I'll Marry Harry!

I absolutely fell in love with Paris after spending one day, but I also experienced another major love affair with the city of London. There is a close tie between the two cities vying for the title as my favorite, but I could easily see myself living in either of the cities in the next few years. I love Europe!

We arrived in London via the Chunnel by 6:15 p.m. on Thursday, April 27/ It was a two hour train ride but because London is one  hour behind Paris time, we gained an hour during travel. The Chunnel was cool, but there was far less tunnel than I had originally anticipated and we weren't able to see any fish! Apparently we were only going through the English Channel and not an ocean, who knew?! The Chunnel terminated at St. Pacras train station which is conveniently located  across the street from the King Cross train station. The infamous Platform 9 3/4 from the Harry Potter book series is located at the train station King Cross so since we were there, we snapped a few pictures. After the photo shoot, we took the tube (metro) to Bank station and then the DLR to Greenwich to find our hostel.

We hadn't looked up anymore about our hostel besides the fact that it is in Greenwich. Luckily, after exiting the Greenwich station and walking down approximately one block, we ran right into it. The hostel franchise that we stayed at are usually situated above a restaurant/bar/night club which we were unaware of as we searched the building for what looked like a hostel check-in desk. We quickly learned that it was the exact same desk where customers pay for their meal and drinks. After checking-in, we went up to our room and met two of our three roommates. The two girls were from Australia and the guy who we met later was from France. I really enjoy meeting people at our hostels and swapping stories, it's great! We spent a few hours utilizing the free Internet while simultaneously solidifying our next morning's plan. We were going to take a short siesta from about midnight to 3 o'clock a.m., take the earliest possible 24-hour bus into the city, walk to Buckingham Palace and camp out there until the wedding festivities commenced!

It was easier to wake up than I thought it would be while finding the correct bus stop was actually the dilemma. I think we  may have walked the entire town of Greenwich in pursuit of this bus stop at 4 o'clock in the morning. It wasn't the most pleasing thing, but Buckingham was calling and I was determined to make it! We eventually caught a bus to Trafalgar Square and walked about another mile to the front of Buckingham where we had arguably the best spots in the house. (Pictures, most certainly, to follow). We finally arrived around 5:15 a.m. and sat by a column until 7:30 when we pushed up to the front where we found ourselves in the fifth row from the fence. It was awesome, besides the fact that I did not sit from 7:30 in the morning until about 2:15 in the afternoon when we finally stopped for lunch. We got some really great pictures including the first picture of Kate and her dad, Michael riding in the Rolls Royce to the church, the royal family's carriage procession from the church back to Buckingham and the traditional kiss on the balcony of Buckingham after we jumped the fence that we had been standing behind for the previous 6 hours. We also met some interesting folks while waiting around for the festivities. Around 9 a.m., the town crier came around and passed out sheets of a song that we were all to sing for the rest of the day. Ask me to sing it for you when I get home, it is an epic song especially with my newly adopted English accent. Another woman who we later found out was from Minnesota was the most un-welcomed individual in our little crowd neighborhood. She wa the epitome of the Negative American stereotype. She was collectively loud, rude, obnoxious and probably mentally insane all the while being completely oblivious to all of these rather unpleasant qualities. Despite this rude Minnesotan, (we didn't admit to any other people in our crowd that we, too, were from Minnesota after learning that she was, we were just too embarrassed) and the endless hours of standing, we had a great time and it was totally worth it! And because we only had exactly two days in London we didn't have time for a nap so we kept trucking through London, first stopping at the Apollo Victoria theatre to purchase student rush tickets for the night's Wicked show, we were in the seventh row of the stall and we were so excited!

After getting our discounted, awesome tickets we went to the British Museum which I was really excited for. The British Museum houses the Rosetta Stone which unlocked the Hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt, a super cool Parthenon exhibit and my personal favorite, an 18th Century Enlightenment exhibit. After exploring the museum for a while we realized the absolute necessity of a nap before the 7:30 show, so we found the nearest park and passed out. I slept for a good 30 minutes and it was wonderful! We grabbed the metro back to the area by the theatre and then picked up some Starbucks coffee as another measure to make sure we would be able to stay awake for the entirety of the show. After having experienced the show, the nap and the Starbucks would not have been necessary in the least because the show was that amazing. Amazing is actually an understatement, but there really exists no sufficient words to describe this show. I recommend that all of you go, ASAP! This day shaped up to be one of my favorites on this incredible journey thus far.

We got back to our hostel around midnight which meant that we had been up and around the city for the previous 19 hours. We allowed ourselves to sleep in until 9:30 the next morning because we needed some sleep, but also had some much to still see in the city since we spent a significant portion of our day just standing outside of only one attraction. Therefore (true to form as most of you know) I compiled a list of every attraction that we wanted to see and then organized our day accordingly in order to more efficiently see the sight and maximize our time at each spot so that we wouldn't feel rushed. For the record (and arguably, because of my list) we were able to see all said items and more! We checked out Abbey Road in the morning, (which was anti-clinactic to say the least) Westminster Abbey/Big Ben, The London Eye and others. My absolute favorite, though, was Covent Gardens. There were market shops, street dwellers and most importantly, a Big Ben Cookie shop. For those of you who have fortunately experienced these remarkably delightful cookies, you know, and for those of you who haven't? Well, I am deeply sorry. These cookies are the best cookies I have ever had! (Mom, your cookies fall in an astonishingly close second!) The Big Ben Cookies Franchise (if one could even really call it that) bakes a variety of kinds of cookies from peanut butter to double chocolate chunck while simultaneously forming the most wonderful of marriages between the hard cookie versus soft cookie debate. If you have been on the fence like myself and remain unsure as to which kind of cookie, soft or hard, that you prefer, look no further my friend. Book a one-way ticket to London and you will forever be at peace with your cookie preference also known as cookie heaven. Or rather, book me a one-way, and with the utmost consistency, prepare yourself for monthly boxes of cookies. So many, that you just don't know what to do with them all, compliments of yours truly.

The last stop on our 102 things to do and see that day was Dirty Dancing, the play. Now, had I seen Dirty Dancing prior to having seen Wicked, I think I would have liked it much more than I did, but because I hadn't, I kept comparing, which is never good. Don't get me wrong, Dirty Dancing was great and the dancing, incredible. Also, to compare musicals to plays is like comparing apples to oranges--so completely and utterly unfair to the orange. So Dirty Dancing was great and once again we had excellent seats--stall H! Being a student rocks! After the show, we met up with Michelle's cousin, Rob, for drinks. Rob is living and working in London and I want his job, whatever it is! He actually works for Best Buy and has travelled the world for his job. I was grateful to be able to network with him and also to exchange stories about our travels. He paid for our meal (because we decided that we were hungry) our drinks and our dessert; it was beautiful. He said that he remembers all to clear how miniscule his bank account was while in college and that all the food and drink was on him. After our little date with Rob I couldn't help but vow to myself that I, too, will pay it forward to all those poor college students that I will encounter during future traveling adventures. It was a regular night on the town for Rob, but for us, well we probably had JACKPOT written across our foreheads for all I know. After parting ways and sprinting through the underground in order to make the last train for Greenwich, we headed home to pack and prepare for our very early flight to Dublin the following morning.

We arrived in our hostel room around 1 a.m. which left us with just under three hours to pack, get ready for bed and sleep before we had to get up again to catch a bus out of Greenwich. Apparently, sleep was overrated on our trip to London as two of the mornings we were up well before the sun made its appearence for the day, but while traveling I have learned a lot: to let go of a perfectly planned trip, because something, though fixable with surely go wrong and sleeping with one's mouth open is a perfectly acceptable and understood means of catching some zzzzs. So we left our hostel around 4 a.m. which was an all too familiar time in this little Greenwich town and hopped on a bus which then brought us to where we picked up another bus. This Easy Jet bus brought us the 60-minute journey to the airport where we finally ran into some Johnnies! Wheew, I was getting worried. It had been a whole day since our last unexpected encounter. This encounter was even more special, however, because not only were the six of us heading to the same place, we were also on the same flight!

After the flight the three boys went straight to the Guiness Factory in Dublin while the three of us boarded the next bus to Cork because we needed sleep! The ride lasted about five hours and upon arrival in Cork we found our friends' apartment complex and within minutes, we were napping in their beds.

In a way we used Cork as our vacation from our vacation. Theorectically we could have gone the entire month of traveling without washing our clothes or updating our blogs and pictures, but it's much better to keep up with those types of things...and, we weren't too fond of the fact that our jeans could stand alone without our legs in them and I had worn the same brown sweater for the previous two and a half weeks, far from lovely. So we did our laundry and made some fun family dinners with our friends studying in Cork. The only tourist attraction that we made sure to visit was the Blarney Stone which is conveniently located 15 minutes outside of Cork. Oh also since we didn't have time to sample the famous fish and chips of London, we stopped at a local diner in Cork, known for their fish and chips, to eat the food of the region. I was not disappointed in the least, it was delicious!

After spending a wonderfully relaxing three days with our friends in Cork, we were off to Munich, Germany! It's getting late here so I must go to bed, but look for the blogs from the rest of my trip in the next week. So much has happened even since then so stay tuned! Love and miss you all! And as they say in Ireland, "Thanks a million for reading my post, cheers!"