London Day 5

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We woke up at 1 pm, after our one and only day of staying out late. I think that is understandable…



Regardless, it turned it to be a very productive day. As soon as we woke up we were ready to start walking to Hyde Park, eager to catch the 2:30 tour that Joon was raving about. We got to our destination 10 minutes late however, because we got lost along the way and because Will and I had to reload credit onto our Oyster cards… Those things can be so annoying and time consuming sometimes. In short, we missed our tour.



We weren’t so disappointed though, because we were close to Buckingham Palace and other must-see places… We took some really cool pictures in front of the Palace, including the guards that were doing nothing but marching back and forth in the stretch of courtyard that they were allowed…. Talk about the most boring, mind-numbing job in the world. I wonder if those guys wake up one day and decide that their purpose in life is to dress up and march up and down within the span of 10 yards or so. I’m probably being unfair but still.



Afterwards, we walked through this really beautiful park abuzz with people and fat squirrels… I swear I’ve never seen such slower squirrels before. Maybe the people that were constantly feeding them caused their corpulence. It was actually cool to see the squirrels jumping up to people’s laps and being fed from human hands. Their was also some swans along the water that seemed to be enjoying themselves, as well as some ducks that looked quite ugly in comparison. We saw Big Ben in the distance, London’s giant clock tower, and we headed towards it.



I don’t know why Big Ben is named as such, but it was huge so I guess that solves where half of its name comes from. After taking some great pictures (I’ll post later), We arrived at Picadilly Square and then headed towards the British Museum. It was absolutely colossal! What I liked about it was that one of its main attractions was on display right away…. We turned into the Ancient Egyptian Exhibit and were awestruck when we saw the Rosetta Stone. It was so sleek and shiny, I never though I would see something as historical as this. It was the one artifact that consistently drew people over, but there were some other amazing pieces housed in the gigantic museum. If I spent two days here without sleep I still don’t think I could see every work.



We arrived back at the hostel using the underground train system, which I commemorated by buying a nice tea towel with all the stops that it travels to. Hopefully I’ll remember how to use it when Adam and I go back to London. Once we got back to the Hostel, Joon spent no time in trying to find directions towards this Korean BBQ place that supposedly has a buffet special for dinner. We got on the next bus we could to a place outside of this city, arriving at a quiet but intimidating looking place. The restaurant was tucked behind a house, hidden almost completely from view. I didn’t have such a great feeling about the place at first, but after we sat down and had our first round of meat…. Wow. We went through about 6 rounds of meat, each round with 3 giants plates of meat. After 18 plates of an assortment of Korean marinated meats, we were finally stuffed. The hour walk home was really brutal because I felt that at any moment I would keel over and spill all the contents of my dinner onto the street, but I held onto them fiercely because they had been too delicious.





We arrived back at the hostel absolutely exhausted, after seeing so much and walking the entire day. We stayed up for awhile though, just hanging out and talking… I really love traveling with these guys, this experience wouldn’t be the same without them.

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