I saw London, I saw France...

I saw London, I saw France, and everyone saw my underpants! I say this because within the first hour of leaving for London, I ripped my pants… the only pants I had for the entire weekend. Fabulous!

When we first got to London I saw the Olympic rings… AWESOME! This year’s Olympics are going to be held there, in case you didn’t know.

We all hopped on the first bus we found and rode around London for awhile. This was really relaxing and a great way to see the city. The only trouble came when we were ready to find our hostel. The bus system in London is so much more confusing than the metro was in Paris. We would be on a bus, and then all of the sudden it would stop and say that it was terminated. After taking what seemed like a million different buses, we finally made it to the hostel.

The hostel was so much nicer than I had pictured in my head. Just the name hostel sounded bad, so I had pictured a building entirely made of concrete with hard bunk beds in a big, open room. I was WRONG. We had  private rooms with bunk beds and our own shower and toilet. The bed was actually pretty comfortable too. I didn’t get to shower because I didn’t pack a towel, and I was not paying 7 pounds to rent one.

After dropping our stuff off at the hostel, we found the Big Bus Sightseeing Tour to begin our exploration of London. It was an open-top bus and it was FREEZING. Being cold was worth it because we got to see the Tower of London, the London Eye, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and Big Ben all in one day.

We also got to go to the Sherlock Holmes Museum! It was really neat because it was in an old building that only had two rooms per floor and went up four floors. There wasn’t much to see on the first few floors, but the upper floors had neat replicas of some of the cases they worked.

On top of the upcoming Olympic games, this weekend was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. All of England seemed to be in London sporting their beloved British flag in support of the Queen’s 60 year reign.

The only downside of this celebration was all of the roads being shut down. We had quite the time trying to get around to the train station Sunday. So, the open-top bus was my favorite part of Saturday, but my favorite part of Sunday was sushi at St. Pancras Station!

This sushi place was really awesome! All of the dishes were priced by plate color and running through a conveyor belt. If you saw something you wanted, you simply had to take it off of the belt and dig in! I got about 5 dishes and unlimited water for only 12  pounds. What a great way to end our London excursion!

Overall, I enjoyed London a lot more than Paris. It was cleaner, more safe, and had a better atmosphere. Now it’s going to be crunch time at work this week. Only two full days left and so much to do! Home bound in 3 days!