So we went to London via bus, and it was the most interesting trip. Our bus left Amsterdam at 9:30pm and drove all night. It had two stops (okay, technically three) in Brussels and Gent, where some passengers got off and new ones got on, and in Calais, France where we all had to pile off the bus, go through France's border control, and then through the UK border control for passport checks, and then they shuffled us all onto a ferry for a 90-minute trip across the Channel. Then we got back on our bus and continued on to London from Dover. We arrived in London around 7 or 7:30 in the morning.
Then more fun stuff. We hadn't gotten much sleep all night because, well, sleeping on buses is hard. Our hostel check-in wasn't until one in the afternoon, so we went to the hostel to drop things off and then we wandered all over the place. It was exhausting, but during this week in London we learned just how small London really is when you are willing to walk. We walked from our hostel, about half an hour to King's Cross station, then another 10 minutes to Euston station, and then another half hour to Camden Town. Then we took the Underground (we had a three-times-a-day limit, because one trip on the Tube in central London is about £2 and a full day Underground pass is £7.30) to Covent Garden, and then to Leicester Square, then Picadilly and finally to Green Park and St. James Park around Buckingham Palace. I realize that none of that will make much sense to you if you are not familiar with London, but if you were you would know that on that first day, with less than an hour of sleep, we walked a very long way. And it felt great.
Anyway, that's just an example. Other days we walked from Covent Garden to the far end of Oxford Street and back, from the London Bridge to Westminster to Leicester Square, etc. We did a lot of walking and slept very well every night.
Then there's food. We saw so many places and things that neither of us had ever seen before because we had only ever spent our time taking the Tube from place to place. I didn't know that London had a Chipotle restaurant. What's more, I didn't know that London had… like, 10 Chipotles. We were going to go there, but then we found a local Mexican grill of a similar style and decided to eat local instead. You see, on the first night we went to Pizza Hut (because all-you-can-eat salad bars are not something that are cheap or easily-found in the Netherlands) and the second night we went to Five Guys. I had discovered just a couple weeks before we left that Five Guys opened their first ever restaurant in the UK in London, and told Jenn about it. We decided we had to go… And then we went back another day for lunch (just for cajun fries. Sandwiches don't fall under £3).
So… Yeah. We found this restaurant one night that had delicious portobella burgers. Another night, we found a London chain restaurant that had a really big salad bar (I was craving vegetables, it seemed like the best way to solve the problem). The Mexican grill restaurant that we found was called Benito's Hat, and we went back there another day for lunch as well. When we went for dinner we got burritos… And watermelon martinis, because it was happy hour. And of course, they carded me. Legal drinking age in the UK is 18. I have never been carded in the Netherlands… When we went back for lunch, we got nachos because they were only £3.
As for what we did all week, we mainly did a lot of exploring. Like I said, avoiding the Underground meant that we saw so many things that we had never thought to look for before. We explored the market at Covent Garden. I never even knew there was a market there. We found a Moomin store and bought thermoses, one of the few purchases I made in London. Oh, and on day one in Camden we both bought bags. I had come with a goal to go home with a new bag because my old one was tired. We found Hamley's, an enormous toy store between Picadilly Circus and Oxford Street.
That's my bag. And my thermos. In case you were wondering.
Let's see. We got 2-day London passes and on the first day with the pass we went to… The Garden Museum, the Churchill War Rooms, the Guards Museum, and the Royal Mews, and then we met up with one of our UK friends and his brother to go to the zoo. I love zoos. We dragged them to an vegetarian Indian buffet that night. On the second day with the pass we went to the Kew Gardens because those are beautiful and then the London Bridge Experience & Tombs, which was pretty creepy. The last two days we were in London were scheduled as the free museum days because we're not a big fan of museums anyway and we knew we'd be exhausted. On those two days, we went to the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum.
So… We had a pretty awesome week. On the last day, our bus was meant to leave at 9:30pm again, so we checked out of the hostel early and paid to store our luggage at the Victoria Coach Station (that's where our bus left from) and then at 9pm we happily climbed in the bus to go home. We arrived in Amsterdam at 9 the next morning, took the train to Jenn's where her dad picked us up and brought us to their camping home in the south of the country. So that's where I've been since Monday morning. Yesterday we went into Breda to do some shopping and other than that we've just been hanging out. And… well I would say we've been chilling but it's so hot. It was hot in London too. We thought we would die. Get this: it was between 75 and 85 all week! See? So hot! :P Right now it's approximately 87.8 degrees (I don't know, 31C) and I'm trying to decide how to turn off the sun.
So I think this weekend we are going to Belgium for a day, and some time next week I guess I'll have to go home. I have an apartment key to turn in before the 9th of August. There are seven of us here at the camping house, Jenn, her two brothers, her father, myself, the youngest brother's friend, and Jenn's cousin. Tomorrow Jenn and I are making burritos for dinner. Burritos for seven, yay.
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