I slept for nine hours straight! I didn’t know I was so tired, till I hit the bed and closed my eyes. Emily was the first one to wake (she didn’t want to miss breakfast), and luckily she woke me up so I wouldn’t miss breakfast. Being late for breakfast I learned is not a good thing. I ended up with just a sausage, beans, tomato, and a croissant. Apparently, if you get there much earlier you have more choices.
After breakfast, Emily and I cleaned up and headed for the TateModernArt Museum. We walked on the millennium bridge and took pictures with St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background. Tate Modern Art… hmm… how can I put it in words… It… was… different. Some of the art were amazing and inspiring! Others were… weird and scarred me for the rest of my life. The Viennese Actionism exhibit, Paul McCarthy’s exhibit (not the Beatles guy), and this one video really of a woman either being killed or killing herself… not really sure, were traumatizing. I’ve never seen so many nude and masochistic images in my entire life. While walking around the museum, I lost count of how many artworks were described as ‘provocative.’ I wanted to give the museum officials a thesaurus. But, there were good exhibits. The pop art exhitibit was cool, but short. They also had a couple of pieces that were good like ‘No Woman, No Cry.’ After seeing that title, the song lyrics ended up being stuck in my head throughout the entire day. It’s still playing in my head right now. The art piece was really intricate with details. The painting was made of little pieces of beads that probably took forever to make. The artwork itself was a tribute to a racial injustice in the British court system some time ago.
For lunch, Emily and I met up with my friend Caroline’s British friend John. John was a gentleman. He was very cordial, nice, funny, and tall (lmao, inside joke). We tried to go to Wegamama’s but it was closed, so we went to Café Rouge. While we ate John gave us great suggestions of where to go including Amy Winehouse’s house. We ate and had a laugh, then headed out for more adventures. John likes sour skittles, so I got him a giant box from Sam’s Club before I left. He was very happy, I just hope the guy doesn’t eat all of it quickly. I don’t want him to kill his mouth. Lmao.
Our next stop was Hyde Park where we found a Winter Wonderland fair happening. They had a mini London Eye, little attractions like you would find in a State Fair. The nifty thing was a giant water globe people would go in and take their picture. Emily and I didn’t stay there for long cause there wasn’t anything too appealing there.
We headed for Oxford Street where London fashionitas reside. The street was filled with bright lights and tons of people. Getting through the crowd was fun. I felt sorry for bus and taxi drivers trying to avoid hitting all of the random tourists jumping in the streets. There were stores left and right and everyone had a huge sale of clearance. Shoes and clothes were calling my name. I was tempted to buy in to the signs that were 7£, but I remembered that my bags were close to hitting the limit weight for when I fly out to Nice.
When we were finally tired, we decided to go back to the Hostel to pick up our laptops and find a free wifi shop. Turns out that cafes closes pretty early here. So, instead we went to a Tesco shop to pick up food for dinner and headed back to the Hostel. Well I’m dead tired now, time for sleep.
Boy, lesson learned, when someone tells you to take the dot2dot service, (taxi service that takes you from HeathrowAirport to your destination) you should listen. I spent a good ole hour in the tube getting to central London. Then to switch to another tube, I found out that there is no such thing as elevators in their public transportation system. So I lugged around 50 lbs of luggage up and down stairs. Luckily, people here are nice and helped me out.
Emily (my study buddy) and I made our way to our Hostel to drop off our things. Right after we decided to take a stroll down some streets and get lost in London. Since, we’re right next to the building we saw St. Paul’s Cathedral (didn’t go inside yet, but we will). We then made our way to the Royal Court of Justices… nothing too interesting there, but the building was beautiful. It was kind of funny cause you had to go through security and no matter how much crap we unloaded from our pockets Emily and I kept beeping. So the guards just let us through. Lmao. Then we just kept walking and walking will we made our way to WaterlooThamesRiver. The site was amazing! From the bridge we could see the London Eye and Big Ben, where we’ll prob go later this week. and saw
After walking for a while, Emily and I decided to find a place to eat. Being really poor students, we scoured for the cheapest place. We both got paninis for 2£65, it was pretty good. We made our way back to the Hostel and passed out. We woke up to conversations in Chinese! Our other roomies in our Hostel dorm are from China studying abroad. They’re really nice and chill, they even let me borrow their UK adaptor cause my laptop battery died. Around 8pm and we got out again to look for dinner, just stopped by and picked up a sandwich. The stores are really cute and I was surprised at all the different flavor chips and sodas they offered. I picked up a Lychee soda! It tasted like lychee with fizz and more sugar. I also got roasted chicken chips. As Emily described it, “It’s like someone dropped a bullion cube in a regular bag of chips.” Lmao.
Cant wait for tomorrow! We’re going to do some more exploring and a friend’s friend will show us some things.
