Chapter 15: Fall Break Part 1, London!

Obviously, my Italian school doesn't really care too much about pilgrims, Indians, or turkeys, so Thanksgiving Break isn't given here. However, we did get a Fall Break- an entire week off school in late October. Since my schedule is only Monday through Wednesday anyway, that meant that I had ten full days of freedom to travel! Dana and I decided to spend five days in London and four days in Paris, and it was honestly the best week of my life.

We flew to London on a Thursday morning, to discover that we were several expensive bus rides and Underground (subway/Tube) transfers away from our hostel, which was called The No. 8. The Number 8 turned out to be a hostel, a bar, and a club combined. It was black on the outside, pale pink walls on the inside, and covered in posters of mostly naked women and some comic book heroes. Not exactly the palace we would've designed for ourselves, but we made it work. Five nights of sharing bathrooms with rough looking middle-aged men, living above a loud club, and sharing a bedroom with a large mouse.....built character? Not ideal, perhaps, but it's pretty hard to complain about your life when you're spending five days in London.


Those five days were a blur of some of the most amazing things I've ever seen. London has SO much to do, it is SO huge and beautiful, and of course, we could understand what everyone was saying! We watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, went to the National Portrait Gallery for two amazing exhibits: From Beatles to Bowie: the 60s Exposed, and a collection of rare Bob Dylan photos, and I toured Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

We went to the Tower of London and saw the Crown Jewels of England, saw an amazing show, STOMP, in London's West End, which is like their Broadway, and walked the famous crosswalk at Abbey Road Studios! We went shopping in a fabulous outdoor market called Camden, took tours on the bright red double decker tours, and wandered around Westminster Abbey and heard the bells ring from inside Big Ben.

One of the craziest things we did was ride the London Eye, which is basically a massive ferris wheel, but it's the largest observational wheel in the world!

We walked through a fantastic open air flower market, and got gloriously lost enough times to accidentally discover beautiful little British neighborhoods. We also got to eat non-Itlalian food like Mexican and Chinese!
London's underground subway system, the Tube, is seriously one of the most impressive modes of public transportation I've ever seen. It's so big and so efficient, but so clean and easy to understand! We literally flew across the city underground in a matter of minutes, and felt like we conquered one of the biggest cities in the world, all by ourselves!


London is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, and my best friend at home has decided to study abroad there next fall! I already know where I'll be spending my Thanksgiving break... :)