London & Amsterdam

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Hey all, it's Angiolina again and I'm updating you on our shenanigans in London and Amsterdam! Stephen is getting drunk in our room and I'm slaving away at the keyboard... how much of a loser am I!

London

We touched down at London Stansted Airport and caught the bus and metro with our overweight bags to our hostel in King's Cross. Needless to say, it was raining. That night we met Trish and Adrian, Aussie friends who we met on Busabout and are living in London, for a good English pub dinner in Leicester Square. The next day was a very special day... my birthday! We went to the Tate Modern museum in the morning, because I've always wanted to go there. We had a bit of a disastrous afternoon, because I really wanted English high tea (scones and stuff), but we couldn't find anywhere to have it. So I settled for coffee and brownie.... no candles =( That night we went to see a West End show called Avenue Q, which was excellent. An adult version of Sesame Street, where Bert is gay, Oscar is addicted to porn, two monsters get drunk on Absinth cocktails and go at it, and one of the theme songs is "It sucks to be me". Hilarious!

We did yet another of those free walking tours, which was very long and informative. We also managed to catch up with Beth, Stephen's cousin Adrian and uncle Stewart. He took us out for drinks and fancy food =) We walked Oxford Street and saw the crown jewels at the Tower of London. We also went to Madame Tussauds and had our piccies taken with just about all of them! However, we also managed to "lose" our camera, which was the lowlight of our trip. We lost all our photos of London and most of the ones from Paris and Munich. The annoying thing is that we don't know what really happened, except that we went to take a photo of "Greek Street" and neither of us had the camera. And it happened on our last day in London, so we couldn't take more photos to make up for it =(

Amsterdam

We flew from London to Amsterdam and we were stressed that I wouldn't be let back into the Shengen Area, since I have outstayed my visa. But the good looking guy at the customs desk merely said "I flew to Australia once". And that was that, I was in! Our hostel was a fair way out of central Amsterdam, in the east of the city. We went to the movies on the first night, to see The Brave One... not the best movie to see when your out at night in a foreign city.

We spent 3 nights in Amsterdam, and I actually enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. It's a really pretty city with all the canals and gardens, if you ignore the occasional whiffs of pot coming from the "coffeeshops"! We went on another of those free walking tours and we also did a night tour of the red light district, which gave some interesting history on prostitution. Did you know that the lights are red because red light hides skin blemishes? Interesting. We also randomly ran into two of his friends from school in the main shopping street and ended up having lunch with them. Stephen had a "space cake" (marajuana chocolate brownie), but was disappointed when it had absolutely no effect! What a waste of five euro! So the next night, he had two space cakes and two joints and fell asleep standing up on the red light district tour. Then he wanted to go to this Chinese buffet place, which was overpriced and under-appetising. But it was all you can eat for 1 hour, even though he stuffed his face and we were done in 15 minutes! But as we were using a stupid and embarrassing disposable camera, we have no photos of Amsterdam and no evidence of his antics.

Although we were staying at the Busabout hostel, we didn't see anyone from Busabout the entire time we were there. So I don't know where they all went because the bus was almost full when we caught it on Friday morning to Berlin.

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