Though we don't live by the river, we have been to the Thames, and it's quite fantastic. But more on that in a moment. Moving back to where our last blog left off...
We went to North London to the London Punx Picnic on Friday night. It was super awesome, we met some really chill people who we talked to most of the time instead of listening to the music, though the bands that we did see were good. We found someone really awesome to stay with in Bristol as well. Our trip definitely took a positive turn that night.
The following night we went back for the second and final night of the show...only to find that it was not at that location. After much confusion and a lot of getting lost we eventually got there. But we were incredibly tired, and none of the folks we'd talked to the night before were there, so we ended up leaving soon. We did go to the British museum that day which was kind of cool. They had a great collection of pocket watches that I was very jealous of.
The next day we went to our couch surfing hosts' house in Harrow, which is a wonderful part of London. Our hosts are great, and there's another American staying here too who's cool too.
Sunday we went to center city London, which is where the Thames is. After a frustrating encounter with a payphone, some "I think it's this way..." wandering and some not so great directions we found London bridge. I was greatly disappointed. It's plain. There's nothing to it really. It's only famous because it was the first bridge across the Thames and because it burnt down. However, there are other nicer bridges around, which I'll get to. We sort of just walked around after that. There was supposed to be this amazing Thames festival, but we didn't find it. We were tired, and it was getting dark so we decided to come back the next day to see more things.
So we went back yesterday. It was so awesome. Almost all of the really famous architectural pieces of London are right around there. We saw them all, or at least most of them beginning with the Tower of London. It's actually more of a castle with turrets, but it's really cool.
From there we walked across Tower Bridge, which is beautiful, and is definitely way better than London Bridge, even if it wasn't interesting enough to fall down. It actually has two towers. The river is certainly a sight for a San Diegan who never sees rivers. It's not that big actually, and not very deep, something like 50 feet, but it's very nice. It is incredibly polluted though, although it's better than it used to be. There's this cool spot that's closed off where dead bodies of people that were thrown out of the Tower used to wash up. I like stuff like that.
We went to the Tate Modern which had some interesting exhibits, including this one that was basically made up of museum-goers playing follow the leader. When we walked past the first time they were walking backwards up this long ramp. The second time they were jogging around it as a group. Then they were doing different movements and ended up taking them down the ramp to the other side of the room. One girl came up to us and said that the piece was called associating something. Another time a different girl came up to us and without giving any introduction began telling us the story of how she wanted to be a smoker when she went to France but didn't like it. Then she rejoined the group. It was very odd.
It's rather unfortunate that to go inside most famous buildings in England you have to pay. This seems to me to be something like having to pay to go to the beach in San Diego since old buildings are so abundant here. We went to St. Paul's Cathedral, which was huge and amazing. We would have had to pay to go in, but it wasn't open anyway.
We got off the tube and went up the stairs just in time to hear and see Big Ben striking 6 o' clock. The parliament building is awesome, it's so ornate and huge. It's crazy that people actually work there, as if it's just a normal office building no doubt. Westminster Abbey is right across from it, and it too is amazing, though I have to say I'm partial to Parliament. It's the only building that's ever instilled any desire in me to be a politician (not going to happen...).
We went to this really good noodle place called Wagamama for dinner. We haven't really been eating solid meals much on this trip, so it was nice to have some real food. We're getting better about that now.
Anyway, today we went to Camden, but as this post is very long I'm going to leave it at that for now.
Cheers,
Stephanie
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