skipping ahead

I'm going to write about my London trip even though I haven't written about others. It's my blog so I guess I can write in whatever order I want.

Thursday afternoon we took the now familiar trip to Madrid Barajas Airport. After these 5 months here, I am for sure a travel expert. The trip consisted of Morgan, Anne, Jake, and myself. Since we were leaving the EU we got our passports stamped. It's about time. I have been so mad each other trip when they don't stamp my passport because its part of the same union. We had a nice flight to London and had to go through customs and all of that, something we aren't used to. They asked why we have a Spanish Visa, why we are there, for how long, who we're with, and how long our program was. I think we all gave kinda different answers, but we got through even though we all said our program was done a different day and we were in Madrid for different reasons. As soon as we left the airport, we hopped in an adorable cab that they call "cabbies" and headed straight to Chipotle. If you don't understand this, then you obviously haven't had Chipotle. We have been without it for over 3 months now, and to be honest it was about 80% of the reason I wanted to go to London. It was awesome. Even though it was as many pounds as it normally is dollars, which means that converts to like a 100 dollars, it was the best meal I've eaten in months. It tasted the same, if not better, and I ate my chicken tacos in about 3 seconds. My only regret is that I didn't eat it for every meal. By this time we decided we should check into our hotel, since it was 11 and we hadn't even put our bags down before getting food. Our hotel was adorable. It was in Notting Hill and right next to Hyde park. There was a loft with 2 beds and one single bed downstairs, obviously the man pad for Jake. We bought pajama shorts with the London Metro map on them on our way to the hotel since Morgan forgot to pack Pjs, and it was probably the best purchase of the trip. We went to bed early and got ready for the jam packed day of traveling.

Our hotel said they served breakfast in the morning, so after hurrying to make this awesome continental breakfast, it turned out to be black coffee, water, a weird juice, and a few slices of bread. There were hard boiled eggs as well but it definitely wasn't the bacon, egg, sausage, bagel breakfast I was hoping for. We walked through Hyde park on the way to our bus tour and it was nice to see people appropriately dressed for the weather. In Madrid all week, I have gotten countless stares for tank tops, shorts or flip flops. I'm sorry, but if it's 85 degrees then I am going to dress like it is 85 degrees, whether it's actually the season of "summer" or not. The guy we bought our bus tour tickets from said he liked my American accent, weird. The tour was awesome though, we got to see everything! We saw: Big Ben (shout out to dad), Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, The London Eye, The London Tower, The London Bridge and many other bridges, Buckingham Palace, Parliament Building, Westminster Abbey, and probably more things that I can't think of right now. But it was an awesome way to see the city. I was a little disappointed when I realized/found out that Shakespeare's Globe is a replica, not the original with the thatched roof and all. Still cool. We went on a ferry tour after this and had a presh little tour guide who had fun facts about the city. I think I got sunburned on this tour. After the tour we went and took a risk to see if they had student tickets at Wicked for that nights showing. We were willing to pay for it, and much to our surprise they had tickets for only 27 pounds. Wicked is my favorite musical and seeing it in London is definitely a once in a lifetime chance. I was concerned it would be really different than when I saw it in SF a few years ago, especially because of the accents, but it was almost exactly the same. There were times you could tell they were British actors but for the most part I didn't even notice. Since we have lived in Spain for the past 3+ months where dinner isn't served until 10 or 11 and places are open all night long, we didn't think we would have any trouble finding food after the amazing show. Wrong-o. After wandering around the neighborhood and almost getting hit by many cars and busses while trying to cross the streets with cars going the wrong way, we realized we were out of luck and ordered pizza to our room. Can't ever complain about pizza. I ordered it and had a hard time, and it was in English. Maybe I've lost my ability to communicate in any language? Who knows. Anne fell asleep before the pizza even got there, and Morgan and I gave Jake our best rendition of Wicked in our matching pajama pants and used the entire loft/stairs/railing/room as our stage. Easily one of my favorite memories of this entire trip, not just to London but in Europe. I only had one Wicked song on my ipod so we had to do the rest a capella. I'll leave it to your imagination of how good we were. My abs hurt in the morning from laughing so hard.

The next morning we slept in on accident because of lack of alarms going off, maybe I should charge my ipod after using it for 3 days. Whoops. It wasn't a big deal though, we weren't that behind schedule. We got an English breakfast consisting of an egg, toast, sausage, bacon, and for some reason a mushroom and a tomato. It was delicious and we all literally licked our plates clean. Off to more touring! We took a cab to the London Eye and watched a 4d video of it before we stood in line. Might I add that the weather was beyond amazing this entire trip and I think London would've sucked if it was rainy and gross. We got on the London Eye with 10 other people and went picture crazy. It was beautiful! Somehow I have seen a pretty good aerial view of almost every city I've been to, it definitely adds a lot to the trip. We got street hot dogs afterwards, and they were nothing short of ehhh. Then we needed water, and it was Kirkland Brand! Oh how I've missed Costco brands and products. It tasted just like home. We walked to Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace afterwards. The palace was huge and the guards are goofy. It wasn't how I pictured it, maybe because in all of the pictures it is grey and foggy. We also realized we know little to nothing about the Royal Family. American education sure does a good job of informing us of Europe or any other country for that matter. Not.  Abbey Road was next and well, it's just a road. A busy road actually that makes it hard to take fun Beatles-ish pictures. Our attempt was enough. The Abbey road recording studio was right there and the walls were covered with Beatles lyrics and signatures. This made the cab ride more worth it. Oh, and the "Tube" is 4 pounds a trip, which is like 6 euros which is basically 100 dollars. Cabs ended up being more efficient and cheaper. And the Tube was crammed and shaky. Once again, Madrid Metro beats all. We shopped around at Harrods and I bought a bear who ended up bringing us tons of entertainment the rest of the trip. He was clipped to my backpack for my trip home and got tons of funny looks. I don't care that I'm 20 and have a bear strapped to my chest, also the bear is wearing a leather jacket. We then finally found dinner. Even though it wasn't fish and chips, it was American barbecue. They had Sierra Nevada mustard and beer and hot wings and bleu cheese and pulled pork sandwiches and ketchup and everything else wonderful and American. I was shocked at the presence of Sierra Nevada products. While holding up a beer to take a picture with, a guy asked if I was some sort of spokesperson for them. Well it's from my town, so duh. We bought our souvenirs and went to bed to wake up and say goodbye to the wonderful town that is London. Best trip I've had with amazing people. Not ready to say goodbye to Europe anytime soon.