London Calling

Let's just say this: I heart London.
Friday morning I woke up at 4:15 am to try and make the bus that goes to the Airport. Well, we were on the wrong side of the street (it was early). Luckily, this really nice taxi driver drove us there for five euro each!
When we arrived in London via RyanAir plane, we took two different trains just to get to the city centre.
Getting on the train!Entrance to Waterloo Station in the city centre:
Then, we decided to get lost for two hours trying to find our hostel in the very poorly marked city. I don't know why, but every city in Europe I've been to has a horrible street sign system: in fact, it's lacking. But that's neither here nor there.
When we finally arrived at out hostel being awake for nearly ten hours and walking around for a total of three with ort heavy backpacks, we checked in then walked to the nearest grocery store to get lunch for the day and makings for lunches the following two days.
[This is a painting in our hostel; it was legit. Only one bathroom for the whole place. However, they had actual cereal for breakfast as opposed to just toast and they had nutella for the toast. Also, they had a projector screen you could watch movies on for free! AND it was only a fifteen minute walk to Big Ben and other tourist-y places]
Finally, we set out on our way!
We got day passes for their underground system, the tube, over to Kensington Gardens.
It was this beautiful park that Princess Di used to live at (at Kensington Palace) and it had a huge lake with fantastic trees and far too many birds and swans.
Kensington Palace:I'm obsessed with the gates that are in front of all the royal buildings:The Sunken Gardens:We then decided to go visit Abbey Road. When we got off the bus, we were told it would be a good half hour walk (which is was, and uphill for a good portion), so we took some good pics on the way:
[This is Mr. Sherlock Holmes:]
This reminded me of home and made me so happy to see it:Abbey Road is an actual road used my many cars. We did get a rather awesome shot of the three of us walking across it. However, my friend has not uploaded those pictures yet. I'll put it on the next blog because it's pretty stinkin awesome!After, we decided to outnerd even ourselves and go to Platform 9 and 3/4 at King's Cross Train Station. For those of you who dont know that reference, you should (a) start reading books or watching movies and (b) know that it's from Harry Potter:
While we were incredibly exhausted after this long day, we still stuck it out to go to the London Eye. I unfortunately only got a picture of this during the day, but the sight was beautiful from the top! Please enjoy my very blurry pictures:
Even after all of this, we still made a twenty minute trek to this fantastic restaurant that was well worth the wait of the day. I looked at the menu and all I saw was BURGER. It came with the most amazing legit bbq sauce. I had a chocolate beer with it. I drank most of the beer before, then I learned chocolate beer and burger do NOT go together. Still, it was perhaps the second best meal I've ever had in my life. And reasonably priced. I had a slice of chocolate cake afterwards (because I deserved it after all my walking) but I forgot to take a picture before I devoured the whole entire thing.
Day Two:
We woke up early in an attempt to beat the crowd to see the changing of the guard. That is not possible. But it was still really cool!

The flag was up which means the Queen was home...I wonder if she ever peeks out to see the ginormous crown on her front lawn...courtyard...own city.
The crowd was insane so we put out bags and person in the front of us to be the tourists that didn't get pick-pocketed:
The guard came in and then they entertained the crowd with some music! It was actually really awesome! THey played Enrique Iglesias and Mark Anthony (hilarious), Beetles medley, and Pirates theme song! It was cool.
Then we went to the National History Museum, which was possibly the neatest part of the trip. We could have spent the whole day there looking at everything! When you walk in they have all this space stuff and then you go up these escalators into this huge world [literally].
This suit here can withstand 9000 degrees for the volcanoes and a guy from ASU wore it!!!
I was so proud and school spirited!
After the volcano and earthquake exhibits, we went to the mammals and birds. The line for the dinosaurs was too long so I was really disappointed we didn't do that:
[These are all hummingbirds, grandma:]
Well, this is obviously a peacock...We had pretty much reached exhaustion by this point. It was three and we hadn't eaten since our delicious cereal breakfast. So, we went to this quaint restaurant and I had my first fish and chips [i know, it wasn't in Dublin. I'm a little ashamed too]:
For the rest of the day, we went shopping (where I got the cutest purple fedora for only three pounds) and then we went out to a cool pub that night.
The next day we got up to make our HOUR AND A HALF WALK to the Tower of London.
But first we had to get shots of Parliament and Big Ben:
The wind was on some sort of Cliffs-of-Moher steroids, as you can tell from my hair:Then we went to the Tower of London to see the Crowned jewels (which were uh. maze. ing.) and the 600 year old castles:
Tower Bridge:
On our long walk back home it started to downpour so we took refuge in the waiting room of a pub until it cleared up. We were so exhausted from the long weekend that when we got back to the hostel we watched Talladega Nights on the projector screen while we took a nap before taking the two trains, one plane (with an hour long wait through the broken customs machines), one bus, and one very long walk back to our apartment.
It was such an amazing experience though!
Sorry if this was quite long! Next weekend is St. Patty's weekend so I'll either update you over the weekend or next Tuesday after all the big events I'm super excited for!
Love you all <3