LONDON - day 1

The past two days have been the most jam-packed, intense, amazing days I've had...ever.  We literally hit the ground running - we ran 45 minutes to Buckingham Palace from our hostel on Tuesday morning to catch the Changing of the Guards.  I left London with a swollen knee, wet rain-soaked stinky clothes, and wonderful memories. 

We (I traveled with my friend Paula) arrived Monday night.  Our flight was from the Eindhoven airport, so we left a lot of time to do the train travel (photo above) and deal with RyanAir.  It was actually incredibly smooth, the airport was really nice and quick-moving, and we flew on a very nice airplane.  We landed in London-Stansted at 7:35pm, but didn't reach London until about 9:00pm.  We left the Liverpool Station at dark to walk to our hostel, which happened to be just across the London Bridge.  We ate a delicious Middle Eastern meal at a restaurant across from our hostel.

We woke up on Tuesday morning and walked to the Tower Bridge 

and a bit around the area.  After realizing that the tour to Buckingham Palace required the tube, we decided it wasn't worth the money and ran there instead.  We didn't actually intend to go for a run- just walked really really quickly for a very long distance.  Luckily the scenery couldn't be better - Westminster Bridge, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and many other gorgeous buildings. 

 We watched the changing of the guards for about an hour and then continued exploring the city

 by foot.  

We snuck into Westminster Abbey and then went to Parliament and found out that we could come back later to sit in on a debate at the House of Commons.  While we waited for Parliament to open to the public we headed to Trafalgar Sqaure and ate "lunch" (packed snacks) on the steps of the National Gallery.  

We then headed back to Parliament to watch the House in session (check out the cool visitor pass), and saw 10 Downing Street and Whitehall Palace along the way.

After the House session, we headed back to the National Gallery (passing St. Martin-in-the-fields and some other famous monuments and buildings) to check out the Picasso exhibition and the permanent collection. 

AFTER the National Gallery, we were exhausted and starving but had one more thing to do before dinner.  We had to get tickets for a show!  We ended up getting tickets to Les Mis in Leicester Square.  The show wasn't until 7:30, so we finally had a chance to sit and enjoy a huge Chinese meal in China town.  We got to the theater just in time to find out that our section was closed.  We were briefly disappointed until we were informed that this meant we were given a free upgrade to incredible seats worth more than twice what we paid.  Les Miserables was amazing.  I'd never seen it and it was the perfect way to end our fir

st day.

Of course to say our day ended that easily would be boring.  After the show (around 11pm) we thought it would be easy enough to walk to our next hostel (which was further away than our first hostel).  About halfway there it started pouring (in London, surprise surprise) so we ended up getting drenched and wandering into our hostel after midnights looking war-torn.