London London London!

This weekend API took us to London. It was my first time in England, and I must say I loved it. The city actually reminded me a lot of New York, except it was cleaner and not so crowded and the buildings were nicer. Here’s basically my whole weekend:

We flew out of the Galway airport, which none of us even knew existed, probably because it only has 2 gates. On the flight over I psyched myself up by listening to all the “The”s on my iPod. The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, The Sex Pistols, The Zombies, The Kinks, and especially The Clash. Our hotel was right off Trafalgar Square, so it was basically the middle of the city, which made it pretty easy to walk most places. API Cork and API Limerick were at the same hotel as us so we all walked over to the London Eye together. I heard two girls talking about the Katy Mills mall so I asked if they were from Texas. Not only were they from my state, they’re from my school. One was from Cork, the other Limerick, and they told me there’s one more UT student who’s in Dublin. Pretty funny. We were actually supposed to all meet up Saturday and take a picture in front of the Texas Embassy (yup, we have an embassy in London from when we were an independent nation), but we were all doing different things so it didn’t end up happening.

My favorite structure in the city

Get it?

Texas Embassy- now a Mexican food restaurant

Saturday I went up to the Portobello Road market with Danielle and Kelsey. I liked it a lot, typical street market set-up. They had a bunch of antique booths, which I didn’t spend too much time at, dresses, bags, souvenirs, records, leather jackets, and lots of food. I got bruchetta from an Italian booth, which was a perfect breakfast, and a sweet new bag to replace my fraying, 4-year-old Target one. We minded the gap on the underground back to London Tower- luckily Kelsey and Danielle are both from New York so they knew exactly how to read the subway maps and all I had to do was follow them through the station. We met up with everyone else and Kevin gave us all bus passes, so we basically just explored the city the rest of the day. Saw London Tower, Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey, Fleet Street- all that good stuff. Later that night I saw We Will Rock You and got Chipotle for dinner, so obviously I was happy.

The beautiful Tower Bridge

We Will Rock You

We had to check out of the hotel Sunday at 11, so we only had a little time in the morning. I ran into Dan on my way to get coffee so we went and got breakfast together then ended up walking around Trafalgar taking pictures riding the giant lion statues there (actually only he was riding them because I wasn’t tall enough to hoist myself up, so I’m just in front of it). After that we saw Kelsey and Meg, and we took a taxi over to Abbey Road, where we got our picture walking across thanks to this hilarious Asian couple. We undergrounded it back to Trafalgar and got one last Starbucks (number 5) before checking out.

Attempting to climb

Couldn't even get it without the jacket

Settled for this

Our photographers

Now I could give you the blow-by-blow of each delay as it was announced, but I’ll just sum up our time at the airport by saying we got there at 12:00 and didn’t leave until 7:30. Air Eirinn gave us each £6 to spend around the airport, so Brendan and I hit the bar around 3:00, by 5:00 quite a crowd had gathered. It was a bummer we couldn’t have spent the extra time around the city in London, but really the airport wasn’t so bad, and at least we were stuck at the giant London one instead of the shed we flew out of in Galway.

So I had a good weekend. I plan on going back to London in a couple weeks with Katie, Brendan, and Colleen. The one thing I really wanted to do that I didn’t get to was the British Museum of Popular Music, because apparently all the other people in API are squares who hate real music (and yes, I realize some of you squares may be reading this blog). I also think we’re going to go see Shakespeare’s grave and the Globe Theatre, and hopefully even Stonehenge.

Me, Colleen, Brendan, Katie, and Sarah- going back November 19th

Not sure what I’m doing this weekend. Maybe going to Dingle, plans are in the works. Nothing really planned for Halloween though. Lacrosse practice/party tonight, I think Danielle made pumpkin soup so hopefully I can snag some of that for dinner.