London Continued

After a wonderful few days in London, I am back at school and ready for class tomorrow. Here are some more pictures from our wonderful adventures!

Clock in Soho by our hotel

View down Soho

Queen Elizabeth Tower!!

London Eye

Parliament 

Pods on the London Eye-- they move at 1 mile an hour

 View of London from the top of the London Eye

Mom and Ms. Gergely 

Financial London 

Courtney, Sally, and I with "Big Ben!"

 Nelson Mandela statue outside of Westminster Abbey and Parliament

Abraham Lincoln-- the only standing statue of him. It is standing in case the Queen comes by.

Westminster Abbey!

 London Eye from Hyde Park

Queen Victoria Statue

 NFL sighting! The Dolphins were playing the Raiders at Wembley Stadium in London

The Blue Rooster at Trafalgar Square

Arch leading directly to Buckingham Palace-- if you look really closely you can see it in the distance 

London Eye, Giant Swings, and Queen Elizabeth Tower in one picture!

St. Paul's Cathedral

Tower Bridge taken from the London Bridge

Tower of London

Red poppies placed for people who had died during the first World War

Tower of London with the Shard in the background

More Queen Elizabeth Tower

Harrods

Peter Pan statue

Phi Mu Love

Take 2

To start off our day today we hopped on the bus and rode round for a while on the top tier with an open top! It was actually more fun than I thought it would be because we had a live tour guide, James, instead of the automated recording. He was quite sarcastic and was constantly joking around with the people on the bus. After finding out we were Americans, the jokes just never stopped! He was very informative to and I was able to pick up on some more information that I had not yet learned such as why certain areas of London were bombed and why non of the famous buildings were destroyed. The answer to this was because the Germans were trying to cut off the English food and water side so they bombed the trading posts along the river. They did not care much about the landmarks and actually used St. Paul's Cathedral as a navigational tool. 

We then got off at Victoria Station and walked to Harrod's which is an upscale shopping store that is just huge! It was quite overwhelming though I did get to play with fake snow. After Harrod's we got sufficiently lost but eventually made our way to lunch and Kensington Gardens. In the gardens we saw the Princess Di memorial fountain which had children playing and swimming in it. According to her brother it would have made her so happy to see it. 

Next we were off to the Peter Pan statue which was installed overnight in 1912 in order to make the school kids think it was magic. 

From the Peter Pan statue we walked down to Kensington Palace which is home to Prince William and Duchess Kate and their family along with Prince Harry and possibly one of their cousins(we never quite figured that one out. Out side the Palace the road had the homes/offices of many of the embassies (except not the U.S. since it is secluded nowhere near anything else). 

We then took the bus back to the hotel where Sally and I napped before dinner. For dinner we went to another cute Italian restaurant where I finally tried Pimm's, an English summery drink. We then walked to a cute little pub that had a Drag Queen singing, which was packed and an incredible sight to see. All the people inside were singing along to songs I presume are famous English songs since we had never heard of them. 

London or New York City

Today was the first day of the girls weekend in London! It started off very touristy although I did get us to London all by myself (with help from Sally) on the Oxford London Tube. As we arrived in London, mom insisted that we get o n a hop on hop off open top tour bus. After stopping at our hotel, we hopped back on and drove by all the iconic sites before stopping at the London Eye.

The weirdest thing about the London Eye is that you do not feel like you are very high up but it does give you an amazing view! After the Eye we walked through many of the site we saw from the bus and back to our hotel.

 We changed and got ready to go out to see Wicked! To get to the theater we decided to take the Underground which ended up being super crowded due to construction and took us 55 minutes to switch tracks and go about 3 stops. We finally made it to the theater and got dinner at an amazing authentic Italian restaurant (you know its Italian when all the waiters speak Italian to each other).

Wicked was amazing! I had not seen it before but did know the premise. Even though I am in London and have even seen an English movie, it shocked me to hear them with British accents, though I must say the wizard had an amazing American accent!

When we got back to the hotel (taking less than half the time it took to get there!) we decided to do some exploring. As we were walking around I began to become confused as to whether I was in NYC or London. the area we are staying in, Leicester Square is very much like Time Square. There are billboards and giant TVs along with many familiar stores! whole Foods, Uggs, Starbucks, Bubba Gump Shrimp, TGI Fridays, and many more. We also ran into M&M world and the NFL(yea apparently the dolphins are playing the raiders in London and there are people wearing NFL jerseys everywhere).