The first weekend here, I went to London with Eseul, Jennifer, and Fang. It was my first time traveling on my own and all of our first stays at a hostel.
London is basically the NYC of England. It's huge, busy, and there is always something to see or do.
This is how our trip started!
We all met up at 6:15AM and walked to the bus stop together, where we then took a bus to Brighton and walked to this place which we thought was our coach station.We got there super early, like 6:45, so we had a lot of time to kill before our coach arrived at 7:45.
(Eseul, this picture of you is Facebook profile pic status... haha.)
Here we are waiting for our coach... completely oblivious to the fact that we're at the wrong station.
After talking to one of the locals who made the same mistake as us, we found out that our correct station and made our way there. However, it was too late...
So, we found this cute cafe and sat down to wait for the 10 AM coach.
Eseul's coffee and croissant... looks good huh? It was...
We almost ended up having to pay another 16 pounds for a new ticket, but one of the staff there got us on the 10 AM coach. He was a bit condescending/mean about it, but he did help us out nonetheless so I am thankful for him. =)
Finally on our way!The coach is pretty nice, and our tickets were only 8 pounds each roundtrip (I ordered them online). Not bad at all...
Two hours later, here we are...
I still remember this feeling getting off the coach and seeing London for the first time. I was so excited and overwhelmed that I almost scared myself... haha.
We walked around aimlessly for a while until we finally settled down and found a place to eat. We were STARVING by this time.
We ate at this random sandwich cafe.
It was cute but the sandwiches were no good... you have to pay 50 pence ($1) for them to toast your sandwich and even more for lettuce and tomatoes. I'm Chinese so obviously I'm too cheap to pay for that stuff... so my sandwich ended up being this cold, chewy mayonnaise sandwich with bits of chicken inside.
I guess it's kind of funny now looking back.. haha.
This day, it rained pretty hard for like 10-15 minutes. London weather is really ADD. You can get four seasons in one day. One minute it's pouring and the next, the sun's out.
Don't even know what this is... we were literally walking around aimlessly!Next time we know to plan better...
I guess we were so overwhelmed with booking hostels and figuring out transportation that we did not plan out what we wanted to see and do there as well as we should have.
After getting directions from some random biker, we ended up here:
This place is called the Vauxhall Bridge. You can see Big Ben and the London Eye here.
There were a ton of drivers on the bridge watching us as we took these pictures... no shame, haha.
To be honest, I'm not too sure what this place is. The biker guy said something about James Bond and military intelligence... oh well. By the way, this is at the huge blue and beige building in the pictures before.
After that, we made our way to our hostel...
...by tube.
We made it! So proud of us.London is split up into eight different zones, with central London (basically all the tourist attractions) being in zones 1 and 2. We didn't know this at first and booked a hostel in zone 4... so it took us about 30 minutes on bus and tube to get to central London each day.
Here is our room!
There were 5 bunks in there (so 10 beds total).
When I first walked in and saw GUYS' things on the other beds, I got so scared that they would be these shady guys. But luckily, they ended up not even showing up that night... and the next day when we came back from London, their stuff was gone.
After settling in, we all knocked out for two hours (we were so exhausted). Then we went to Greenwich Village to look for dinner. Here is what our dinner looked like:
Chips, Indian curry (from the fridge section of the grocery store), ham and raw spinach, and stir-fried vegetables... so interesting.
This is the kitchen and common room of our hostel. We stayed here the entire night and met some really interesting people: two guys who were born in Virginia but grew up in Spain and are now learning English in England, one girl from New York traveling alone (she's so brave), and two students from Stanford.
That is the end of my first day in London!!
