London Travels

On Saturday, Jenny and I got back from our lovely trip to London! Jenny's university had a break last week, so we went to stay with our friend Eve, who is from London and was going home for the break.

It was the first time either Jenny or I had been to the U.K., and it was the first time we'd been in an English-speaking country since the beginning of September. We arrived at St. Pancras International via Eurostar on Friday afternoon, and Eve came to meet us and show us to her house. She's from a section of London called Islington, and her parents still live there in the house she grew up in (but they were in Berlin for most of the time we were staying there).

St. Pancras International, the station where we arrived

After we got settled in and Eve made us some dinner, Jenny and I took the Underground to West End to see Billy Elliot the Musical, which we had bought tickets for online. It was a really good show! The music wasn't particularly memorable, but the dancing was amazing. It was really cool to see a kid who's like eleven years old who is such a phenomenal dancer. I probably wouldn't have picked Billy Elliot as one of the shows I wanted to go see if Jenny hadn't wanted to, but I'm glad she did, because I really enjoyed it!
After Billy Elliot, we met up with Eve and her boyfriend Steve to go see the Features, who are an awesome band from Tennessee who just happened to be playing at a club in London while we were there! (If you haven't heard them, you should visit their myspace here.) It was really great to be able to see them - they are one of my favorite bands ever to see live, plus they remind me of home. And Eve and Steve really liked them too!

The next day we went down to Leicester Square to try to get cheap tickets for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, but they were sold out. So we went back to Eve's house for the afternoon, and for dinner, Steve made us his specialty lasagna, which was quite good. After dinner we went to meet up with our friends Amie and Ed, who were staying in London with their friend Amy, and some friends of Eve's. We all went to this anti-Valentine's dance night called "Feeling Gloomy", where they played songs with sad lyrics, which was fun.

The next day, Jenny and I had tickets to see Waiting for Godot in the afternoon. It was really interesting to see a play I've read multiple times and discussed at length in different classes on stage, and it was quite cool to see Ian McKellen performing in person! But it was also a hard play to sit through at times, because it's basically a couple of people talking nonsense onstage for two and a half hours. After that, Jenny and I went to eat dinner at a nearby restaurant, then headed back to Eve's, where we spent the rest of the evening.
Ed and Amie had come over the night before, and Ed hadn't been feeling well. Ed was supposed to fly to Stockholm really early in the morning, but when the rest of us got up, he was still there, and still very sick. We made sure he was okay, then went to take a free walking tour of some of London's most famous sites with Eve's friend Dave, who is a tour guide.

Buckingham Palace, the first stop on the tour

It was a great tour - we saw all the main touristy things, like Buckingham Palace (Where we saw the Changing of the Guards, kind of. There were so many people watching that mostly all you could see was the backs of other people's heads.), Trafalgar Square, Big Ben, The Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey. Then, after the tour, Dave invited everyone who was on the tour to eat lunch with the tour guides in a pub, so we went along. Eve, Amie, Jenny and I all got fish and chips, which were good, but unsurprisingly, not much different from any other fried fish or "chips" I'd eaten before in my life.

The Changing of the Guards - this is pretty much the clearest view I had the whole time
A Royal Guard - sadly, they weren't wearing their red coats because it was cold

Trafalgar Square

That night we went to a small play put on by a friend of Eve's. It was actually a couple of short plays in a row with the same cast, written by Christopher Durang (who I'd never heard of before, even though he's American). They were pretty funny. Afterward we went for a drink with Eve's friend who put on the play and her boyfriend.

The next day was really rainy and nasty. We went to some "charity shops", which are like Goodwill, but nicer. Jenny, Amie, and Eve got clothes, and I got some books. Then we went to have fancy English tea at The Liberty, a department store which has a famous little cafe. We then went back to Eve's and got our stuff ready to go, because Amie was heading back to Lille and Jenny and I were going to stay with our friend Johanna (a former UT professor we both knew from doing work study in the Religious Studies department) in Otley, a town near Leeds.

Otley - somewhat hard to see because of the fog

Jenny's stomach had been feeling weird that day, but she had thought it was just because we'd gone to a kebab shop kind of late the night before. But on the train, she got really sick, and we realized that she had the same sickness as Ed had. That night at Johanna's I got really sick too, and we both spent the whole next day lying in bed.

Luckily the sickness passed pretty quickly though, and we both felt able to venture out of the house the next day. Johanna's husband David drove us up to a nice trail that went along the side of a hill overlooking Otley, and we had a nice walk on it, then walked down and explored the town some. The next day Johanna took us to breakfast before we got on the train back to London. I wish that we had been able to see more of Otley and Leeds, but hopefully we can go back some time.

This is the trail we walked on

When we got back to London, we decided to try to go ride the London Eye. But when we got down there, we learned that it was 18 pounds a person to ride it, and we had already been unsure of whether it would be worth riding after dark, so we decided not to. Instead, we walked along the Thames and looked at all the things there are along there, like the Globe Theatre, London Bridge, and Tower Bridge.

The London Eye
The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben at night
The re-creation of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
The sign on London Bridge, which frankly is more interesting than the bridge itself - it's just a typical bridge that cars drive across
Tower Bridge

The next morning we packed up our stuff and headed back to Lille. It was a really good trip, and I would definitely like to visit again!