London

06/13

Finally arrived in London this morning still feeling a tad groggy from the flight. The size and magnitude of the city is hard to grasp when the jetlag and sleeping pills haven´t worn off. Nonetheless, I was able to successfully navigate my way from the airport to my hostel.

St. Christopher´s Inn is in a clutch location. Located just south of the Thames I´m about a 10 minute walk from the Tower of London. I am sharing a room with seven other people one of which is a girl from Virginia named Danielle. After checking in we decided to grab some lunch at a pub. So we walked towards the area of town I´m dubbing the business district and found a place to eat. We were near the Bank of England and the stock exchange. I found it quite odd that the patrons of the pub were all wearing business suits and pounding beers at 3 pm. I guess this is Europe.

After lunch we tried to get in a quick tour of the Tower of London, but didn´t. We arrived too late and I was informed that it probably wasn´t worth it to go through with such little time. So instead I decided to make my way over tot he British Museum. Somewhere along the way I realized that the key to my locker was missing. Great. Then I got lost on my way to the museum and turned back towards the hostel. So much for my first day of sight seeing. Tomorrow will be better considering it´s my only full day left in London before moving on to Barca. The good news is that the hostel had a pair of bolt cutters on hand. Jet lag is setting in, time to take a nap before rebounding tonight.

06/14

Yester evening I went to dinner with one of the guests sharing the hostel room. An aussie girl from Sydney, named Colette. We headed to Picadilly Circus/Soho area in an attempt to find some authentic British food, we settled on pizza. Restaurants can be quite descriptive in their attempt to sell you food items. What we thought was going to be an awesome italian pizza turned out to be cheese ´zza with cut up hotdog on top. So much for authentic cuisine.

For some reason or another the beers on tap here taste awful. The beer is served warm and to be quite honest the "good" beer I paid for tasted like nothing but skunked natty light. Once I explained the meaning of skunked to Colette she concurred. By the time we bailed and got back to our hostel, it was about midnight and the jetlag was really hitting me hard. I climbed into my bunk exhausted and sore expecting to pass out before my head hit the pillow.

That however would not be the case. Between the traffic noise and A&E´s filming of Axe Men International in my dorm room I was kept wide awake. The german girl below me, the spanish dude, and a guy I´m pretty sure was dutch were sawing some serious logs. I don´t want to generalize, but german women snore. Loudly. Good thing I brough along some ear plugs

The sun had risen and it was time to get moving. I hopped out of bed inten on getting a full day of sightseeing in. I pulled out my watch and checked th time. Five past five in the morning. Okay I´m going back to sleep again.

7 am. Time to get moving, again. After eating breakfast I set out towards Big Ben. I decided to wake early so I wouldn´t have to wait in as many museum lines. What I wasn´t aware of is that museums don´t open until ten because as one local put it, "Us British stay out too bloody late at night".

So to kill the time I snap a couple of photos in front of Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. For being a house of God the place charges an awful lot to see the inside, so I passed. Afterwards i walked by Scotland Yard, or at least what I thought was their HQ. With about 2 more hours to kill I wandered through St. James Park and tried to get in a couple snapshots of the Queen´s casa. Unfortunately the blokes were still taking down scaffolding from the Jubilee and had the whole joint sealed off. Leave it to the Queen to pull some kind of stunt like that.

So the trip to Buckingham was shortlived and left plenty of time to check out Hyde Park. That place is cool. Walking from the south end of the pond or east, whatever directio, I saw the Princess Diana memorial fountain, Peter Pan, Italian Gardens, and the Albert Memorial.

It was an overall swell morning. With the slight paranoid notion that one of my foreign roommates was going to rob me blind while I was away, I skipped on over to the Natural History Museum. My Dad once told me he spent an entire day in one wing alone and didn´t see everything. Intent to prove him wrong I went on a mad dash through the place attempting to view everything. The place is massive though. There was so much stuff in there that it would take this whole journal just to explain the two hours I spent in there. There must have been four or five different elementary schools on field trips there today and of course they had the dinosaur wing packed to capacity. I don´t blame them though, dinosaurs are awesome. My favorite part of the place was the animals exhibit. There were stuffed birds of every species in there. I lol´d when I heard a school boy pronounce toucan like "two-cun". Brits and their ridiculous accents.

After the nat history museum I rode the tube over to the British Museum. My favorite exhibits there definitely had to be the egyptian and Parts of the Parthenon. Seeing the Rosetta Stone up close and personal was tight. So tight that I bought a Rosetta Stone paperweight. The friezes of the Parthenon were awesome as well. Most of the statues had some kind of damage done to them in the form of castration or amputation. Looters have a perverted mentality.I´m definitely going to have to come back to London for another day before I go home and check otu more sites.

Finally got a cell phone. That was a separate ordeal in and of itself but it is settled now. Also, Twix McFlurrys are the bomb. I could definitely sink my teeth into another one of those.

Got another early day tomorrow. Flying to Barcelona to meet up with Ross. Can´t wait, London has been rad but it´s on to the next one.