London: Part One

This past weekend, as most of you know, was Easter weekend and most people in Europe get Good Friday and Easter Monday off from school or work.  Since this meant Darren had four consecutive days off, we decided to use all that time to go to one of the best destinations in Europe: London.  My dad took me and my brother to London nine years ago and I've always wanted to go back since.  When Darren and I started planning for our trip, we decided Darren would take Tuesday off, too, so that meant we would have five glorious days in London.  I spent hours looking up all the things to do before we left and my list was so long, that even with five days I still couldn't fit in everything I was interested in seeing.  I took this as a sign that this trip was going to be awesome.

We arrived Thursday early evening to a sunny, warm, and lively London.  We stayed at the Apex City of London Hotel (highly recommend it), which was near the Tower of London and in the financial district.  Since it was the end of the day and the beginning of a holiday weekend, tons of business people were enjoying a drink and soaking up the sun with coworkers outside all the bars and restaurants.  

We dropped our stuff at the hotel and immediately left to get some sightseeing in before the day was over.  We ate a quick dinner, where I enjoyed the food, but mostly enjoyed speaking English!  You just feel so empowered when you can communicate without any problems!  After dinner, we took the subway over to the National Portait Gallery.  The gallery features portraits of Britain's most famous/important citizens throughout history, beginning with the Tudor family all the way up to people like Paul McCartney and Princess Diana.  Darren and I both enjoyed this museum because it was nice to put a face with all these names you learn in school.  We were only able to see half of it before it closed, but since it is free (as are most museums here) we would just finish it up another day.

The entrance to the National Portrait Gallery, no photography allowed inside

The next day, Good Friday, we woke up and headed out to see the British Museum.  To get there from our hotel, we took a subway line in and would have had to transfer to another line, but we decided to walk from there to see some neighborhoods along the way.  We first stopped at Embankment Park to see the beautiful flowers that had bloomed.

Embankment Park

We then walked up through the Covent Garden neighborhood, which originally was an actual garden in medieval times, but now has lots of shops, restaurants, and a farmer's market.  I thought it was a really cute part of town.

The Covent Garden subway station

A cute, old restaurant in Covent Garden

Ran into this great street in Covent Garden

We finally arrived at The British Museum and it was packed, but this was to be expected on a holiday weekend.  The British Museum is the oldest public museum in the world.  It was established in 1753, but  came to its current home in the early 1800s.  The British Museum holds some of the world's greatest artifacts and luckily you can take pictures, so I'll show you some we saw.

Entrance gate to the British Museum

Entrance to the British Museum

The main hall inside the museum that connects all the galleries

Probably the most famous artifact in the museum is the Rosetta Stone.  As you might be able to see in the picture below, the stone tablet contains a government decree written in three languages: ancient Egyptian, a later form of Egyptian (I think), and ancient Greek.  By using the other two languages written on the tablet, historians were finally able to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

All the tourists swarming around the Rosetta Stone

The British Museum has artifacts from all over the world and from all periods of time, which are contained in 94 galleries stretch 2.5 miles long!  In other words: you can spend a lot of time here.  We managed to see most of the museum in four hours before I just refused to look at any more artifacts and demanded lunch.

Darren with an ancient Egyptian artifact

Statues taken from the Parthenon

Cleopatra

The first statue created of The Buddha

A Mayan artifact

So the first lunch I planned was not traditional British food, or even at a British restaurant.  We ate at the only Chipotle in Europe because I miss burritos a lot.  It was delicious.

We then took the subway over to the Notting Hill neighborhood to see what it looked like.  The area was a mix of cute, old residential streets and a few hipster streets where the popular stores were selling vintage clothes and accessories.

A cute Notting Hill street

Lovely Wisteria that was in bloom all over London and made everywhere smell wonderful

Just south of Notting Hill is the Kensington area, which features, among other things, a long, wide road where most foreign embassies are located.  You can see in the picture below all the large estates the embassies were located in.  It was a very pretty area.

The estates in Kensington that house ambassadors and foreign embassies

Next to these estates is Kensington Gardens, which has the famous Kensington Palace where Princess Diana lived and where people laid thousands of bouquets for her after her death.

Kensington Palace, usually open to the public, but is undergoing renovation currently

Everyone out enjoying the warm weather and sunshine in Kensington Gardens

After a quick dinner of meat pies and sandwiches at a local pub, our last stop of the night was to see the famous department store Harrod's before it closed.  Funnily enough, Switzerland tourism is currently advertising all over Harrod's department store, so it was a little weird to get away from Switzerland only to see tons of Swiss flags in London.

Harrod's department store decked out in Swiss flags

After that we headed back to the hotel and collapsed.