Its been a few days since we arrived back from our journey
of a lifetime and I still feel exhausted from everything that we fit in this
past weekend. We left for London on Friday, Dublin on Sunday and came back to
Nice Tuesday! Since we did so much (and had a few not-so-great travel
experiences), I’m going to be splitting the posts into three: London, Getting
to Dublin, and Dublin!
So like I said, Amanda, my roommate, and I left for London
on Friday. We had been trying to figure out a way to get to Dublin but it was
so expensive to fly there from Nice, but luckily my friend Shannon studied in
Dublin last semester and was able to give us a LOT of help! She suggested we
try flying through London, but since I had never been to England before, I
didn’t want to just fly through, so we spent two nights in a hostel in London.
Amanda and I were so excited to get to England and Ireland
that we were basically pacing around all day. Like I said, they were both
places we really wanted to see and we were anxious to get going!
We left Nice about 3:15 and were settled in our hostel a few
hours later! One of my friends studying abroad had traveled to London and gave
us a lot of tips and recommended St. Christopher’s Hostel. It was really great
and definitely a fun and different experience. Amanda and I stayed in a room
with 6 other girls and shared a bathroom with the rest of the rooms on our
floor. It felt a little “5-man” ish but with random people from all over the
world.
We dropped our stuff off and then went on a search for
CHIPOTLE! Since its so big at home and the only city that really has it is
London, we knew that had to be out first stop. And it was as amazing as you’d
expect.
The Chipotle was right near Picadilly Square which is like a
smaller NY Times Square. We walked around and were amazed by everything- they
actually drive bright red double decker buses? Their cabs still look like that?
We got a coffee at a really delicious small shop then grabbed a drink at the
hostel bar. We called it quits early because we only really had one day in
London, so we needed to take full advantage of it.
The next morning we got breakfast and found out about a free
walking tour that started at 11, so we had the chance to run over to the Tower
Bridge in the day time since we had seen it in the dark the night before, then stopped in the Bourough Street Market (I just love seeing
all the markets here. It has to be my favorite thing to do in Europe). Then
we headed out with our tour group (where I ended up speaking French. Are you
kidding!? Do you know how excited I was to speak ENGLISH this trip, and of
course one of the tour guides was born in Paris. Classic).
Our tour guide was your typical British man with a think
accent, very vulgar and spit a lot. It was definitely fun and we saw a lot of
the main sites in the short amount of time we had, but I don’t know if I would
recommend the walking tour (maybe a bus tour- the walking tour didn’t stop so I
have a lack of pictures of some of the cool sites. I don’t even have a picture
of me in front of Buckingham Palace! Sigh). Anyways, we saw Green Park,
Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and Big Ben (with a lot of other random
small stops in between).
We didn’t finish up until early afternoon and our whole tour
group went to a pub to get some food! Amanda and I got fish and chips, which
was actually delicious, and finished it off with an apple pie covered in warm
custard. YUM!
We walked back to Big Ben so we could actually see it, since
we didn’t really with the tour group, and took some touristy pictures in phone booths.
We hung around there for a while because it was so beautiful and busy. Oh, and
we had PHENOMINAL weather! Yes, that’s right, we had fantastic weather in one
of the rainiest placed in the world. Blue skies, sunny, and I was comfortable
in just a sweater and light jacket. So we strolled around for a while then
headed back to the hostel to freshen up before our Pub Crawl that night!
We could only stay a few hours at the pubs because we had to
get to the airport extremely early the next day, we wanted to take the
Underground back which stops running at night and the “pubs” were actually
clubs and we were completely underdressed. We had a blast though and met people
from all over the world.
We really had hardly any time in London at all so it was awesome
to see all of the big sites, but there’s so much more that London has to offer
that we’d need weeks to see. It was so amazing being able to take a break from
worrying about communicating and just be able to enjoy our time. I always
thought London would be too much like the U.S. for me and I wouldn’t like that,
but I LOVED IT. It was so nice to feel a little closer to home and its some
place I would love to go back and visit.
My next post will be all about our interesting voyage from
London to Dublin, so stay tuned!!
Cheerio!
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