And We Went Dancing!

You know, I noticed that when I do stuff over a period of a few days but don't blog about it, I start forgetting about that event! I am so happy to have this blog which will create a permanent record of my travel here because otherwise London would just become a hazy memory a few years from now! SO, without further ado, I present day two of my trip in London!

Surprisingly my day did not start out at the crack of dawn but at 10PM instead! My mother and I literally slept like dead people. We awoke in the exact same position that we fell asleep in, our bodies were so tired! But we had to hurry because the changing of the guard's at Buckingham Palace waits for no one!

I've never really taken cops on horses seriously back home but this lady was rocking it!
Oh and the horses name was Merlin, ha!

 We proceded to walk down St. James' Park where I saw the adorable little squirrel in the previous post as well as a lot of other little birds. There were ducks, swans, geese even an obese pelican!

Eventually we ended up in front of the most iconic and well recognized clock towers in the world, Big Ben! It was really quite amazing and we heard it as it was chiming for noon which, in my opinion, makes it extra special.

And of course I needed to take a picture in front of a London phone booth! It's so awesome that London is full of them because quite frankly not everyone has a cell phone and that's something that peeves me off about the US, the lack of public phones...hmm writing this at 2AM in the morning might not be a good idea if I'm going to go off into random rants...Oh and I forgot to mention that my "piggy bank" is actually a miniature phone booth back in the US =]

Farther down the street from Big Ben is Westminster Abbey which was architecturally gorgeous and I wish I had taken more picture of. It sort of reminded me of the Hunchback of Notre Dame even though clearly I'm not in France and this isn't Notre Dame...

And for those of you Harry Potter fans I hope that this looks familiar! It's the Palace of Westminster (aka Houses of Parliament) and it appears in the...6th movie I believe! Again, everything here is so beautiful and regal I love it!

After you cross Westminster bridge there's a sort of boardwalk called the Queen's Walk which we went along right next to the Thames River. There were a lot of little restaurants and entertainers it was really, well, entertaining! I feel like a kid for saying this but my favorite where the entertainers who worked with bubbles because they came out so huge and so colorful!

It looks like Big Bubble is gonna eat little bubble!

Our bellies started to rumble a bit after that so we went in search of food passing Trafalgar square once again! We ended up eating a Cheese and Bacon (not bacon and cheese! We made the mistake of asking for two bacon and cheese burgers and all we got back was a blank stare for a few minutes and then "Oh, do you mean a cheese and bacon burger? -.- ) burger with chips (aka French fries! Although seeing as the British and French never really got along I can see why they don't call 'em that...)

Lions at the base of Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square

The 'chips' tasted WAY better than American ones and the bun was made out of ciabatta bread I think

Afterwards we jumped on The Tube and went down to South Kensington which has some very posh neighborhoods and stores and just strolled around there. I loved the townhouses/apartments around here with the red bricks it was amazing for taking pictures! We also stopped by Harrod's which is apparently now a tourist destination judging by the amount of people with camera's swinging around their necks and not urchasing anything! Harrod's is like a...Bloomingdales I guess but everything is full price...yeah...I kept on thinking, "you know you're in a rich neighborhood when you see four Porsche cars parked right next to each other!"

I like this sort of serious picture of mine =]

There's three right next to me and one a little farther down the road towards the far right of the picture.

We took the Tube back up to Covent Garden where I had a hot chocolate and almost croissant (yum!) and then wandered into this little park that had live performers and people where just chilling on the lawn. My mom and I just sat on a bench and talked for an hour as well as People Watching (funnest thing to do when you need to kill time in a foreign place!)

To end the night we ended up going to my first Musical in London called Blood Brothers. It was excellent I really enjoyed it! Even though the plot was a little sad (A mother must give up one of her twins because she can't afford him but then the sons find each other and become BFFs and "blood brothers" (they cut their palms open and shook hands! but not for real of course) but then they get separated again and then...well point is one of the brothers goes a little insane and is going to kill the other because of a girl but then the mom pleads him not to shoot him because that's his real brother but then a they both end up dead anyways because the police shoot or something...it was GOOOOD). The woman who played the mom was especially good since when they finished the musical you could see that she was crying for real, plus she had an amazing voice ("and we went daaaancing!"). It was an excellent way to end the night =]

UYL,
Andre