London First :)

So Saturday morning (the 10th) I woke up way too early to catch the bus to catch the train to catch my flight. Thank God my travels went smoothly and I met up with my travel companions, Kylie (friend from all my education classes), Jordyn (friend who I went to college with, but got to know better in Germany) and a new friend Stephanie. We took our short one hour flight and got to London, but not without flirting with the English speaking male flight attendants :)

Once at the airport we found out that we were about an hour and 45 minutes away from London and pretty much out of luck on a place to stay. We finally found a place that cost an arm and a leg, we needed to sleep somewhere so we took it. No worries though, that night we found a hostel for our remaining nights in London named the Generator, it was a huge, busy hostel definitely marketed to a younger crowd :) Our first night in London we dressed our tired selves up and went out to a club down the street from our hostel. Much fun was had by all.

The next day (Sunday) we bought our key to the city, (an all day underground ticket and map) and gave ourselves the best "see it all touristy tour". We saw Parliament, Big Ben, St. Paul's Cathedral, Shakespeare's church (beautiful!!!), the Globe Theatre, Westminster Abbey and then ended our day with some wonderfully greasy fish and chips. My favorite was Big Ben, people had told me not to get excited about it, that it wasn't anything to gawk at, but I thought it was fantastic! It was bigger than I expected and as you can see from the pictures we had perfect weather. We were so tired by the time we got back to the Generator, but we still stayed up and planned our trip to Ireland. We bought round trip train and ferry tickets for just 60 pounds each.

Monday we went to Buckingham Palace (how cool does that sound!?) and we happen to walk up just as the changing of the guard ceremony was happening, it only happens once every 48 hours at 10:30am... we have impeccable timing :) It was fun using our cameras and taking pictures trying to capture some of what was going on in front of the mob that we were behind. We then went to Harrod's, the humongous department store. We all felt very underdressed and were shocked at the prices on, well everything. The only thing we could afford there was food, I had an amazing turkey sandwich, possibly the best I've ever had. We then just laid around in the park and relaxed for the remainder of the afternoon. Our train and ferry tickets were booked for that night, (so we could save money on a hostel and save ourselves a day). At about 7pm we headed to the train station to start our Ireland Adventure!