Feria Break: Making History in London

Hi! So I'm sitting on the plane waiting for take-off to Dublin. Brittany and I have been up since 4am this morning, but we're still in great spirits, 1 because London was the most amazing trip ever and 2 because we just saw on the news that Osama Bin Ladin is dead. Yay! We saw videos of all the people in NYC with American flags and it made us miss the good ole US! Now onto London,


Friday: For those of you who have been living under a rock, the Royal Wedding dubbed "Wedding of the Century" took place this past Friday! Brittany and I were able to participate in the celebrations in Hyde Park and had the best time ever even though we were running on 1 hour of sleep since Thursday. Our plane left Madrid at 7am Friday, so we had to take a 6pm bus on Thursday to Madrid, stayed in the airport overnight and got to London bright and early. We were exhausted, but so so excited!

We got to Astor Hyde Park Hostel located in the adorable more residential area of Kensington (and right by Hyde Park) just in time to watch the wedding procession of Prince William and Kate. It was so neat just seeing everyone glued to the TV. It was fun sharing the experience with people all over the world. As soon as they said their "I Wills" we headed to the party in Hyde Park (which can be compared to London's Central Park! Huge!). We got a little lost, but made it in time to join the 300,00 people party as we watched the parade after the wedding, the kiss at Buckingham Palace, and the planes fly over. Seriously, although I loved all of the site seeing we did in London, nothing can top my experience Friday. Everyone was just so happy and dancing and talking and waving the English Flags. There was a live band there that played all kinds of old and new hits and kept everyone entertained in between commercial breaks and long after the Royal wedding official celebrations were over (we stayed 2 hours after the official stuff was over and the party was still going on strong!). I wish I could open my mind to share with you the feeling of happiness and excitement that was flowing through everyone in Hyde Park, but I guess these pictures and videos will have to do!

tents were up all over selling all kinds of yummy food

Prince William and "Catherine" after their kiss on the balcony!

haha so funny. These people were just dancing up a storm!

So many flags with Will and Kate on them

After the wedding celebrations and running on only 1 hour of sleep in 29 hours, we were physically and emotionally spent. However, when you only have 3 short days in London, you have to make the most of it. Brittany and I then took the "tube" (metro) to Picadilly Street which is a place with lots of shopping (places like Fortnum and Mason which is like a grocery store except with chandeliers and rich royal red carpet) and has big screens on the buildings like NYC. We then went to Covent Garden for dinner, which is the most adorable area and has a really awesome food market. We ate fish and chips and watched street performers for about a good 2 hours. This one performer that I'll post a video on took about an hour to get to his final act. Everyone in the crowd and restaurants around were really rowdy and still drinking in celebration and kept running onto his stage. The rowdiest one, that topped even Jimmy Green's performance will also be posted here. It was so funny!

Covent Gardens

Saturday: The next morning, Brittany and I headed to Harrods to meet my roommate Annie, and some other people from our program. I would venture a guess to say that Harrods is the largest and most expensive department store in the world. It is a 7 floor, 2 block large store that sells everything from expensive food (fish, caviar, chocolate and pastries, steak restaurants, etc) to designer handbags, to furniture, sculptures and paintings, clothes (cheapest item of clothing was a tshirt that was 100 pounds!), toys, sports equipment, and so much more. When you walk in, you literally think you're in a palace (the chandeliers and paints and wall decor reminded me of Versailles palace in Paris). Pictures don't do this place justice, but hopefully you can get the idea.

cakes in every window for the wedding. (every business in London had a "shrine" for the wedding

Just a food market. No biggie

best cupcakes ever

Some sculptures in Harrods (how does the ball stay in the air?!)

all of us girls at harrods

After that, our big group of 9 people headed to Green Park (another huge park! 1/3 of London is greenery, which is awesome) to do a free tour of London. We covered a ton of stuff and learned a lot too.

Trafalgar Square

Me and Big Ben

Westminister Abbey a day after the Royal Wedding!

House of Parliament

We only had toast our hostel provided for breakfast. By the time we could eat lunch after the tour, it was 5pm. It was so hungry! Brittany and I ordered a yummy sounding cheese and bacon burger at this cool pub and ended up getting a chicken and mushroom sandwhich, which they swore was our bacon and cheese burger (I know British English is different than American English, like they call fries chips, but I mean I'm pretty sure chicken is chicken and a burger is a burger).

Our next stop was the London Eye. Everyone except Annie joined. She has a fake front tooth, and while she was brushing her teeth that morning it cracked. She had a dentist appointment at 7pm so couldn't come with us. She was such a trooper and good sport the whole time. I was so proud of her!

I had been kind of worried about site seeing in a big group of people. Being with 9 people can really slow you down and I get annoyed with slackers. However, I am so so glad we all hung out. We had so much fun and I'm so happy we did it. Here are some great pictures of the London eye :)

We then met Annie at the King's Cross Station. If you don't know what we did here, then stop reading right now because we can't be friends... Just kidding! But for real, you should know that's where Harry Potter must go to get to Hogwarts. Good thing we're witches and wizards because it was extremely difficult to find (no, it wasn't in the area of platform 9-11, but 1-8?). Here's a picture of me before I went through the wall to join Harry, Hermione and Ron on the Hogwarts express.

By the time we finished taking pictures and finding a local pub/bar, it was 11pm. We drank some Pimms until our night was cut short by bouncers making everyone pour their drinks into plastic cups. It was only midnight! Its so crazy and you can tell we're still living, eating and drinking on Spanish time because Spaniards don't even go out until midnight and these bars were closing at midnight!

Sunday Brittany and I woke up bright and early Sunday to fit in as much as possible since it was our last day. London has so much to do, and since we really only had 2 days to tour, we had to pick and choose what we wanted to do. We first headed to Abbey road to get a picture of where the famous Beatles took their picture. (Brittany's a big John Lennon fan).

After Abbey Road, we headed back to Buckingham palace to watch the changing of the guards. You get to see the new guards march in, then like 45 minutes later, the guards that have just been released of their duties march back out. This video is of the guards leaving Buckingham Palace.

We then did something really cool and went to Shakespeare's Globe, which is an exact replica of where the Shakespeare plays used to be held and saw a play!  We saw All's Well That Ends Well. For those of you not familiar with the play (I wasn't) it's about a servant girl who loves a royal count. The girl, Helen is good with medicine and heals the kind, who then gives her the chance to marry anyone she wishes. She choses the boy, who doesn't love her. The boy says he will never call Helen his wife until he "beds" her and gets her pregnant and then runs off to war.  Well Helen meets the maid the count is really in love with and convinces her to trade spots with her in bed one night. So the count actually "beds" his wife, gets her pregnant and then she reveals what she did in the end, making him love her for her cunningness.

After the play we headed to Nottinghill (no, I haven't seen the movie :( ) and Portobello Market.  The area was so neat. All along the streets were shops after shops of everything you could imagine. It was a very coloful neighborhood and although busy with tourists, it seemed like a cute homey area to live.

Brittany and I were then off to St. Paul's Cathedral which has the 2nd largest dome in the world, only lagging behind the Vatican (Sevilla's Catedral is the 3rd largest). We went to church for the first time in months. You don't know how refreshing and relieving it felt to go and actually understand and have the ability to participate. I usually go to church every weekend and I really don't like not going for 4 months especially when I'm so blessed to be studying abroad and having the chance to see everything I have seen.

Brittany and I had a scare on the tube after church on our way to the Tower Bridge. We were in the very last "cabin" of the metro and the tube suddenly stopped. The conductor came on and said that he lost some kind of function and he was trying to fix it. We ended up sitting there for 40 minutes with no where to go and lights going on and off, sometimes leaving us in the pitch black. It got kind of scary because we could hear other trains and we were scared they were trains on our line and were going to run into us (remember we were in the back). It was also frightening when the conductor raced into our cabin asking me and 2 other passengers to stand up so he could look at the engine under our seat. We were just not having good luck. After finally getting off, we were a little shaken up, so headed to Tower Bridge, took some pictures and then took a double decker bus back.

London was so so so much fun! I think this was the best trip I've taken. It's always hard to label a trip as "the best" because every city is unique and amazing in its own way. However, London was perfect, the wedding was perfect, and Brittany and I are the perfect travel buddies never getting on each others nerves. It was just great! Now off to write about Dublin! Thanks for reading :)

Lauren