London Calling

I have now been in London 5 days, and I can already tell weekends are probably going to be the highlights here! Yesterday and today have been pretty lonely with Spencer at work.  So far, I have mostly stayed in our "flat" to unpack and get settled in.  One thing I’ve realized is how much I rely on Internet!!!  Not only do I feel completely out of the loop without e-mail, Instagram, and Facebook, but I also can’t look up recipes, find places I want to go on Google maps, watch movies on Netflix, or read the news. It’s a big adjustment from living in my parents’ busy house with all my siblings, working full time, and studying for boards in my free time.  Today, I made my way to a local Barclays bank in Loughton just to use their free Wifi to check my email and post this.  Our landlord says we should be getting our own internet sometime this week, and I can hardly wait.  I’m more excited about internet then getting our microwave or my second lost bag of luggage!

Luckily last weekend makes up for all of it!  On Saturday we spent the day in central London at all the “tourist traps”.  I wanted to spend my first day doing all the things I’d pictured London to be, so we visited Buckingham Palace, Parliament, and Westminster Abbey. We decided not to pay for a tour any of the interiors this time.  It's tourist season right now, and everywhere we went was absolutely PACKED, apparently July and August are the worst for tourists. On Saturday, we also made our way to part of "West End" which goes on for “blocks” (not that they have any form of a grid system here).  West End mostly seemed like walking down the streets of Vegas, or how we'd imagine NYC, with hundreds of people everywhere. We also walked around Chinatown (which Spencer LOVED), and Trafalgar Square.

I insisted we take these oober tourist pictures.

Westminster Abbey (Do you see how many people are behind me? It was nuts!)

Buckingham Palace

Top Left: Spencer was more excited about this car then just about anything, Top right and bottom left: The eye of London, Bottom Right: The international arch (I think)

Sunday afternoon we rode the tube back into central London, and had a glamorous picnic of PB&J in Hyde Park.  We rented Barclays Bikes for the day, and rode all around the Kensington Gardens.  A lot of the gardens were just grass and huge trees, but we did find a couple beautiful spots including the Italian Gardens, the Peter Pan statue, the underwhelming Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, the royal flower walk (which was gorgeous), and eventually we ended up at Kensington Palace.    

The Albert Memorial (for Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria), was beautiful!  I'd never heard of it, but it was incredible!

The Italian Gardens

Kensington Palace with statue of Queen Victoria

I love exploring London, and I think I could happily be a tourist everyday, even without Spencer…if I could just convince my poor, aching feet of that!