Lost in the City

Hi all!

I’ve finally started my blog! I guess I’ll dive right in and let you all know what I did yesterday and today.

Yesterday I decided to go in to Central London, it was forecasted to be raining all weekend but I woke up to it being a really nice day so I thought I’d take advantage of it. So I took myself down to Leicester Square, along Shaftesbury Avenue, and along Oxford Street to do a little shopping at H&M, Primark, Blackwell’s, & Forbidden Planet. I realized it was past lunch so I popped in to the nearest Costa coffee (which is my favorite place to get coffee now, outside of the school’s cafe) and had a nice bacon & brie panini (which is one of my main food groups over here) and a mocha. I decided then that I wanted to go down and walk along the Thames. So I proceeded to do just that and ended up walking WAY more than I had originally planned to. I really wanted to see and walk across the Millenium Bridge (for purely nerdy reasons, it’s in Harry Potter ok). I headed in that direction and passed bridge, after bridge, after bridge and still I had not come across it….finally I found it! I walked across and it was wonderful! Then I decided I wanted to try to find Battersea park but by the time I finally saw signs for it I was exhausted and just wanted to find the nearest tube station and go back to the house. I ended up walking past all the bridges I’d walked past already and finally walked back across to the correct side. I had no idea really where I was at this point so I attempted to find a nearby station and walked and walked and walked, found a station only to see that that particular station was indeed closed. Brilliant. So I walked and walked some more and eventually came across Farringdon Station (my hero). It was quite the little adventure I had and indeed my feet and shoulders were killing me after. But did that stop me from going out again today? No, no it did not.

 

Today was also apparently supposed to rain, though amazingly enough it didn’t. But I thought what better to do on a potentially rainy day than take a jaunt to the National Gallery. I took a nice stroll through the gallery and saw works by the likes of Monet, van Gogh, Renoir, Gaugin, Pissaro, Cezanne, Manet, Signac, Seurat, Degas, and more. After that I thought I’d take a little stroll in one of the parks nearby (I feel bad cause I actually don’t know which park it was…..I’ll look into it). As I was walking through I saw a heron which so I stopped to take some pictures. When the heron eventually flew off I walked on, I was still so happy about seeing the heron (I know I’m weird) that I almost didn’t notice the five pelicans. Thankfully I didn’t (the crowd of people near them helped me not to miss them). I took some pictures and a video (I’ll post it soon) of the lovely birds and then I pet one. I PET A PELICAN!!!!! I thought for sure he was gonna turn around and snap at me (waterfowl tend to not be my biggest fans) but he didn’t and it was wonderful. He was so soft!!! Then walked across the Thames again, then back, and then took a nice double decker (obviously I went to the top) back to Trafalgar Square and hopped on the tube back to the house.

 

As you can see (and I realize I was probably rambling in the majority of this post) I had an eventful past couple days, I will try to make a post of catching you (anyone who actually reads this) up on the first weeks of me being here in the wonderful, beautiful city of London.

 

Goodbye for now I gotta go memorize some lines!

Cheers,

Olivia