Day 25: London Calling -- Day 1

As I am writing this, I realize I am way behind on my posts... my apologies! I just literally had the absolute best time of my life this past weekend in London and I am trying to find a way to put it into words so that y'all will understand how great it was. I want to do my trip justice in the Blog world! I am also working on getting pictures up for the past week in Tuscany -- so expect big things from Life in Limbo this week :)

Ok here goes nothing.... I'll do my very best to express how unbelievably awesome this weekend was! I am in love with London :)

Friday - June 11, 2010:

Even though we had only gone to bed 5 hours before, when I woke up at 8 a.m. I was wide-eyed and ready to go explore London! I jumped down from my top bunk and plopped onto Becca's bed to wake her up -- I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning! I was so excited and didn't really know why... I was just ready to go! So once we managed to get ready in the dingy, tight quarters of Picadilly Backpackers, we made our way outside. We were on our way to Starbucks (ahhhhh!) when a donut shop caught our attention. We both looked at each other, shrugged and figured why not! We must take advantage of delicious food opportunities when we can. So we got a donut to go and took it to Starbucks, where we both ordered our morning drinks of choice (me regular, brewed coffee and her a skinny vanilla latte).

The next thing on our agenda (yes, we made an agenda. I took a picture of it too -- you can call me dorky) was to.... SHOP. Shop, shop and shop some more. We knew that London had fabulous shopping and we would be consumed with thinking about it if we didn't go ahead and get it out of the way for the weekend. I like to think of this as a smart strategy! So we took our last bit of Starbucks to go and made our way to our number one priority... a store called TopShop. Y'all... you've never seen 2 girls more giddy when we saw those silver letters on the side of that building. We bolted for the doors and did some serious shopping. I think we spent like 4 hours in this one store (granted it was 3 stories...). I was in heaven--I think I could've bought everything in the store if my budget had allowed. Want to hear something funny? I guess Becca looked like a good target for a Personal Shopping experience because she literally was carrying so many clothes around to try on that she could barely see her feet because she got pulled into the Personal Shopping area and treated to her own dressing room. Isn't that hysterical? We were loving it!! Another reason to love TopShop.

This is what I like to call my "trifecta" picture because if you look closely you'll see 3 important aspects of London -- 1) Starbucks cup in hand 2) Red double-decker bus 3) TopShop. Can you see the excitement on my face? It was real!

This is a cute store called Liberty. If you know that cute line they have in Target right now, Liberty of London for Target, well this is Liberty of London! It is kind of like a special, high-end department store like Henri Bendels in NYC. It was absolutely precious inside!

So after we spent too much money and not nearly enough time in this one store, we decided we needed to regroup and go get lunch. So we toted our bags proudly and found this pub to eat lunch. It was so cute. I love pubs! It was lunch time but it was packed with a work crowd getting a mid-day cider. Remember me telling you about the cider we tried at the Duomo in Florence? Ok well it's everywhere in London! In fact, I think I can say it is the drink of choice. So you better bet once Becca and I scored a good table in the front room, we ordered us a cider to get us going for the rest of our day. We also got some lunch food -- we split this delicious pea and asparagus risotto with chicken. It was the perfect way to spend time after our morning in TopShop!

Yummy-ness. Another tally in the "Non-Italian" meal category.

Cider. Why this isn't in every bar in America is beyond me. I'm bringing it back to the States big time!

Looking a bit touristy with our map out, but we didn't care. Everyone in London is so incredibly friendly. If we ever got lost, we would just stop some random person on the street and they would be more than willing to help us (that is before we tied England in the World Cup game... it may be a different story now!)

This is Regent Street.. one of the main streets of London. Look at how beautiful these buildings are. Don't they look typical England to you? They did to me and I fell in love with them! They're so pretttttyyy :)

After our lunch at the Claghan Pub, we set out to do some more shopping along Regent and Oxford Streets. But you know what, we didn't find anything that was winning us over because we had such high TopShop standards from the morning! I guess that's a good thing... So we meandered our way back to Picadilly Backpackers to look over our purchases and change for the evening.

We took The Tube (their Metro) to Waterloo (shoutout Abba) and went to the London Eye. The London Eye is this huge ferris wheel that overlooks the whole city. I wish we could have ridden it but the line was too long and we were ready to get to dinner. But we did enjoy the scenery that the London Eye area offered us! It was my first sighting of Big Ben -- that's exciting! You can see from the pictures that we were by water, so we had to cross the bridge to get to the area we were headed to.

That dang map....

Pretty park down by the London Eye.

When we were walking to dinner we stumbled upon The Sherlock Holmes Pub. This is where the story of Sherlock Holmes was written! So of course Becca and I freaked out and had to go get a cider. Oh and we saw the red telephone booths (they're literally everywhere) and had to have a photoshoot!

You'll see we ordered 3... one for me, one for Becca and one for Katherine (our friend on the Italy trip that absolutely loves this drink. She told us to drink one for her while we were over there, and we stuck to our promise. This is our picture for her!)

Our walk to dinner... no biggie, that's just Big Ben in the background. Isn't this gorgeous? This is the Embassy district.

You know how cities paint animals, put them around town and sell them for charity? Ok well London's animal of choice was an elephant and their were 250 of them! So when you see them randomly in our pictures, it's because they're on every corner of the city.

For dinner, we had our hearts sat on Mexican. I don't think I've told you, but Becca came to London for Spring Break. So she knew her way around the city fairly well (which helped so much) and had great places to eat at already picked out. This is one place they came to over Spring Break and she really wanted to go back, and nothing sounded better than fajitas to me! So we made our way to Texas Embassy, sat down at our table for 2 and enjoyed a delicious Mexican fiesta!

Another pretty building in Piccadilly Circus. I looooooooooove this place.

After dinner, we wandered around the main squares of the city and ended up going to a few different bars before settling on one for the rest of the night. Here, at this place called the Zoo Bar, we danced and danced all night and had the best time! We embraced the touristy-ness when we were walking home and decided to get someone to take our picture in front of this fountain. London is a really big city, kind of like New York, but it was different because we felt so safe. Like I said, everyone was so nice and there wasn't a moment when I was scared or uneasy about it just being the 2 of us in this big place. Another score for London :)

I would say Friday was a MAJOR success. We navigated the city flawlessly (The Tube included), stuck to our agenda AND accomplished everything on our agenda. I love when that happens! So this trip got off to a great start the first day :) I can't wait to tell you about Saturday!