London Adventure, Part 1

Some of you are probably wondering why I had a little bit of a hiatus. This is because, as a pre-birthday celebration (although my birthday isn't until the 19th I like to celebrate it for as long as possible), on the 7th of September Bethany and I jetted off to London to see the sights and meet some friends. I decided to document our 8-day trip in a couple of blogs as we ended up having quite a jampacked schedule.

As some of you know, I'm quite the overpacker. I debated paying for a bag so I wouldn't have to try and cram everything into carry-on luggage but decided the €70 or so would be better spent on other things - and I'm so glad I made that decision as I pretty much ran out of money toward the end of our holiday.

As Bethany is originally from London she wasn't too thrilled to be going with me - as I had only been to London once when I was 9 and didn't remember any of it, I wanted to go back and do all the tourist-y bits. And yes, you can bet I got a picture with a red telephone box.

As I live in Ireland it's pretty low hassle to get to London, the flight only takes an hour and it's usually pretty cheap. I've read so many people complain about how expensive London is but compared to Ireland I find most things a lot cheaper over there - especially food and transport. Unfortunately as we wanted to do the tourist attractions this bumped the cost up majorly and in hindsight it would've been worth it to sell an organ on the black market to pay for some. Thankfully I had the foresight to get free entry tickets for Thorpe Park on eBay (random way to get tickets but I strongly advise it to save you money) which only put me £12 out of pocket.

As we had a few hours to kill when we arrived, we met Bethany's old school friends and spent the evening chatting and sitting on a hill looking over the illuminated London skyline. I'm probably romanticising it a little bit seeing as there was a suspicious couple up to no good at the top of the hill but hey, a girl can dream.

On Monday we went to Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, which absolutely annihilated the shopping centres we have here in Ireland. We spent the entire day walking around the centre and even then we didn't go into every shop! I somehow managed to spend most of my spending money on the first day...oops. 

As we were in London we also decided to sample some of the local cuisine, and by local cuisine I mean Nando's. It's an unspoken rule that if you go to the UK you have to get Nando's. 

On Tuesday we went to Thorpe Park, which I was a bit apprehensive about as I haven't been on many rollercoasters in my lifetime. However, I managed to brave all of the rides except one which I totally chickened out of and had to do the 'I-chickened-out' walk of shame back out of the queue. I also ended up getting whiplash from Colossus but it was definitely worth it. My favourite ride was Tidal Wave - I love log flume rides, but didn't expect it to be that wet. The sign said 'you will get a bit wet' - when we left the ride we were literally dripping wet and had to sit in the sun for a while to dry off a little! All in all it was a great day and I'm glad we got to experience it.

As this post is becoming pretty long I decided to write about the rest of my trip in the next blog, read it here!