A Fancy Weekend in London

I had a whole week of from school, so I took advantage and did a bit of solo traveling. I already wrote about some of my time in Berlin, spending it both by myself and meeting up with a friend. After Berlin, I went to London to meet up with some friends because why not? The first few days we did all the touristy stuff, like seeing Westminster Abbey and the parliament building and Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard, which by the way, is not worth waiting around for. My personal opinion is that it is cool to watch once, but that’s it. There’s a band and sometimes you can see the guards and the horse processions, but the massive crowds might ruin it and you won’t get a good view of anything. It’s definitely worth it to wait until late afternoon/nighttime to get a good picture of the palace.

I never realized this until this trip, but most of the museums in London are free to enter, so that took up a lot of our time the first day. The British Museum was really interesting because they had a lot of artifacts from all over the world. The British War Museum was also interesting and had a lot of really cool exhibits. It was especially interesting to me because I had been in Berlin the day before and had been to some museums that had depicted events of WWII from what the Germans had been thinking and doing. In the war museum in London they obviously had events from the British point of view.

I had been to London before this trip, so some of the stuff that we had planned to do I had already been to before. But one of the things that we did that I never even thought to do was to have a traditional British afternoon tea. It was funny to me because I hadn’t brought any sort of nice clothes with me and afternoon tea to me feels fancy. But it was really nice to take some time out of the day and relax and drink tea and eat little sandwiches and scones. I felt very British the whole time. The place we ended up picking was also part of a little museum, so the whole place was extravagant until we got to the actual restaurant part of it which was actually nice and cozy feeling. I felt like a classy lady the whole time, even though I don’t even really like tea.

And, just in case someone has a trip to London coming up within the next few years and wants to see Big Ben – the tower is under construction.