London Baby

This past weekend was a weekend of many firsts. It was my first time traveling solo, first hostel stay, first visitor, first overnight trip, and, most excitingly, my first time in London.

Though London boasts some of England's most famous attractions, I wasn't going there just to see the sights. I was there to pick up Anisha, one of my oldest friends, who was flying in to visit me for a week. Since my knowledge of London is based off of Notting Hill and Love Actually, I was a tad nervous taking the reins and touring around just the two of us. However, it was a challenge I was most definitely up for.

Despite my lack of navigational experience, we were able to get around London fairly easily. In the first day alone we managed to get from Heathrow to our hostel, check in, and tour most of the big sights. By dinner we had seen: Picidilly circle, Trafalgar Square, St. Jame's Park, the London Eye, Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the Royal Museum. Apparently,  We discovered that the key to finding London's main events was to not look for them. We managed to stumble upon all of the previously mentioned attractions, but when we were purposely looking for certain things, like the discount show tickets stand, we ended up going in circles and passing it repeatedly.

Note to self: Wandering is more productive.

Our first day in London was complete with damp English weather and capped off with a musical called Avenue Q, essentially an adult version of Sesame Street, which was absolutely hilarious. After successfully keeping Anisha awake for over 35 hours, we returned to our hostel ready to crash. We were both exhausted and when we finally reached our hostel, we were serenaded to sleep by drunken Englishmen singing "I would walk 500 miles" at the karaoke stand in the pub downstairs.

London is the more proper cousin of New York City because it has it's own Time Square like area, Broadway and theatre district, copious amounts of ethnic restaurants, tourist traps around every corner, and a subway line that will get you anywhere and everywhere. Since we had done most of the big stuff the previous day, Anisha and spent our second day seeing Buckingham Palace, Changing of the Queens Life Guard (i.e. a horse walking around in a circle), Hyde Park, and Harrods (i.e. one stop shopping for the rich and pretentious). Despite its steep prices, we couldn't resist Harrod's candy and dessert section, afterall, we were visiting on Valentines Day. After buying each other mini-cupcakes and chocolate strawberries (we couldn't buy them for ourselves, that would be just sad), we returned to our hostel for a pint before packing up and heading back to Leeds. It was a whirlwind of a tour, but our time in London left us totally stoked to return.

Highlight of the trip: Watching the highlights of the Olympic opening ceremonies in Trafalgar Square surrounded by people from all over the world. It reminded me of why I absolutely LOVE being Canadian, not that I could ever forget.