London: my first taste

In a nutshell… London was AMAZING! I’d flown into Heathrow, so it wasn’t exactly my first time there, but obviously I hadn’t really had time to see any of it while I was there, so I was really looking forward to exploring the big city. Thus follow my exploits, replete with many a picture (yay!):

We departed kinda later Friday than we’d intended because it took a while to rally the troops (there were 6 of us total and I was the only girl… haha), but we finally left Selwyn a little after noon, and walked over to the train station which took maybe 20 minutes. The train to London lasted about 40 minutes because it was the express one that didn’t stop until it got to London. We embarked at King’s Cross and from there immediately transferred to the Underground to tube over to our hotel, which wasn’t too far away from our stop at Great Portland Street. Our hotel room was pretty cozy what with 6 people! We arrived there probably around 4 and just chilled in the room for a while before hopping back on the tube to go get dinner at a pub and meet up with some other USC girls. We all then went to see Avenue Q, which was hilarious! I’d heard some of the songs before but never actually seen the musical, so that was really entertaining. Afterwards we went back on the tube to Soho and spent most of the night at a place called Bar Soho. The drinks were kind of expensive but it was a really fun time anyway. At the end of the night we all packed into our room (3 of us on the bed, 3 scattered throughout the floor space).

Saturday, we wanted to wake up around 10 so that we could meet with Kimberly (our program director) for lunch, but we’d been out late the night before and missed it. Four of us (me, Jeff, Corbin and Chase) were going to see King Lear at The Globe that afternoon, so we tubed it over there before the show started at 2. The performance was incredible- I’d read King Lear freshman year so I could follow the story, and the acting was really stellar. And watching a Shakespearean play acted out in a replica of the original Globe was seriously cool. I’m really glad we had seats though, there were a lot of standing seats and the performance was at least 3 hours; that would have been a long time to stand!

After that, we went back to the hotel and met back up with the other two (Rex and Nick) before going out to an AMAZING Indian restaurant. Seriously, talk to any one of us and we will keep gushing about it. The naan was incredible. British Indian food is renowned and I now know why… we are going to get some for sure back here at Cambridge. Later that night, most of the group went to an underground indie club close to our hotel, but Jeff and I wanted to go out to Soho, so the two of us met up with another USC student Ning and went to Heaven, an ENORMOUS club- it had three separate dance floors/DJs and like 5 bars throughout. We stayed there really late, by the time we left it was daylight again! But it was a fun trek home to our hotel (the tube was closed and we didn’t know the bus routes well enough, so Jeff and I walked all the way back to our hotel). Here is a triumphant picture of the three of us having survived to the morning:


This morning, we woke up around 11 because we had to check out of our hotel by noon. We did so successfully and split up again. Armed with our packed bags, Jeff, Corbin and I tubed to Westminster and saw Big Ben, and also walked around the House of Parliament which is a really neat building, although there's so much security and restricted civilian access you can't see that much of it. We then had a hilariously awful lunch at a local pub before walking over to Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, there weren’t any of the guards around, but it was still neat to see. It's actually a pretty underwhelming building- grey and rectangular, but the front gates are gorgeous and they all have gold incorporated into it. Afterwards, we walked to the tube station at Victoria, which took us back to King’s Cross where we caught a train to Cambridge and got back around 5pm.

Overall, it was a fabulous whirlwind weekend and I absolutely fell in love with London. My favorite part of being there was just walking around and absorbing the city’s culture and sights, even if we didn’t really have enough time to do much of touristy sightseeing. I definitely got a bearing for London and am really looking forward to exploring it further in two weeks with Thea! But now I’m back to the grindstone, class starts again tomorrow and it’s nigh time to start considering work on my essays… hmm…