Since we had gone to bed a bit earlier the night before, it was a bit easier to get up this morning a bit earlier than normal. Our first destination was to check out Lewisham, the first area of my mission (actually called Catford). It was kind of fun getting there because we were on a double-decker bus on the top level at the very front. Once we made it into Lewisham, I was all sorts of backwards. This was for a couple of reasons. First, since I served there, there had been a LOT of new construction, especially high-rise housing complexes, built right between the high street and where we lived as missionaries (which were fairly close in proximity).
Once I got my bearings, we headed from the bus stop to the high street. This was a fun experience because it was a chance for Ang to experience the “true” London that is poorer and has lots of Africans and immigrants. 😛 The high street was just as I remembered; even the German sausage guy was still there. Haha, Ang really enjoyed seeing all the produce and goods that were being sold on the stands (with pretty good prices, I might add). After unsuccessfully finding a pair of shoes that Ang liked at Tk-Maxx (their version of our Tj-Maxx), we headed to my old flat where I lived while serving there. Getting there was interesting, though. They were doing a lot of construction at the large roundabout between the flat and the high street and had shifted around a lot of the pedestrian pathways, so it was really confusing to find out where we needed to go. Eventually, we did and stopped by the flat before we headed to the train station to go to Buckingham palace for the changing of the Guard.
Once there, we stood around and waited. Haha, I completely forget that they don’t do the actual walking outside the palace grounds until the end of the 45-minute ceremony, so we just stood around with the thousands of other tourists. At least there were some breaks in the clouds and we could enjoy some sunshine. Eventually, the guards came our and it was over pretty quickly. It was still cool to see though. After that, we walked along the Mall toward Trafalgar Square.
Trafalgar Square was cool to see but it was absolutely packed with people. Apparently, Shakespear birthday is in April and there were a bunch of celebrations around London. In the square, they had some people performing something (couldn’t tell, to be honest) and a bunch of food vendors. After see that all the lines for the food vendors we wanted to eat at were super long, we headed to a restaurant around the corner named Tortilla. This was basically the UK equivalent of Chipotle, and it was pretty good food. After that, we checked out the National Gallery for about 30 minutes and headed off to our next destination: Westminster/Big Ben/Houses of Parliament. On our way, Angela bought a cute looking sweater at a tourist shop.
Once there, we sat for a bit at Parliament Square to rest our feet since they were aching quite a bit at this point. While there, something really weird happened: probably near a thousand young people rode their bikes past and several of them were doing wheelies. It was the strangest thing has there was no police presence or anything. Even a quick google search didn’t show anything, so I have no clue about that. Anyway, eventually they all passed so we took some pictures of Big Ben and some funny photos of people taking Big Ben photos. We then walked across the Westminster bridge where I took a pic of me standing on the other half of the bridge. (When I was serving there, I took a picture of me standing with one foot on each half of the bridge since the other side of the river was the England London Mission).
Once across the bridge, we headed to the McDonalds nearby the London Eye where I had the first double cheeseburger while in my mission. For some reason, I had to get one so I did. 🙂 While we were sharing that, we headed to little arcade thing that was kind of crappy and shady looking, so we got out of there. Once outside, we stared at the London Eye, remarked about how we were glad we didn’t waste money on it (since we got better views of London elsewhere), and headed to the Waterloo graffiti tunnel. This was a tunnel that goes under Waterloo train station and people are allowed to freely spraypaint the place how they want. There was a lot of really cool street art there. While there, we talked with this normal looking 40-year-old man about this face he was spray painting on the wall. He basically said that the only reason he doing that was he likes to leave “his mark” around the city.
After that, we caught the tube to Hyde Park to visit the chapel there. There was a visitor’s centre there and, most importantly, a bathroom. 😛 We then rented bikes and cycled around Hyde Park for a good part of an hour. Our hands froze! Haha, we should have had gloves but the decision to get bikes was kind of spontaneous. The park was pretty beautiful to visit. That said, we both remarked how it would have been even better if it was warm and sunny. Oh well, maybe next time.
After that, in a quest for the legendary tourist shops I remember from my mission, we headed to Piccadilly Circus, which is known as the Times Square of London with lots of electronic signs. There were also a lot of tourists there, so we moved toward Leicester Square where we found the tourist shops I was thinking of and checked out London’s China town. While exploring that area, we came across a magician doing a performance. The guys was doing some cool trick, but it seemed that his whole audience didn’t speak English, so the crowd was lukewarm at best. Eventually he gave up and told the crowd they were fired. It was kind of funny to watch his performance break down like that, but I did tell him that we enjoyed it anyway. After that, we checked out the M&M store and got on our way to the St Pancras Station.
You see, St Pancras/King Cross is where Harry Potter infamously runs his trolley into Platform 9 3/4 to get to the magical wizarding world train station. Well, we get there and all the Platform 9 3/4 is just a random wall with a pretend trolley going half-way through it with a long line for pictures and Harry Potter next door. THERE IS NOTHING IN THAT STATION THE REMOTELY RESEMBLES PLATFORM 9 3/4. Haha, I know I shouldn’t be, but I am still rather upset about that. I just wanted to get out of that stupid place, so we left back toward the flat. On the way home, we stopped at the Kebab place for food. Ang got some chicken and chips, and I got a regular doner kebab and (for some reason) a large chips. Haha, even the shop guys warned me on that order. I finished the Kebab but neither of us could finish the chips after we became uncomfortably full.
Then we slept.
