and headed
to bed once we determined the hostel bar closed at 12:00am.
We woke
up to a rainy Saturday, but we expected rain, so it wasn't a real surprise. We
had a traditional English breakfast at the hostel with beans and black pudding,
I thought it was delicious. We headed to Hyde Park Corner where we took another
Sandeman's New Europe free walking tours, this was my fourth one. This tour had
a royal theme, so we saw mostly the sites relating to the royal family. It was
probably a combination of the poor weather, the detours due to the Olympics,
the amount of walking we had to do, and the fact that our guide was a bit sick,
but this was probably the least enjoyable free tour that I've done yet. It was
still informative, and we did get to see a lot of things on my list of things
to see in London.
After the tour, we joined the guides and other tourists at a
traditional English pub for lunch where I had fish and chips with English ale.
It was delicious. We also bought tickets for the Old City Tour and the pubcrawl
later than night.
We proceeded from the pub to the Old City Tour meeting point
in Covent Garden. We had a much smaller group on this tour and the weather had
improved a bit, with the sun coming out by the end of the tour. We saw a lot
more of the City of London, and the history on this tour was much more
interesting. Although much of the places were where I had been the day before,
it was great to learn the history behind them.
After the tour Laura headed to
see Wicked the musical, while the rest of us went to the hostel to change and
go out on the pubcrawl. Once again we had a great time on the pubcrawl despite
getting soaked by the rain leaving the first place. We met people
from all over the place, and with the help of the extremely
friendly London Police, we made our way back to the hostel. The tube had
long since closed, so we had to make our way across town by buses, we would
have had a hard time without the help.
Sunday we
headed to London Eye, where we avoided the worst of the line ups, and
thankfully we had pre-ordered our tickets. We were fortunate to have very decent
weather and we were able to see the city perfectly during our 30 minutes trip
on the Eye.
Afterwards we grabbed a traditional McDonalds lunch, I tried to get
mine to be as British as possible. We then headed back to Piccadilly Circus
where we did a bit of souvenir shopping, and then to Hyde Park/Kensington
Gardens. We walked around there for about an hour, seeing the Diana, Princess
of Wales memorial fountain and had a delicious Belgian waffle.
We then caught
the tube to where we had to catch the train to the airport, and after a bit of
a delay, we reluctantly departed London at 7:30pm. We landed at
9:30pm, and I had to take a bus, train, and a cab to get home, which wasn't
until 1:00am, but the trip was definitely worth it.
I spent
the past week working in the lab, so the week flew by. I partied with the
German students that'll be going to UNB for the fall semester on Wednesday
night, and met some of the students who had been at UNB last year. It made for
a bit of a rough Thursday, but it was worth it. I had a work BBQ, called a
grillfest in German, on Friday night, and I made a dessert that was supposed to
be pecan pie squares, but you can't get pecans here this time of year, so I did
a lot of improvising, and surprisingly people ate them. There was an impressive
variety of meats and salads, and a lot of beer. I ended up going back to
Schwenningen after midnight with one of the guys from my work and we went to
the club in the train station where I met a bunch of the guys on his football
(soccer) team. I got home around 3:30am I think, woke up around 10:00am, and
headed to Konstanz. I met up with Breagh and Kaylen there, we walked around the
city, a beautiful place, and Kaylen did a bit of shopping. I had met the
girlfriend of one of the guys at work the night before at the BBQ and she was
working in Konstanz so we found her store and made plans to go for a drink with
her, her boyfriend, and some coworkers, after the store closed. We
wandered a bit more until it was nearly 5:00pm, and it started to downpour. We
were to meet at 5:15pm, so we waited for the rain to stop. It didn't. We ended
up running part of the way there, but it was pointless, we all got mildly
soaked. We went to a very 70's style bar and had a few drinks before sprinting
to catch the ferry to Friedrichshafen where Breagh lives. We made nachos and
potato chips for supper before catching a train to Ravensburg where we attended
a massive festival with thousands of people, had some great beer, and ate
some delicious food. It was probably the closest I'll get to an Oktoberfest
like setting, it was pretty insane. We made it back to Breagh's around 2:00am
and we spent Sunday wandering around Friedrichshafen having Thai food for
lunch, and another great ice cream afterwards. I caught the train around 3:00pm
to head back to Schwenningen. It was a nice to not have to fly anywhere this
weekend, and I think I may have caught up on a bit of sleep, although I'm
pretty tired at the moment, having nothing to do at work makes for a long day,
although tomorrow I'll be working on the production line, so hopefully that'll
go well!
