London Part 1

My first weekend excursion was a trip to London. Me and six friends planned out two days worth of site-seeing and adventures throughout the city of London. It is impossible to do and see everything in London because there's just so much to do! However, we did a pretty good job of hitting some of the main attractions that London has to offer. In order to get the most out of our trip to London, we took an early coach bus (which only cost 8.50 pound each way) that got us to the city by 10:30am. Once in the city, we got tube passes for the day. Our first stop was to see Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station. It was so much fun taking goofy tourist pictures pretending like we were running through the wall on our way to Hogwarts. This was one of the highlights of the entire trip! After having way too much fun taking picture, we hopped back on the tube and headed to our hostel to check in. The hostel was called No. 8 hostel, and it only cost 9 pounds a night. However, it was located in a kind of shady neighborhood area, which made me a little bit nervous. It was a sunny day, so we checked in, dropped of our stuff, and set out to see London! During the daylight hours, we walked in a park where we saw strange-looking ducks and swans that tried to eat my fingers haha. We saw Buckingham Palace, Westminster, Big Ben, Parliament, and we saw the London Eye, but we could not go up in it because it was closed for maintenance. It was the perfect day for pictures. The sun was out and the was not a cloud in the sky! However, it was very cold, so once we saw all of the big sites and the sun started setting, we found a restaurant called Las Iguanas to eat at. This was our splurge meal of the trip. We all got cocktails and/or wine with our meals to celebrate our first night in London. My cocktail was called Key West Cooler, and it was delicious, along with my quesadillas and chicken with chips meal. I think all of our stomachs were satisfied after that meal. Our night was not over after dinner, though. Since the British Museum is free, and it was open until 8:30pm, we decided to go there next. The British Museum had several ancient artifacts from Egypt, Rome, and many other places. The Egyptian collection was my favorite though because I love learning about mummies and hieroglyphics. The museum also contained the Rosetta Stone, which was used to help decode the meaning of hieroglyphics. We stayed until the museum was closed, and then we walked around downtown for a bit. Two of our British friends, Jack and Ben, met up with us at night. We were originally planning on going out with them at night, but after the long day of walking outside in the cold and waking up early, we were all too exhausted to go out. Instead, we took the tube back to the hostel, played a few games of Jenga, and then went to sleep so that we would be refreshed and energized for our second day in London.