LONDON, ENGLAND

I made it to Europe!!!

If you’re new here, welcome! Today marks the first day of a full semester studying in Europe. My semester in Prague starts mid-February, but being anxious to travel I decided to come to Europe a little early and travel around for a few weeks. One of my USC roommates, Lauren, was on board to do the same so after finding an incredibly cheap flight from NYC to London, our starting point was decided.

Figuring out the trains from the London Heathrow airport to downtown was actually pretty easy, just expensive. I had to drag my 300 pound suitcase around a lot of places and up some stairs. I think I almost died trying to get from the train to the platform over a substantial gap, but we made it.

We found our accommodations at the Horse and Stables Hostel. It’s an adorable little hostel in a great location for exploring the city!

Day 1: 

We decided to start by exploring Waterloo, the area near our hostel. This brought us to the Imperial War Museum, Riverside restaurant for lunch, and Cubana where we enjoyed some fun cocktails. We also stumbled upon The Leake Street graffiti tunnel, which we later found out is a public part of The Vaults. The Vaults as a whole are art galleries found underneath the railway arches of the Waterloo Train Station. I know its early on, but this was definitely a favorite discovery thus far.

It was a long day of walking after getting maybe three hours of sleep on the plane (the melatonin and cocktails did not work in our favor), and I’m sure part of our exhaustion was just pure jet lag so we got to bed early tonight.

Day 2:

Today we crossed the bridge and explored the more well-known parts of London. We saw Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, the Buckingham Palace, the Horse Guards Parade, Westminster Abbey, and explored a bit of Trafalgar Square. We also came across an adorable charity-based café inside The Abbey Community Centre. This is where we stopped to look over our map and figure out where in the world we were after walking around aimlessly. Thankfully, a woman saw us and sat down with us to explain the area better. She even talked about some of the history of London -like the fact that Buckingham Palace was expanded for the Queen and King to live in, and that Hyde and Kensington parks used to be the “hunting grounds” of the Queen and King.

We spent about 2.5 hours searching for food today… we wanted to have a late, bigger lunch that would count as both dinner and lunch. But unfortunately, waiting until about 3 to start looking was the wrong move. Everywhere we found was closed between lunch and dinner hours, so we spent a long time aimlessly walking around before finding a place to eat. We walked for a while longer before settling for a sweet treat to hold us over, and luckily Konditor and Cook answered our prayers on that front.

Day 3: Our last day in London.

We ended up befriending the 7 French students who were staying in the hostel room with us, so on our last day we decided to explore as a group of 9. We ventured towards Camden where we found the well-known Camden market which was massive and so cool! Unfortunately for Lauren and I this was a cash-only market so we couldn’t actually buy anything but it was still great.

At some point we separated from our French friends and took a metro to the other side of London where we saw the London Bridge, the Tower Bridge, and the London Tower Prison which was SO cool. The Tower Bridge was probably my favorite thing we saw the entire weekend. From here we started back towards our hostel and stumbled upon the Borough Market on our way. This market was INCREDIBLE. It was more like a farmers market with a huge selection of fresh juices, cheeses, sandwiches, etc. and it was so fun to wander around. Finally, we stopped at dinner at a highly-recommended restaurant called Masters Super Fish where we tried their famous fish and chips. The rest of the night we spent re-packing our luggage before our early morning trip to Madrid.