London

I went to London this weekend with some other people from my school doing MISTI in Spain and France.  My little little in AXO, Ann is working in Salamanca and flew in with Josh who is working in Madrid.  Another girl from AXO, Joanie, is working in Paris and took the train with Rohan who is also working in Paris.  We stayed in Rohan's apartment in Chelsea and saw almost all of Zone 1 in 2 days!  It was a really amazing weekend, and I probably got 8 hours of sleep over the course of 3 nights.

My flight was delayed, so I got to Rohan's with Ann and Josh around midnight on Friday night.  His apartment was incredible and definitely nicer than any hotel I could have afforded.  After arriving and going over our itinerary for the weekend (which was extremely packed), we went to a club in London called Fabric.  It was basically everything I would think of for a stereotypical underground London club.   We got back around 4:30, with enough time to get 2-3 hours of sleep before our wakeup call.

Rohan cooked us a traditional full English breakfast before we headed out to St. Paul's Cathedral, which might be my favorite part of the trip.

This is Joanie and Ann at the top.  The wind definitely woke all of us up.  The view was absolutely incredible!  Definitely worth the 530 steps up to the top.

Next on the agenda was Buckingham Palace.  We just missed the changing of the guards but it was still pretty cool.  We also took some phone booth pictures on the way :)

Next we went to Harrod's for lunch.  We picknicked with all of our Harrod's food in Hyde Park.  From the left, that's Rohan, me, Ann, Joanie, Nicole, and Josh.  Nicole is Josh's friend from high school and since she's working in London this summer, she met up with us for most of the weekend.  We had a really fun group of people :)

From Hyde Park, we made our way to see Big Ben, Waterloo Bridge, and the London Eye.  It was a great walk along the water and we got to see a lot of monuments along the way.  

Saturday night we went to a more posh club near Piccadilly Square.  This is us outside Rohan's apartment in Chelsea.  

This club was possibly the classiest place I've ever been.  Rohan (who we discovered is very wealthy), dropped $600 on that bottle of Champagne Josh is holding.  So that glass I'm holding, worth about $100.  It was definitely the best Champagne I've ever had.  At one point Ann said, "This is nicer Champagne than I'll have at my wedding."  

The next morning (after another quick 2-3 hours of sleep), we went to a tour at the Globe Theatre.  It was really cool and the tour guide was a really funny speaker.  Next we went to a tour at the London Dungeon.  Since they don't allow pictures inside, this was all I got.  But I highly recommend this if you plan on visiting London.  It was great!  It's an interactive tour with actors playing people from the 1600s.  They cover Jack the Ripper, the plague, and Sweeney Todd.  It was definitely scary!

 Next we made our way to London Tower and the Tower Bridge for some more windy pictures.  We saw the crown jewels and learned a lot about the history of London.  From the London Tower, we got a great view of the Olympic rings on the Tower Bridge.

 We walked around some more and got Indian food for dinner.  This was one of the last pictures I took since my battery died.  Which is unfortunate since there were so many picture opportunities Sunday night!  I'll add some once other people from the trip post pictures.  We found a bar to watch the EuroCup final at, called Metra (it turned into a club after the game).  Since Spain won 4-0, it was lucky that most of the bar consisted of Spanish fans.  We got seats on top of the DJ table which was lucky since probably over a hundred people were standing (it was extremely crowded).  Being in the streets afterwards was an incredible experience.  It was like one giant Spain themed party.  People were screaming and singing and climbing on statues and the entire square was covered in people.  After a while we went home and Joanie, Ann, and I decided that since wake up call Monday morning was 3:30, we would go to bed (another 3 hours).  Josh and Rohan decided to just stay up all night and go to a gay bar (neither of them are gay), and said they had a great time, despite Josh being pretty nervous about it :)

Monday morning we left earlier than we got back Friday night, and I got back to my house in Zurich around 11.  I ended up not going into work because I was so tired and took a 3 hour nap before starting to work from home.  I woke up this morning still tired so hopefully by tomorrow I'll be back to normal. The weekend was definitely the most jam packed weekend of my life, and I had a great time!