Faffy London Excursion

What a weekend! We just got back a couple of hours ago from our weekend trip to London...which was awesome!! We left early Friday morning (flight at 8:50, so we left the house at 6) and got back today, Monday, (flight at 6am so we left the apartment at 2:15!). It was crazy. It was really cool to be able to travel by ourselves and without our big group. It was just me, my roommate Meridith, and Britt. We stayed with Meridith's older brother's mission companion who is married and lives just 30 minutes in an apartment outside of London. His name is Julian and his wife's name is Kimber (she's from california and he's from england) and they were super nice and very helpful! They met while Kimber was doing a BYU study abroad in London and then got married two years later after a long distance relationship and summers together. Anyway, they are a very cool and very nice couple. They were actually visiting family saturday and sunday so they left us the keys to their apartment and told us to make ourselves at home. We had to take a bus (a double-decker red one!) to the underground or the tube that would take us to the city. On Friday we saw the London Bridge, the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, Portabello Road, and the National Art Gallery Museum. The museum was very cool because it included pieces from a lot of the painters that I had learned about in humanities and french class, so I could recognize a lot of them. We came back the apartment with Julian and Kimber and she had made pizza/spaghetti/noodles dish for us and we watched episodes of Arrested Development because they had them all on DVD and its their favorite show. We got up Saturday and had some interesting experiences with the shower...For some reason Europe just hasn't figured out how to get water to work right. We had to flip three switches to turn on the hot water and you had to turn it on an hour before if you wanted an hour's worth of hot water. Then you had to barely turn the hot knob, then turn the cold knob all the way to get a lot of pressure, and then adjust the temperature with the hot knob again. Yeah, it was bizarre and we didn't have much luck with it. Saturday we went to buy Wicked! tickets first thing because none of us had ever seen it and that was something that we really wanted to do. Then we went and saw the Parliament buildings, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye, and the Millennium Bridge. Meridith was very excited because they shot a scene from Harry Potter on the Millenium Bridge on the Thames. It was basically like fair grounds around the London Eye and there were a lot of street performers. One guy was balancing a soccer ball on a stick coming out of his mouth and then a bottle on top of the ball and another ball on top of that and another bottle on top of that! They were fun to watch. We missed the visiting hours for Westminster Abbey, so we couldn't go in, but the outside was very pretty. Then we to eat dinner at a place Julian and Kimber recommended to us called Wagamama's, which was very good. It was like ramen meals and asian plates. Then we went to Victoria station and saw Wicked! and it was awesome!! Seriously, such a good show. I thought it was very good. The costumes were awesome and their voices were incredible. I really recommend that everyone see it. I still have the songs stuck in my head. Then we went back to the apartment and tried like 8 different kinds of candies that we had never seen before--all good, and we watched more Arrested Development. Sunday we had some more fun with the shower and then we headed out to see more of London. We went to the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, and back to Westminster Abbey to hear an organ recital (it was the only way we could get inside, but it was still very cool!). The British Museum was very cool because it had a huge variety of things to see from every part of the world and every time period. We saw the Rosetta Stone, mummies, money from all over the world, Egyptian statues, Greek and Roman statues and columns...just everything. Buckingham Palace wasn't too exciting, basically just because it was so hot! They didn't have any of the guards with fluffy hats out for us to mess with, but it was a pretty building. Then we went back to hear the organ recital and then we took a nap outside of the cathedral. We didn't go to sleep last night because we didn't want to not wake up, so I'm pretty tired right now. We had to leave at 2:15 am to get a night bus, to get to another night bus, to get onto the train, to go to the airport, to get on a plane, to get on a train, to get on another train before walking home. Needless to say we were exhausted and it was a long trip home. We had a lot of fun together though and it was a terrific weekend!